Berlin: Our first experience of Europe
- Andrea
- Nov 26, 2023
- 16 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
A little bit of background📝
This post is part of the series on our first ever world wandering, a six-week trip to LA, London, Berlin, Europe (on a bus tour), and the UK (a road trip around England, Scotland and Wales). The post has been written in retrospect, almost 30 years after the trip, from the journal I wrote at the time and from my memories.
The first in the series is my post is on our LA stopover and the second is on our London taster. These posts give good background on how we got to Berlin. You can read about our other European experience on this trip on my tour post. The final post in the series is on our self-drive around England, Scotland, and Wales.
As with the whole series, and all my travel wanderings posts, I'm recording my experience of travelling rather than giving a list of travel recommendations. My travel wanderings read much like a journal.
Our 1996 trip was our first ever experience outside of Australia and New Zealand. We did this trip in the days before there was easy access to information on the Internet and before the days of Google maps. I recall how wide-eyed we were, as we experienced so many firsts on the trip of things we'd only read about in books or seen on TV and in film. There was no blogging back then! I also look back now and marvel at how much travel has changed and how much easier it is now to both plan and execute.
Remember, too, that my photos were taken on an 'analog' camera, so they reflect the quality of the photos in the mid 1990s and their survival almost thirty years later.
💭I've added my reflections on what our Berlin experience (and our first ever European wanderings) meant to me and my most vivid and lasting impressions of the city at the end of this post. |
Arrival in Berlin🛬
We were one week into our six-week first ever international adventure when we arrived in Berlin. In that first week, we'd experienced a heady stopover in Los Angeles and a whirlwind exploration of London, staying with a friend. The next stage of our itinerary saw us on a three-day Berlin sojourn before the start of our European tour. Why Berlin? Our flight package with Qantas and British Airways included return tickets from London to a selected European capital city. We chose Berlin as I learnt German in high school and had been fascinated with the country - and indeed Europe - ever since I can remember. Berlin wasn't on our European tour itinerary and this was 1996, only a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. Berlin had only been reinstated as the capital of Germany for six years. I'd missed the opportunity to see East Berlin during the Cold War years, but I was keen to experience the new Berlin and its unique history.
We arrived in Berlin in the early evening of Friday 5 July, after a 90-minute flight on a (tiny to us) 757 aircraft. It was a somewhat bumpy journey, I recall. It was cool to see the the green carpet-like landscapes below us, though, as they looked so lush! We flew into Tempelhof, an airport that is no longer operational. Tempelhof was closed to aviation traffic in 2008 and has been redeveloped as a events and trade fairs venue.
I was equal parts excited and anxious arriving in a country where we didn't speak the language. While Los Angeles and London were BIG experiences for us, both , after a unfamiliar and new, we didn't have to navigate a different language. I felt quite daunted by the prospect of being in Berlin now that it was a reality. We tentatively made our way to Arrivals but it was a smooth entry as we had no luggage to collect, having left our big suitcases in London. I remember standing outside the Arrivals area and feeling anxious about how to get to our hotel, even though we knew it was only a short bus journey. A lovely English woman helped us as she must have overheard us talking to each other about what to do.
We stayed for three nights in Kanthotel, on Kantstrasse, in the Charlottenburg part of the city, west of the centre. We had no trouble finding it in the end, our first confidence boost of the trip! I had to do a bit of Google detective work, almost 30 years later, to discover that the hotel is now a Best Western. It's located on a main road, close to the Berlin integrated train system (the U-bahn subway and S-bahn above ground city transit), and around a 25-minute journey into Alexanderplatz, considered to be the heart of the city. I don't have a photo of the exterior of the hotel from our stay, but the one below shows what it looks like now.
I can't recall the cost now, but I do remember thinking at the time that it was expensive compared to Australia for a similar standard. I noted in my journal that the hotel was 5-star, but looking below at the only shot I have, it doesn't seem that way! That said, the surviving picture and the little bit of information I kept from the hotel brochure is super 1990s. Gawd. I'm not bothered anyway about accommodation as it's only somewhere to sleep and our room was small but clean and in a good location. That's all we cared about. We'd had a light meal on the plane so didn't bother with dinner. I think we were just relieved to have made it to Berlin!
Day 1 in Berlin❤️🩹
We were up early on the first morning as we planned to travel to Oranienburg, in what used to be East Berlin, to visit Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum. It may sound odd, but visiting a former concentration camp was a bucket list item for me. I am a history nerd (and I have a degree in the subject), with a particular interest in social and political history and I spent a dark period in my teenage years devouring books on the Holocaust.
