Berlin - Overview and Impressions

Before I get into pictures and specifics about our Berlin trip, some background info seems to be in order.

Our trip was organized by the Auslandsamt (the department at the University that deals with international students), which meant that our group (Wheaton, Wesleyan, Vanderbilt) was just a part of a larger group of international students going on the trip. For the trip, the Auslandsamt rented a tour bus to get us to and around Berlin and, since every seat was filled, I would guess we had about 40 or so people along for the ride.

Our trip ran from Wednesday to Sunday and we had a pretty packed itinerary: Wednesday we drove to Berlin and checked into the hostel and then walked over to the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, Thursday we had a bus tour of the city in the morning and then the rest of the day off, Friday we drove to Potsdam (about an hour away) to tour a Stasi prison and one of Fredrick the Great's summer homes and then we came back to Berlin and went to a show at a theater, Saturday we had a foot tour of Kreutzberg (one of Berlin's "boroughs") in the morning and the rest of the day off, and Sunday we drove back to Regensburg.


My first impression of Berlin was that it is huge, open, modern, and doesn't really feel like it's in Germany. A lot of this has to do with the city's history: Berlin is a pretty young city by european standards - it wasn't really important until the last couple hundred years and Allied bombing in WWII managed to pretty much level all of the buildings in the entire city, resulting in a clean slate for lots of new buildings. While Regensburg is a city of stone, Berlin is a city of glass and steel. The fact that everything got destroyed also seems to have created a lot of open space that has yet to be filled in - cities like Boston and New York tend to feel cramped, narrow and don't have much grass, sidewalk space, etc., Berlin just seems to have more space between buildings, wider streets and more parks.

By German standards, Berlin is not particularly wealthy, has a pretty cheap cost of living and therefore a lot of immigrants and young people. This makes Berlin have a really intersting cultural scene. As the mayor said, "Berlin is poor, but sexy."

One thing that kind of annoyed me about Berlin is how much is in English - while the city didn't feel as touristy as Munich, there were times when I felt like I could have been in America. Germany in general has a fascination with America that borders on idol worship at times - on one hand I'm glad that they're not snooty like the French but at the same time it's kind of unsettling how much of our culture they latch on to. Since Berlin is such young and trendy city, it all seems much more magnified here.