Five Senses Survey II And Journal Entry I

Because there is quite a bit of overlap the topic of the 5-senses survey and my initial feelings and thoughts about Berlin, I've combined these two entries and extended the target word count.

Because I have not yet spent much time in the southern part of the city where my community partner is based, this survey deals mostly with the first area I stayed after arriving, and one which I still think of as being the most interesting in many ways. I am defining the area as being between Landsburger Alle station, the DDR prison museum, and the REWE store. These three landmarks form a sort of cone to the east of the city in an area dominated by old soviet housing and small storefronts. This seems to overlap quite a bit with the north-western quarter of the Lichtenberg neighborhood, and so I will sometimes refer to it as Lichtenberg though I feel like that neighborhood is much larger than the area I've defined. I'm choosing this area over Kreuzberg even though I have now spend more time in Kruezberg because of the way my perception of this area changed as my 5 days there went on. Thus, this is almost two different surveys.

I first entered this area when getting off the S-Bahn at Landsburger Alle Station. Having not yet seen much of the city, this seemed like a pretty familiar kind of place. Medium sized buildings and plenty of cars. If it wasn't for the German being spoken, it almost could have been some area in Seattle, maybe near the CD. At this point I hadn't yet figured out how to use the trams and was to tired to figure out which one I needed, so I walked about a mile and a half to the hostel (in the north-eastern area of the cone). As I walked it was easy to see I was in the former east, though that didn't really strike me at the time. I only noticed the tall, bland apartment buildings as landmarks related to finding my way, and not historical ones that set this area of the city apart from others. The further out I got from the city, the less English I saw and heard, and this was my first real sign that this was not really a tourist area.

After settling in and walking more of the area, my original feelings were pretty well confirmed, I felt. The neighborhood has many of the massive old soviet buildings throughout it, and along Konrad-Wolf Str. there is some kind of abandoned East German building which has had all it's windows broken and is covered in graffiti. The grass around these buildings, even the inhabited ones, is not often maintained and not once did I see someone outside working or picking up trash, the way you do closer to city's interior. All of this gave the neighborhood a bleak kind of feeling on my first days here. I was too exhausted to do much for the first 48 hours and so this was really the only parts of the city that I saw as I walked to the bank or the store or the Burger King on Landsburger Alle. The smell didn't do anything to comfort me either. I wasn't used to the smell of Berlin and kept getting whiffs of it and thinking it might be me that smelled that way, after spending so long on the plane.

The first change in how I looked at this area came after I went on my third day to a tour of all the major attractions in the city center. After seeing the variety of architecture in the city I was relieved that the whole place didn't look the way the area around my hostel did. But as time went on I began to look at Lichtenstein in a third way, I began to value the fact that many of the store employees in the area did not speak English well or at all, and how laid back and wide open the space felt. It did not feel like I, as an English speaker, was being catered to in the way it can feel I am at Checkpoint Charlie or Museum Island. It felt much more authentic and reminded me at the end of every day that I am a visitor in a different place, even if I can still order my coffee in English in the Starbucks by Brandenburg Tor. I began to look forward to looking out the tram window at the huge gray apartment buildings on my way home each day. The smell was barely noticeable compared to some areas, and the wild grass was nice to see after being around concrete all day.

This third image of this eastern part of the city is the one I still have now, and I'm almost superstitiously concerned that it will change again if I go back after the program ends and that, after spending so long in Kreuzberg, the area around Lichtenstein will feel boring and sad again. I very much hope that it won't.

It's strange to think that I've only been here about two weeks and already have areas of the city that I feel an emotional connection to.  It doesn't make sense on a lot of levels but I guess when you are in a new place you try to find something to connect with and make your own as soon as possible.  That's essentially what I've done with Lichtenstein, I guess.  To a lesser extent, I've also developed positive feelings towards the Soviet Memorial, and have gone there to read and study this past week.  It is unique in this city (or as much of it as I've seen) in that it is wide open and doesn't contain people doing distracting things, but still has enough interesting features to spark thoughts and feelings.   These features make it ideal for thinking and contemplation, and if I were to do my scavenger hunt again I would run all the way to it's entrance and snap a picture to use it as my artifact.

Of course, I did not do that.  Instead I found a very ugly fountain near the university.  Near one of the bridges to museum island, there is a small set of stairs going down to a path.  If you walk down these stairs and turn to the right there will be a small fountain in the image of a fish.  This fish is not some majestic fish with water tumbling from it's scaly lips, but a flounder or some other kind of large, flat, bottom-feeder.  A small amount of unclean water dribbles from it's mouth into what is something less than a pool and more like a quarter inch of green slime at the very bottom of a large basin.  In an area of the city with so many monuments and fountains kept in good condition for tourism and history's sake, this little fish fountain stood out to me.  I kinda like it.  There's something nice about small, untouched pieces of the city like that.

The Palace of Tears is about as opposite from that as I can think.  It stands as something clearly meant to draw your attention and reproduce something from the past (which, I suppose, should be the main goals of nearly any museum).  Still, the Palace of tears lacked the impact I had expected it to have.  It is of course sad, and listening to and reading personal accounts was emotionally difficult to process at times, but overall there was something less than personal about the experience.  It felt sterile and posed where some other museums have not.  This is not to say I didn't find it interesting or worthwhile, only that the means of delivery felt off to me.  The posed suitcases with personal items and stories were possibly the main problem with it for me.  It felt like looking into a zoo of someone's personal story in a way that detracted from that story.

The bunker tour on the other hand had more emotional impact than expected.

When we see Nazi paraphernalia, it is almost always in one of two settings:  In a museum in a well lit place, cleaned and ironed and pressed behind glass with a little sign next to it informing us of it's history as part of the Nazi machine.  Or, we see it in the news, cleaned and ironed and worn by some neo-Nazi asshole who wants to play dress-up and hide behind a wall of police at some demonstration or march.

But this was neither of those.  Here, the items are dirty, as though they have been just recently pulled from the ground.  They are in cases in poorly lit rooms where their backlights create an almost shrine-like aura around them for the viewers.  There are no signs reminding us of what part they played.  Only the objects.  When we see these things in the museums and on the news we are more or less told what to think of them.  We are supposed to be revolted, and, of course, we are.  But when that context is taken away, when there is no label telling you what they are and they are only objects in a collection in a dark place fifty feet underground where you cannot take photographs of them, it gives you (or at least, gave me) a very unsettling feeling of wrongness.  There is something wrong-feeling about seeing these weapons and posters and star-of-David armbands displayed in this way.  It feels one step closer to being real than the sterile and bright displays of the German History Museum with their little reminders that you are looking at an exhibit.  It makes you wonder how many other collections there are like that which aren't shown to the public at all, and are kept with different feelings in mind.