Women's March in Berlin

Last weekend the kids and I attended the local Women's March so our voices would be heard about the many social issues facing our society today. From equal rights and equal pay to the many overturns this administration is making to the progress we saw under Obama, we were there at the Brandenburg Gate to be heard. We marched by some important, historic buildings for this capital city and it was really moving to be part of it and pique the kids' interest in today's social issues. I was so proud of their little signs too.

Allierten Museum Visit

Quick trip down to the Dahlem neighborhood to check out the Allierten ("Allied") Museum that chronicles the events from the initial steps of the four Allied powers in the post-war administration of Germany to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Free entry!

Dahlem was the center of the American Sector of post-war Berlin and the Museum is housed within the old base movie theatre for the US troops and families stationed here. 

Built in 1953, the Outpost Theatre channeled architectural ideas from Berlin's 1920's and 30's timeframe.

The main exhibits room sits in the former theatre. An annex building nearby houses a mix of permanent and temporary exhibits. In between the two, in the old car park, sits a British Hastings Airlift airplane, a DDR guard tower + Wall remnant, and a later version of the Checkpoint Charlie gatehouse.

They somehow got their hands on one old watchtower and Wall section. The Berlin Wall itself did not course through Dahlem neighborhood.

The famous "You Are Leaving" signs for the various Allied sektors.

The CIA built a spy tunnel underneath the Wall in the early 50's and jacked into a telephone exchange on the DDR side so they could listen in to the voice traffic of East Germany. Eventually it was discovered and the Soviets had a field day with the press event, showing off to the world how the American's were trying to spy on them. Which of course we were.

The "Luftbrücke" (Airlift) exhibit featured a bit of the artificial metal runway that was discovered at Gatow during construction work at the airport in 1997. We've run across bits of this stuff at Tempelhof too, hiding off in little-used corners of the field.

The British Hastings TG 503 Airlift veteran.

Another prize: the original facade of the Checkpoint Charlie gatehouse. After Reunification the Wall itself and most associated infrastructure was hurriedly removed. It was only later that someone saw the historical value of the monstrous concept. The Charlie gatehouse was removed but then later replaced with a replica. The rest of the original gatehouse is gone to history, but the wooden facade and doorframe was rescued from the scrapheap.

live in Berlin, wear the trenchcoat

Fall Break in the Balkans entry #3: Split & Zadar

View of old town in Split from Diocletian's bell tower. Marjan Hill visible on upper right. Our flat was just below the hill on the water.

Major Activities for the remaining days of the Herbstferien break for us in Split, Croatia:

1. Buying an eel at the fish market and figuring out how to cook it later.
2. Exploring the old streets of the original town's footprint, a walled city built around Roman Emperor Diocletian's Palace.
3. Hiking and bike touring around the city peninsula park of Suma Marjan, a natural offset to the bustling Split waterfront.
4. Taking a ferry ride out to Brač Island, where the autumn olive harvest was in full swing. Hiking a bunch of old roads defined by piles of limestone rocks that made them into tunnels. One lane only!
5. It was not swimming weather being October, but the days were full of gorgeous beautiful blinding sunlight. Our 5th floor flat looked right out on the harbor and the old town in by far the coolest places we've stayed.

Split, Croatia. A photo-tour!

Split has been a port town for over 2000 years. Much of the original town walls and structures are still there.

I love the old worn stones of these towns.

Within the old town various squares suddenly open up before you. And they are filled with cafes.

Ok, so some of the city has been restored. See the floor...

Outer city wall.

Climbing up the belltower in Diocletian's Palace. We make it a priority to march the children up as many belltowers as possible in Europe.

Cody Climber.

View from our flat.

The kids sat and watched this old gent fishing for 20 minutes. Having just had successful fishing experiences on our trip to the States, they were interested to check on his methods.

Sunset after a day of biking and hiking around Marjan Hill behind Split.

Cold in the shade, but that delicious blue sky was just what us sun-starved Berliners needed!

It's a Yugo. In Former Yugoslavia. A piece of history really.

The ferocious eel from the Fish Market.

Island of Brač, one hour ferry ride out from Split. The trucks trundle down these little lanes taking the olive harvest to market.

Poofballs!!

Diocletian's Palace. A midnight ramble through the streets of the ancient town.

The night fountain shot. Every digital scrapbook needs one.

Waterfront stroll on the last day. Such an amazing thing to need sunglasses!

There is a huge fish hook behind Cassandra. The idea was to show how she is such a good catch! It sorta worked.

In Zadar, yet another ancient port town a bit further up the coast, they have installed a wave organ that emits super-eerie sounds in response to the action of the waves coming in.

Zadar Ruins. 

Zadar old town pizza for dinner...

