I remember my mother telling me that, when she was in Berlin in 1945-46, she realized she might never be closer to Lithuania, the country from which her parents emigrated. Getting there, at the time, however, was impossible. It was occupied by Soviet troops and would be for the next 45 years.
As Julia and I were planning our visit to Berlin, I realized we would likely never be closer to Lithuania. We thought perhaps we could, in some fashion, fulfill my mother’s hope.
We arrived at the Vilnius airport around 6 pm on 19 June. Vilius Vaseikis, from Lithuania Visits, met us at the airport and drove us to the apartment in Old Town we had secured through him. It was located on Pilies Gatvė (“Castle Street”), one of Old Town’s main drags. While it was early evening by the time we had settled in, sunset wasn’t until just before 10 pm local, so we went out to eat and took a quick tour of our surroundings.
At a nearby restaurant, offering traditional Lithuanian cuisine, we shared herring and what one might call a potato sampler. A variety of potato dishes, including potato-stuffed sausage. There’s also a shot of the beer menu in the gallery, including one option with hemp seeds.
Our last day in Berlin prior to leaving for Lithuania focused on churches and museums. The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was close enough to our hotel to walk to in the morning.
Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church
Heavily damaged in WWII bombing, the church tower is a stark visual reminder of the kind of damage done to Berlin and Germany, and it has been left in the condition you see to be that reminder. There are also new church buildings surrounding the tower, so the congregation is active.
Original construction of the church began in 1891. Kaiser Wilhelm II built it to honor his father, Wilhelm I.
Here’s video (1:48).
Museum Island
Museum Island (Museuminsel) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with five museums and the Berlin Cathedral. It’s actually the north end of an island in the middle of the River Spree. Many of the museums were damaged in WWII and you’ll see examples in a couple of videos below. As the island had been in East Berlin postwar, restoration of the museums and collections did not really begin until the 1990s.
(With only a few hours available, our museum tour was relatively brief. It’s certainly worth at least a day.)
The first video focuses on the Neues Museum, built in 1843-55, but not reopened after reunification until 2009.
The building houses the Egyptian museum, including the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti. (Photography of the bust by museum visitors is not allowed. This is an “official” photo.) There are also portions of another major collection, artifacts from the Stone Age and later prehistoric eras from the Museum of Pre- and Early History.
The video (2:00) opens with the Lustgarten (Pleasure Garden) and Altes Museum.
Pergamon Museum
The Pergamon Museum houses an antiquity collection, the Middle East museum, and the museum of Islamic Art. It is notable for the monumental scale of several exhibits, including the Ishtar Gate of Babylon.
Ishtar Gate
Video (1:55).
Berlin Cathedral
“Berlin Cathedral” is much easier than the official name: Evangelical Supreme Parish and Collegiate Church. Construction of the current church began in 1893 and it was opened in 1905. The building was damaged in WWII, but East Germany permitted the start of reconstruction in 1975 due to the infusion of West German currency.
Not without taking some ideological revenge, however. East Germany destroyed the northern wing of the original building, compared by some to the Medici Chapel in Florence, Italy, because it had been a memorial to the Hohenzollern dynasty, which ruled Germany for many years. (There are four caskets of Hohenzollerns on the church’s main floor. Many more are in the lower level of the church. Fascinating stuff below, but conditions were not suitable for video.)
Restoration renewed after reunification, and efforts to restore the dome and surrounding cupolas continue today.
Julia and I visited around the time of the daily prayer service at 6 pm, which lasts about half an hour and requires visitors to be seated, with no photography allowed. The time features brief sermons and longer selections from the magnificent organ in the church.
Most of the video (2:34) is accompanied by music from that organ. I cheated a little and turned on the video camera, which simply sat on the pew and collected audio.
Bundespressekonferenz
Between visits to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and Museum Island, we joined two new friends, Michael and Cornelia Günther, at the Bundespressekonferenz (BPK) building for lunch. The BPK (Federal Press Conference) is a union of full-time journalists who report principally for German media. Also in the building, located near the Reichstag and other government buildings, are members of the Association of Foreign Press in Germany (VAP).
