One of the murals I was determined to see while in Berlin was this of the astronaut painted by Portugese born, Danish based artist – Victor Ash ( www.victorash.net/ ). I took several shots of the work which is about four-five stories tall. This was my favourite however as it shows the size of the work in relation to the building it is on, and the park in front of it.
Down a side street off the busy commercial hub of Potsdamer Platz is this relic of the Berlin Wall and the Cold War,an East German watchtower. The “panorama observation tower” originally stood between the Brandenburg Gate and Leipziger Platz and served as a base for border guards. Construction of these crenelated type BT 6 watchtowers began in 1966 and there were at one time 200 of them.
Originally a guardhouse in the 1800s, Neue Wache ( or New Guardhouse ) has been a war memorial since the 1930s.
It is really just a single room, containing a single sculpture, an enlarged version of Käthe Kollwitz’s Mother with her Dead Son. The sculpture is directly under the oculus ( a round, eye-like opening in the roof ), and so is exposed to the rain, snow and cold of the Berlin climate, symbolising the suffering of civilians during World War II.?
Leibhaftig is a bar that serves Bavarian Tapas, but is also the home of a hausbrauerei, Wanke Brau. At the moment it serves a pilsner and a weissbier, both of which are very good. These are brewed on commission by brewery Schleppzig in the Spreewald, about 60 kms outside Berlin. Talking to Marcus Wanke the brewer, he says he has a rye beer on the go, but only does dark beers in winter.
Art works, Teufelsberg
I left it for a couple of days to recover from the information overload which was my trip to Field Station, Berlin or Teufelsberg as it is more commonly known.
Today however I went through the photos I had taken of the art works on the mountain
Built on an artificial mountain created after WWII, the Cold War listening post ran from 1963 through to the early 1990s. Once the operators left however, the site was abandoned and fell into the sort of ruin you see today. Since about 2010, volunteers have gradually cleared out some of the rubble and attempted to preserve what is left.
Since 2012 a community of groups including artists and historians have worked to bring life back to the Devil’s Mountain, including tours and art events.
My Flickr photos – Teufelsberg street art
Links
from Tumblr http://bit.ly/1iwKJfx
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Market Gate of Miletus – Pergamon Museum – http://bit.ly/1kebVCD
The other two photos here are the Pergamon altar and the Ishtar Gate into Babylon
It is hard to describe the Pergamom Museum for it is unlike most museums that I have visited in that much of its contents are large pieces of ancient buildings which have been rebuilt inside the walls of the museum, and in fact the museum has been designed to house some of these large buildings.
One of the bonuses of getting to Teufelsberg was the opportunity to walk through a small part of the Grunewald forest.
Teufelsberg
I hardly know where to start with describing Teufelsberg (or Devil’s Mountain). I went up there today on a tour led by former US Army analyst Christopher McLarren. McLarren was stationed here at Field Station Berlin during the Cold War and since settling in Berlin, has become an expert on not only it’s history as a listening post, but also on how the mountain was created, and what has happened since the station was closed in the 1990s. It was a fascinating and personal tour dotted with anecdotes of spies caught (Valery Kirukhin) and missed ( James W. Hall )
I’ll write separately about the art work on the site but so far this has been my favourite trip in Berlin, including as it does, a walk through the Grunewald to get there.
Links worth reading
from Tumblr http://bit.ly/1h3QD8A
via IFTTT
Cycling in Berlin
Just like the suburb I normally live in, cycling is very big in Berlin generally, and in Prenzlauer in particular. There are however some noticeable differences.
from Tumblr http://bit.ly/PEJDHy
via IFTTT
Our local U-bahn stop is U Eberswalderstrasse. After the first day we stopped bothering with the timetables as we have never waited more than three minutes for a U2 train heading in the direction we wanted to take.
