A previous arrangement to meet a friend in Brussels had fallen through, so I decided to break up my trip home and revisit Berlin for the first time in several years. So after an early start for the early morning train, I arrived in to Berlin Hauptbahnof at around 1pm, 52 minutes late since we are stuck for ages at the border, and the tannoy only gave announcements in Polish (and possibly German) so the reasons why will forever be a mystery. I got to the hostel to be told my room wouldn’t be ready till 3pm, so after putting my rucksack in the luggage room I took a walk along the Spree towards Federichstrasse, hunting for somewhere that served falafel, something which Berlin has a reknowned reputation for due to an established population of Turkish immigrants. The place I knew from my first ever visit (back in 2007) appears to be now ancient history, but I found a worthy replacement down the road, it was more expensive than I remember it, but then the pound-to-euro exchange rate isn’t what it was back then and inflation has taken its toll too. I made my way back to the hostel, checked in and showered, and then finally went about properly going about my day in Berlin.
Top: currywurst from a Berlin food stall. Bottom: Falafel, Berlin style.
My first idea was to have a walk around the Tiergarten – however that got scuppered when I found that large amounts of it were fenced off due to a corporate 5k run event. I subsequently elected to find somewhere for Berlin’s other delicacy, currywurst, and then head for Treptower Park, a similarly large park in eastern Berlin, and quite near Federichshain, where I would be investigating several bars later. This was nicely serene compared to the hustle and bustle of the centre, and even stopped for an ice cream and Fritz-Kola (Germany’s homegrown brand of cola drink, ubiquitous in the country), and then wandered around the park, inevitably finding myself at the Soviet War Memorial, which had recently had grown controversial amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and throughout the year several former communist countries would remove their memorials to the Soviets, notably Latvia. The display boards give the place a bit of nuanced discussion regarding the thin line between remembering the soldiers who sacrificed their lives to defeat Nazi Germany and glorifying the Soviet Union itself. Walking around and I can understand why the gargantuan nature of the monument may be said to lend itself too much to the glorification side of things, there were even statues of Stalin originally installed, although they were subsequently removed in the late 1950s as part of the ‘de-Stalinisation’ process which took place under Stalin’s immediate successor, Khrushchev. Even so, the Allies would have at best struggled to defeat the Nazis without the immense contributions the Soviets made towards the war effort, and the Soviet Union did lose the most of any soldiers in World War II, with Soviet POWs often winding up in concentration camps (where they were often murdered or died as a result of terrible working and living conditions), and even those that survived the Nazis were at risk of being killed by Stalin’s NKVD (secret police, forerunner to the KGB) since they were deemed to have been “corrupted by capitalism”. I moved on from the memorial to walk around the Karpfentich (“carp pond”), before finally making my way to the nearest S-Bahn station to head into Federichshain.
Clockwise from top left: Approaching the Bundestag, the Bundestag from across the Spree,
modern office development, the Spree at Treptower Park, the Soviet war memorial,
the Karpfentich at Treptower Park.
Top row, left to right: Sculpture in central Berlin, artwork and fountain in Treptower Park.
Bottom row: more from the Soviet War memorial.