Chapter 26: Ten days in Berlin

“Do you ever regret staying in hostels?” The question had come after I’d written about a particular poor night’s sleep ahead of a visit to the Hamburg zoo. My reflex answer was to say no. Hostels have been a practical necessity for a trip of this length: if I weren’t willing to share rooms with others I’d be back home and broke long ago by now. But they’ve expanded the journey in qualitative terms, not just length. I’ve shared dorms or cabins with people from 44 countries (yes, I’ve been counting) and made friends with people from across the world, and even a couple from Melbourne. It is a richer, fuller experience than if I’d spent the last five months sitting on my own in hotel rooms.

That’s not to say, though, that the trials of hostel life aren’t beginning to wear thin.

My first hint that the Hamburg hostel wasn’t going to be my favourite was the brothel housed in the basement. It didn’t get much more encouraging when I made it to reception – I was careful to ensure it was the right establishment’s reception – where the owner professed to have no knowledge of my booking and no beds available that matched what I’d booked? I’ve gotten pretty good at standing my ground in such situations, though, and I waited patiently as he peered quizzically at my booking confirmation – checking his computer once, twice, then a third time – and finally he gave me a key for a three, rather than five bed room.

My dorm mate – until a little after midnight there was only one – was Nicholas, and it was a big night for him. He’s a refugee from Nigeria who came to Italy by boat a decade ago, and his first daughter died in the crossing. What can one possibly say to that? We had rapidly bypassed the standard dorm room small talk, and I was out of my depth.

Nicholas had stayed in Italy, but came to Hamburg six months ago to find work (an electrician in Nigeria, he’s working in a kitchen, and understandably frustrated by it). And his wife and three younger children were on their way, tonight, to see him for the first time since he left Italy, so he was naturally a little worked up. He finally let me get to sleep at about 1AM, but then I woke at three o’clock to one end of a loud conversation: Nicholas’s wife had missed a bus or something, and would be late. I had to draw on some emergency reserves of patience as I pointed out it was a discussion best had outside.

The next night was a Saturday: the wrong time of the week to be staying in Hamburg’s red light district. A bucks party or similar had taken up residence in the building next to ours, and were alternating between belting out football chants and classic rock songs. Usually I’d be fine: I have an $80 pair of custom-moulded ear plugs that have paid for themselves several times over while sleeping in dorms, but I had an early train and couldn’t risk oversleeping an alarm. I shouted out into the void a couple of times, to predictable non-effect, and then noticed the loading bay to the building was open. So I went in, climbed the stairs and followed my ears to the inconsiderate sods on the top floor. The door I found appeared to be to a construction site, not an apartment, and I suspect they weren’t supposed to be there any more than I was. I knocked and shouted for a while, and I heard them try the door but fail to get it open. No matter: the message seemed to get across, they quietened down and I at least got a few hours sleep.

My Berlin hostel wasn’t in nearly so dubious a neighbourhood, though it had its moments too. I was to be here for ten nights, the longest I’ve been in one place since I moved out of my apartment in March. So when I was allocated a fourth floor room without an elevator, it was time to play the diabetes card again. “The fridge is on the ground floor, you see. I might need to get down to my insulin in a hurry.” Absolute twaddle. But we met in the middle: I moved to the second floor, cutting my climb up and down by half.

Next step: a shower. I’ve become something of a connoisseur of bad shower design over the past few months, and Berlin was the finest example yet. One or the worst types of hostel shower works like the taps in a public bathroom: you press a button and water flows for about 15 seconds or so, then cuts out until you press the button again. It’s an ingenious way of ruining a shower, which is perhaps the only self-indulgence available to a hostel guest. 

Berlin had taken this low point and dug deeper. It didn’t have a button, it had a hand sensor. Wave your hand in front of the sensor and you’ll get water: icy, icy water that seems to fall from all parts of the ceiling at once. You can work the angles all you like but you won’t be able to reach that sensor without copping an Arctic deluge. You needed to somehow keep the water running so it might eventually reach at least room temperature, which meant waving your hand in front of the sensor at intervals of 15 seconds: leave it too late and the water will cut out, but because the sensor also works in reverse, go too soon and the water will cut out anyway. I was genuinely nostalgic for those terrible showers back in Romania. 

