Can never get away from politics

This is the last post from Berlin and I considered holding it off to add more related to the other places we are visiting on this trip. What I've come to realize is that the politics of the Baltic countries is for the most part different from those of Berlin, a formerly divided city. So politics will come up again and again but will conclude our stay in Berlin with this post. Stay tuned for the Baltic....

At the entrance to the Jewish cemetery that was formerly inside East Berlin in the Jewish quarter is an open plaza where you can see lines that outline where the Jewish old age home was. Of course, it was destroyed during WWII and of course the inhabitants were all murdered. The focus is on this sculpture for political interest.

This sculpture at first looks like it might be a Holocaust Memorial or a memorial to mark the location of the Jewish old age home. It is neither. It was created by an East German artist, Will Lammert who had himself survived the Holocaust was created for some other purpose and when the East Germans realized they needed to start commemorating the Holocaust in order to draw tourists they erected it here, and called it a Holocaust memorial.

Just a reminder about the stumbling stones. These are quite shiny as they are in a heavily trafficked area.

This church was the site of a visit by Martin Luther King in 1964, in defiance of the fact that the US did not recognize the GDR (East Germany). In his sermon he said" No man-made barrier can erase the fact that children live on both sides of the Wall." The congregation responded by singing "Let My People Go."

This is the town hall of Schoenberg, next to the Bavarian neighborhood (see previous post) and the site of John F. Kennedy's famous speech in which he said "Ich Bin Ein Berliner." The wall had already been in place for two years when he came so it was an empty gesture and additionally we learned that semantically by saying Ein Berliner he was saying "I am a donut" as his grammar was how a German person would say that. I always thought the speech was delivered in front of the Brandenburg Gate.