Posts Tagged ‘WWII’
German-Russian Museum at Berlin-Karlshorst
Marcel Krueger heads to the German-Russian Museum at Berlin-Karlshorst to explore some memories of wartime... Berlin lay in ruins as the planes landed. From all over Europe, the vanquishers and the vanquished of World War Two came. Nine days after Adolf Hitler had shot himself and the Red Army defeated the last defenders of the capital of the Third Reich, Axis and Allies converged here to accept the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s [...]
ZZB: Berlin’s Historical Eye Witnesses
Paul Scraton goes beyond the museums and the history books to look at the importance of eyewitness history and Berlin's ZeitZeugenBörse... http://youtu.be/v3x2EBKn4PM Eyewitness History: An Interview with Jutta Hertlein from the ZeitZeugenBörse Berlin (by Dougal Squires and Ruby Pester). A few years ago I visited the crowded offices of the Falls Road Community Council in Belfast, where they were busy collecting and documenting the testimonies of local people and their memories of [...]
Book Review: Berlin by David Clay Large
Paul Scraton takes a closer look at David Clay Large's fantastic history of the city... “What Potsdamer Platz resembles is an edge city; one of those private, development-driven urbanoid clusters that have sprouted up across the American landscape in recent years. It is reassuring that the new Potsdamer Platz is notably without nationalist expressions. The downside of this is that the place could be anywhere. Like other edge cities, it occupies a kind of nebulous international airport [...]
Liquidrom
William Thirteen gets pampered at one of Berlin's most unique spas... Anyone who spends much time here soon realises that Berlin is the three-toed sloth in the zoo of European capitals. While the denizens of London and Paris race about their cities, pressing past each other like anxious antelope on a headlong rush to high-rent, fashionably-appointed dooms, Berliners are hard pressed to tear themselves away from that second Milchkaffee before happy hour - and then only to wander off to [...]
Notes From The Underground
Paul Sullivan heads underground to explore an immaculately preserved WWII bunker... Most passengers passing through Gesundbrunnen S Bahn station don’t think twice about the door at the bottom of the stairs. Why should they? It's a plain old door, indistinguishable from a normal private entrance or storage area. But if you opened the door you'd be face-to-face with bonafide Nazi history, in the shape of one of Berlin’s best-preserved war bunkers. The door is locked of course, but not [...]
Strandbad Wannsee
Berlin's oldest and most famous lido still packs in the punters... You're in Berlin. The sun has got his hat (and rave shades) on and you suddenly find yourself longing to escape the city - to flee the concrete, traffic and shadows for some sand, sea and fresh air. The East (Baltic) sea is at least three hours away: too far for a day trip, especially since you're not an early riser. But wait. What's that large mass of water south-west of the city, en route to Potsdam? Of course -- it's [...]
Escape From Berlin by Catherine Klein
A tense and personal portrait of a Berlin torn apart by war… As anyone who has ever visited or lived in Berlin knows, it’s impossible not to stumble across the Second World War at some point. Its ghostly aura seeps through the city like an invisible fog, filling empty concrete bunkers, haunting memorials, cleaving to certain architecture. It’s especially apparent in the spaces where the places used to be. While we tend to be well acquainted with the facts of the war (the dates, the [...]
