First port of call was Duisburg, in the heart of the Ruhr Valley, in Germany’s industrial belt. ‘You’re an Australian, and, um, here in Duisberg?’ said the dubious waitress. I don’t think Duisberg is a tourist mecca which is a blessing (no touts or tour buses clogging up the streets) and a curse – nothing much was open even by 8am, which meant a day trip was started on an empty stomach. First world problem, I know.
The reason for coming here was to see Emscher Park, a former steel works converted into a public park, and the first really prominent attempt at creating a post-industrial work of landscape architecture, a precursor to sites like Cockatoo Island. The steelworks operated from the late 19th century and closed just before the park’s establishment in the mid 1990s. The supersized factory machinery (think blast furnaces, hoppers, catwalks, storage tanks etc) forms the structure of the park. Spaces around the machinery are either subject to deliberate intervention to create useable spaces complete with trees, benches, a kiosk, performance areas and the like (you can even go diving in one of the water tanks!) , or allowed to lay fallow and go to pasture. There’s also a night-time layer of lighting so the machinery glows at night. As a landscape architect, it was great to see such a prominent piece of work in the flesh.
No oddity about an Australian in Berlin, kicked of with an Alternative Berlin tour run by an expat Australian who’d stayed after falling in love with the place six or seven years ago. As we walked from the district of Mitte across the Jannowitzbrucke to Kreutzberg, he took us through the world of street art, beach bars (you need top use your imagination in land-locked Berlin) and the emergence of unique Berlin culture brought about by Communism in the east and isolation from the rest of the west on the other side of the wall. West Berlin wasn’t a popular place for West Germans to live so it attracted a lot of non-mainstream type people – artists, students, misfits, immigrants, leading to a unique mix which only now seems to be starting to dissolve: the riverfront is now being defined by high rise towers and the traditional Kreutzberg inhabitants are being displaced through gentrification and unaffordable property prices. Sound familiar?
Jumping into a few of the more touristy activities I visited the Jewish Museum, an architectural masterpiece which almost but not quite overshadows the content of its collection. The grid of columns forming the Garden of Exile within the museum grounds is beautiful in its simplicity. It’s interesting to compare the controlled contemplativeness of this to the nearby Holocaust Memorial, a similar but much larger collection of columns towards the middle of which the ground slopes down, the making the columns increasingly tall despite what is visible from the street. Its still a subtle design but the overwhelming effect is claustrophobic and overpowering by the time one reaches the centre of it. Even the screaming schoolkids playing hide and seek couldn’t detract from the effect.
As fantastic and important as the Brandenburg Gate is, the place has turned into a bit of a crowded carnival of walking tours, spivs, touts and other assorted colour which detracts from any sense of meaning there. Likewise Checkpoint Charlie, but far different was Tranenplast (Palace of Tears), the hall at Friedrichstrasse Station which was the major transit point between east and west now given over to interpretation. Similarly good was the East Side Gallery, a graffiti covered remant section of the Berlin Wall left as a reminder of the greater whole.
Walking up the spiral ramp of the glass Reichstag dome was impressive, once getting past the formal and contrived experience of actually getting in there, involving a return personalised letter emailed after you submit your online booking, a security screening and passage through a series of airlocks, gates and lifts up to the base of the dome itself. Once you’re finally there you get a great overview of Berlin right from its centre and light and shade and reflections of the structure itself.
On a tip from the tour guide I went to visit Tempelhof, the former airfield now given over as public parkland with cyclists and rollerpladers hooning up and down the runways. Very cool.
I’m writing this sentence to act as reminder to track down the lithographer whose work I saw at the Berlinische Galerie, whose Steadman-like works from the early 20th Century predicted coming horrors of two world wars. I didn’t write down his name, and do you think I could find it again easily?..
You get the impression that Berlin is a whole collection of different pieces held together by the S-Bahn ring which surrounds the centre. It presents a united face to the rest of the world but the view from within is a family of siblings each with own different, but equally valid, personality.