In contrast to the U.S. and many other countries, the BPK is the “host” of press conferences by German government officials. BPK “invites” officials and they come to the building. Only BPK and VAP members can participate and ask questions. I believe German Chancellor Angela Merkel makes an annual appearance.
Michael is an independent multimedia producer, director, etc. Among other projects, he is working with the Canaris family and Heiko Suhr on a documentary about Admiral Canaris. Cornelia (Connie) is a correspondent for The Economist.
BPK atrium/courtyard
We visited both of their offices and they treated us to lunch in the very nice courtyard of the BPK building. In The Economist office, we were introduced to Vendeline von Bredow, European business and finance correspondent. Ms. von Bredow had spent time in Chicago as the magazine’s Midwest correspondent. Michael pointed out that Ms. von Bredow was a direct descendent of Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of the German Empire in the late 19th century. :0
While short of the record set the day before, I was still quite active. Steps were 19,616 for 6.5 miles. Says I climbed 17 floors and I can’t quite figure out where that happened.
An earlier post had offered a teasing peek at the Hotel-Pension Funk, to which we moved on 16 June. This video will show the rest of the walk-in, as well as some video from my room.
One of the things we learned on this trip was that Julia was not going to get much, if any, sleep if we continued to share a room. My snoring (and likely sleep apnea) was nowhere close to being a sleeping aid. She stuck it out at the Hotel Haus Leopold, but after one night at the Funk we arranged for a separate room for me. Luckily, the hotel’s top room was available for a couple of nights (before we left for Lithuania) and at a reduced rate.
Here’s video (1:17).
The Funk had been the home of Asta Nielsen, a silent film star (1910s, 1920s) of Danish origin who made nearly all of her 74 films in Germany. The building had been built in the late 19th century and her home was the entire third floor, forming part of a circle around a central courtyard. Reconfiguring the layout for a hotel created 14 rooms, plus a breakfast area. As you’ll see, it retained at least some of the flavor of the time when Die Asta (The Asta), as many Germans called her, was the hostess.
Here’s a gallery of photos showing the entrance and hallways.
The Asta is not well known in the U.S., perhaps because her often erotic films were heavily censored here or just not offered. Here is a gallery of some of the posters in the hotel. (I’m kinda curious about the film “Das Eskimobaby,” featuring “lustspiel in 3 akten.”)
I did not discover the Funk. Indeed, I found it among Rick Steves’s recommendations for housing. Glad I did. Staff was also great. Very helpful.
There was a restaurant just down the street from the Funk that became a favorite. The Literaturhaus features readings and other literary events in a 19th century townhouse. It also features al fresco dining and the Cafe Wintergarten. We tried it one evening after much walking and we may not have eaten anywhere else in Berlin after that.
Our introduction to Berlin hotels was the Hotel Haus Leopold in Zehlendorf. As I mentioned previously, Isabel had made the arrangements for us and several other members of the Canaris extended family were staying there as well. Julia and I joined them each morning for breakfast in the very pleasant dining room.
The hotel was in a great location for the early part of our trip, as most of the sights in connection with my parents and events related to the Canaris photos were relatively nearby. Below is an album of some pictures of the exterior.
Below, some photos of the interior. Every shower we had in both Berlin and Lithuania offered the handheld shower head. Most flush mechanisms for toilets were a panel in the wall above the toilet. Some shut off automatically, some you had to push the panel back. (There were a couple where it took a while, for me at least, to figure out what button to push.)
Monday, 17 June, was our first huge tourism day in Berlin. We went to the Tiergarten District, which includes the famous zoological garden of the same name and many of the major historic sites of the city.
(To give a sense of scale, the Health app on my iPhone recorded me taking 24,839 steps to cover 8.8 miles and 10 floors that day. Personal record in steps/distance.)
