Berlin
is the capital and the largest city of Germany.
Berlin is a city on the cutting-edge, and has often been in the spotlight
on the world stage over the past 100 years. This is a city where constant
change is a given. Sure, the Wall isn't there any more, but Berlin is
still very much divided: in the center of the city, there's a pretty neat
segue from the wealthy glitz of the west to newly developed central east
Berlin. This area was quickly colonized by the trendy café-bar
set in the early 1990s and swift rebuilding has erased nearly all trace
of the wall. It's the suburbs of East Berlin with their gray and decaying
apartment blocks, cardboard cars and paucity of telephones that make it
apparent that the Wall was up to protect a utilitarian East from a decadent
West.
Before
it came down, the Wall was the most enduring icon of a nation's disharmony.
But it's not as if the city hadn't seen it all before. From the civic
turmoil of the Thirty Years War, to the devastating impact of the firebombing
during WWII, Berlin has constantly been under siege or in a post-siege
rebuilding phase. Even in the middle of trouble and strife, though, Berliners
have continued to live it up. This is the city where cabaret and techno
were born. There's an edgy out-there quality to the nightlife - think
Sally Bowles and her divine decadence through to the contemporary cool
of Blixa Bargeld and Nick Cave's tortured noise poetry - that is both
intimidating and exciting. Whichever way you spell it, Berlin spells groove.
Berlin
sits in the middle of the region known from medieval times as the Mark
of Brandenburg, now the Bundesland (federal state) of Brandenburg. The
city spills north and south of the Spree River, which winds through some
of the magnificent parkland that comprises a third of the municipal area.
You can't really get lost within sight of the brooding and monstrous Fernsehturm
(TV Tower), a useful orientation point visible from most of central Berlin.
Unter der Linden, the fashionable avenue of aristocratic old Berlin, extends
from the Brandenburg Gate to Alexanderplatz, once the heart of socialist
East Germany. Some of Berlin's finest museums are here, on Museumsinsel
in the Spree, the original center of the metropolis. West of the Brandenburg
Gate, the boulevard runs through Tiergarten, a huge landscaped park. You
may remember the Victory Column at its center from the Wim Wender's film
Wings of Desire. The commercial center of west Berlin glitters just to
the south.
Berlin
is the capital and the largest city of Germany.
Before
it came down, the Wall was the most enduring icon of a nation's disharmony.
But it's not as if the city hadn't seen it all before. From the civic
turmoil of the Thirty Years War, to the devastating impact of the firebombing
during WWII, Berlin has constantly been under siege or in a post-siege
rebuilding phase. Even in the middle of trouble and strife, though, Berliners
have continued to live it up. This is the city where cabaret and techno
were born. There's an edgy out-there quality to the nightlife - think
Sally Bowles and her divine decadence through to the contemporary cool
of Blixa Bargeld and Nick Cave's tortured noise poetry - that is both
intimidating and exciting. Whichever way you spell it, Berlin spells groove.
Berlin
sits in the middle of the region known from medieval times as the Mark
of Brandenburg, now the Bundesland (federal state) of Brandenburg. The
city spills north and south of the Spree River, which winds through some
of the magnificent parkland that comprises a third of the municipal area.
You can't really get lost within sight of the brooding and monstrous Fernsehturm
(TV Tower), a useful orientation point visible from most of central Berlin.
Unter der Linden, the fashionable avenue of aristocratic old Berlin, extends
from the Brandenburg Gate to Alexanderplatz, once the heart of socialist
East Germany. Some of Berlin's finest museums are here, on Museumsinsel
in the Spree, the original center of the metropolis. West of the Brandenburg
Gate, the boulevard runs through Tiergarten, a huge landscaped park. You
may remember the Victory Column at its center from the Wim Wender's film
Wings of Desire. The commercial center of west Berlin glitters just to
the south.