berlin Archives - Page 21 of 23

This shot was uploaded to the Gadling Flickr pool by Luminous Lens over a year ago, but I stumbled across it randomly while browsing through the collection of impressive photos our readers have submitted over time. This one was taken in Berlin, Germany during the Brazil vs. Croatia 2006 World Cup game. Down 1-0 and only a minute left, the Croatian fans lit flares and stormed the field in protest.

If you’d like to contribute a Photo of the Day shot for consideration, please visit our Gadling Flickr pool and upload your favorites.

Across Northern Europe: Terror in Berlin

by Brook Silva-Braga on Aug 17, 2007

I’m in Belgium now but I have a word more about Germany because simply being a tourist in Berlin will get you thinking. I’d love to take a history class on the last century in Berlin: WWI leads to Hitler leads to WWII leads to the DDR leads to the fall of the Berlin wall. How’s that for a syllabus?

A couple days ago I was at the Topography of Terror, an outdoor museum that lost funding before it was completed. The exhibit stands where the Gestapo and SS once set up shop and is complete enough in it’s telling of terrible things.

“World history sometimes seems unjust, but in the end it reveals a superior justice.” That quote was translated into English on one of the displays from the WWII period and it reminded me of Martin Luther King Jr.’s hopeful formulation that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”

But in 1944 it wasn’t that kind of movie and the quote is from Joseph Goebbels the Nazi propaganda minister. He was right, I suppose, but I’m not sure he knew it.

I spent a fair bit of my time in Berlin wishing I was traveling with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian president has famously denied the Holocaust and when Mike Wallace interviewed him on “60 Minutes” some months ago, Ahmadinejad basically asked, “If it happened, where is the evidence?”

Berlin, indeed much of Germany, is an answer to that question. Perhaps most stirring at the Topography of Terror are the audio recordings which play with the push of a button at several of the displays. One live radio report describes the hysterical crowd on the night Hitler was named Chancellor.

But the button I wished Ahmadinejad would push was from October 4, 1943. It was Heinrich Himmler, the SS commander speaking at a Nazi party meeting. “I want to talk to you quite openly here about a very difficult topic,” he said. “The extinction of the Jews.”

Germany is peppered with such horrible things. But tonight I’m in Belgium where the museums and monuments don’t make you think so much. That might not be fair though, since it was only a few decades before Hitler that Belgium’s King Leopold II’s pursuit of rubber led to the death of 5 to 22 million people in the Congo.

Back home in the United States of America our wealth was derived with the help of an unspeakable forced migration. Slaves worked land that was free because it’s native inhabitants had been exterminated or relocated.

I thought of that sometimes as I walked through Berlin; how Germans face their grandparent’s misdeeds much more than the rest of us.

“This was the worst event in the history of the world,” a thirty-something German told me. “And it’s important that we remember it, so that it never happens again. But sometimes it’s too much.”

I thought he was right and I thought if there were fewer people like the president of Iran, it wouldn’t be so necessary.

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Previously on Across Northern Europe:

Brook Silva-Braga is traveling northern Europe for the month of August and reuniting with some of the people he met on the yearlong trip which was the basis of his travel documentary, A Map for Saturday. You can follow his adventure in the series, Across Northern Europe.

Across Northern Europe: Globians Film Festival

by Brook Silva-Braga on Aug 16, 2007

If you’re in Berlin and have a few free hours this weekend skip down to Potsdam, about 20 minutes away by express train. You’ll find the Globians World and Culture Documentary Film Festival presenting films which are especially geared to the global tastes of Gadling readers.

This weekend’s slate of films focus on Asia: from Indian call centers to Tibetan orphanages to Chinese suicides to Japanese gigolos.

Director Joachim Polzer created a thematic program, starting with general long-term travel last Saturday (full disclosure: my film opened the festival) and following with nights devoted to Latin America, the United States, Europe, Africa and other less geographic themes.

The festival began in 2005, some 15 years after one of Polzer’s interview subjects told him, “We are all Globians.”

“The word stuck with me,” Polzer said.

At the time, Polzer was making documentaries himself in California and was struck by the number of quality English-language films that never made it to Germany.

“People think ‘American documentary, what is that?’ but there are lots of good programs on PBS and other places that people here don’t know about.”

With that premise he launched Globians in Potsdam, Berlin’s smaller sibling to the southwest. It’s not the easiest place to attract interest in English-language documentaries but Polzer says its better than being “the 20th film festival in Berlin.”

The modest audience of 300 in 2005 doubled last year and doubled again this year. More than 70 features are on this year’s roster.

The common thread of the three films I had a chance to see was unique perspective. “Back to the Ice: A Year in Antarctica” is a portrait of long-term stays in one the planet’s harshest environments. “Dark Water Rising: The Truth About Hurricane Katrina Animal Rescue” is a revealing, at times gruesome story of animal rescuers who seem somewhat ignorant to the simultaneous human suffering. “Match & Marry” explains the unorthodox coupling of Orthodox Jews in New York and elsewhere.

All three films told stories that I haven’t seen told elsewhere, stories that aren’t easy to tell for various reasons. Those difficulties were also evident in the limited production value and at times incomplete nature of the stories. They will all struggle to find a wide audience, which is too bad because they offer rarely seen perspectives. The chance to get a glimpse runs til Sunday and will return next summer for the festival’s fourth year.

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Previously on Across Northern Europe:

Across Northern Europe: A Perishable Feast

by Brook Silva-Braga on Aug 15, 2007

The difference between traveling and vacationing is a favorite topic of longterm travel writers. It’s not hard to see which group they hold in higher regard or believe they belong to. I try not to be competitive when it comes to travel — it’s so terribly tacky — but I’m sure I fail sometimes.

