Walking down the streets of a great city like Berlin, you don’t really know what lies behind the fancy facades. Often, the front of a building hides courtyard after courtyard of a graffiti-laced world where people live in simple apartments that date back to the 19th century, built to house the workers needed to power Berlin’s Industrial Age boom. Until recently, these apartment flats were “squats,” where people with little money camped out after the fall of communism. Today they are slowly gentrifying. Their very existence invigorates my favorite Berlin neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg, with a trendy nonconformity and creative energy.
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I was just all alone in a secret KGB prison outside of Berlin with ghosts of people once held there. If someone is held in a KGB prison, it’s probably because they are a good person, not a bad person. Alone in that prison, I couldn’t help but think of two presidents, Putin and Trump, talking privately for two hours about their power and how to wield it.
In the 1980s, a young Vladimir Putin was a rising star in the KGB, working right there in Germany when this prison was full of unjustly incarcerated people. Now, he’s Mr. Make Russia Great Again. He’s leading his country — with a cunning ruthlessness that impresses both his people and our president — back to a position of global strength after its fall with the implosion of the USSR.
Pondering photos of people broken here, solitary confinement cells, and what it takes to rule a people who are not really free, I wondered what motivates our president to admire autocrats across the globe. Fighting for democracy and civil liberties is messy and frustrating I’m sure. Perhaps brutal measures by autocrats who have unbridled power are more rewarding. People don’t get in your way. You see results strong and fast.
Putin helped run and organize a system of prisons like this back then and he runs his country with a similar heartlessness today. The cost is real lives. Broken lives. This prison is silent today, but its ghosts spoke to me. Its inmates were silenced by isolation. They could do nothing.
But we are not isolated. We can make a difference. Silence on our part, as our president cozies up to autocracy, is a choice.
If ever you’re in Berlin, and you need a little such inspiration, here’s my entry for this sight from my Berlin guidebook:
KGB Prison Memorial at Leistikowstrasse, Potsdam
Standing in stark contrast to all of Potsdam’s pretty palaces and Hohenzollern bombast, this crumbling concrete prison has been turned into a memorial and documentation center to the Cold War victims of USSR “counterintelligence” (free, Tue-Sun 14:00-18:00, closed Mon).
On the nondescript Leistikowstrasse, a few steps from the lakeside park, the KGB established a base in August 1945 (mere days after the Potsdam Conference), which remained active until the fall of the USSR in 1991. The centerpiece of their “secret city” was this transit prison in which enemies of the Soviet regime were held and punished in horrible conditions before entering the USSR “justice” system — to be tried, executed, or shipped off to the notorious gulag labor camps. While most prisoners were Russian citizens, until 1955 the prison also held Germans who were essentially kidnapped by the USSR in retribution for their wartime activities.
From the blocky modern reception building, you’ll enter the complex. In the yard find the model illustrating how this was just the inner core of a walled secret city which until 1991 was technically Soviet territory and run by the KGB. Then head inside the prison, where the hallways and cells are an eerie world of peeling paint, faded linoleum, and rusted hinges. The two floors host a well-presented exhibit in English, explaining the history of the building and profiling many of the individuals who were held here.
At Rick Steves’ Europe, we have two things in abundance: a passion for providing practical information for better travels, and talented people on our staff. And you’ll see what I mean on the Rick Steves Travel Talks page, where you can watch more than 60 travel classes for free.
Here’s some big news: Our latest free, streaming travel videos are…language classes! If you’ll be traveling to lands where people speak German, French, Italian, or Spanish (or just want to hone your language skills a bit because it’s fun), grab your favorite travel partner, pour yourselves an appropriate beverage, and join us for a fast-moving and instructive hour.
We offer travel classes throughout the year at our Edmonds headquarters, and this is our chance to send our great teachers into your world. Good luck — or perhaps I should say, “Viel Glück…bonne chance…in bocca al lupo…buena suerte!”
If Germany’s on your list, consider timing your trip around one of Europe’s biggest parties: Munich’s Oktoberfest. I’ve been in Munich for each of the last two Oktoberfests, and I’m so impressed by the simple Bavarian joy of the party. For a visitor, there’s no better place to see (and join) Germans at play. Inside huge beer-hall tents, you’ll find a slap-happy world of lederhosen, dirndls, fancy hats, and maidens with flowers in their hair. Join the party with me in this clip from my new, one-hour Rick Steves’ European Festivals public television special.
And if you’re heading to Germany, the Rick Steves Germany 2018 guidebook just hit the shelves. Happy travels!
The Dutch are preparing for a rising sea by moving mountains of sand to fortify their dikes
I get very frustrated when I hear people call climate change a “theory.” From a European perspective, humans are causing the planet to warm up — which will likely lead to devastating hardship and suffering for future generations…most severely in the poor world. Those who deny that fact are either very greedy or very stupid.
In my travels, I see signs of our changing climate everywhere. In England’s Portsmouth, floodgates are being built on medieval streets that never needed them before. In Hamburg, you’ll find all-new riverside construction basically on stilts, in anticipation of storm surges that could push the Elbe River into people’s living rooms.
The Dutch — famously smart, famously frugal, and famously below sea level — are spending billions of euros shoring up their dikes and preparing for a rising sea. Rotterdam has a new storm surge barrier, the size of two horizontal Eiffel Towers on wheels, that can roll together when high seas threaten. And the Swiss (who don’t build ski lifts these days without plumbing them to make snow) remember summer skiing in the Alps as something their parents did.
In my personal world, the Iditarod dog race in Alaska that my sister participates in has become an annual rocky slog — even with a course that has been relocated to find some snow. And my family’s cabin retreat in Washington’s Cascade Mountains is threatened by persistent forest fires.
What about you? Have you witnessed the effects of climate change during your travels? Please share your observations in the comments below or on Facebook.
(Of course, inspiring so many people to cross the Atlantic makes me a huge contributor to climate change. This is something I’ve struggled with for a long time, and I’m still working to find a clear and effective way to make our company carbon-neutral. I’d love to hear if you’ve found a good way to balance the negative impact flying has on the environment.)
