Family Fun in Europe, Part 11: Berlin

This is my eleventh post about our family's 2024 trip to Europe. I recommend reading the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth posts before this one.

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Berlin, Germany

On Wednesday, July 24, Sky Princess docked at Warnemunde, Germany. A fishing village for centuries, Warnemunde became an important seaside resort in the 1800's. It's location on the Baltic Sea makes it Germany's most popular cruise terminal. 

Warnemunde has some interesting attractions, but many tourists on ocean cruises use it as a gateway to Berlin. In fact, Princess chartered a train directly to Berlin for the many passengers who wanted to visit Germany's capital city. That's what we did. 

Without stops, it took about 2.5 hours to arrive in Berlin. Once there, we transferred to a bus and met our guide who would be showing us some of Berlin's most interesting and important locations. I spy the German flag!

Our first stop was at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. 

This monument, opened in 2005, consists of 2711 concrete slabs that honor the approximately 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

It is powerful to go deep into the slabs and see them in all directions, dwarfing visitors. 

  

Check out the aerial view to get a sense of the size of this memorial - an entire city block.  

On our way to our next stop, we walked past these signs...

  

... past the State Parliament building...

... to the Topographie des Terrors. 

Between 1933-1945 during the Nazi regime, this was the headquarters of the Sicherheitspolizei (security police), SD (intelligence agency), Einsatzgruppen (death squads), and the Gestapo (secret police). 

That's one of the few portions of the Berlin Wall still standing. 

  

We drove by (through?) Checkpoint Charlie. I would have loved to have stopped there to look around and visit the museum. Someday. 

We were headed to a different museum. Specifically, the Jewish Museum Berlin. Both of the buildings below are the museum. You can see them side-by-side here. 

Security to get into the museum is intense. Airport level, which is understandable. I got through the main security without issue, then we had lunch. When I tried to go into the main gallery, the guard stopped me. I had taken my sweater off and draped it over my arm. That is not allowed. I had the choice of putting it back on, tying it around my waist, or not entering the gallery. I chose Option #2. 

According to our guide, the museum is intentionally designed to be disorienting. It's also very stark. Architect Daniel Libeskind included calls this "Memory Void." It's dedicated to all innocent victims of war and violence. 

  

The museum covers many different facets of the Jewish people in Germany. 

  

This was powerful. This is pages and pages, floor to ceiling, of laws relating to Jews year-by-year. 

As you walk through the exhibit, you can see limitations placed on Jews, slowly at first but rapidly accelerating. 

This mural showed the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust by country. It's horrifying. 

I enjoyed my time at the Jewish Museum Berlin, if "enjoyed" is the right word to use, considering that Jewish history in Germany has a period that is as dark as it gets. Honestly though, I felt like this museum was a Holocaust museum with a small amount of non-Holocaust material added in. I'm missing the rest of the history about the Jewish experience, as well as the depth of the religion, and the rich traditions and contributions of German Jews. There was some...

... but it wasn't enough. Or, it was too much, if this museum was intended to focus only on the worst period of Jewish history. Again, I enjoyed the museum and definitely recommend it, but it left me a bit confused about their mission. I just read the mission statement now, as I'm writing this in August, a few weeks after visiting. 

We always visit museum gift shops; Steve collects pins and Trevor collects playing cards. While they were browsing, I spotted these keychains.

And then these mugs. 

I recognized them right away - I'd taken pictures of them on our way into the museum. 

But why? Traffic signal people are not normally on keychains and mugs, at least not anywhere else that I've been in the world. A bit of research led me to this very interesting article about Ampelmannchen. 

We left the Jewish Museum and headed to Brandenburg Gate. It is very impressive. 

Right next to the Brandenburg Gate, there's an American flag flying. Turns out that's the US Embassy.  

Proof I was in Berlin. Or, at least proof that my shoes were. That's the Fernsehturm Berlin pictured on the manhole cover. 

And there it is in real life, first from Brandenburg Gate and a few minutes later from our bus. 

  

See that line of bricks in the next two pictures? You see those all around Berlin. They mark where the Berlin Wall once stood. They haven't marked all 96 miles of where the Wall once stood, but a lot of it is marked with brick. 

We stopped at a park with a big sign telling us Grillen is verboten. I took a picture of the sign, but didn't feel brazen enough to photograph the numerous people who were grilling literally within 10 feet of this sign in all directions. It was crazy. Since grilling is forbidden, there weren't any grills. So all of the "grills" were extremely makeshift. It was interesting, to say the least. 

 

We weren't there to see German scofflaws, of course. We were there to see the Centrum Judaicum. 

   

After a brief visit, we were back on the bus and headed to the train station. We saw lots of interesting places along the way. I wish we'd been able to see some of them up close. 

  

What do you think - do I look like my dad?

  

I didn't mention earlier that they fed us a snack on the train ride from Warnemunde to Berlin. I am going to mention the snack on the way back, because it was awesome. Check out our Laugenstange. There is butter inside them, just like the creme in a Twinkie. Soooo good! 

It was around 9:00 pm when we returned to our ship. Unfortunately, since 800+ of us all came in on the same chartered train, it took quite some time to get us all through security and onboard. 

If I'd known how slowly the line was going to move, I might have headed the other direction to get a glimpse of Warnemunde instead of just standing there shuffling along. It would have been nice to see even a tiny bit of the port where we were actually docked. 

The next day was a sea day. It was still really nice to have a relaxing day without setting an alarm clock and racing from place to place. Tomorrow I'll tell you about the next port we visited.