Imagine my delight, then, when I was forced to go roaming the building to find an unoccupied shower half-way through my stay, and happened across one that had accidentally been left in a usable state. It had a proper shower head. Proper taps, for hot *and* cold. Give a man a shower and he will wash for a day. Give a man hot water and stable water pressure and he will wash like he hasn’t washed for a week.

At least I had good people to talk to here. After warning two Italian girls, Giorgia and Marianna, about the grim shower situation, we segued into discussing the good and bad aspects of hostel living. After five months of doing this I’ve reached grizzled (grizzling?) veteran status among the Hostelling fraternity, and I was raving about how great my one in Helsinki was. It even had a toaster, I said. I miss regular access to toasters.

“I’ve seen one!”, Marianna interjected. 

Here? 

“Yes... in the chicken!”

I hadn’t thought to look for a toaster in the chicken. 

*

As mentioned, I had ten full days in Berlin. A week and a half stretched out ahead of me, and I imagined an idyllic, slow-paced stay.

Well, not so slow, there, Charlie. Ten days disappears pretty fast when you sit down and work out what you want to do. After ten minutes I had two enormous zoos, a parliament, a couple of parks and no fewer than 11 museums on my list. Suffice to say, I didn’t manage it all. 

I didn’t get through much at all on day one, by the time I had sorted myself out at the hostel. A walk through the Tiergarten – Berlin’s rather overgrown Central Park – beckoned, but didn’t last long: I was chased out by mosquitoes. So instead I headed towards the Brandenburg Gate, in keeping with what’s become my habit of doing something cliched on my first day. Along the way, I found Berlin’s ‘Victory Column’:

Not particularly interesting in itself, but I thought it’s cute how Germany hasn’t let a high profile lack of recent victories deter them from having a victory column.

I made the obligatory stop at the Brandenburg Gate, which is now back to being a triumphal arch but was, when the Berlin Wall was still standing, literally a gate. The wall fell down – spontaneously crumbled, really - after conservative superhero Ronald Reagan stood there 30 years ago and requested, in that strict but loving grandfatherly way of his, that Mikhail Gorbachev tear it down. It took another two years, but it was absolutely Reagan saying ‘open sesame’ that led to its fall. Not the culmination of 40 years of courageous resistance by the people of Eastern Europe, who really had no agency in this story whatsoever.

There are bits of the wall still standing here and there – I’ll get to the most significant ones later – but where it has been removed entirely, such as around the Brandenburg Gate, it’s been replaced by a double row of cobblestones that trace its entire path:

I came across those cobblestones several times during the ten days, and every time they brought me up short. I’d look around, trying to imagine a concrete barrier ripping the two sides of the street in front of me into different spheres of influence. It’s a bizarre thought.

From the Brandenburg Gate I went to the German parliament building, the Bundestag. I’d had notions of going up into the dome on top of the building, which provides a wonderful (and free) view of the city. I didn’t know, though, that it required pre-booking, and when I got there it was booked out for the day. The fellow working there said you could only book up to two days in advance, so I filed it away as something to do later in the visit. I wish I had asked him to explain further.

It was time, on day two, to start trying to get some of these museums out of the way. Up first was the DDR Museum, dedicated to life in the former East Germany. This was my last shot at a satisfying museum of communism, and it finally delivered. Without papering over the regime’s crimes, it doesn’t dwell on them to the exclusion of all else, like Budapest, and nor does it go for the easy kitsch approach like Prague. It focuses most of its attention on the people themselves, and on daily life, and what most stuck with me was an elevator. I climbed in and the door rattled shut. The lights flickered, cut out, came back again. The floor shuddered, shifted, swayed under my feet. Did the lift get stuck? I wasn’t sure, but when the doors finally opened I was still on the same floor I’d boarded on. It was a simulation, as I’d suspected (and hoped), but I don’t think I’d have coped with that every day. I’d rather take the stairs.

