Introduction
When we planned our first trip to Berlin at one of our spring meetings, I had no idea that a pleasant coincidence would allow me to repeat this trip again quite soon. But when I wrote that first trip report, I could have guessed that the Tolkienesque analogy of "going there and back again" would be lame - it was more reminiscent of The Fellowship of the Ring and our journey into the heart of dark Mordor than the journey of a lone Hobbit. And I could have saved that hobbit journey for this trip - because this time I was not accompanied by anyone, and could have made the most of every minute.
So hear the story of the second trip to Berlin from June 9 to June 14, 2015.
Tuesday - Wednesday 9 - 10 June - work
A pleasant business trip took me to Berlin, so I spent Tuesday - Thursday until lunchtime conferencing, gluttony and other pastimes of the hard-working. In between, however, there was time to visit the Berlin Zoo, which I was very pleasantly surprised by and can recommend to anyone going to Berlin. Unlike the one in Prague, you won't encounter any hills there, on the contrary, you will come across a number of species that you won't see here. And if you have time and some extra euros to spend, the aquarium is definitely worth it!
My joy was only tempered by the fact that the entrance to the centre of Berlin is only for cars with a green eco sticker, for cars under the year 2006, which my trusty Volkswagen Oktavia did not meet, and so I had to leave it outside the zone at the second hotel, which was to become my refuge after the end of my company activities.
Thursday 11 June
Gluttony and work obligations passed in the hot Berlin afternoon, and after deliberating whether it was time to move to the Turkish part of the city to a hotel or whether not to go somewhere else, I chose the latter option and set out to revisit the Bendler Block, now Stauffenbergstrasse. A place we had already visited during the first expedition, the place where von Stauffenberg and some others who tried to assassinate Hitler were executed. Two floors of this building are now designated as a Memorial to German Resistance to Fascism and Hitler. The museum is mainly "text" and photographic, and large panels in English and German tell many stories of heroism, but also of despair, betrayal and death. Executions of opponents of the regime continued right up to the very end of the war, as recalled by the temporary exhibition on the first floor, dedicated, among other things, to Plötzensee prison, the destination of my next journey.
I took a few last photos in the courtyard, but in my mind I still had the panel with dozens of photos of people who were not afraid to stand up to the Nazis. Somehow I also had similar panels in my head from our old exhibition about the resistance in the Protectorate, and I couldn't shake the feeling that those people who managed to stand up to Hitler and his executioners in Germany were desperately few.
I called a taxi, whose driver tried to rob me in exactly the same way as taxi drivers do in Prague (and probably anywhere else in the world), and chose a longer, all the more expensive route. At least we were able to talk a bit about how life is in Berlin these days, and how politicians are the same whores everywhere in the world and stealing is the same everywhere too, after all.
Reassured by these facts, I supported the local Turkish community by buying dinner and sleeping to support my body before another day, which was already going to be full of travelling to see the past.