Tips 1 - 10 of 20 Berlin Things to Do
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Photos:
1. Statues at Humboldt University
2. Books about Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt
3. Kosmos by Alexander von Humboldt
4. Cyclist at the Humboldt University
The Humboldt University in Berlin was founded in 1810 by the scholar, linguist and diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1767-1835, who for a short time -- less than a year, actually -- was in charge of education in the government of Prussia. During that time he and his staff not only founded the new university but also instituted sweeping reforms of the Prussian school system.
His younger brother Alexander von Humboldt, 1769-1859, was a naturalist and explorer who was especially interested in botany, geography and geology. He traveled for five years in Latin America and then spent the next twenty-one years, mainly in Paris, writing up the scientific results of his travels and publishing them in a set of huge, elaborately illustrated volumes. (I have looked through some of these in libraries and was astounded at the scope and vast amounts of detail.)
In the winter of 1827-28 Alexander von Humboldt gave a series of lectures on the natural sciences at the University of Berlin, now the Humboldt University. These lectures were the starting point of Kosmos, a "physical description of the world", in which he explained and summed up the results of a number of scientific disciplines of his time, including geography, geology, zoology, botany and astronomy.
Kosmos was a very popular book in the nineteenth century -- or books, since it was originally published in five volumes that Alexander von Humboldt wrote during the last three decades of his life. It was reprinted in various editions and was translated into several languages.
My copy of Kosmos (third photo) is a one-volume edition that I inherited from my father. It is in the original German but was printed and published in Philadelphia in 1869, ten years after the author's death.
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Phone: 030 20930
Address: Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin
Directions: Across the street from the State Opera House
GPS 52°31'3.21" North; 13°23'37.14" East
Website: http://www.hu-berlin.de/
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In 1905 Albert Einstein, who was then a 26-year-old employee of the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, published six scientific papers which among other things solved the long-standing problem of Brownian motion and introduced the totally new theory of Special Relativity. The 100th anniversary of these papers in 2005 was the occasion for numerous exhibitions on Einstein and his life and work.
Here at the Humboldt University in Berlin is where Einstein worked (and sometimes also lectured) from 1914 to 1932.
Thanks to VT member kokoryko (Hermann) for pointing out that Berlin was where Albert Einstein wrote his seminal paper on the theory of General Relativity, "the paper which changed our vision of the universe". This paper was first published in the Journal of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1916.Second photo: Here again is my favorite book on Einstein: Subtle is the Lord… The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein by Abraham Pais, published 1982 by Oxford University Press. Just don't ask me to explain the equations, okay?
Third, fourth and fifth photos: People riding bicycles past the Humboldt University on the street Unter den Linden. Albert Einstein was a keen cyclist who once said that he got the idea for his Special Theory of Relativity while riding his bicycle. Another Einstein quotation: “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”
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Phone: 030 20930
Address: Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin
Directions: Across the street from the State Opera House
GPS 52°31'3.21" North; 13°23'37.14" East
Website: http://www.hu-berlin.de/
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This highly unusual memorial consists of 2,711 concrete slabs or "stelae" arranged in a grid pattern on a slightly sloping ground occupying an entire city block of 19,000 square meters.
You can enter and walk through the field from all four sides, and experience the wave-like form of the stelae differently from each different position.
After a fair amount of controversy, this unique design by the New York architect Peter Eisenman was approved in 1999, built starting in 2003 and completed in 2005. The Field of Stelae is open to the public day and night.
Eisenman recognizes that his design represents a radical break with the traditional concept of a memorial. In 1998 he explained: "The enormity and scale of the horror of the Holocaust is such that any attempt to represent it by traditional means is inevitably inadequate ... Our memorial attempts to present a new idea of memory as distinct from nostalgia ... We can only know the past today through a manifestation in the present."
In one corner of the site there is also an underground Information Center which is intended "to back up the abstract form of remembrance inspired by the Memorial with concrete facts and information about the victims."
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Phone: +49 (0)30 / 200 766 - 0
Address: Cora-Berliner-Straße 1, 10117 Berlin
Directions: Between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz.
GPS 52°30'50.89" North; 13°22'40.83" East
Website: http://www.holocaust-mahnmal.de
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Things To Do: Trains to Life, Trains to Death
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Photos:
1. Children investigating the sculpture
2. Children on the sculpture
3. Trains to Life -- but only for the children, not their parents
4. Trains to Death -- for children and parents together
5. Plaque on the sculpture
The children in the first two photos are investigating the new sculpture "Trains to Life, Trains to Death" while their mother explains in simple words what the sculpture is about.
Trains to Life were the trains that saved the lives of ten thousand Jewish children by transporting them from Nazi Germany to Britain between December 1938 and September 1939. Many of those children never saw their parents again.
Artist Frank Meisler was one of those ten thousand rescued children. Now, seventy years later, he has designed two sculptures to commemorate the rescue -- and to memorialize the thousands who other children and their parents who were sent to their death, also on trains, by the Nazis during the Second World War.
The sculpture "Trains to Life, Trains to Death" was recently unveiled in front of the Friedrichstraße train station in Berlin. This is where the first emergency transports of Jewish children left for England on December 1, 1938.
This sculpture has a counterpart, by the same artist, outside Liverpool Street Station in London, which is where Frank Meisler arrived at the end of August 1939 with 14 other children from his home city of Danzig, now Gdansk, Poland.
