Strolling Through Berlin Mitte: A Walk Through History and Modern Charm
Taking the underground train from Mehringdamm to Mitte is in itself an experience. Mehringdamm is a popular station because of its convenient tracks that point North to South, West to East. Those two directions will get you somewhere close to where you want to be in Berlin.
Window Seat in Berlin Mitte
The street is sunny, it’s the first day of spring in Berlin. A hopeful day for going out for a walk. I decided not to take my camera with me. I wanted to spend my energies on looking and thinking about what I read on the information boards. Many of the buildings have a notice board with basic information about why it exists.
In Mehringdamm U-Bahnhof I pass the bakery where fresh bread smells tempting, then down the steps onto the main platform. Here it smells of burned brake pads — or discs. I never know if it really is the brake discs or maybe it’s the burned oil, maybe just the smell of people tightly gathered. Their bodies and clothing. It could be anything. But once inside the train which will take me to Unter den Linden, I breathe gently enough to minimize the intake of definite body odours.
Berlin Mitte, Unter den Linden, the station was opened five years ago. More space for foot traffic to enter and leave without crushing each other. I prefer it to Friedrich Strasse underground station which is cramped. The stairs are narrow and getting up them is as slow. Always, there is a person at the front of the crowd who feels the compulsion to read their mobile phone while leaving the train, then dawdle up the steps to the street. Unter den Linden allows passengers to by-pass these irritating passengers.
Unter den Linden is full. Newly arrived tourists walk along the streets in groups. As I pass, I can hear snippets of their conversations, “Well, we’re not in a hurry. If we get lost it might be fun!”, and “Where did tourists go to during the berlin Wall days?” — “they certainly didn’t walk along Unter den Linden, did they?”.
Good question. I felt tempted to turn my head and answer the question. ‘They all headed for the Kurfürstendamm. That’s where the action was. Different times, discos not clubs, red-light district. A mixture of glitz and seediness all in one big boulevard. Locals and tourists.
If you were a Kreuzberg dweller in the eighties and hated the squeaky-clean glitz and glamour of disco, then you stayed around Kreuzberg and drank cheap Kindl beer while listening to a local band play their set.
Berlin’s Unter den Linden is a long boulevard that goes from Brandenburg Gate to Alexander Platz. It is a neo-classical neighbourhood from head to toe. The overall effect is overwhelming. Each building has its function.
Out for a Walk in Berlin Mitte
These buildings cause offence to some groups of people; it’s a waste of money and they shouldn’t be maintained but torn down. They are pointless icons of patriarchy and wealth. They don’t serve the people; they don’t represent modern Berlin life. The arguments go on and on. The deeper the argument, the more it harks back to an old Communist point of view. That history doesn’t concern us today, and everything should represent, in its barest bones, a functional idea that serves the people.
The Berlin Stadt Palace has gone through many changes over the years. Always in an attempt to please people. Today, it is a Cultural Centre. “The Humboldt Forum”, designed to represent a mix of various cultural ideas in the form of arts and literature, the history of Berlin, Mitte, and its development. And somehow, draws together a world history shown through cultural aspects and ideas.
The Berlin Palace has always been a little controversial. Its present form has gone back to classical baroque architecture. It looks good to me, but many complain that it is too fancy, too expensive, and is probably more like a “folly” than a functional building.
Its exhibitions questionably pander to modern “political correctness” — which is hard to define into a single idea or dominant theme.
Opposite the Berlin Palace sits the majestic architecture of the Berliner Dom, The Berlin Cathedral. It’s a grand example of classical lines and curves, pillars that guard broad steps leading up to the front passage before entering the Dome.
Religion is always a contentious subject, it’s the cause of many terrible wars, arguments about God and other gods. It demands that people follow blindly its rules as if they were laws of the land. It confuses hearts and minds and tells them that they lack faith or have sinned. It claims to be a life enhancing practice for people to live with belief and hope.
We seldom hear of arguments about tearing down cathedrals or churches. The prospect of a church being converted still seems like a touchy subject where planners might be playing with fire — God’s fire.
To abolish churches might lead to a further burst of hedonism in society — and there seems to be enough of that already.
At least the Berlin Cathedral stands as a symbol of an idea lost. A cohesive society that knows where its going and what it’s doing. A community. We live in times where every little group has great ideas about how to live and how to pray. These groups claim great internet followings, and I always wonder, would these internet followers follow their leaders into the streets of Berlin and demand change from and to something they deem a better way to live?
Farther up the road, the Deutsche Staats Oper sits pretty in pink. The sun kisses its pastel pink walls and sets off the modest gold lettering above the door.
I’m sitting on a bench on the opposite side of the broad road. Traffic whooshes past, pedestrians stop and start to orientate themselves, look at the building, look down at their notes, move on. Close to my bench sits a woman reading a book, I can’t see the title, but she is deeply engrossed in the story. All this history and architecture can’t distract her. She is happy to sit amongst it and enjoy delving into a fictional world that suits her better.
I stand up and walk to the entrance of what I still think of as the “Tomb of the unknown Soldier”. It’s another idea of a functional building that has changed in meaning over many years.
Unknown soldiers are men lost on the battle fields. Their mothers and fathers never saw them again after they were taken and forced to go to the front. They didn’t start the war, they had a vague idea that they should do their duty and carry out the task of defending their land.
There is a notice board at the front door. It tells us about the tomb that contained the ashes of an unknown soldier and the ashes of an unknown victim of the Nazi regime — someone who perished in the concentration camps. These have now been removed, and the room inside represents a Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny. A statue of Mother and Dead Child is the main point of interest at the centre of the room. It is a sculptured work of the artist Käthe Kollwitz. Her works were mostly in charcoal and depicted the deep understanding and perception she had for the victims of poverty and tyranny in Berlin’s post First World War period.
It occurred to me that when we go out for a walk in our city, like Berlin, we are confronted by history — which is a great thing to consider — but often, that history in bricks and mortar form, or through books that help us formulate our perception of the past, is often a story of war, poverty and tyranny. It’s the people’s history of a chain of events that never ceases.