With the vitamin D stocks replenished, we went back to Berlin to take on another cold and cloudy winter! And then it took Jay three months to finish the blog post. Results of this trip:

1. Cassandra loved Split, on the level that she has loved places in Spain. She would like a return trip.
2. Jay was swimming in history again, which is all he really needs to stay in a pleasant, baffled state of wonderment. The experiences in Bosnia specifically awoke a desire to visit Sarajevo and explore further into the Balkans. Which means Bulgaria.
3. Jasper enjoyed the fish market and playing on the chaise lounge chair in our flat.
4. Cody enjoyed feeding the eel remains to street cats in a back alley next to the hotel decorated with colorful grafitti splashes and unused construction materials.

So it really is a good thing we specifically went to Split or else the kids might not have had those experiences anywhere else. Ha!

Tempelhofer Feld (THF) Tour

Berlin Airlift C-54 veteran on the apron at THF.

In December we got a couple interested friends together to go do the tour of the old Tempelhof Airport of Berlin Airlift fame. It was a civilian airport until 2008 then turned into the city's largest open space park land. Here you can have the unique experience of biking on former runways. I incorporate it often on trips back and forth to work as it is an easy way to rack up some mileage since the area is so vast. We go here in the summer to fly our kites, rent pedal go-carts or have family bike-picnics.

Dominating the northwest end of the park is the massive Terminal building, which is fenced off from the rest of the site. It is being used now to house refugees and a few businesses moved in as tenants. But for as many times as we've been to Tempelhof we have never gone "inside." This came to an end one windy day in December when we scooted in the Grün Berlin office on Tempelhofer Damm and presented ourselves to the tour guide. We would spend the next two hours in the complex.

The Terminal is worthy of note. It is 1.2km long, one of the largest buildings in Europe. Built during the late thirties under the Nazis, it was designed to be the showcase airport for the planned architectural overhaul of the entire city of Berlin into its new incarnation as the "World's Capital City."

Thankfully that never happened. However they did end up leaving a gigantic architectural record behind. Like many places in Berlin, this one is ripe with history, stories and ghosts.

In the picture below, the Terminal building occupies the upper left part of the former airfield.

Here is what I learned on the tour in loose chronological order for the airport:

Tempelhof Field was a cavalry demonstration area in the 1800's before being used as an airfield in the early 1900s. Orrville Wright came in 1909 to give fund raising flights and show off the technology. The first flight passenger was carried aloft here.

Germans went crazy for aviation. Hamburg airport opened in 1911 and Bremen followed in 1913, two of the world's oldest airports that are still utilized for civilian traffic. Wilbur Wright's College Park, Maryland airport opened just before that in 1909.

The initial "terminal" building was built in the 1920s at Tempelhof when passenger traffic started to happen.

When the Nazi's took power, Hitler wanted to build a massive airport to align with his other plans of filling up Berlin with architectural monstrosities to befit a city that he wanted to become the "Welthauptstadt" (World's Capital City). Tempelhof was chosen as the site.

Designed in 1930's, construction stopped in '41 when resources were needed elsewhere due to the war. Throughout the war it was a grass field, although it was never used as an airfield during the war.

Overhead view of the 1.2 km-long terminal building and field beyond. Dated 2008, Berliner Morgenpost.

The south side of the terminal building (right hand side of the above picture) was a Stuka dive-bomber factory during the war, using forced laborers from the camp nearby. It was established here after early British bombing raids damaged the airplane manufacturing plants in North Germany nearer to England, so they had to move the production lines away from the coast. Tempelhof was a huge empty unfinished space that served well for this purpose.

The complex was not targeted during the war by American and British bombers as they knew that when Germany was defeated the Allies would be occupying the city. Doing that required air facilities, so they left Tempelhof alone.

There was however fighting around it during the final battle with the Russians. This resulted in light damage to the structure but nothing like what the rest of the city endured. Nazi sappers rigged explosives in May 1945 in an attempt to destroy it but the explosion only damaged a small part of the vast complex.


Berlin Airlift "LuftBrücke"

Berlin was an outpost in the middle of Soviet-controlled East Germany.

The Airlift was begun originally to resupply US/UK/FR army garrisons in Berlin after the Russians cut off rail and road access to the city in response to West Berlin's introduction of its own currency. The Airlift later assumed its more-familiar humanitarian storyline of helping the city survive the blockade. Berlin was vitally important on all accounts: Allied troops, Berlin civilians, West Berlin as a political symbol and geographic reality located deep behind the Iron Curtain. There were approximately 2M civilians in West Berlin at this time.

Berlin needed 1000 flights a day to survive, at its height they were able to do 1400 a day. There were three air corridors, two for incoming and one for outgoing back to West Germany. The Soviets didn't shoot down any Airlift airplanes, but accidents and crashes during the effort claimed some 70 lives. The names of these people are inscribed at the Luftbrücke Memorial just outside the main terminal entrance.

Luftbrücke Memorial, Tempelhofer Feld. The three prongs symbolize the three airports in Berlin.

A similar memorial exists in Frankfurt Am Main, one of the main departure points from West Germany into Berlin.

There were three main airports in the airlift: Tempelhof (US sector), Gatow (British Sector) and Tegel (French Sector). Tegel itself was built specifically for the Airlift in three months in 1948.