Reichstag in 1945
The Reichstag
Our first main stop was the Reichstag, home of the present Bundestag, the German federal parliament. Originally built in 1894 to house the Imperial Diet of the German Empire, the structure was severely damaged in 1933, when it was set on fire in suspicious circumstances. Blaming Communists for the fire, the new Nazi government suspended rights granted the party and arrested members. It was also damaged by Allied bombing of Berlin in WWII.
During the Cold War, the government of West Germany was in Bonn, and the Reichstag went through only a partial restoration. When reunification of German took place in 1990, the official ceremony took place at the Reichstag. It was not until 1999, however, that full restoration of the building was completed. Architect Norman Foster replaced the original cupola with a glass dome that is a particular favorite with tourists.
(Julia and I had intended to visit the dome, but you need to make a reservation and our upcoming week-long trip to Lithuania prevented us from securing one.)
Here’s video (2:01) of the first part of the journey.
Brandenburg Gate
Those of us of a certain age are familiar with the name Brandenburg Gate, as it was a major symbol of the Cold War. It was originally built in 1791 on the order of Prussian King Frederick William II to celebrate the peaceful resolution of conflict with the Dutch.
Located just inside what was East Berlin, the gate was closed following the construction of the Berlin Wall. In 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan spoke at the gate (photo) and said, “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The gate was the site of another official event on the day of German reunification. At midnight on 3 October 1990, the West German flag — now the flag of a reunified Germany — was raised over the gate.
There is no vehicle traffic through the gate. The adjacent large square — Pariser Platz — is a cobblestone pedestrian zone. The U.S. Embassy is located on the northern edge of Pariser Platz, next to the gate. And we found a little touch of the U.S. there.
Even in Berlin
The walk also brought us to the site of the “Memorial for the Uprising of 1953,” something I had not been aware of. The memorial is located in the forecourt of a massive building that had been Hermann Goring’s Ministry for Aviation in the Nazi era and is now the German Department of Finance.
For three days in June 1953, tens of thousands of East Germans took to the streets in East Berlin and in other parts of East Germany in protest against the East German regime. Soviet troops and East German police put down the uprising, at a cost of more than 500 persons killed, 1,800 wounded, and 5,000 arrested.
West Germany established the memorial. The broad avenue through Tiergarten, seen at the beginning of the Reichstag video above, is named “Straße des 17 Juni.”
East Germans had produced an art piece, a mural on the front of the building, entitled “Aufbau der Republik” (Build-up of the Republic). Made of Meissen porcelain tiles and described as an example of “socialist realism,” it depicts happy East Germans toiling in joy in service to the state.
Here is video (2:32) of that area.
Checkpoint Charlie
Another iconic name from post WWII, Checkpoint Charlie was the border crossing point between the Russian and American zones of occupied Berlin immediately after the war and later, following the building of the Berlin Wall, between East and West Germany.
Today, it is a tourist attraction with actors playing the roles of American or Soviet soldiers and shops offering bogus pieces of the Berlin Wall.
Here’s video (1:29).
The Trabant
If West Germany has been famous for the high quality of automobiles designed and built there, East Germany was maybe notorious for producing the Trabant, better known by a nickname, the Trabi.
Called “a spark plug with a roof,” the Trabi was built between 1957 and 1990 with few if any significant variations. It was the most common car in East Germany and, as it was produced by a state monopoly, it took 10 years to get one. Most agreed with the description of the cars as “loud, slow, poorly designed, and badly built.”
Trabis are now something of a retro item, used for displays, toys, etc. This is a toy I brought home for my granddaughters.
During our walkabout this day, I came across what I thought might be a Trabi used car lot. Indeed, it was connected to Trabi World, where one could rent a Trabi for a spin around Berlin. Don’t know what provisions were made for possible breakdowns. Here’s video (1:04).
Potsdamer Platz and The Wall
Potsdamer Platz is about a kilometer south of the Brandenburg Gate. The area was pretty much destroyed during WWII and then left desolate by the East Germans, bisected by the Berlin Wall. Since reunification, it has been transformed into a thriving commercial center.
