Berlin April 2023

Anne had very kindly met me at the airport last night and brought me to the apartment. It was ok, not fantastically clean but absolutely not the worst place I've ever stayed, and it had all the facilities that we needed. Everyone was tired, especially Anita and Rob who had travelled from Australia, so after a chat we all went to our beds.

We had a slow lazy start to the day and decided to go out for breakfast. We got our weekly transport tickets for €39 which allowed unlimited travel on public transport within Berlin, Zones A B. I was reminded again how utterly rubbish public transport is in Scotland, it is inefficient, expensive and limited in scope whereas in Berlin, we never waited more than 5 mins for a train, tram or bus, it wasn't expensive and every part of the city was serviced.

We went into the city and had a wander around led by Anne who used to live in Berlin and so acted as our guide (she was amazing), we went to the Brandenburg Gate which was busy and, as was normal for Berlin, there was some building work going on. However, it was impressive, and in the distance you could see the sunlight gleaming on the top of the Victory Column, it was very beautiful. One could not help thinking about the momentous events of history, many in my own lifetime, that had taken place in this very spot.

We stopped off at the Holocaust memorial, it is basically a collection of rectangular blocks of varying sizes. I was a bit surprised at how unkempt it was, there were lots of weeds growing up around the blocks. Some people were climbing on the blocks and jumping from one to the other which seemed somewhat disrespectful to me and I was quite pleased when a security guard came and sent them packing. On the main road next to the memorial you can see the line of where the Berlin wall went.

Our next stop was Checkpoint Charlie, and Rob and I did the tourist thing of having our photograph taken behind the sandbags. A few days later at another museum we had a close look at some photographs and concluded that the Checkpoint building is fake and just for tourists, the roof line is completely different from that of the original. Still, it was a little bit of history.

After coffee and a pastry, (the Germans are VERY good at pastry... though surprisingly not so good at coffee) Anne went off to do some stuff and left us to our own devices, we decided to go to the Jewish Museum. We managed to find our own way (thank you Google Maps) in we went. It is a very strange and clever building, actually it's really two buildings, the original building which is quite conventional and in style of its time, and that is connected to a modern and striking building designed by Daniel Libeskind who said of it:

"The new design, which was created a year before the Berlin Wall came down, was based on three conceptions that formed the museum's foundation: first, the impossibility of understanding the history of Berlin without understanding the enormous intellectual, economic and cultural contribution made by the Jewish citizens of Berlin, second, the necessity to integrate physically and spiritually the meaning of the Holocaust into the consciousness and memory of the city of Berlin. Third, that only through the acknowledgement and incorporation of this erasure and void of Jewish life in Berlin, can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future."

One of the 'exhibits' is the garden of Exile. Whilst it is possible to describe the garden in terms of its architecture, it is much more difficult to describe the effect that it has on you when you enter it. It is set in a perfect square with a very, very uneven floor, and 48 concrete columns that tower over you and which are topped with Russian olive trees. The columns are not all perfectly straight, or is it the unevenness of the floor...I don't know. The aim was to help the visitor get a sense of the discomfort of the exiles as they left pre-war Germany to a new life in a new country with little more than what they could carry into that very uncertain future.

The skill of the architect became very evident when I experienced a moment of sudden disequilibration, and the garden began to spin like a merry-go-round. I had to leave, and after a few moments I felt better. We carried on going around the museum, which is absolutely superb and I would recommend it highly. I was particularly struck by one of the later exhibits, a collection of laws that were enacted against the Jews almost from the moment that the Nazis came to power. They hang on banners in chronological order and they go on and on. One that stood out for me was the law that Jews were forbidden from going for a walk, it is difficult to contemplate such calculated vindictive hatred. It was also a reminder of the need to protect democratic freedom, for everything that the Nazis did was within the law, they made sure of that by writing the laws.

As we got near the end of the tour through the museum, I began to get dizzy again, the room started to spin, and this time it wasn't going away. I wondered if it was because I hadn't eaten or drunk much so we went to the café, I sat down whilst Rob and Anita got me a sugary coffee and a bottle of water. Sitting at the table I began to feel very, very sick, Anita quickly emptied her small shoulder bag, not a second too soon for I was immediately sick into it. Rob got a bin bag and I was sick into that, again, and again and again, all the while the whole room was spinning like I was on a merry-go-round. I have never felt like that before and hopefully never will again.

We got an uber back to the apartment, and thankfully I managed not to be sick in the car, but the second I got out, in the middle of the road I was sick into the bin bag which I was still holding onto for dear life. Rob all but carried me up the stairs and I lay on the sofa bed. As soon as I lay flat the room stopped spinning, as soon as I moved my head I felt very dizzy again and was sick again. Anne wanted to get a doctor but I felt confident that it was an equilibrium problem possibly made worse by my experience in the Garden of Exile, and that it would pass.

Mirjam arrived, she was working each day and joining us in the evenings, I hadn't seen her for a year and she reached down to hug me and I reached up to hug her...and then was instantly sick into the famous bin bag (which was filling up). I had been so looking forward to seeing her again and it wasn't the meeting I had hoped for and it made me feel 100 times worse.

I lay down, and when the others went out for dinner I fell asleep, I woke up at 4am, went to the loo and the room was not spinning and I did not feel sick. I fell asleep again and when I woke I felt much better.

My first day in Berlin got off to a good start and went downhill as quickly as Lewis Hamilton vying for pole position, hopefully things could only get better...Read more