A short walk, north-east,
from the hotel, along Griefswalder Straβe leads to Ernst-Thälmann Park, named
for a former Communist leader, and featuring an impressive 14m bronze monument,
by Lev Kerbel, in his memory.
[Click on images to enlarge]
[Click on images to enlarge]
From the S-Bahnhof Griefswalder
Straβe it is an easy journey south-east to Treptower Park and the astonishing,
vast, Soviet War Memorial.
Completed in 1949 it
commemorates Soviet soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin, April-May 1945.
It is estimated that some 80,000 Soviet soldiers lost their lives in the
battle, 5,000 of whom are laid to rest in Treptower Park.
Near the entrance to the
park is a statue of a woman – the Motherland weeping at the loss of her sons.
From here an immense vista
opens up to a huge figure in the distance framed by a pair of angular
constructions.
These constructions – it
turns out – are two ‘stylized Soviet flags’ built out of red granite and each
flanked by the statue of a kneeling soldier.
From here to the, still
distant, monument the space is lined by 16 stone sarcophagi (one for each of
the then 16 Soviet Republics) with relief carvings.
Finally, one reaches the
12m tall statue, on top of a substantial mound, of a Soviet soldier, with a
sword, holding a German child and standing over a broken swastika.
Impressive.
Not a monument, but at 30m
high, a monumental sculpture, Jonathan Borofosky’s Molecule Man stands in the River Spree close to Treptower Park.
Further West, in
Tiergarten is another Soviet War Memorial. This one, erected in 1945, comprises
a curved structure topped by a statue of a Soviet soldier, flanked by a pair of
Howitzer guns and a pair of T-34 tanks!
The Brandenburger Tor stands at the end of
Unter den Linden on which are to be found Bebelplatz - the site of one of the
Nazi's book burnings, now memorialised by the Empty Library by MichaUllman: a glass plate set into the cobbles looking into a room of empty
shelves, big enough to hold the estimated 20,000 burned books...
and the 'NeueWache', the sublime neo-classical memorial to victims of war, by Karl Friedrich Schinkel: the interior is an austere, plain but beautiful space
containing only Käthe Kollwitz's Mother with her Dead Son and lit by a
central, circular opening in the ceiling.
Finally, I paid my respects
to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, sculpted by
Ludwig Engelhardt
for the Marx-Engels-Forum
between Alexanderplatz
and the Spree river.
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