Here’s video (3:19), including panoramic views of the city.
Holocaust Memorial
On a site covering more than 4.5 acres, located between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, lie 2,711 slabs of concrete of varying height. They constitute the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” also known as the Holocaust Memorial.
Completed in 2005, the memorial’s design has been controversial. There are no plaques, inscriptions, religious symbols, or names. New York architect Peter Eisenman, who designed the memorial, said he wanted visitors to feel the loss and disorientation that Jews felt during the Holocaust. No stone is the exact same size as another, intended to reflect individuality along with sameness. I guess I appreciate representational art more than conceptual art. Personally, I found the memorial lacking . . . what, I’m not quite sure.
Here’s video (1:02).
Soviet War Memorial
Seemingly out of place, there is a large Soviet War Memorial in Tiergarten. It was erected in 1945, only months after Soviet troops took Berlin, using stones from the destroyed Reich Chancellery.
The site is also the burial place of about 2,000 Soviet soldiers, from among an estimated 80,000 killed in the Battle of Berlin. The memorial is still used for commemorative events, including VE (Victory in Europe) Day, 8 May.
On Sunday, 16 June, Julia and I went to church. We walked from the hotel to the Parish Church of the Sacred Heart (Herz-Jesu). It was somewhat close, but that’s not why we went there.
My parents were married on 11 November 1945 in that church. Using photos taken at the wedding, Julia had been able to locate the church because of the distinctive artwork behind the altar. Indeed, she and Sam visited the church on their December 2017 honeymoon.
Below is a combination of a picture from the wedding in 1945 and one taken on our visit. Not a perfect match, but we did a little better in the video.
Here then is a brief (1:26) video taken of the church. We waited to shoot the interior until after Mass and the parishioners had left.
After church, we took the long way back to the hotel so that we could see some more of Zehlendorf. In an earlier post, I mentioned some street names related to the American presence post-WWII. This one was a bit of a puzzle.
We then changed hotels and took a cab to Charlottenburg, another upscale neighborhood and much more urban. As we planned a few days of serious tourism, we wanted to be closer to the main sights. Our hotel was the Hotel Pension Funk, and it was all that the name implies . . . and more. You’ll get a slight preview in this video (1:43) of the hotel and area around it, but there will be a special post about it later.
This was also the first day of much walking . . . the first of several days of much walking. On this day, I took 12,128 steps and covered 4.2 miles. The next day, I crushed my previous PR.
We left Zehlendorf on Saturday, 15 June, and got a quick, condensed tour of the former U.S. section of occupied Berlin.
Before we went on the tour, however, I wandered down the street to an ATM to get some euros. Below are a couple of photos from the shopping area maybe a kilometer from the hotel.
The ice cream cone is pretty obvious, but I was a little surprised to see a store called “Schmuck.” I later learned, though, that however Yiddish might translate the word :), it means “jewelry, adornment” in German.
Throughout our visit to Berlin, I was disappointed to see the amount of “tagging.” Maybe not as much as in 1970s New York City, but a lot. Graffiti is technically illegal in Germany, but perhaps “street art” is forgiven. Whatever, I’m generally not a fan. Here’s a scene from my walk.
We met up with Christoph Krajewski, a friend of Isabel’s and a professional guide. He was kind enough to give us the tour free of charge. Chris had been born in Berlin in 1943, so he certainly had the local background and was very informative. We were also joined by Heiko Suhr, military historian, who is working on a book and documentary about Wilhelm Canaris.
As it was the American sector, some of the streets bear American names, presented in German style, such as the signage below. (One of my alma maters.)
Germany and the U.S. share the eagle as a national symbol. This representation was quite common in the area we toured.
The tour was conducted mostly by car, with few stops. We had a lot to cover. Some of the video below was shot from the moving car. Following the tour, we met Michael Günther at the Alliiertenmuseum (Allied Museum), which offers WWII historical items from American, English, and French forces. Michael interviewed me on camera for possible use in the documentary.
