"A Once Divided City" a Berlin Travel Page by antistar

"I have to admit my first impressions of Berlin were not good. After arriving we immediately took the underground to Warschauerstrasse, and on exiting I was presented with what looked like a super-sized Coventry. Now anyone who has been to Coventry, in the deepest West Midlands of England, will tell you it is not a pretty sight, suffering as it did from some of the worst post-war blight that any council planners inflicted on a people anywhere. Coventry is an ugly, grey, concrete corpse of a once proud city, bombed flat during the Second World War, and then rebuilt in such a way as to make the inhabitants unsure if they'd actually prefer the burnt out ruins instead. In Berlin, the streets of towering two-tone foggy grey concrete slabs stretched out along wide traffic filled boulevards of rainy grey tarmac, and were lined with dingy grey pavements that were covered in dirty brown dog ***.

That was East Berlin, though, and the suburbs of inner city East Berlin at that. This was the Stalinist paradise of post-war East Germany, with just a hint of Soviet bitterness thrown in, and towering two-tone concrete slabs were de rigueur in Communist architecture circles of the time. It was also Berlin, and Berlin is ten times cooler than most other cities, just by mere fact of being Berlin; Coventry just doesn't even rate. The similarities between Berlin's Friedrichshain and Coventry's Hillfields are just skin deep, and begin and end with the grey facades of the housing projects themselves. The people of East Berlin are a world apart from Coventry. Rather than being feral, knife wielding, inbred dogs, donning cheap Kappa sportswear, the population of Friedrichshain were young, relaxed, friendly, and altogether better dressed." - from my travelogue

I was quite taken with Berlin, and have decided that one day I'd like to live there. The city has a great vibrancy, a feeling of being very alive, and driving towards a newer, better, place. It is also surprisingly laid back for such a large capital city. Having at least two centers probably helps towards the feeling that it is more of a big town, with a big city life, than a giant metropolis. The pace of life was much slower than the impossibly hectic cities of Paris and London, and I really liked that.

A great article on the history of Ronald Reagan's famous statement of freedom.

For me, brought up as a child during the Cold War, Berlin was always the divided city, a symbol of the insanities brough about by the 20th century's great clash of ideologies. The city has a great history aside from these few decades, and many of the people of Berlin would like to forget this period of the city's history, at least the DDR portion of it, but that is what I wanted to see most when visiting the city. Top of my list was the Wall itself, along with the Brandenburg Gate and Alexanderplatz. Der Alex was something I particularly wanted to see, after it appeared in the fantastic film, "Goodbye, Lenin!". This film brought back that whole era vividly, especially the moments before and after the fall of the wall, and is definitely worth watching before you arrive in the city.

The city has masses of things to see and do, and once you've seen everything you thought you wanted to see, you'll find you have an even longer list for the next time you visit.