6/18 NMM and Bike Tour Along Berlin Wall

Today we were able to sleep in because our first class was at 2pm in the afternoon. Ironically, this was also the first lecture that started late. Our lecture on the New Metropolitan Mainstream (NMM) touched on new trends in the movement of people in Germany since the collapse in socialism. After socialism collapsed there were many abandoned buildings in the East as people migrated from East Germany to West. The result was many people squatting in abandoned buildings. Although there has been a crackdown on this behavior recently, there was a large squatting culture. Another evolution in Berlin’s growth is the gentrification of neighborhoods that is bringing the rich to the city center and pushing the poor to the outskirts. This is a natural evolution of the city and us New Yorkers can see it occurring in Manhattan and Brooklyn today. In order to build Columbia’s Manhattanville campus we had to push people out of their homes on 125^th street for the “greater good” of New York. Neighborhoods like Dumbo that are directly across the East River are increasing rents to astronomical prices the equivalent, if not more expensive then areas of Manhattan. This seems to be a global phenomena in the growth of cities today and I can’t tell if it is morally right and if it is the best for the community when it comes to retaining local and sub-cultures.

Another layer of the NMM that we discussed were the Flagship Projects like the equivalent of a World Trade Center. In Berlin many of the projects that the government has embarked on skip over socialist and Nazi architecture and instead glorify their Prussian History. An interesting discussion that has occurred was over resurrecting old Nazi architecture – which would be viewed in a very political way and a resurgence of dangerous nationalism. This reminded me of the Yasukuni Shrine of Japan, which gained association with war time atrocities and has become a politically charged debate since WWII. Although it is simply a domestic issue it gains traction worldwide.

After class, we went to the TV Tower for a bike tour of Germany. The bike tour was the perfect mode of transportation in the city because all roads, large or small, had bike lanes and clear system of law that made biking manageable and safe mode of transportation. We started in East Berlin in Mitte’s Alexanderplatz, the old GDR city center. Since the opening of the East, Alexanderplatz has been fast changing with luxury condos being purchased – even by Donald Trump! GO CAPITALISM!

Trumping over the Berlin Wall

Alexanderplatz

We then biked along Stalinalle, which was changed to Frankfurteralle after destalinization period in the late 195. Frankfurteralle that lead to the Alexanderplatz had very Soviet architecture and served the needs of the political elite of the GDR including entertainment and parades. The apartments on the street were complete garbage and our tour guide told us that they only cost 100-150 Euro a month! That's close to 1/10^th of my rent! The concrete used in the construction was of such horrible quality that the lifespan only lasted 60 years and there were initiatives to destroy the buildings in the future and change similar neighborhoods into national parks.

After biking down to Alexanderplatz we went to a recreation of the Berlin wall. The wall had three sections, the western side was the actually location demarcating the zone. There was a section between the walls of open space where guards were given shoot to kill orders to anyone that tried to cross over to the East and then there was the Eastern Wall. After four generations of the wall, they added cylinder along the top making it physically impossible to grab the wall and gain traction in order to jump over. It is incredible to think that a zone like this still exists today between the North and South Korea in the form of the DMZ. What an incredible experience that would be to travel to the DPRK and see how their evolution of the wall differed from the European version.

When the wall went up in August 13th, 1981, it was done one night without warning to the public. This stopped the mass migration of citizens to the west, but also cost hundreds of thousands of jobs because citizens from both sides could not commute to the other for their work. I cannot imagine waking up one morning on my commute to the JP Morgan office on Wall Street and realizing that I couldn’t go past Grand Central Station for the foreseeable future. Yet interestingly, with the establishment of the wall, the GDR economy was able to stabilize and after a decade, the GDR was even making loans to the Russians.

When chilling on the wall, me and a couple of the guys decided to try and make our way to the top of the wall. Anton stood on my shoulders and I boosted him up using perfect squat technique  (shout out to Demetri for teaching me). I got some help climbing over as well, but on my way down I hurt my foot and its been bothering me ever since. I can’t imagine trying to jump over if there was barbed wire and putting my life at risk just to climb to the West.

NYU Graduate Hipster Drawing Maps

Tour guide

After spending time at the wall, we biked to the Soviet War Memorial. This memorial was rarely seen by western tourists and is usually visited only by Eastern Europeans. In the West we call the Second World War, WWII because of the Blitzkrieg on London and storming of the beaches of Normandy. However in Russian the war is called the Great Patriotic War and viewed as a war between the Germans and Russians because the scale and scope of destruction and death eclipsed the western front. It is called the Great Patriotic War because it was similar to Napoleon’s conquest into Russia when the fate of Russian Sovereignty was threatened by an outside power.

The Soviet war memorial was incredible. When walking through a stone structure and in the distance there is a large sculpture of a seated woman. You are drawn to the sculpture and before you know it you look to the left and there are these two bronze triangular structured gates on either side with hammer and sickle engravings near the top and soldiers kneeling as if paying respect to their fallen comrades. On both the left and the right were giant stone slabs of insitu sculptures that depicted the Russian narrative of the war written in German and Russian languages. At the end on top of a hill stood a large man with a sword in hand. Under the sword is a broken swatstika – symbolizing Russia’s role in liberating the Germans from fascism. The entire memorial is incredibly powerful, but in the eyes of a westerner, I could not help but feel like I was in a graveyard of the orks in Mordor of Lord of the Rings. I do not say that to equate the Russian to a lower level being, but the presence of the hammer and sickle, images of soldiers mourning and this gigantic statue in the center of it all created an ominous feeling similar to what I felt when watching those movies.

Lord of the CCCP - Communist Mordor

Soviet World War II Memorial

Stepping on Swatstikas 

Russian Statue

The soviet war memorial was preserved incredibly well and because of Russians doing everything in their power to ensure that the Germans never forgot the atrocities of the war. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the German Government told Russia that their presence of troops was no longer welcome in the former GDR. Russia then left Germany under the condition that the war memorials never be changed and a trust be set up to maintain all of them. This agreement reached tensions when Putin seized Crimea and domestic politicians became unhappy with what happened.

The last stop on this four-hour bike ride was Checkpoint Charlie. Checkpoint Charlie has slowly disappeared into the fabric of society like Alexanderplatz with many luxury condos rising. It is interesting how society decides what things to retain in the memories of the people and what they decide to destroy or reshape to change the narrative of national identity. In the case of Checkpoint Charlie, there is now a two story McDonalds on the street behind a gimmicky show of Germans pretending to be man the station of checkpoint Charlie in American Army.

After Checkpoint Charlie and a Big Mac, Fries and Fanta, we hopped on our bikes and went back to the TV Tower. Living in touring around East Germany has given me insight into how little understanding I have of the world living in the US. I feel like my thinking is very limited because I cannot speak the language of the countries we are going to and communicate with the locals. Japanese has given me the opportunity to appreciate this limitation because my language skills have allowed me to peer into the World of the far east. Even something as significant as WWII, a shared global experience was perceived in many different ways all different parties. East Berlin had remnants of this difference, but actually stepping foot in Moscow will be like stepping into the belly of the beast (bear?) and I can’t wait to scratch this surface of cultural and ideological difference

Tomorrow morning we are off to Moscow! Deutscheland, you have been uber  to me! Auf diedersehen!