Berlin Part II: Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders, and my Walking Tour

Finally getting to travel to Berlin was like putting a face to the name of someone you’ve heard so much about; someone you’ve never met who’s somehow a friend of all of your friends; someone you’ve stalked on Facebook but, though there are thousands of pictures, most of them are blurry or out-of-date, their wall comments are incomprehensible, and their “interests” are so general—“art, music, German, history, cheap rent...”—it sort of sounds like a list of freshman year General Ed. requirements.

So Berlin and I finally got to hang out, and I sort of understand these rave-if-vague reviews. Berlin is a giant city and there’s so much to do. I think it’s easy to leave feeling like you didn’t get to see enough of it even if, like me, you spend 6 full days tromping around in the snow trying to see everything you’d heard about plus everything you hadn’t. It’s hard to give a precise and accurate description of a place so diverse and abundant with itself.

Though it’s true I didn’t prepare much in advance for the trip, with retrospect I think one of the better if unwitting sources of information I had about Berlin was a good memory of a great movie. Before traveling to Berlin, I recommend watching Wim Wenders’ 1987 movie Wings of Desire*. It is beautiful, shot in black and white, in German (subtitles in English of course), and is sadly the basis for imitation that birthed Brad Silberling’s 1998 blockbuster City of Angels, featuring Meg Ryan and Nicholas Cage. And while I never appreciated Sarah McLachlan’s mawkish contribution to the soundtrack (that is, Angel), as a 12 year-old I guess I might have been convinced by Meg’s 429th performance as an adorable, unjustly burned heroine of a former, destructive relationship, now recovering and finding solace in the arms of…oh why not, an angel.

But I really, really recommend Wings of Desire instead. Because the dialogue is excellent (Wenders employed Austrian novelist/playwright/poet Peter Handke to write much of the script), the shots are amazing, and the movie really avoids cliché in a way wholly unlike its Hollywood counterpart. And through its Berlin setting Wenders conveys a very profound sense of how full of remembrance and monument the city is. As the movie is produced before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s among several really great movies that allow you to see the city before that change took place in ‘89.

Below are the pictures of my end-of-2010 city walking tour, spread out over several days:

The Brandenburg Tor

The Jewish memorial

Graffiti in the frost on the stone slabs of the Jewish memorial

War memorial, Neue Wache

The Berliner Dome

Checkpoint Charlie

Leaving the American sector, Checkpoint Charlie

Bertolt Brecht!

The German National Library (figures prominently in Wings of Desire)

The Russian War Memorial

Siegessäule (The Victory Column--under construction, but also makes a great appearance in Wings of Desire)

more Siegessäule

Part of the Berlin Wall along the Spree

Eastside Gallery (Berlin Wall)

Eastside Gallery (Berlin Wall)

Eastside Gallery (Berlin Wall).

So other than a compulsion to see in person the beautiful monuments and buildings shot by a talented director of a late 1980’s German film, my trip was governed largely by two factors. The first being (I realize this theme is becoming tiresome but bear with me…) the cold, and the second being frugality, or cheapness in the disguise of frugality in the disguise of a 3-Tages-Karte. In Berlin, I learned that one can purchase a ticket that allows 3 days of unlimited museum-going for 9.50€ (student discount)! Which is obviously a great deal, and as I noted in the Strasbourg post, a day—or several days—of museums goes very well with insane winter temperatures(-11 C?!).

Coming next to the blog: The Jewish Museum, the Topography of Terror Museum, the Berlin Modern Art Museum.

*originally entitled Der Himmel über Berlin for release in Germany.