13 June: Potsdamer Platz & Spies

After a day chasing doctors yesterday, had a good sleep. Woke still feeling a bit yuck, but Des was wonderful as always. (I suspect she quite enjoyed flinging me from one end of the bed to the other!)

The hotel sold postcards but no stamps😳, so after breakfast we walked along to Potsdamer Platz in search of a Deutsche Post shop so Des could post a card.

Originally Potsdamer Platz was a gate in the city wall where the road entered from Potsdam City, 26 km away.

Once Germany became an empire in 1871 with Berlin as its capital, Potsdamer Platz really took off, becoming the busiest traffic intersection in Europe, famous for luxury hotels and department stores, and the hub of Berlin night life.

In WWII Potsdamer Platz was devastated by Allied bombers and Russian artillery. Only a wasteland of rubble remained.

After the war, it was on the border between the American, British and Russian occupation zones. Tensions ran high with the developing Cold War.

In June 1953 Potsdamer Platz was the site of a brutal Russian suppression of a workers’ uprising, and in August 1961 the Berlin Wall cut it in half. It remained desolate until the Wall was breached in 1989.

After 1990, this 60 hectare space in the centre of Berlin became a massive redevelopment site. This has continued to the present day. Potsdamer Platz now attracts 70,000 visitors per day, and 100,000 on the weekend.

Back to the stamp! We arrived hopefully at Potsdamer Platz, and followed directions from several people as to the location of Deutsche Post. We never found it, so settled for a lovely Indian lunch instead.

Now full, we walked the short distance to the Deutsches Spionagemuseum (German Spy Museum). This describes the history of intelligence, spying and sabotage, from its earliest examples BC, to the 1980s. A huge effort has obviously gone into acquisition and display of a large number of relevant exhibits.

Favourites were an Enigma coding machine; a Russian Proton solo underwater device (device & swimmer fired from a submarine torpedo tube!) ; a UHU glue stick secret camera; a mini-parachute for dropping homing pigeons; and a Bulgarian umbrella with a poison needle in the end, used in London to kill defector Georgi Ivanov Markov in 1978. There was also an exhibit devoted to each of the 007s, and the flash spying gear they used.

Amazing stuff!

After all that (phew!) we walked back to the hotel to prepare for our Berliner Phlharmoniker concert that evening.Meer informatie