One bit I forgot to add in about recent Father's Day was Cassandra's gift to me: a ticket for us all to go to the Berliner Unterwelten Lange Nacht der Unterwelten.
What does all that mean? "Unterwelten" is a local association that runs archeological projects that delve into Berlin's subterranean history. (Unterwelten means "under worlds.") This includes stuff like abandoned U-Bahn tunnels, underground bunkers, dis-used brewery cellar vaults and escape routes under the former Berlin Wall.
On the Lange Nacht ticket we gained admittance to as many of these things as we wanted to see in between 6pm and 2 am on a recent Friday night. It was as close to the perfect gift for me as anyone could possibly imagine and so the night arrived and we all went with Poppy to the first spot.
The civilian air raid bunker underneath the Gesundbrunnen train station.
Built by the Nazis to guard Berliners from Allied air strikes, the bunker was used as a supplies cache during the Cold War in case the Russians cut off Berlin again. Afterwards "Unterwelten" was permitted by the city to start doing research and now it is a large underground museum that traces the history of Berlin's wartime experience through the Cold War by exhibiting its collection in the former air raid shelter rooms.
The old paint is still on the walls directing people to the bathrooms, old ventilation blowers sit rusted in corners and in glassed exhibit boxes are bent MG-34 machine guns, pottery shards and shoes unearthed from the city's war rubble. To clean the city of the bomb and battle debris, they built a network of narrow-gauge rail lines for trains to take the mountains of bricks out of the city for deposit in various locations. Many of these rubble mountains on the city's outskirts now form Berlin's only real terrain features.
From the bunker we moved on to a video exhibit set up in the former men's restroom in an underground S-Bahn station. The facility hasn't been updated and our chairs were placed right next to the tiled pisser-wall and floor drain. As we say constantly around here when having these experiences, "Okay, that was so Berlin." The video was 1930's era footage of the incredible work involved in drilling and supporting train tunnels for the U-Bahn underneath the city. The size and scope of these huge concrete projects that were executed in vast underground caverns beneath a functioning city was startling. Even a slice of double-deck train tunnels required incredible amounts of concrete, and these things extended for miles underneath the city.
The third stop was at Bernauer Strasse. This is the location of the Berlin Wall Memorial, complete with a long section of the still-standing barrier. This is the place of the pictures of people jumping out of their bedroom windows with suitcases to flee across the street to safety in the West. After a few days, the East German border engineers walled up those windows that faced to West Berlin, putting a stop to that practice. People had consider other options now.
Bernauer is famous for another reason, its tunnels. Most of Berlin sits on top of a high water table, making it such that every time you dig for construction reasons you hit water almost immediately. Big pink pipes spring up around all construction sites in the city to drain the water out of the dig. Digging tunnels through that is just not practical if you want to escape, so people looked for higher ground. They found it at Bernauer Strasse, where an accident of glacial deposits left more moraine dirt and provided an opportunity to dig without hitting the water table.
As a result of this, the ground underneath the Memorial on Bernauer is shot-through with tunnels, caved-in tunnels, and counter-tunnels. This part of Berlin, due to the higher ground, also attracted Breweries to the area where they could excavate huge cellars to cool the beer during processing and storage. One of these old breweries sits right on Bernauer Strasse and Unterwelten has a special arrangement with the owners of the building to run its tours through these basements.
In the old basements and beer storage vaults under the street level, tunnel-builders went to work digging their escape routes to the West. Special guests tonight at this location were a few of the tunnel-builders themselves, who gladly shared their stories of what it was like working in secret underneath the machine guns of the Stasi partrolling the death strip just above them. I have never been so happy to know German since few of these guys speak English.
One gent posed in front of a big picture of his younger self. His story was that he and his young family lived on the East side of the street and were suddenly hemmed in the morning after the border was closed. He had some special permit and could cross the border, so was able to organize a counter tunnel dug from the other side with associates. Eventually the tunnels matched and we was able to escape with his family. He tells you this story standing in the very room he spent nearly a year digging out his tunnel with a group of secretive friends. Around us was the collected detritus of such operations: former bracing made from window frames to shore up the old tunnel, shovels, telephone lines.
They built a small track with a dolly to take the dirt out, and had to connect with guys at the start of the tunnel to signal them to pull the cart back out with a connecting rope. Then they'd push the empty one back down the tunnel for another load.
We walked through the rest of the vaults, peering down into a couple more vertical shafts that had also been tunnels (but were secured with grates now), then exited through a final beer cellar to the basement of the Unterwelten-rented house. There we unexpectedly ran into Janek and Sylvia, parents we met during the Vorbergstrasse kita days.
This was great in itself since we had not seen them in quite some time. But also Janek's dad Ulli was on hand. We'd met him before at parties at their house but tonight I learned that he was also a tunnel builder! Then we ate up his story about August 1961 on the night the Wall went up and how he and his girlfriend got split up, with her getting stuck on the other side. Try as he might, he never saw her again, but he still got involved in building connecting tunnels from the West to help others.
This was a revelation since I'd never known any of this about Janek's dad. He is now a member of the Unterwelten and on nights like this helps interpret that crazy history for visitors.
It was now getting on toward bedtime for the kids so Janek offered to take everyone home (four kids plus Rocky) so Cassandra and I could stay out and go to another location.
We took the train back up to Gesundbrunnen and walked across the street to Humboldthain Park, where lies the ruins of a gigantic air-raid Flak Tower. One of three the Nazis built to protect Berlin from air raids, now only the top levels of it stick out of the forest in the park. Fun fact: the word "FLAK" is an abbreviation for the German word Flugzeugabwehrkanone. "Airplane Defence Cannon."
The plan had been to raze it with dynamite but the structure proved nearly impossible to destroy due to its vastness, so they just piled up Berlin war rubble to the roof of the huge structure and left it. Now it is one of the largest hills in the Berlin skyline.
It is also an Unterwelten site. We grabbed a döner kebab and a beer from a Turkish food stand and climbed the long path up the "hill" to the bunker's summit entrance, located next to one of the former secondary small-calibre gun platforms. It was dark now and lights marked the path up through the forest, which was populated by many others doing the same thing. 11:30 pm.
We got in around midnight. They gave us a quick briefing, hard hats, and then sent off our group to explore the blasted insides of the former tower which had once functioned as a military site, hospital, civilian shelter and art storage location.
Tons of dynamite had done a number on the structure. Much work has been done since the 90's to build a semblance of a path through the cavernous interior levels of the half-destroyed building. Gigantic circular staircases had crumbled into an abyss, their rusted steel - reinforcing rod supports obscenely protruding from the walls left after the demolition blasts. Piles of rubble are swept into corners and the "path" meanders over them and up and down makeshift stairwells and platforms. Bat colonies thrive in here. The lighting is sufficient, but everywhere are dark corners, abysses and demolition evidence contributing to the awesome mystery of the place.
At length, we turned in our hard hats and exited into the cool night air on the former gun platforms. From the high vantage point, which you don't often get in Berlin, the city spread out. We could pick out the landmarks easily - a famous church steeple, the Tiergarten's Siegesäule tower, the curve of the Spree river in front of the Hauptbahnhof.
Another head-spinning night. Thanks honey for a great Dad's day gift!
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