Despite being a museum of communism this is very much a profit-driven enterprise, and you have to exit through the gift shop. I’m not buying souvenirs on this trip, at all, but I was sorely tempted:

I doubled down on totalitarianism by heading to the Typography of Terror, a museum built on the rubble of the former Gestapo headquarters and dedicated to reinforcing perhaps the single most important two words in all of democratic politics: ‘never again’. To be honest, I’m broadly familiar with Nazi history, and it didn’t have much that was new, though there were some photos of Auschwitz guards, laughing and smiling as they gathered together on a day off from mass murder, that got inside my head a bit. I was careful not to get too caught up in tracing the Nazi period – Berlin is so much more than that – but I think the Germans deserve an enormous amount of credit for how they don’t shrink away, as so many countries (including Australia) do, from the nadir of their history. Never again.

I finished the night back at the Bundestag, though again I didn’t go up in the dome. As if to reinforce the point I made above – in fact, it literally is intended to reinforce the point – all through this summer there’s a half hour projection show on the walls of one of the parliament office buildings, tracing German democracy from Weimar through to this year. It screens twice every night, for six months, and there were hundreds of people there. To watch a documentary about having a parliament. After a day spent with communism and Nazism, it was the perfect, faith-restoring nightcap.

I kept binging on museums over the next few days. Some of the most eagerly anticipated were on Museum Island. It is – as the name might reasonably lead you to believe – an island in the middle of the river with five major art museums, which are even World Heritage listed. I ignored the two that hold medieval and 19th century art, preferring to focus on the three that, together, make up one of the world’s greatest antiquities collections: the Altes (‘Old’), Neues (‘New’) and Pergamon Museums.

First, though, I had to get through security. The rather overly self-important fellow at the entrance wanted me to check my bag at the cloak room, but it had my insulin, testing kit and sugar supplies, so that was a firm no. I may have even quoted some made up sub-section of European Union law on the rights of people with disabilities (I’m sure one exists, but I can’t be bothered looking it up). Wanting to score a point before conceding defeat, however, he insisted I couldn’t enter with the water bottle in my hand. Happy to preserve his dignity, I promptly drank the water, but that wasn’t enough: he demanded I throw out the (empty) bottle too, least I use it to pour the water it didn’t contain over a sculpture. He dropped the ball, though: if he’d thought to look in the bag I refused to be parted from he would have found a contraband bottle of iced tea, and who *knows* what damage I could have done with that.

The Neues Museum is home to the famous bust of Nefertiti, which is much bigger than I imagined, and here too the guards were determined to obey rules to the letter, even whilst completely missing the point of them. You weren’t allowed to take a photo of the bust, so photos were prohibited in the entire room housing the bust. Photos were allowed in the next room ,however, so the doorway was completely jammed with people taking photos there instead, but at least the rules were being followed. Aside from the bust, the most interesting thing in the museum might be the building itself. It was destroyed during the war, and a conscious choice was made to incorporate the damage into the restoration. Bricks are exposed, frescoes are half-missing, there are pock marks in the walls.

The best of the Museums is, unfortunately, only half-open. The Pergamon Museum takes its name from the Pergamon Altar, a massive Classical Greek building that was picked up, holus-bolus, in Turkey and plonked inside a museum in Berlin. The Altar is in the part of the museum that’s being restored until 2019, so I missed out. The similarly monumental Ishtar Gate of Babylon is still on display though:

I admit to being very conflicted by the Pergamon. Just as the Parthenon Marbles belong back in Athens, the unseen Altar belongs in Pergamon, and the Ishtar Gate in Babylon. Pergamon is in Turkey and Babylon in Iraq, though, and the latter at least is no safe place for the Ishtar Gate to be. It’s not a quandary I have a satisfactory answer to.

The museum visits continued to pile up – the German Jewish Museum, German History Museum, Natural History Museum and Stasi Museum – until it was time to give my brain a break for a few days. There were zoo visits, of course: two, this time, because not even the local zoo could escape the Cold War. What was left of Berlin Zoo after the war – not much, it was so thoroughly destroyed that the few surviving keepers had to keep some of the few surviving animals in their bathrooms until their enclosures could be rebuilt – fell into the American zone. At that point East Berlin residents could still visit, but as far as the East Germans were concerned this simply would not do, so they built their own. And, as one might expect of a Stalinist status symbol, the new Berlin Tierpark was more than five times bigger. The two zoos competed with each other for the rest of the Cold War, each trying to have the most and the rarest species. It was the space race of the zoo world.