Another look without the city borders. Gatow is no longer in service as an airport either and half of its runway got bulldozed for a housing development. However there is a German military museum out there that is the focus of a future post.

At Tempelhof, the US built the concrete runways in 1948 for the airlift. The original airport plan had no runways since all planes just took off from grass. This gave early pilots the advantage of turning into the wind to take off whichever way the way was blowing, not something you can do with an expensive and stationary concrete runway. Improvements in aviation technology eventually overcame these limitations.

By the Spring of 1949 the Allies had days when they brought in more supplies on airplanes than they had beforehand using trains, ships and trucks. This fact and the overall efficiency of the operation was pressed home repeatedly in media reports and propaganda campaigns to make the Russians look bad. The Soviets lifted the rail and road restrictions on May 1, 1949, admitting defeat in the first major political battle of the Cold War.

This Eagle sculpture in front of main terminal entrance used to sit on top and had a huge swastika in its claws. Dismantled. Only head is left, installed outside.

At the northeast corner of field there are two interpretive signs for two former airplanes, a C-54 and a C-47 that used to be displayed there. The C-54 is the one they now keep under the THF overhang. The C-47 is the one they hung up outside the Deutsche Technik Museum.

The kids play on a dirt mound covering part of the early-stage artificial runway. 

Civilian traffic landed at Tempelhof from 1950's thru '75, when it was curtailed and most sent to Tegel. US Military took over most of the activity. Opened again to air service 1990 - 2008. The site was converted to a park after public referendum in 2010.

Main terminal with overhang construction. This enabled passenger loading without exposing people to the elements in the days before jetways.

Planes could easily pull underneath the overhang.

From the observation deck on top of the main terminal. Architects wanted to create a structure that was a cross between a stadium and a functional airport terminal to facilitate mass rallies around the spectacle of aviation and other political reasons. The curving structure was designed as a grandstand and could hold up to 100,000 people on the roof. They never got around to building the actual seats.

Here is a view to the East. The white containers are the soon-to-be opened complex for refugee housing. The scrub trees to the right of the taxiway are made of bomb rubble from the war. The US Air Force officers shooting range and paratroop tower/static line and practice course is also here. This is approximately where the original airport building was in the 1920's.

The main arrival/departure hall, in operation until 2008. This vast room is rented out for events. The check-in counters, bag drops and airline name-shields are still there.

The old airport cafes are maintained as they were.

The Airlift veteran C-54 Globemaster that lives on as a full time resident and movie/event prop.

Baggage claim in the main hall. Baggage transport logistics have not changed appreciably since they were pioneered here in the 30's.

Former check-in desks.

The Americans left their mark by building a basketball court for the USAF contingent stationed here.

Centercourt emblem.

Deep underneath THF is a bomb shelter complex designed to protect the population of nearby neighborhoods. Many rooms still contain original paintings of German fairy tale stories to keep the children's mind off of the bombardment happening upstairs. Why would they think to include bomb shelters in the first place? By the late '30s the plans were already laid for the war and somebody realized it was a necessary hedge.

The complex is quite vast and very little of it is currently being used for anything.

One of the interesting trivia bits to the building is a gigantic "hidden" room located just above the entry way to the main arrival/departures hall. The terminal structure was not yet finished at war's end, so there was the question of whether to complete the construction using the existing plans. No architect would touch that of course so it was just easier to install a fake ceiling and leave this potentially massive entryway forgotten. 

You can now walk into this room, which still features damages from the battle since nothing in it was ever fixed. It is testament to the size of the building that you could just close off a hall this big and not even notice it.

Tour guide orients the group in the "hidden room." We stand on an artificial floor over the existing entrance foyer.

Smoke-blackened ceilings and scarred stone pillars frame the huge original entryway. It feels like walking into some recently-discovered Egyptian Temple.

Parting shot of the C-54, since I love airplanes.

What does it feel like to bike down old runways on sunny spring days? Elation.

The future of Tempelhofer Feld, like many historical artifacts in Berlin, is uncertain. With land prices soaring as more people and businesses move to Berlin, a chunk of real estate right in the middle of it all is incredibly tempting for the city to sell off to developers. Berlin isn't in the best financial state either, which is what makes it so amazing that a citizens movement was able to save it in 2008 after the official closure.

Everywhere you look around the city you see construction cranes and new apartments going up. While there is a historical protection law ("Denkmalschutz") for structures, it seems to be unevenly applied across many of these building sites around the city. Even since we have been here we've seen unused stretches of land with atmospheric old railway buildings fall under the bulldozer and the feeling is that the pace of this will not taper off anytime soon.

Tempelhof Terminal will never have to face this, but the open land of the runways and surroundings is at risk. The current deal is that protection of 'Tempelhofer Freiheit" extends until 2020 then there will be another battle over the real estate. I feel it is one of the things that makes Berlin unique and I love having the runways for my cycling workouts. I hope this continues.