To fortify ourselves for the journey to the museum, we enjoyed the hotel's buffet breakfast. At the risk of sounding like bumpkins, this was a new experience for us. There were all kinds of breads, meats, cheese, fruit, yoghurts, cereals and hot food as well, so unlike Australian hotels at the time. We expected to be sharing the breakfast room with loads of other tourists but it was relatively empty despite being peak season. Perhaps we were just up too early?
Remembering that this was 1996, we had a set of printed instructions on how to get to Sachsenhausen that our travel agent had photocopied from her own copy of Let's go Germany. We set off, full of trepidation about getting to our destination. We took the correct train, although we couldn't work out the ticketing system (my high school German failing me). The ticket below is the only one we bought for our entire three-day stay. Honesty is my jam and I felt guilty about using the one ticket, but we couldn't figure out what to do. There didn't seem to be any ticket machines for boarding and disembarking and no tapping on and tapping off like you do today. We weren't asked to show our tickets at any stage during our day.
Anyway, we travelled about an hour north of the city, on an old rickety train, past grey, graffitied buildings, loads of construction, and remnants of boarded-up stations from the Cold War era. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it was so odd to get off the train, walk about 20 minutes through a little town, turn down a suburban street and then find a concentration camp at the end of it. I somehow imagined the camp would be isolated and away from residential dwellings. The below photo is of the street we walked down to find the camp.
It's been a long time since we made the journey to Sachsenhausen, but I will never forget the experience. It was just as chilling and disturbing as I'd imagined it would be, made even more so by the cold, gloomy weather. We were also the only people there for most of our visit.
The camp was huge, with barbed wire fences, guard towers, labs where human experiments were carried out, and crematoria. There are several memorials to those murdered in the camp and of course the Arbeit macht frei (work will make you free) gate. Everything seemed well preserved, partly I imagine as Sachsenhausen is less well known than other camps and is located in what was East Germany . Again, this added to the disturbing nature of the experience. The camp visit left an indelible mark on us.
Rusted old barbed wire was lying all around the main part of the camp. I know it wasn't the right thing to do (our younger selves and all that), but we picked up a small piece. The reality of what we had seen at the camp was so strong and that little piece of barbed wire still reminds of the experience and the horrors of the Holocaust.
We headed back into Berlin and strolled up the K'damm (Kurfurstendamm), the main shopping street in Berlin. The avenue runs into Tauentzienstrasse where the sculpture in the below photo was erected in 1987. The sculpture - Berlin - represents a broken chain that symbolises the severed connections between West and East Berlin during the construction of the Berlin Wall.
On the same street is the KaDeWe, the second largest department store in Europe after Harrods. The name is abbreviated from Kaufhaus des Westens, meaning 'Department Store of the West'. We had a wander around, but didn't buy anything other than a store bag (photo below). KaDeWe is luxurious like Harrods and our budget didn't extend to buying from a store like that. That said, there is an interesting history to the store and the building. KaDeWe was founded by Adolf Jandorf, a Jewish businessman who built up a chain of basic needs department stores before opening KaDeWe in 1907 to cater for the elite. The store was transferred to Aryan owners during the Second World War as part of the Nazi policy to seize Jewish property. In 1944, a German bomber was shot down and crashed into the store, killing the plane's seven crew and destroying much of the store. The building was rebuilt in the 1950s and its space expanded in the 1970s and again in the year we visited Berlin, to cater for growing business after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The store has been 100% owned by a Thai company since 2015.
We had kebabs for lunch, found everywhere in Berlin. Turkish cuisine was prevalent in the city at the time due to the huge Turkish influence from the gastarbiter (guest worker) program. This program admitted foreign workers to West Germany after World War Two to help rebuild the country's infrastructure. The kebabs were so delicious - full of flavours and spices, served with sauerkraut in a damper-type roll. Yum! (Sadly, no photos. These were the days when photos were rationed as film rolls had limited shots and there was no posting on social media back then.)
After lunch, we had a poke around Bahnhof Zoo, or the Berlin Zoologischer Garten, a huge train station and the most important traffic junction in the former West Berlin. It's a mecca of shops and eateries now, but is probably more famous as a former drug and hustler scene. We kind of liked the eclectic mix of people and fashions we saw as we wandered around.
Our last stop for the day was the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (Gedachtniskirche), a Protestant church affiliated with the Evangelical Church of Berlin. The church, originally built in the 1890s, was bombed extensively during the Second World War. It's an imposing site - an old church sitting in the middle of a modern city, the bomb damage still visible. Amazingly, there are stairs in the old church that lead to nowhere as the spire was blown off. The ground floor is now a peace memorial, nicknamed by Berliners as der hohle Zahn: 'the hollow tooth'. There's a new part, built between 1959 and 1963, but it's the damaged old part that is the constant reminder of the constant and destructive bombings in WW2.
