Tuesday

We only had one event planned for Tuesday – the German History Museum. I didn’t arrive super excited, but this was another completely excellent museum. Upstairs I went through the history from the start of the German people (the Germanic tribes didn’t keep written records until they encountered the Romans, so German history starts around then) to 1918 and downstairs from 1918 through the present day.

I really enjoyed both the exhibits on Otto von Bismarck and the one on the Second World War – I’ve always said that I’ve wanted to go to a German WWII museum. Now I have and it lived up to expectations – while the museum didn’t at all defend the Nazis, it was very critical of the allied air raids as well as the division and occupation of Germany.

After the history museum I had a club sandwich (about on par with Steak and Shake) for a lot of Euros. At least we were at a café on Unter Den Linden Straβe. A bit later I saw some guys putting up a pair of EV Deltamax 1122 speakers – a slightly older version of the speakers I have!

A few of us and I then went to the Berlin Salvador Dali gallery. It wasn’t quite what we expected – they didn’t have any major works, and most of what they did have was pretty late in his life. It was a lot of fun looking at his sketches. There were a lot of common themes throughout- clocks, genitals, animal-people were the three that I picked out as being particularly strong.

The group further fragmented after that and a friend and I went to the Jewish museum. If you look back through the blog you can find an account of my first trip there. I feel the same way now. In fact, I might appreciate the architecture and museum even more after being in architecture school. It’s absolutely incredible how the building influences a visitor’s emotions – I’m not sure any other building in the world does it like the Jewish Museum.

I also got a better look through the old museum. It seems odd at first – there are a lot of personal exhibits and anecdotes. Unlike the history museum, the Jewish Museum isn’t trying to tell a story – they’re trying to have the visitor feel the experiences of the Jewish people. It is, I believe, successful.

After the museum it was off to the hotel with a stop for cheap Chinese at dinnertime. After that we tried to find a dance club – you’ve got to listen to some techno when in Germany. Unfortunately, we came up empty because everybody was super tired. We did see a fight on the U-Bahn (subway). A guy threw a bottle at the door of a train during the fight- the police showed up in less than a minute and had everything under control, which was pretty impressive.