I didn’t finish yesterday’s post as we did seem to shoehorn a lot in. On the way back home we had to chnage at the Zoo. There was yet another Christmas Market. There are between 60 and a hundred Christmas markets in Berling, so it wasn’t a surprise to find another one!
There were many photo opportunities.
So, yet again we walked around, seeing the identical things that we had seen in the other one. We decided to sit and have a drink, a saxophonist and singer playing in the background, Chris Rea covers.
What i didn’t know until later was that in 2016 a terrorist drove a tractor trailer into the Christmas crowds, killing 11 people and injuring 55 people. If I had known that before we went I may have thought twice.
We went into the Kaiser Wilhelm memorial church, which was devastated during the Second World War, much like Coventry Cathedral. As a symbol of reconciliation and the shared experience, inside there is the Cross of Nails, made from nails found in the rubble of Coventry Cathedral.
The modern church constructed opposite, built between 1959 and 1963, is spectacular. The walls are covered with 21,292 stained glass windows.
That night we returned home and visited the Night and Day shop that had an amazing array of Dr Oeteker pizzas. made in Germany. Pizza and beer it was! Worldwide they produce 4.5 million pizzas a day! I had a four cheese one, there were so many flavours that we don’t have in the UK.
The next day we had a lie in and Pete went to Lidl for provisions, bringing back still warm bread. Today we were going to go to the Stasi Museum, we had never visited it before. so it seemed a good idea to explore that side of things in the history of East Germany.
On the way we had to at Frankfurter Tor, we made a bit of a detour as we had seen what looked like a huge Humana shop, a second hand chain common in Europe. This is it’s largest second hand shop and the largest second hand shop in Europe! Over 30,000 items covering 5 floors.
The staircase was amazing. Pete bought me a stripy hat! He also told me that it has been used in the Queens Gambit.
The Stasi (short for Staatssicherheit, “State Security”) was the secret police and intelligence service of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1950 to 1990. It became one of the most extensive and intrusive surveillance organizations in modern history.
A visit to the Stasi Museum in Berlin is one of those experiences that stays with you. It’s not just a museum — it’s a walk straight into the nerve centre of East Germany’s secret police, preserved almost exactly as it was when the Stasi operated. In fact the cafe and the shop had the same austere atmosphere that I had experienced in East Berlin and Hungary when it was it was in the Eastern Block.
It was really interesting reading about their tactics, really scary stuff.
They developed something called Zersetzung which was was a systematic method of psychological demolition taught at the Stasi’s own College of Law. Its goal was to paralyze targets by destroying their self-confidence and social ties while concealing the state’s involvement. There were testimonials from people who it had happened to. It was horrible, they literally questioned their own sanity. Small things moved slightly, so subtle but over a period of time it would make people feel like they were being pushed over the edge. They couldn’t disclose it as it would make them sound mad.
At its peak, the Stasi employed ~91,000 full-time staff and between 174,000 and 500,000 “informal collaborators” (IMs), which included neighbours, friends, and family members. One in every 6.5 people.
We saw lots of the ways in which they spied on the population, a constant physical and electronic surveillance included phone tapping, bugging apartments, and covertly photographing mail.
The other strange thing they did was scent profiling. Agents would collec”olfactory snapshots” of dissidents by stealing worn clothing or using cloths on chairs during interrogations, storing these in jars to be tracked by dogs if needed.
This bit seemed so crazy. But when we were going round and saying how awful, I did reflect that we have our own ‘Spy Cops’ scandel going on at the moment, over a 1000 left/animal right groups etc infiltrated by undercover police, having ‘deceptive relationships’, which even ended up with children being born as a result, a really gross form or violation and abuse! It was just on such a large scale in the East, but these tactics are not limited to them.
One peculiar thing I saw was the diagram drawn by Erich Mielke how was the head of the Stasi, as how he expected his breakfast to be served every day.
But things started to fall apart as counter culture grew.
We stayed for quite a few hours here and it was well worth a visit. For levity we decided to travel onwards to the Ramones Museum, having had fond memories from a previous visit.
I was completely disorientated and for good reason, the location had changed, not only that it wasn’t really a museum anymore. There were a lot of the same things but it was completely scaled back, and was now more of a alternative vegan cafe. It was disappointing but we had a look round and a few well deserved beers.
Pete had a chat with the woman serving at the bar and it seems as though the owner wants to change it to a Hard Rock Cafe type of place, which is a shame.
It was a great day and a ne hat to boot!
Random Acts of Travelling 