For me though there is a real and important difference between a short trip and long trip and I’m reminded of it now in the middle of my not-so-short, month-long jaunt. For me, you only truly feel like a traveler when you can’t see either end of your trip. When you can count how many days you’ve been away or how many you have left you are on a “vacation” from your life. But when you’re lost in the middle of it, it IS your life and you can inhabit the road like a new apartment. That’s the feeling of travel we get addicted to.

Since I’ve been back from my yearlong trip I’ve tried to figure out if I wanted to go on another big trip. I spent a few weeks in Costa Rica this winter asking myself, “Is this what I want to do?” And on the day we all rode the ferry in the bikini-hot sun and found a little beach village at the end of the dirt road I knew there was nothing finer. And on the slow, meaningless, empty, pointless days I wished I had a job for goodness sakes.

But here I am in Berlin traveling again and remembering that feeling of living on the road instead of visiting it. How can I tell the difference? The first sign came around 3am two nights ago at a club too far from my hostel. I was dancing, which meant I was traveling, because I don’t dance at home. “Why don’t I dance at home?” I was thinking as I danced there.

You can’t describe or even understand how you change when go away or how you change when you go back but it’s chemical and unstoppable and you can feel it and taste it but never touch it. You can just see what it does, like make you dance or talk to someone on the street. You need to get a little roughed up and jaded by being away and then you get in that groove.

A few days ago I mentioned Hemingway’s theory that Paris is a movable feast you can take with you wherever else you go. But the change I’m talking about doesn’t stay with you when you’re home. It’s a perishable feast you can bring home like a French peach in August. You can bring it home and have it there for a week until it rots.

That’s what makes it so special too. I made a damn feature length documentary about traveling and wrote elaborate things about it all. But the Swiss girls in the next bunk own that more than me now. They’re away for the summer and they know what I’m talking about better than I do. And when they go home their basket of new food will go stale and someone else will be eating French peaches without us.

But last night it was the four of us — the Swiss girls, the Canadian guy and me — drinking German beer in Berlin. Holly and Nadine are 19 years old and I am not. I’m not sure what we found to talk about but we spoke all night and into the morning.

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Previously on Across Northern Europe:

Across Northern Europe: Why Bother Going to Berlin?

by Brook Silva-Braga on Aug 14, 2007

Museums make me thoughtful, or maybe just a bit precious, and I was in the Pergamon museum here in Berlin today thinking that there may be no more pointless thing than going to a museum. I was having very big thoughts about museums though.

Art, I think, is about distillation. It’s about someone spending hours, months, years creating something for us to admire for a few minutes. We’re looking at all the time they spent making it; it’s all concentrated down onto a canvas or sculpture like a very high proof liquor.

And it’s also, obviously, an example of the best anyone has been able to do. Only the best distillations make it to the museum and that must have been a very cool thing a long time ago.

But these days we’re surrounded by movies, books, computer software, furniture, sitcoms that all perform the same trick every day: They take a great amount of expert effort and focus it into consumable pieces for our enjoyment. How many hundreds of man hours do you think go into a 23-minute episode of The Office? How much time did I spend dreaming up this ridiculous blog entry for you to skim for three minutes (and fortunately stumble upon this sentence)?

We’ve become desensitized to distillation.

I think this is why so many people have to work so hard to pretend they care at all about the things they see in museums. Stand in the corner of any gallery in any museum anywhere in the world and watch how many people spend less than ten seconds at each piece of art, when they even bother to stop at in the first place.

And usually when we care the most — indicated by us snapping the greatest number of terrible pictures — it’s because we’ve seen the artwork so often before in popular culture. How often have you been anxious to see a work you hadn’t already seen reproductions of?

It seems to me seeing great art once meant much more for two principle reasons: 1) you couldn’t see a reproduction from home and 2) you couldn’t reach the art very easily. For a boy from New York to see some stuff in Berlin would have been a big deal 200 or even 20 years ago, but not now.

This got me thinking about travel in general because both points 1) and 2) are becoming less true for all sorts of things other than art; it’s easier for the world to come to you and easier for you to go to the world, which starts to erode the reasons to go traveling at all.

Need I waste a paragraph listing ways the world is coming to us? We’ve already seen reproductions of the paintings, tasted reproductions of the food, heard reproductions of the music. Etc to infinity.

And meanwhile going to the world is easier than it probably should be. Look at the twelve of us sitting here in the Heart of Gold Hostel common area in Berlin, Germany. Look at the Koreans on their wi-fi, the dressed up Europeans slurping the bottom of their cocktails, look at me sitting here typing rubbish.

Berlin, Germany, man! There was a wall keeping the world out so recently that if reunified Germany was a backpacker it wouldn’t be old enough to drink the Jager shots on tap at the hostel bar. But in 17 years visiting here has morphed from tragically impossible to impossibly easy.

That’s point 2: When seeing the painting takes no effort you end up spending ten damn seconds in front of it. And these days I look at Russia and the Middle East and say, “At least there’s still somewhere you have to work a little to get to.”

So could travel be on a collision course with itself? Is the world coming to us and us going to world becoming so easy that the magic is disappearing?

No, there won’t be empty planes in 50 years any more than there are empty museums today. We’ll still go. We’ll go because we’re supposed to. We’ll go because its a status symbol. We’ll go because there are some tastes, some colors, some sounds and feelings and sights that will never be fully diminished. And we won’t even really know it’s different, I bet. It’ll be like drinking beer when you’ve never tasted grain alcohol. That’s plenty distilled, we’ll say, wiping our mouth. We’ll hold the glass up to the light and admire it, like we do now.

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Previously on Across Northern Europe: