Berlin isn't picture-postcard perfect by any means. It has graffitti on its graffitti, and the Soviets joylessly left their funtional concrete, grey mark on the eastern side of the city. And yet it is Number 1 on my list of places in which I could settle outside of my hometown. There's something about the city that you can't quite quantify: an electrifying vibe and a feeling of potential that after all its upheaval this unified city's time has come.
As I arrived into the sparkling new Hauptbahnhof, a temple of gleaming chrome, I passed the Reichstag, the German seat of Parliament complete with Norman Foster's crowining glass dome, and dived onto the highly efficient S-Bahn to the familiar stop of Warschauer Strasse, home to the hostel at which I had stayed four times previously and which I count as my home in Berlin. The Sunflower Hostel is a laid back place, wirh a great social area to meet people and colourful murals everywhere. I grabbed a bed with the intention of using the free wifi to the hilt to carry on my web work.
Yet again, I didn't particularly stray far, but I did manage to hunt down an exhibition in Potsdamer Platz station which I had read about on the BBC News website. It detailed the role of Deutsche Bahn - the German rail company - in transporting Jews during the Holocaust. The Government had insisted it be presented not in a museum, but free in a Deutsche Bahn station where it would obtain full exposure. Germans are incredible at facing up to their demons of sixty years ago; they have no choice really given the heinous things that happened.
The exhibition showed pictures of then major Deutsche Bahn figures posing with swastika armbands side-by-side with party leaders and ministers. It detailed - albeit in German - how the organisation fed into the Government of the time and laid out how it aided and abetted in shipping Jews out of their German hometowns and off to camps; tragic journeys they commonly had to pay for themselves. The exhibition finished with a simple yet gut-punching list of Jewish children from the local area - complete with smiling photographs - who went to their deaths on the trains. Powerful indeed.