We rested in the hotel from late afternoon and ventured out again in search of dinner. Even though our hotel was in quite a central location, we struggled to find something open. We ended up at a Burger King, the equivalent of Hungry Jack's in Australia. I was still nervous about speaking German but we managed to order a meal deal each. The food tasted the same as if ordered from any generic burger chain. Not very German, I know, but needs must and all that!
Day 2 in Berlin👣
We'd picked up a brochure in the hotel for English-speaking guided city walks. We liked the idea of making the most of the limited time we had in the city so we turned up at Bahnhof Zoo where the tour started. Somehow our introverted selves managed to find the guide who charged us 10DM each, telling us we looked like students so we could have student tickets. Ha! This is what you did back then - read through brochures in hotels and just chanced it, based on the information in printed material.
The tour was amazingly comprehensive and our guide, Susanne, very knowledgeable. Susanne was Swiss but had lived all over the place and she was interesting and easy to listen to. The tour took us around so many iconic places and walking gave us such a lovely feel for the city. We took the train twice during the tour but there was a lot of walking so it was exhausting. Absolutely worth it, though! The tour was really just a taster as we only spent a few minutes looking at a bunch of key places from the outside. It was still a great way to experience the city in a short timeframe and Susanne's commentary helped us understand the significance of the sites we strolled past.
One of the most striking things we saw was the Berlin Cathedral, right across the road of the plain, drab Communist party building. The building was to be torn down eventually. This (rather bad quality) photo was taken from a 2006 article about the building's demolition. Its ugliness against the Cathedral is quite stark.
Here we've captured the cathedral's reflection in the old building. Not a bad shot considering our now-ancient camera! Also, it's kind of cool that we saw the Communist Party building before it was torn down.
Below you can see the cathedral in all its magnificence. We didn't have time to go inside but it was enough to see it from the outside. The terrible photos taken on our now long-outdated camera do not do it justice at all!
Along with the cathedral and the old Communist party building, we walked down Unter den Linden, the boulevard in the Mitte district named after the linden trees that line the street. We also walked along the River Spree, around the lustgarten on Museum Island, once used for Nazi rallies. We saw the Nazi book burning memorial at Bebelplatz, ironically across the road from Humboldt University. The Empty Library is below ground, featuring a bunch of empty bookshelves to memorialise all the books by Jewish authors that the Nazis destroyed in 1933. I don't have a photo from our trip, but I have included one below from Wikipedia.
Below are two of the key Berlin landmarks: The Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag. We had the chance to see these magnificent structures and the incredible construction all around Potsdamerplatz as the city moved forward after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the time, Berlin was the largest construction site in the world. Berlin was designated as the capital again in 1990 but the seat of parliament did not transfer from Bonn until the year 2000. The Reichstag was under major construction to prepare for the transfer. What a time to be in Berlin!
Here are some more key places that I managed to capture on film during our city walk. Going clockwise from the top left: The 69-metre-high Victory Column can be seen in the distance, the famous Berlin landmark commemorating the Franco-Prussian War in the 1870s, with Victoria, the Goddess of Victory atop the monument. The Altes Museum is one of the main museums in the city, built between 1825 and 1830 in neoclassical style. The Deutscher Dom is another of the magnificent Berlin cathedrals. It dates back to the beginning of the 18th century. Sadly, the church was almost completely destroyed in the bombing of Berlin during WW2 and only rebuilt between 1983 and the year we visited the city. The last photo shows the place that is now a documentation centre and museum (the Topography of Terror) on the site of the former SS headquarters.
The tour, although four hours long, was a bit of a whirlwind and I'd love to return to the city again one day to explore all the place we glimpsed (and more!) in more depth. We only had two days in Berlin but at least we got to wander around and take in some of the history and incredible changes happening in the mid 1990s. I will be forever grateful for that opportunity.
The tour ended at Checkpoint Charlie and at a section of the Berlin Wall. It was a real 'pinch me' moment for me as I couldn't quite believe I was standing in front of something so historically significant. We left the tour and explored the Checkpoint Charlie museum, fascinating for its displays of escape attempts told through photo essays and newspaper clippings. I love narrative museums like that.
The mementos of the Berlin Wall in the below collection were given to me by my sister who had visited Berlin a few years earlier. Completely tacky, I know, but the pieces of the Wall that came in a plastic case are so on brand for the 1990s! I've kept the pieces of the Wall, but of course have no way of knowing if they are genuine. Hardly likely, but still something to keep and treasure.
