Berlin/Unter den Linden

From World travel guide

The area around Unter den Linden, Berlin's primary boulevard, represents the very core of the central Berlin Mitte district.

Understand

See

The main east-west thoroughfare within central Berlin, and the streets immediately adjacent to it, feature a large number of attractions for the traveller. From east to west, they are:

• the Brandenburg Gate (Brandenburger Tor) [1] - the only surviving Berlin city gate and a potent symbol of the city. This is the point where Strasse des 17. Juni becomes Unter den Linden. The gate was designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans in 1791 and was intended to resemble the Acropolis in Athens. The Brandenburg Gate now symbolizes reunification, after dividing East and West Berlin for decades)

• Pariser Platz - the large square in front of the Brandeburg Gate contains the British, French and American embassies, as well as the rebuilt Hotel Adlon

• the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe [2] (Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas) - opening on the 10 May 2005, a vast Holocaust memorial built adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate and Pariser Platz and only a few hundred metres from the site of Hitler's bunker

• the Russian Embassy (formerly the Soviet Embassy, Sowjetische Botschaft) [3] - a vast wedding cake of a building, built between 1949-1951 in the best Stalinist style and meant to symbolise the dominance of the Soviet Union in East German affairs before 1989

• Bebelplatz - Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels made Bebelplatz (then called Opernplatz) infamous 10 May 1933 when he used the square across from Humboldt University to burn 20,000 books by "immoral" authors of whom the Nazis did not approve. Their list included Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Arnold Zweig, Kurt Tucholsky and Sigmund Freud. The monument itself, though, blames Nazi students for the episode.

When entering the square it's easy to miss the monument. Look dead center: the monument is underground. A piece of plexiglass allows the viewer to look underground into a large, white room, filled with entirely empty, blank white bookcases. The absence of books reminds the viewer just what was lost here: ideas. But the event did reveal things to come, as Author and philosopher Heinrich Heine, whose books were burned, said in 1821: "This was only the foreplay. Where they burn books, they will also burn people". He was correct.

• the Neue Wache ("New Guardhouse") [4] - originally erected in 1818 to a classicaly-insired design by Karl Friedrich Schinckel as a guardhouse for the imperial palace, since 1993 this compact building has housed a small, but extremely powerful war cenotaph, the Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany, continuing its use under East German rule as the primary "Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism". The interior of the Doric column-fronted building is intentionally empty, but for a small but moving sculpture by Käthe Kollwitz depicting a mother cradling a dead child. The statue is positioned beneath a round hile in the ceiling, exposing the figures to the rain and snow.

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