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Directions: Bahnhof Friedrichstraße
GPS 52°31'11.37" North; 13°23'15.48" East
Website: http://www.bigartmob.com/view/5623/trains-to-life-trains-to-death
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Things To Do: Old Jewish cemetery
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Photos:
1. Sculpture in front of the old Jewish cemetery, Hamburger Straße
2. Plaque at the old Jewish cemetery
The plaque (second photo) reads:
This was the site of the first old people's home of the Jewish Community Berlin. In 1942 the Gestapo changed it into a collection camp for Jewish citizens. 55000 Berlin Jews from babies to elderly people were abducted to the concentration camps Auschwitz and Theresienstadt and brutally murdered.
DO NOT EVER FORGET THAT
PREVENT WAR
PRESERVE PEACE
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Address: Hamburger Straße
Directions: GPS 52°31'27.56" North; 13°23'58.60" East
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Things To Do: Robert Metzke's Diesterweg Monument
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Photos:
1. Diesterweg Monument
2. Old German handwriting on the shield
At first I was puzzled by this "Diesterweg Monument" because I only knew of Diesterweg as the name of a German publishing company. But it turns out that this is a monument to the teacher and pedagogical reformer Friedrich Adolph Diesterweg (1790-1866), who campaigned for better and more professional teacher training and for less influence of the churches on the schools.
But I wasn't entirely wrong about the publishing company, because Friedrich Adolph Diesterweg turns out to have been the father of Moritz Diesterweg (1834–1906), the founder of the Diesterweg publishing house, which to this day is a leading German publisher of school books.
The words on the shield (second photo) are in an obsolete form of German handwriting called "Sütterlin", which was invented by a Berlin graphic artist named Ludwig Sütterlin (1865-1917) and was taught in German schools from 1915 to 1941. Most Germans under the age of eighty have difficulty reading this kind of writing, but historians sometimes learn it so they can decipher old documents.
As a foreigner I could only read one of the three words on the shield (the second word, which is also the shortest), but I have it on good authority that the words are "Lebe im Ganzen", a quotation from Friedrich Adolph Diesterweg meaning roughly "Live as a whole".
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Address: Monbijoupark
Directions: GPS 52°31'22.60"N; 13°23'52.83"E
Website: http://www.bildhauerei-in-berlin.de/_html/_katalog/details-1328.html
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Things To Do: Gendarmenmarkt
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Photos:
1. French "Dom" at the Gendarmenmarkt
2. Concert House
The German word "Dom" usually means cathedral, but the German Dom and the French Dom at the Gendarmenmarkt are not cathedrals at all, they are just, well, buildings with domes.
In the German Dom there is a museum of the German parliament, and in the French Dom (first photo) there is a museum devoted to the Huguenots, French Protestants who fled from France to avoid persecution at various periods starting in the sixteenth century.
The Protestant rulers of Berlin welcomed the Huguenots with open arms, not only because of their religion but also because most of them were skilled workers in a variety of trades -- and because they spoke French, a particularly suave language that every self-respecting German aristocrat wanted to learn.
The Concert House (second photo) was originally built from 1818 to 1821 by Karl Friedrich Schinkel as a theater. The original building was destroyed in the Second World War. After a long hiatus it was rebuilt as a concert house from 1979 to 1984.
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Directions: GPS 52°30'47.70" North; 13°23'33.59" East
Website: http://www.berlin.de/orte/sehenswuerdigkeiten/gendarmenmarkt/
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Photos:
1. Charlottenburg Palace
2. Statue in the palace garden
3. The palace from a bridge in the garden
4. Walking towards the palace on Schlossstraße = Palace Street
From the excellent English-language audio guide we learned that this palace was originally built by Elector Frederick III as a summer residence for his wife Sophie Charlotte in 1699. It was later expanded into a royal palace after Frederick became the first Prussian King, Friedrich I.
The palace was severely damaged by allied bombing in 1943, but was carefully reconstructed after the war.
Behind the palace is a large park which was originally a formal French Baroque garden. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was gradually transformed into an English-style landscape garden. After the Second World War a small part right behind the palace was again laid out in the original French style.
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Phone: 030 32 09 11
Address: Spandauer Damm 10-22, 14059 Berlin
Directions: Bus X9, 109, 145, 210
GPS 52°31'13.66" North; 13°17'44.65" East
Website: http://www.spsg.de/index.php?id=134
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Toshioohsako Fri Nov 13, 2009 13:32 UTC
Very interesting tips and information | lynnehamman Wed Nov 11, 2009 13:11 UTC
Interesting info on Berlin, Don . I recently saw a film about Uschi Obermaier and gang at Stuttgarter Platz. Good photos too. My daughter was in Berlin for recent big celebration and falling of dominos. | scottishvisitor Sun Nov 8, 2009 21:25 UTC
Loved the thread of remembrance running through some tips particularly The Trains to Life - here I'm glad you included photos of children & their curiousity | kokoryko Sat Nov 7, 2009 21:53 UTC
There is a lot to see in Berlin, Don, and I certainly will pay a visit to Humboldt (Alex) whose Kosmos was a bedside book for me, for long time. Hope the monuments to Jews will be more than just displays, but memory-keepers for Berliner. Enjoyed reading! |
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on Oct 15, 2009
