Einige Fotos aus Berlin

[fivemack]

I tried to write this as a city shaped by historical periods, but that's only facilely the case, and to divide into nine chunks with a photo in each would be silly. Also, Livejournal won't let me post a message with more than a dozen links in it, so I'll have to post two.

• The Prussians; the 1791 Brandenburg Gate, changed by later use into something other than a celebration of peace, and the 1871 Victory Column, which never really celebrated peace at all, and whose granite still bears the bullet-pocks it deserved. You can climb it; it's in the centre of the large dense wood of the Tiergarten, and city is visible around the horizon. With binoculars, you can see a few wind-turbines revolving in the fields beyond the city limits; from the air, Germany is splashed with little patches of the things. The Cathedral dates from this time; the Fernsehturm visible in the photo, from somewhat later.
  
  Around the end of the 19th century, I presume as a side-effect of huge loans to the decaying Ottoman Empire, Germans did a lot of Indiana Jones (or, to be fair, British Museum) archaeology: the Processional Way from the Ishtar Gate in Babylon stands in the Pergamon museum, together with the Pergamon altar (a somewhat-damaged frieze to put the Elgin Marbles to shame), monolithic statues from Syrian civilisations long-forgotten, much other striking Greek sculpture and some amazing Islamic decorative art.
• The War. In the 1890s, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was built; it did not make its sixtieth birthday. You almost forget that Germany was a centre of the sciences; in the war, the record of aviation firsts and Zuse's Bauhaus completion of Babbage's dream of mechanical computation were utterly destroyed. Throughout the city, the quote about 'Denker und Dichter, jetzt Richter und Henker' comes to mind: it's completely incomprehensible that the culture which produced this city later produced Auschwitz and Stalingrad.
• The Present. The Synagogue has been brightly re-gilded. The new Holocaust Memorial is appropriately large, ugly and incomprehensible.