After being in Germany as it suffered through an unprecedented 30 days in a row of temperatures between 90 and 100 degrees, and now in the midst of several days of torrential thunder storms, I’m clued into climate change as it affects Europe. Here in Hamburg, in anticipation of storm surges that could push the Elbe River into people’s living rooms, you’ll find all-new riverside construction basically on stilts. The city’s 60-mile-long embankment is also beefed up. In an effort to make beer out of lemons, the city has gone to great lengths to make the new embankment not an eyesore, but an elevated, parklike people zone.
Hamburg’s Biggest WWII Bunker Now Filled with Music
Although it was almost completely destroyed in a horrific bombing in 1943, today’s Hamburg has rebounded as a surprisingly fun and fascinating city. While little remains from WWII, scores of the city’s old Nazi bunkers are simply too stout to be worth destroying. So they survive and are used in various creative ways. This bunker (Flakturm IV, on Feldstrasse in the St. Pauli neighborhood) is the biggest, designed to give 25,000 people shelter. It’s now filled with concert venues, recording studios, and dance clubs — and was fun to include in our TV show on Hamburg.
By the way, we’re just finishing our Germany shoot, and all three of our new Germany shows will air on public television in October of 2016. (These three shows are the first to be produced in our next series. We’ll likely produce 7 more in order to release 10 new episodes next year. Stay tuned!)
Big, Mucky Balls of Secrets at the Former Stasi Headquarters in Leipzig
We’re hard at work in Leipzig, Germany, shooting a new TV show. My favorite sight in Leipzig is the former headquarters of the communist-era secret police, or Stasi. Like the USSR had the KGB, East Germany had the Stasi. This amazing museum smells like the musty files that it kept on its citizens. The old vinyl floor is yellowed, and the camera lenses actually look like buttons. During the final days of the regime, the apparatchiks shredded as many documents as possible, and then dissolved the shredded paper into big, mucky balls. Here’s a little peek at what happens when a government goes overboard in surveilling its own people.
A DDR Toy Story
In Leipzig, a city that helped lead East Germany to freedom at the end of the Cold War in 1989, the excellent Contemporary History Museum gives a fascinating insight into the 40-plus years people spent under communism. As we were scouting to decide what we’d include in our new TV show on Saxony (Dresden and Leipzig), my wonderful guide, Gisa Schönfeld, marveled at how her toy box was almost perfectly duplicated in the museum. It’s an example of how in the DDR, people did have things…all of the same things.
Hitler’s Aesthetic of Anti-individualism
When World War II broke out, Hitler was building a massive congress hall to accommodate his top 50,000 Nazis for annual gatherings. The unfinished and empty husk of this building still stands empty, as Germans can’t find an appropriate use for it. The brutal, no-questions-asked, Neoclassical design — like the architecture of any dictator — effectively drives individualism down and makes you feel insignificant…unless you join what they promised would be the winning team.