I also headed deep into East Berlin to check out the Eastside Gallery. It’s the longest chunk of the Berlin Wall left standing, and each slab has been turned into a canvas for street art, much of it revolving around the obvious themes of peace and freedom:

I actually came out here twice, because the first time the sun was in a crappy spot for taking photos, and both times I saw the same troop of what could politely be called ‘street performers’. It was one of those ‘ball in a cup’ games, where a man sits there rapidly moving the cups around and somebody guesses which one has a ball inside. 

It cost €50 to bet that you could find the ball, and he had three dedicated, but curiously dispassionate players. One would make a bet, lose their money, but without any visible reaction to the loss. Instead they’d just hang around, and a minute or two later bet again, this time winning back their cash. It all gave the impression of an even contest, should somebody watching be tempted to play, but the same three €50 notes were simply cycling back and forth. My suspicion that it was a scam was confirmed when they heard sirens (for something else) and suddenly all had to be somewhere else very quickly. 

My last encounter with the Berlin Wall was a visit to my namesake, Checkpoint Charlie. To be honest there’s very little to see: the guard station is still there (flanked by the museum on the West Berlin side of the road and, inevitably, a McDonald’s on the East side), and there’s a couple of guys dressed as American soldiers for the purpose of selling photos. The Museum is overwhelmingly wordy, with huge slabs of texts covering the walls, but it has a wonderful collection of daring escape tales. 

One bloke made his own kayak and paddled all the way to Sweden. Another went a step further, using spare Trabi parts to build an ultralight aircraft: I’m not sure I’d want to trust Trabant engineering with my life. Two families one-upped him, in turn, with a hot air ballon. People stashed themselves inside suitcases, tyres, petrol drums and even a plastic cow to get out by car. A family’s West German relatives visited Czechoslovakia, then reported their car and passports stolen, having in reality given them to the East German half of the family to use at the border. I was horrified, however, by one bloke who used a similar trick to get his East German wife out: he romanced a West German woman who looked similar, visited the East with her and then used her passport to sneak his wife out, leaving his victim stranded in the East. Some people don’t deserve freedom, and he rightly lost his for awhile.

I also learned that soon after the Wall was built both sides had used loudspeakers to direct propaganda at the other side, but had cut it out shortly afterwards because it was all getting too loud. So they put up billboards with those news ticker scrolling messages to get the point across in a less disruptive manner. The world is completely bonkers.

Meanwhile, I’d kept putting off going to the Bundestag Dome, which I figured might make a nice finale to my stay in Berlin. That was until my dorm mate, Sherry (a Taiwanese woman with the most refined of upper-class British accents, courtesy of an English school teacher) broke the news to me that she had booked her tickets weeks in advance. But, I objected, the staff there had told me you could only book two days in advance! That only applied to walk-up tickets: pre-booked ones were long gone. I headed to the dome to try my luck, but was told I’d be lining up for two hours to secure a ticket for 8AM the next morning. Suffice to say, I preferred not to wait, and hence managed to spend ten days in Berlin without getting to its most iconic attraction. At least I have a good reason to go back.

*

Having established that chickens and kitchens are one and the same thing, I eagerly headed to the chicken the next morning to make some toast. Alas, I’d counted my toasters before they hatched: this chicken’s toaster was nowhere to be found. 

Giorgia and Marianna had checked out by this time, and had been replaced by a trio of girls who must still have been in their teens, and who spent most of the night out on the town, sleeping through the day. We got along fine, despite not having a lot of common ground, and I was quite concerned when I overheard them discussing how to get into the Watergate. “Do you think we’ll need fake IDs?”, asked one.

Baffled, and slightly alarmed, I was on the point of interjecting – don’t these kids know what happened the last time people snuck into the Watergate using fake IDs? – when I twigged that the Watergate is a Berlin nightclub. I might just be getting a little old for this hostel caper.