The video (2:09) ends with one of the first “buddy bears” I saw in Berlin. A standing bear has been part of the Berlin identity for centuries. (You’ll see it on the picture of the city hall in 1963, and on bottles of Berliner pilsner.) In 2001, two art students did a street art project, designing and building a bear with a friendly mien. Now they are almost ubiquitous, with different colors and designs to convey a message. Okay, this is street art I like. You’ll see more buddy bears in other videos, too. (I was very disappointed at not being able to find an option that one could inflate to real buddy bear size.)
Wannsee is in the southwestern Berlin borough of Steglitz-Zehlendorf. Two lakes, the larger Großer Wannsee and the Kleiner Wannsee, are located on the River Havel. The area provides much scenic and recreational opportunities . . . and some history.
After visiting the former home of the Canaris family on June 14, the extended Canaris family invited Julia and me to join them on a boat tour of Wannsee. Prussian royalty of the late 18th century built “palaces” along the lakes, and on ‘Peacock Island.’ Those have been joined since by the homes or vacation homes of many of Germany’s notables. In this video (4:10), you’ll see homes and other buildings from a wide range of eras and in many different styles.
The ‘Wannsee House’
There is one particular villa of special note. It had been built in 1914-15 by a merchant and factory owner. The original owner sold it in 1923 to a firm owned by the industrialist Friedrich Minoux, an early ally of Adolf Hitler. Minoux sold the villa in 1940 to a foundation established by SS Obergrüppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich to build or acquire vacation resorts for the SS Security Service (SD).
On January 20, 1942, Heydrich and 14 other members of the SS hierarchy or senior government officials met at the villa to begin discussion of how to ensure that the elements of the German regime could bring about “the final solution of the Jewish question,” the systematic extermination of European Jews. The ‘Wannsee Conference’ lasted 90 minutes.
The building served as a school from 1952 until 1982, when it became a memorial. In 1992, on the 50th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, the building was designated an official museum and educational center related to the Holocaust.
Michael Günther took Julia and me on a walking tour of the building the day after our boat tour of Wannsee. You’ll see segments of both days in this short (2:20) video.
‘Bridge of spies’
The Gleinicke Bridge crosses the Havel River in Wannsee, connecting Berlin with Potsdam. After WWII, the border between West Berlin and East Germany ran down the middle of the river, with Potsdam in East Germany. In 1952, East German officials closed the bridge to West Berliners. Following construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the bridge was closed to East Germans as well.
With such restricted access, the bridge became the site of several exchanges of captured spies during the Cold War. Reporters began to refer to it as the “bridge of spies.” (An American movie of the same name was released in 2015.) The first exchange was in 1962, when Americans released convicted Soviet spy Rudolf Abel and received captured U-2 pilot Gary Powers in return. In 1985, 23 captured American agents were exchanged for one Polish and three Soviet agents. In 1986, human rights campaigner and Soviet political prisoner Natan Sharansky was among those exchanged.
One day after the Berlin Wall opened in 1989, all Germans were able to walk across the bridge. Border fortifications and barricades were removed upon the reunification of Germany in 1990.
One feature of the bridge that points to its former status as a border point is the color of its paint. As you’ll see in this brief (1:01) video, the shades of green on each half of the bridge are different.
Julia and me in front of the former Canaris home. Like the touch of the Porsche and BMW.
Admiral Canaris, his wife, and two daughters had lived at Waldsangerpfad 17, also in Zehlendorf and southwest of the center of Berlin. (UPDATE: A little more research reveals that the address of the house when the Canarises lived there was Betazeile 17.)
By the time my parents lived in the house — beginning November 1945, six months after the end of the war — no one from the Canaris family lived there. Based on mounting evidence that he had been working against Hitler, Wilhelm Canaris had been dismissed and the Abwehr disestablished in early 1944. After Canaris’s personal diary, containing additional evidence of his opposition, was presented to Hitler, Canaris was arrested, convicted by an SS summary court, and sentenced to death. He was executed on 9 April 1945.
