It is the second part of a trip to the German capital this time with a touch of the past.
Remember the "Wings of Desire" by Wim Wenders? The film showed a cold Berlin still divided by the wall, marked by a post World War II, a dreamlike view of the city that has almost disappeared altogether, instead, were some remnants of the past that is worth visiting one of these sites is the checkpoint Charlie, the famous American checkpoint that served as a gateway to the then East Germany from the west, the former Federal Republic of Germany. I can say that 26 years after the fall of the wall, it is worth to walk across the Friederichstrabe from the underground stop of Stradmitte, to this famous wooden house, because we are faced with one of the most commercial avenues of the city, there are shops for all tastes, is also one of the busiest thoroughfares of the city and right there at the end of this the image of a GI Joe waiting for us, where there is still a fraction of the wall and images of this period, it's almost hard to believe that in that same spot has took place one of the darkest pages of world history, after the pictures, and just keep the other side there is this image of a Soviet military and "we have entered" in the former German Democratic Republic.
If you feel like walking more you should follow the Niederkirchnerstrasse, called the Topography of Terror, where once stood the infamous headquarters Gestapo and turn to the Stresemannstrabe will culminate in the famous Postdammer Platz, which appears in the famous Wim Wenders film and which was no more than fields. At the present it is impossible to remain indifferent to the numerous sky crapers and the incessant building, one of them is the famous Sony Center.
If you follow the Ebertstrabe will meet the doors of Brandenburg, but rather in the middle there is the memorial of the dead Jews of Europe, in an area covering 19,000 square meters, which you will be faced with large gray blocks without inscriptions or photographs by Peter Eisenman . This massive work allows us to stroll through its linear ridges where we are literally "absorbed" by large blocks and I could not help thinking as I walked across that gray static mass that if I did not known better what that was, I would not call it a monument dedicated to the six million Jews killed by the Nazis.
By passing the famous warrant gate erected by King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, will run into one of the green areas of the city, the Tiergarten, if you still have the will to walk almost to exhaustion, follow the Tiergartenstrabe and you will face what I call the embassy district, some of buildings were simply ostentatious and almost megalomaniac and it was very interesting, but my goal was to visit one of the landmarks of world design, the Bauhaus arquives. It is a small building with a temporary exhibition where we cannot only see a few icons pieces of this time, as we can still access a free guide audio that we will inform the various educational stages of this revolutionary institution, their teachers and the touch of modernity that lit the world. At the end of the day I could not help reflecting that Berlin turned out to literally rise from the ashes, as the phoenix, but left some open wounds as memory, painful memories, but necessary, not to forget, that the horror does not happen again .
