Tag Archives: monument

Berlin, History, Urban Nature

Gallery: Dorotheenstädtisch-Friedrichswerderscher Friedhof

Dorotheenstädtisch-Friedrichswerderscher Cemetery is just up the street from our apartment here in Mitte. It has many famous graves, including Bertolt Brecht. It also has a mausoleum that still has bullet holes from WWII. I found the various places where you can still see the bullet holes like this to be among the saddest signs of the war. You can see the furious intent behind the scars and know that they were aiming to kill someone. Sometimes Berlin feels like a great Necropolis, filled with monuments, cemeteries, and the scars of war at every turn.

History, Photos, Poetry, Weimar

Gallery: Weimar

We stopped in Weimar on our way from Leipzig to Opfermoor Vogtei. Weimar was a charming Thuringian city in Central Germany, home to literary icons like Goethe and Schiller, the Wiemar Republic, Bauhaus, and a town idealized by the Nazis as a ideal of German culture. It is also home to Buchenwald Concentration Camp, which we did not go to. One of the more interesting things Elliott and I noted in Weimar was a noticeable lack of small children.

Art, Berlin, Photos, Urban Nature

Gallery: Friedhöfe vor dem Halleschen Tor

I spent the day in Kreuzberg with my friends Elliott and Ben. We found this cemetery that had not only Felix Mendelssohn’s grave, but also E.T.A. Hoffmann, the Romantic-era author of the book The Nutcracker was based on, as well as the protagonist of Offenbach’s opera Tales of Hoffman.

Angela Brower (Nicklausse) and Diana Damrau (Giulietta) in the 4th act of Jacques Offenbach’s “Les contes d’Hoffmann” in a production by Richard Jones. Bayerische Staatsoper 2011.

Art, Berlin, History, Personal Journal, Photos, Urban Nature

Gallery: Viktoriapark

I went to Viktoriapark in Kreuzberg with my friends Elliott and Ben. We had radlers in the Biergarten and then walked up the hill to the Prussian National Monument for the Liberation Wars, which actually predates Germany as a nation (1821). It is a beautiful Neoclassical spire commemorating the German Campaign of 1813 during the Napoleonic Wars. From the top of Kreuzberg you can see the entire city. It was a fun afternoon.

Ben on a zipline, Viktoriapark, Berlin-Kreuzberg.