Rain. Lots and lots and lots of rain. We get up a bit later than the previous day and so just have a banana and a coffee for breakfast in the room. We’d already decided on a plan of action for today, knowing it would be wet, and so head back to ‘museum island’ and join the queue for the DDR Museum.
The museum is on the canal-front, on a site where the DDR’s elite used to meet and dine. It appears, however, that everyone else in Berlin has formulated the same wet-weather plan as us and is similarly queuing to escape the rain inside. We line up and join the scrum to get into the museum.
It’s a shame, really, that the museum has such a small footprint. It’s packed with material, virtually all of which is interactive in some way – a Trabant you can get inside; a recreation of a flat inside a DDR apartment block complete with furniture and fittings to be played with. Each area too has information panels or sources that you pull out with various levers and handles – these are great to encourage you too ‘look’ for the information and dig in more depth. The key problem is that a lot of information is hidden in dead-end passageways which, with the sheer number of people currently inside the museum, means it’s a constant battle to see everything.
We are impressed, though. The museum covers every aspect of life in the DDR in a generally objective way. It’s notable when we walk round Warsaw a couple of days later that we picked up a lot of knowledge about Communist-era town planning and architecture from the DDR museum. For someone who teaches the rise and fall of Communism at IGCSE level, it was particularly interesting. The exam syllabus requires only a fleeting overview of specifics on life under Communism in Eastern Europe that I myself only have a slim knowledge and understanding. However, although there’s now lots more that I can claim to know about this period of history as a result of our time in the former Eastern Bloc, I doubt that I’ll be able to find (a) the time or (b) the justification to introduce much of it into the classroom.
We spend 2 hours looking around the museum – much longer than we planned – and emerge through the exit door into the museum restaurant. Looking outside we find that it’s still pouring down with rain, and so opt to eat lunch here. The menu is fascinating – all ‘classic’ DDR dishes, prepared under the watchful eye of a man who was a sous-chef in the original restaurant 20 years ago. The restaurant is a superb extension of the museum itself. The menu has a series of notes for the dishes on offer, describing the origin of the dish and in some cases an explanation of why it was created. Pork, for example, was often used in the East as a replacement for veal. Other ‘western’ foods have their own DDR equivalent. Beef burgers were replaced with pork burgers and given their own name. Conventional pizzas became square, and again renamed. Even a DDR cola drink was created, although the menus does highlight that Pepsi had a license to bottle their drink in the DDR but could only sell it to visiting Westerners.
Alice goes for the DDR pizza option (called a ‘krusti’ and with salami she gets her daily does of pork) while I choose to eat Berlin’s most famous cuisine, the curry wurst. It’s a simple dish of fried, sliced, skinless sausage that is smothered in spicy ketchup and sprinkled with curry powder. It tastes like a hot dog in cheap ketchup with curry powder. Perhaps that’s the idea. I can certainly see its appeal as late-night, post-pub street food but having it for lunch was perhaps not the most sensible choice.
We leave the restaurant and it’s still raining, but the downpour has eased to a drizzle. The previous night we’d been mulling over the idea of going up the TV tower, and although we’re keen to try it we realise that doing so in such low cloud would be rather pointless. We do, however, walk around its base. The plaza surrounding the tower is in the process of being renovated, and we find ourselves weaving through grey concrete corridors to get inside the building. The place is deserted. But then we emerge on the other side of the base into a park of the square that has had its refurbishment complete and find it packed with people queuing to go up the tower in the cloud. Clearly our ability to find ourselves off-the-beaten track has not been affected by the rain.
Around the TV tower we begin to see what Easter Berlin ‘used’ to be like. Large grey rectangular concrete boxes look out onto grey concrete walkways on which are placed grey rectangular concrete benches. The regeneration of the area around the Brandenburg Gate up the museum island gives an idea of what the town planners are hoping to achieve with their vision of urban renewal in the old Communist area, but considering they’ve already removed one of the most important DDR-era building in the shape of the palace of culture, I think it would be a terrible shame to remove every last piece of DDR architecture. The 50 years of Communist rule are an indelible mark on this part of Germany and the rest of the Eastern Bloc, and removing every trace of its existence would – I believe – be an injustice to the people who for so long lived under it. In the same way that people are now scrabbling to rescue the last few remaining sections of the wall, I fear that when the last prefabricated concrete apartment building falls people will say, “we should have kept one to remember”.
