Berlin is a cosmopolitan city. It is young, fresh and modern. It is also ancient and dark, with a history so remarkable one wonders how it has managed to reinvent itself so much over the years.
Today, Berlin is many things in one, as it has always been before. It is the capital city of Germany; it is also a cultural hub with its abundance of green parks, galleries and museums. It is a family city and a tourist haven.
In visiting Berlin in summer, it is very common to find young families lounging in the parks, with the galleries and museums teeming with people enjoying the arts and culture the city is famous for. Berlin is also famous for its architecture. Some buildings are valued-based on which famous architect designed them.
So among the sprawling buildings of this metropolis, there are always old structures that have helped defined the city and just around the corner from Anhalter Banhoff there is one such building, a giant grey structure rising four storeys.
Berlin was heavily bombarded between 1940 and 1945 when World War II raged. The city suffered 363 air raids, with British, American, French and Russian planes trying to subdue the capital of Nazi Germany. The British and the Americans alone dropped almost 70, 000 tons of bombs on the city.
To protect the residents of the city from the raids, bunkers were constructed to shelter the citizens. These were crowded during the war period with thousands of desperate civilians taking shelter in them.
And after the war, the massive structures became lasting legacies of the war with the most infamous one, the Fuhrerbunker, where Adolf Hitler lived out his last days and where the last flames of Nazi power were extinguished when the tyrant and his wife of a few hours, Eva Braun, killed themselves and were cremated.
As an unwanted legacy of its Nazi past, that bunker was demolished in 1947. The site remained unmarked until 2006 when a plaque was installed to indicate where the bunker had been.
But the bunker on Schonebeger Street, next to the Anhalter Banhoff (train station) has enjoyed a different fate. Today, it is called the Berlin Story Bunker and three of the five floors of this massive concrete structure have been put to use. On one floor, there is a museum, showcasing icons and moments from Berlin’s 800 years of history. On another floor there is “Chambers of Horror”, eerily-dark and populated by ghoulish figures and through which visitors are chased around the 700 square meter space by a ‘ghost’. And on the other floor there is a “Figure Cabinet” where visitors are treated to 20 scenes of torture and gruesome medical practices of the past.
Walking through the gates, the place is quiet, and looks deserted apart from the yellow banner fitted next to a four meter high section of the Berlin Wall. The yellow banner reads Berlin Museum. In the grounds, the bunker rises skyward, an ugly grey building with an ugly story. The outer walls are between 2 and 4m thick to withstand shelling and the building was designed to hold 3, 500 people. At the end of the war in 1945, there were 12,000 people crowded in there, filling their nostrils with the smell of each other’s fears.
The tour starts at the “Figure Cabinet” at the entrance of which a painting of a beautiful woman on the wall blinks, stirs and transforms into a rotten carcass growling at the observer. Sometimes the painting is not of a woman at all but a fine gentleman that transforms into a creepy monstrosity.
Down the corridors, there are open doors leading into garishly lit rooms with white arrows on the floor inviting the visitor to enter. Entering, one is greeted by spooky sounds coming off some hidden speakers. There is a corpse laid out in the casket, and inching closer to have a better look, the dead woman sits up, creeping out the weak-hearted visitor. This is not an exhibition for the fearful or the ones who dread the macabre. It is an exhibition of death and the instruments of death; the guillotines, the garrottes, the executioner’s axe and the many tools man had fashioned to end life.
In some of the chambers, there are re-enactments of gory scenes from the past with lifelike figures-a man having his leg sawed off with no anaesthesia, a man with a nail driven through his tongue (punishment for traitors and liars in the past). And somewhere in one of the chambers, there is a live witch, tending to her coven and willing to read visitors palms and tell their fortunes.
Bizarrely, in “Figure Cabinet” there is a horror-themed bar where thirsty visitors may have drinks and buy souvenirs, branded T-shirts with grinning skulls among other items. Up the stairs, it is dark. There is a man standing, waiting to usher you in. He says it will be better if you go in as a group. You are not allowed to turn on any light or take pictures. He smiles and wishes you luck.
It is the abode of phantoms and ghosts. In the various chambers, there are horrid figures in different grotesque poses. You move closer to have a look and a black-clad figure with a skull face jumps out of the dark, growls at you and just as quickly disappear into darkness.
In this darkness, you are tempted to forget what the bunker was originally built for, what had happened here all those years ago.
For those who have forgotten, the last leg of the tour provides a succinct reminder. It is the Berlin Story Museum. Here there are busts and photos of the people who rose to prominence in Berlin, raising the city’s profile along the way- the Kaiser Wilhems, the Otto Von Bismarcks or the Iron Chancellor, as he was known, and even the death mask of Friedrich The Great.
There are photos too, many of them and one of the most iconic was the 1933 Nazi Book Burning bonfire in Opernplatz. Hitler and his lieutenants while trying to consolidate their power decided to burn thousands of books that “promoted un-German spirit”. One of the authors was there, watching the madness from the rear and a recording of what he witnessed that night makes for compelling listening on the audio guide.
Of course the audio-visual and the many mementos documents reminds of the most bitter periods in Berlin’s history, when the city was walled-off into East and West, keeping the people apart for almost five decades. Berliners would never let themselves forget about the notorious Berlin Wall. They will never let their visitors forget as well.
There is so much to see in Berlin. So much. But for those seeking history and some fun, certainly, The Berlin Story Museum is one of the places to visit.