While my parents lived in the house, my mother became pregnant with me. This is a picture of my mother, in spring 1946, sitting on a cot out on the second-floor rear deck of the house. She told me later that she was suffering from morning sickness at the time. Sure looks it.
On 14 June 2019, Julia and I joined members of the extended Canaris family on a visit to the Canaris home. The neighborhood is quite nice, featuring generally large homes, expansive yards, and cobbled roads. (I’m not sure I’d enjoy driving on the cobbled surfaces, but they lend a certain style and do tend to slow drivers down.)
(Julia and Sam had previously visited the house in December 2017, when they went to Paris and Berlin for their honeymoon. She had tracked it down using WWII-era photos as reference.)
Isabel had made arrangements beforehand, of course, with the current occupants of the house, who were very gracious in inviting us onto the grounds. We spent 15-20 minutes in the back yard, which contained wonderful plants and landscaping. I believe the current owners learned about the home’s history only a short time before the visit (it was 72+ years ago) and of its importance to me personally only during our visit.
We were met at Tegel Airport at about 10:30 am June 13 by Isabel Traenckner-Probst and her daughter, Eva. As we emerged from customs, we saw two tall women waving balloons and heard them yell our names.
Isabel drove us to the hotel she had so kindly arranged for us, but our rooms were not ready and would not be for several hours. Recognizing we had taken a redeye, Isabel, again kindly, made her home available to us for naps. Isabel and her family, also including husband, Reiner, and son, Lars, live in one of what the locals call “American homes,” apartments originally built to house American service members and their families.
(Isabel is a great-great-grandniece of Wilhelm Canaris, German admiral and head of the Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence agency, and she was our principal contact with the extended family. [More about the Admiral later.] My parents had lived in the Canaris house 1945-46, returned to the U.S. with two of his personal photo albums, and we were in Berlin to mark the return of those albums and other material to the Canaris family.)
After we grabbed a few hours sleep, Isabel drove us to the Hotel Haus Leopold, a favorite of her and her family, located in an upscale neighborhood of Berlin, Zehlendorf.
We came to realize that Zehlendorf was the area where my parents were married in November 1945, and where they lived after that. Most American forces lived and worked in this section of Berlin during the occupation and for many years thereafter.
That evening, we met other members of the Canaris family at a reception held at Chalet Suisse, located in a forest setting, Grunevald, in Zehlendorf. Below are scenes from Chalet Suisse.
I was surprised to learn that there were several members of the family meeting each other for the first time. Then again, as I learned more, it was not so surprising. The Canarises, while well-established in the first half of the 20th century and before, had been very much disrupted by the war and different elements of the family dispersed near its end and afterward to other parts of Europe and beyond. Many had traveled far for this night and they had a lot of catching up to do.
Isabel was also trying to develop a family tree and had brought her intial draft, sketched out on attached sheets of paper perhaps 5 ft X 12 ft in size. Family members added to the names listed there. At one point, Isabel apologized to Julia and me for everyone speaking in German. I said, “No need to speak English.” And a young woman, who was writing on the family tree, looked over at me and, with a smile, said “But we all could.”
Reiner and Isabel lay out family tree.
At dinner, I sat alongside my first personal contact with the Canaris family, Patricia Highfill, another great-great-grandniece. (Her picture appeared in the Christmas letter post, as I had delivered the albums and other material to her in the fall at her home in Palm Desert, Calif. She then brought them to her family’s home in Switzerland and they were conveyed to Berlin.) She urged me to try a meal with one of her favorites, rösti. I would describe rösti as high-end “hash browns.” When Julia told Eva our version of “rösti” was a popular breakfast side in the U.S., she was surprised.
I also met at dinner Michael Günther, a TV documentary producer, who is heading up production of a documentary on Admiral Canaris. Julia and I would become friends with Michael and his wife, Cornelia (Connie). More on them later, too.
Back to the hotel around 11, we rested for a big day ahead.
