Friedrichshain Park and Re-unification Day

One day on the good advice of our host we set out for a long walk through the nearby Prenzlauer Berg area to Friedrichshain Park it's the first public park in Berlin, big and beautiful.

Up to the top of the hill in park

Many beautiful trees  in the park

  We had a delightful lunch on a large sunny terrace overlooking a little lake. Paul loved the veal cheeks.

 It was surprising to see so many young people and children with parents in the park on a Wednesday.

This playground's equipment made of unfinished logs are typical of many of the playgrounds we saw in Berlin

Tanning cleavage

Afterward we headed south to an area alleged to contain galleries, Karl Marx Allee, but everything seemed to be closed.  Finally we looked up the date, October 3, on the Android and realized it was a holiday, German Reunification Day.  No wonder everyone was in the park!  Meanwhile we were amazed by the extremely wide boulevards bordered by massive tall apartment buildings built after WWII in classic designs.  It looked like a New City Plan taken to the extreme - the buildings for the most part were nice to look at, but the overall effect was cold.

It felt like another place entirely; nothing like the smaller scale, closer buildings in the old neighborhoods, which had charmed us since our arrival.

Off Karl-Marx Allee were smaller scale streets and buildings. On one of them, according to the guide book,  is a landmark building built in 1952. It was one of the first to have all the modern conveniences of central heating, running hot water, an elevator, garbage disposals, private telephones, and a roof top garden.

Finally we retreated from the big E. German planned housing projects and took the U-bahn back to our friendly neighborhood.  It was a beautiful sunny evening, so we commemorated Germany’s Reunification by visiting the memorial at the site of “The Wall” just a block from our home.  We read and listened to translations of first hand experiences of those who escaped. About 3500 people succeeded and 179 were killed in their attempts.  A photograph of a young bride and groom on the west side waving their bouquet up to the bride’s parents leaning out a window on the east side was heart-rending, but the next photo of the bride’s parents looking down, with the mother’s face twisted in happiness to see her daughter on her wedding day and anguish to be unable to touch her,  pushed me into streaming tears.  This was followed by a picture of a 4 year old dropping from a fourth story window in an E. Berlin building into the waiting safety net on the west side below.  How hard must it have been for one of his parents to let go and watch him fall.  This was early in 1961 when there was only one wall.  Because so many escaped in 1961, the E. Germans built a second wall with the 20 m killing zone between. This pretty much did the job and few escapes were made, although 57 made it through a tunnel from an E. German bakery before the Stassi was tipped off and arrested everyone remaining.

These presentations were out in the open air and answered many of our questions about the wall in such a relate-able human way.

Later I wrote our home exchange hosts about the above experience, and she confided that while there are more freedoms now, she did not celebrate that the wall came down.  She felt that was the day the country she had grown up in just vanished.  She said she loves  having the freedom to travel but she feels their lives have become so much more competitive and complex since 1989.  She remembers the old neighborhoods and sense of community, people helping people; now the neighborhood is all new young people buying new things and having babies.  We told her we saw the same thing in the Marina after the 1989 quake pushed the old-timers out so buildings could be brought up to code, then the younger people moved in.  We also told her how we regret the changing attitudes in the US toward making money and acquisition.  Don’t all of us want the best of the old days and of the new days?  Our email conversations are generating a lot of interesting thought and conversation.  Paul and I feel very fortunate to know someone who can tell us how they loved their life in their country that went away.  It's a perspective we would never have considered on our own.
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