The postcard in the below collection features a now famous shot by German photographer, Peter Leibing, of East German guard, Conrad Schumann, jumping over wire to freedom on the third day of the construction of the Wall. Schumann was born in 1942 and died by suicide in 1998 in his home in Bavaria, aged 56, after suffering from depression for many years and struggling with his mental health after rejection by his family when he returned to East Berlin after the fall of the Wall.
The sculpture (circle insert above) that captures the moment Schumann lept to freedom, Mauerspringer ('wall jumper'), was unveiled in 2009, created by Florian and Michael Brauer and Edward Anders. The sculpture was originally located close to the site of Schumann's defection, but has since been moved to Brunnenstrasse. |
Fortified by another kebab, we walked to Schloss Charlottenburg in the afternoon. The sun had come out and it was a lovely Sunday afternoon. Such a pretty part of the city!
The baroque palace is magnificent, but we were content just to wander around the gardens, taking in the afternoon sun with all the local families having picnics. You can see from the photo of me in the below collection that we were pretty exhausted from two days of walking around Berlin!
We headed back to the hotel later in the afternoon, after fuelling up on the most delicious chocolate ice cream I'd tasted to date. I tried to ask for two ice creams, but again, my high school German failed me and the server gave me one ice cream with two scoops! Not to worry, I knew the words for "another, please", so we could both enjoy a double shot of the scrumptious ice cream.
After two hectic days in Berlin, we crashed and slept for several hours back at the hotel before waking up at 9pm briefly and then going back to sleep. I guess the week of travels in three different countries had caught up with us!
Returning to London💂🏼
The weather turned cold and miserable the next day so we decided to have a late breakfast and take it easy. We could have tried to do something first thing in the morning, but we honestly didn't have the energy. We'd only been away from Australia for just over a week, but we had sure packed a lot into that week!
We took the bus back to Tempelhof to return to London to embark on our 19-day bus tour of Europe. Arriving early at the airport meant a longish wait for the lunchtime flight, but we passed the time with people-watching. The airport was kind of depressing, though, especially on a bleak day. There was heavy security even in those pre-9/11 days.
There was another Tube strike in London when we arrived back, but we felt less daunted this time using the trains. We found the Tower Thistle without any dramas and collected the luggage that we had stored three days earlier. The hotel is just the Tower Hotel now, but I'm sure you'll know it. The front of the hotel, where the cafes are located, is often featured in TV shows and films. To us, the hotel was very flash!
We could have gone out and explored London a bit more but we needed a little down time in preparation for the tour. We'd seen and done so much in a short time and we were anticipating a whirlwind of experiences on the tour. We were due down in the lobby at 5.30am the next morning to start the tour, so we were glad of the chance to rest, only going out to a nearby Safeways later for some dinner. This was exciting enough for us, being able to buy a prepared dinner at a supermarket. It seems odd to say this now, but at the time in Australia, you couldn't do that.
We were excited to be able to see Tower Bridge from our room. We were fortunate to see the bridge lift up that evening to let a ship pass through. How cool is that? (For some sad and inexplicable reason I don't have a photo, just the very bad one below of the view of the bridge from our room.)
I was absolutely thrilled to have had the opportunity to visit Berlin and to finally set foot in Europe. I have been a Europhile since I was a child, fascinated by the history, the architecture, and the landscapes of all the countries of Europe and the idea of Europe as a concept. I had learnt German at high school and had always been interested in Germany and its turbulent history.
Berlin was our first experience of Europe, so it will always hold a special place in my wandering heart.
We felt proud of ourselves for navigating the city, no mean feat back then without the benefit of Google maps!
I felt privileged and in awe of the politically and historically significant places we experienced.
Berlin cemented my love of Europe and this love has not dimmed in the years since our very first experience.
Berlin is a funky and eclectic place. It felt like we'd stepped into another dimension!
I have only appreciated with the passage of time the significance of our visit so soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. There was so much construction and that watershed period in recent history came to life for us.
The sombre and heartbreaking experience of Sachsenhausen made me see the realities of the Holocaust for the first time.
Checkpoint Charlie and The Wall were pinch-me moments.
Turkish kebabs. Delicious!
I would love to return to Berlin one day soon and explore the city further as there's so much more I would like to experience. We saw a lot of things, but not in as much depth as I would have liked. Our first ever world wanderings were very much a taster and quite a whirlwind, experiencing lots of things in a short time. With the privilege of time, better earning capacity, and experience, I have learnt that depth is what I am after.
What next? Our adventures on a tour bus for 19 days with 40+ other people, hurtling around Europe...
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