{"id":3323,"date":"2018-05-06T19:05:59","date_gmt":"2018-05-06T23:05:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/?p=3323"},"modified":"2018-05-28T01:45:25","modified_gmt":"2018-05-28T05:45:25","slug":"my-trip-to-berlin-germany-the-sights-in-berlin-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/my-trip-to-berlin-germany-the-sights-in-berlin-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"My Trip To Berlin, Germany: The Sights In Berlin (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

More Berlin Sights<\/h1>\n

Last week after speaking at a software developer conference in Berlin Germany, I had the opportunity to take several personal days while there and I got to see quite a bit of the city! It was pretty amazing!<\/p>\n

There was so much to see and do in the city of Berlin, that I can’t fit it all into a single blog post!\u00a0 So welcome to part 2 of Berlin sights!<\/p>\n

Checkpoint Charlie<\/h1>\n

Checkpoint Charlie<\/a> (or Checkpoint C) was a famous\u00a0crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War<\/a>.\u00a0 The original booth is on display in a museum, but a copy of the booth is situated on the original site for tourists.\u00a0 Along with Military Police actors posing for photographs.<\/p>\n

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Berlin Wall<\/h1>\n

Only one block west of Checkpoint Charlie is a memorial or a monument to the Berlin Wall<\/a>.\u00a0 It is a 200 meter (650 foot) long section of the wall that was never torn down and is now protected by a fence<\/a>.\u00a0 Although the wall was torn into and chipped away before being protected as a memorial.\u00a0 This is not the only stretch of the Berlin Wall that still stands, though.\u00a0 There are several throughout the city<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Small sections can be found throughout the city on display too.\u00a0 This one was just a block from Checkpoint Charlie.<\/p>\n

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And this one was just across the street from Checkpoint Charlie.<\/p>\n

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German Historical Museum<\/h1>\n

I dashed through the German Historical Museum<\/a> in only 3 hours one afternoon, but you can easily spend an entire day going through all the displays there.\u00a0 It is laid out chronologically, so you can go quickly through time periods that you are less interested in and you can spend more time on other periods.\u00a0\u00a0I didn’t take a lot of photos inside.\u00a0 It was a bit overwhelming.<\/p>\n

Here is a 16th century book that I thought was pretty cool.\u00a0 It was hand-drawn and hand-written on parchment.\u00a0 My phone camera and the dim lighting didn’t allow me to capture the incredible detail.\u00a0 Each page is a unique work of art.<\/p>\n

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Here is an actual prosthetic arm from the 16th century.\u00a0 It’s made out of iron and wood.<\/p>\n

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It was probably made for a high ranking knight who had lost his arm in battle.\u00a0 The elbow has 6 different positions that the wearer could set.<\/p>\n

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And the hand has a button to move the index finger and middle finger, plus another button to move the ring finger and little finger.\u00a0 Pretty advanced!<\/p>\n

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Here is a photo of 2 different light bulbs from the 1870s.\u00a0 On the left, Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulb.\u00a0 And on the right,\u00a0Sir Joseph Wilson Swan’s incandescent bulb.<\/p>\n

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Both of these inventors seemed to independently invent their versions around the same time period.\u00a0 And they integrated each others ideas into their own inventions.\u00a0 They even worked together for a while.<\/p>\n

I ran out of time by the time I got to the Hitler section and WWII and then the Cold War.\u00a0 I should have skimmed through some of the earlier history, because there are a lot of cool things to learn in the WWII and Cold War sections of the museum.<\/p>\n

Here is the ballot from the German elections on March 5th of 1933<\/a>.\u00a0 Adolf Hitler<\/a> called for this election shortly after he had been appointed as Chancellor.\u00a0 You can see that the voters had 15 different choices, and that the Nazi party was on top of the list.<\/p>\n

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Here is one of the Nazi party campaign posters for this election.\u00a0 It says: “The Reich will never be destroyed – if you stay united and loyal”.\u00a0 This poster blended the old Reich President (Paul von Hindenburg<\/a>) with the new young Chancellor, while placing Hitler’s head subtly in the foreground.<\/p>\n

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They had nearly 90% voter turnout for this election and Hitler’s Nazi party won about 44% of the votes.\u00a0 Just two weeks after this election, Hitler persuaded and intimidated other parties and was able to pass an act that effectively gave him dictatorial powers<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0Within a few months, the Nazis banned all other parties and dissolved the German Parliament (Reichstag<\/a>).\u00a0 And the rest is history.<\/p>\n

Sad and shameful history.<\/p>\n

Holocaust Memorial<\/h1>\n

Just one block south of the Brandenburg Gate, is a really interesting and creative\u00a0Holocaust Memorial, or Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe<\/a>.\u00a0 It covers an entire large city block … almost 5 acres.<\/p>\n

When you first enter the park and see the memorial, it appears to be just rows and rows of concrete slabs.\u00a0 The slabs look sort of like graves in a large cemetery.\u00a0 There are thousands and thousands of these concrete slabs and they are not all the same height.\u00a0 It’s quite beautiful.<\/p>\n

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But then when you walk into the memorial, you quickly realize that the ground undulates up and down wildly as you get deeper into the interior of the memorial.\u00a0 The ground gets lower and lower.\u00a0 And the concrete slabs get higher and higher.\u00a0 Eventually the slabs tower over all visitors that explore the park.\u00a0 The mood of visitors turns to confusion, isolation, and even a little bit of worry.<\/p>\n

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The artist who designed this memorial says that the slabs\u00a0“are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere”.\u00a0 It’s a unique experience.<\/p>\n

Buried under ground in the middle of the memorial, is an information center, but it was closed for the day when I was there.\u00a0 So I didn’t get to go inside.<\/p>\n

But wait, there\u2019s more!<\/h1>\n

Next time I\u2019ll publish yet another blog post showing even more of the fun sightseeing that I did in Berlin<\/a>. Because in 3 days I saw a ton of cool stuff and it won\u2019t all fit into even two blog posts!<\/p>\n

Thanks for your interest!<\/p>\n

Kurt<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More Berlin Sights Last week after speaking at a software developer conference in Berlin Germany, I had the opportunity to take several personal days while there and I got to see quite a bit of the city! It was pretty amazing! There was so much to see and do in the city of Berlin, that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[110],"tags":[609,499,278,40],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3323"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3323"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3428,"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3323\/revisions\/3428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}