Month: August 2014

Every time I decide to get out and see a great city after dark, I’m impressed by how different it is after hours. And Berlin is no exception.

After a long day of filming our new TV episode on Berlin, I decided to take my own audio tour — the newest self-guided tour on our free Rick Steves’ Audio Europe app. It’s fun to actually give these tours a whirl after we produce them. (The tour works great. But I took notes on the gaps where I needed to pause my iPhone. Now I’ll go home and edit the tour so that it can be done in real time, without pausing. If you have our app, remember to update the tours periodically so you don’t miss the fixes we make.)

Berlin is a city with a dark history and many memorials. In about an hour, you can visit 8 or 10 powerful memorials across the old center of Berlin. Experiencing them at night on this trip, I realized this is a great way to see the city.

I enjoyed standing before the Brandenburg Gate, gloriously floodlit and without all the commercial commotion that surrounds it throughout the day. I pondered the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe with only the security guard sharing the moment with me. And I stood over the spot where the Nazis ceremonially burned the booked that didn’t fit their ideology.

It was on this square (now called Bebelplatz) in 1933 that staff and students from the university threw 20,000 newly forbidden books (authored by Einstein, Hemmingway, Freud, and T.S. Elliot, among others) into a huge bonfire on the orders of the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. In fact, Goebbels himself tossed books onto the fire, condemning writers to the flames. He declared, “The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism has come to an end, and the German revolution has again opened the way for the true essence of being German.”

The “burning of the books memorial” on Bebelplatz is a glass pane in the cobbles with a room of shelves under the square. During the day, it’s full of glare and commotion, so the experience never quite works. But after dark, it’s quiet, and the empty shelves are hauntingly bare and beautifully lit. The contrast between that and the nighttime cityscape above is quite evocative. I’ve stood over this memorial many times in broad daylight and never really been moved. Finally, tonight, it grabbed me.

Get out at night and just be in a great city. Have you noticed that difference I’m clueing into in other great cities?

The historic Brandenburg Gate (1791) was the grandest — and is the last survivor — of 14 gates in Berlin’s old city wall. The gate was the symbol of Prussian Berlin, and later the symbol of a divided Berlin. Today, it’s once again the centerpiece of a great and united capital.

Being alone with the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe after dark, I thought perhaps this is the way the architect who designed it wanted it to be experienced.

Standing on Bebelplatz, you look down through a glass panel and see a room of empty bookshelves.

Hiking around and around up the long ramp inside the glass dome of Germany’s striking Reichstag, I was heading for the summit. Along the way I enjoyed 360 degrees of Berlin. Here’s a little tour.

Germany’s parliament building, or Reichstag, is a must-see attraction in Berlin. With its motto, “To the German People,” it’s the symbolic heart of German democracy.

The Reichstag has a short yet dramatic history. When inaugurated in the 1890s, the new parliament building was dismissed by the emperor as a “chatting house for monkeys.” But at the end of World War I, the German Republic was proclaimed from here. Then, in 1933, a mysterious fire gutted the building, giving Chancellor Hitler a convenient opportunity to blame the communists for the blaze in order to consolidate his hold on power. As World War II drew to a close, the Nazis made their last stand here. Imagine: Desperate Germans fighting Russians on its rooftop. After 1945, the bombed-out building stood like a ghost through the Cold War. Then, with reunification, the parliament moved back to Berlin. This historic ruin was rebuilt with a modern element: a striking glass dome.

A walkway winds all the way to the top of that dome. A cone of mirrors reflects natural light into the legislative chamber far below. As you spiral up, survey the city. The views are marvelous.

But for Germans, mindful of their dark 20th-century history, the view that matters most is inward, looking down, literally over the shoulders of their legislators. The architecture comes with a poignant message: The people are determined keep a wary eye on their government.

We got great footage of the Reichstag, and this is one of the dimensions of the new Berlin that I’m thrilled to include in our new TV show on Berlin — the fastest-changing city in Europe. Stay tuned, as we have a dozen new shows coming to your public television station starting in about a month.

One of the great sights in Berlin is its history-stained Reichstag building, capped by an inspirational glass dome.

Tourists are welcome to marvel at the inside of the Reichstag dome.

I’ve long marveled at the notion of German citizens keeping a symbolic eye on their government by climbing the dome and literally looking down over the shoulders of their legislators at work. This poster, which I photographed on my way out of the building, gave me the view I wished we had for our TV cameras.

Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof — the city’s huge and thundering main train station — is one of Europe’s mightiest, with several levels of tracks serving over a thousand trains a day and a vast shopping mall of commercial activity. While a massive public expense, Germans consider infrastructure like this a good investment for both business and for everyday people. Just being here, for a train enthusiast like me, gets me all giddy. What train stations do that for you?