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On Saturday morning, I gave the Red Berlin tour, which was the least sought after tour, but I think the best (I am biased. Afterall, I was the tour guide!!!). The only difficulty was that I stumbled out of bed, while still half asleep and therefore, forgot to bring my jacket. The climate in Berlin wasn’t what could be described as temperate, so this cannot be described as my brightest idea. In fact, it was very cold, which was made a little more unpleasant, in that all the places I was taking people, were a little exposed.

Putting aside the cold (and it was brutally cold), we made our way to see the graves of the socialist revolutionaries, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebkneckt, as well as the leaders of the former German Democratic Republic in Friedrichsfelde. Here, the main discussion was, surprisingly not dead socialists, but rather bananas. They were a luxury item in the former DDR, which came as a surprise to some of my four participants, though it then led to an interesting discussion about life in the DDR and also, allowed me to tell the others of the trauma of a friend of mine, who missed out on her new uniform in the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend), because the state that it supported had disappeared. I also talked the experiences that some of the people I know had had with the secret police, the Stasi. This allowed us to have something approaching an objective discussion about the former East Germany, which was the aim of the tour, in my opinion. People got chatting and everybody had something to say. So, I think, success.

We then went to see the memorial to the Soviet soldiers that fell in the liberation of Berlin at the end of the Second World War. The Soviet Memorial is my favourite site in the city. It is huge, built from concrete and granite, taken from destroyed Nazi era buildings. What I find fascinating about it is that it perfectly represents the perverse and all controlling nature of Stalinism. Of course, this was not its open intention, but that is what you can see now. It is a grand attempt, in the heart of Berlin’s Treptower Park, to exonerate the Soviet regime. It brushes over the Non Aggression Pact between Hitler and Stalin, and instead looks at the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941. It was a tool to show the power of the then Soviet Union, clearly intended to intimidate the East German puppet state that it had installed. It is complete with quotes from Stalin in Russian and German, expressing the national unity of the Soviet people, in the face of Nazi aggression. It was there clearly to provide a logical rationale for the Warsaw Pact satellite states and their subservience to Moscow. But back to the tour, we walked through the park and I think that the others were impressed. Also, one of the participants told me that he had a stone fetish, so I think he was happy. 

After the windswept park, we got back on the train and made our way to Alexanderplatz, where we did the standard very tourist sites, before making our way to the Marx-Engels Forum, where we joined a large group of people, who were climbing all over the statues. We decided not to climb the statues (I did not want to have any dead participants) and then turned our gaze to the half demolished Palace of the Republic, which is being torn down by the new federal government. At this point, I think the tour participants had had enough of me, so I left them to their own devices. I went home to bed and well, that was that. A cold morning in Berlin, but hopefully one, where my fellow wanderers learnt something and hopefully, despite the cold, had some fun.

Bernard

Comments (1)

	1. 10-04-2007 21:09
	already told u Bernard...the tour was great and the discussion on the DDR was awsome. Besides Spreewalder Gurken now i can add also Bananas to my vintage idea of the DDR Registered

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