This concept of memory and nostalgia is evident in a shopping mall we visit opposite the TV tower. We go in on the pretext of buying something with which to make sandwiches on tomorrow’s long journey to Warsaw. Leaving the supermarket, we wander through the rest of the mall. A small, squat, darkened bar sits at the centre. Next door is a shop selling DDR memorabilia. We buy a map showing Berlin in 1961 after the wall was built – that’s the new addition to the wall display in my classroom. The owner – clearly excited to have made a sale – told us about a shop upstairs that sold exclusively DDR goods. Our interest piqued, we find the shelves stocked with all the things we’d seen a couple of hours earlier in the museum. The companies and factories are still operational, and producing the same things they did at the time. There’s a buzz of excited sentimentality. It’s like when we visit an Olde Sweet Shoppe and find all the things we used to have as kids. Like that, but not quite. This supermarket – which offers a mail-order service – seems to be the last ‘real’ way to access the items of a society that disappeared almost overnight with reunification and the immediate import of Western goods.
We walk back towards museum island, having decided that we’ll have a snack in one of the cafes. Through the drizzle we navigate to the side of the New Museum but end up in a dead end of building works when we try to get through to the next museum along. We retrace our steps, take a bridge off the island, walk north and then find another bridge onto the island again, through the building works but giving us access to the Pergamon Museum. We’ve chosen this one as although the Old Museum has the Nefertiti bust, the guide says that this is the better museum overall to visit. The entrance is covered still in building works and we have to follow not the sign for the entrance, but the “no entry” sign of the exit to find the cafe. Normally museum cafes are a good bet for a snack and a tea, but this one is quite pokey and the building works, combined with its near cellar position mean it’s very dark inside. Because of the rain they have cranked up the heat making it a little too warm for comfort. We’ve come too far to turn around and find somewhere else so we order a coffee and some cake each and rest our tired legs.
When we have finished we set off back to the hotel to spend more time off our weary feet before dinner. This isn’t too far a walk and we think again at how pleased we are with the location when we really weren’t so sure about it when we were booking the room.
For dinner we decide to return to the area south and east of museum island where we were last night. It seemed to have a range of little streets and cafes that look like they have potential. On our way we walk past a set of public bikes for hire. They’re like the Boris Bike, and after a while playing with possible puns to give to these, we settle on the Merkel Cycle.
After realising we haven’t got a clue how the bike hire scheme works, we walk on to the Georg Brauhaus again as we want to try their dark beer. The light yesterday was very good and so we have high hopes for the brown. We couldn’t try it yesterday as after 1.5lt of the light we didn’t have space for the dark as well! We order a medium of each and both taste the dark. It’s not dark like a stout, but more of a rich and sweet dark from the malt and sugars. It’s really very yummy and definitely a distinct taste from the light. Mmmmm, we could have more of this but we’ve resolve to try somewhere new and so we get up after our beers, have a final gaze at the large copper mash tun and then head into the street. It seems a lot quieter out tonight than last night and, although this may be because we are out for dinner an hour earlier than we were before, it’s more likely is the damp weather is causing people to stay indoors. While the beer garden was heaving yesterday (we couldn’t get a seat outside) there isn’t a soul on the wet seats but still space indoors for punters.
We walk around a few streets looking at menus and through doors. Everywhere looks quite similar, and the only unique place is called Kartofell House (potato house) so we decide to try this. When we get in the door the waiter is quite dismissive which is a little off-putting, but it does seem busy there so we wait our turn to be seated. For the next five minutes no one comes to seat us. Another group comes in behind us and we see a couple already seated who are waiting with their menus closed for someone to take their order. There’s three empty tables, but we’re not seated, and the people who are sat and waiting to order look frustrated. We’re not impressed and decide to give them two minutes to seat us before we try somewhere else (the restaurant is opposite three others, so it is very easy for us to take our business elsewhere). The time is up and so we leave. We’re soon across the road checking their menus and we spy from the corner of our eye that another two groups/couples have left the place prematurely too.
Opposite is a group of three restaurants that at first glance seem to share a common area, but then on closer inspection they are actually separate. We head to one with a few good German dishes on the menu and this turns out to be a great choice. Inside is a vaulted ceiling, and the windows leaded which creates a really interesting room. The place is a gem and looks to be really quite popular as there are always people coming in the door. The food is great; Alice has something without pork for a change, but it’s braised boar in a wonderfully rich red wine sauce with cranberries and red cabbage. She remarks that having red cabbage over two days makes it feel like Christmas!
Having stumbled upon a really great meal from one that could have been a very mediocre, our night draws a lovely three days exploring Berlin to a close. People have recommended Berlin to us before; saying that we would really love it here, and we have done. It’s one to ‘add to the list’ for the future.
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