Ich bin ein Berliner
March 3, 2008 – 3:22 pmIf you're new, you should subscribe to my RSS feed so you can see when I've updated. CHOICE!
Thought I’d follow up that last post with another update from Berlin, since I’m on a bit of a roll.
The show last night went really well. We played after a band called Diego who sounded so much like Interpol that I thought they were playing covers. The small room was really full and the crowd were nice and responsive, inviting us back up for a second encore. Afterwards the lead singer came up to me, Stephen and John and told us how much he enjoyed the show. He became really emotional and started saying some really intense stuff. It might have been that his english wasn’t that great, so the words he was choosing might have been a bit stronger than he intended. He told us in a heavy german accent that “Ze crowd didn’t know what zey ver listening to. I knew zo. It is all about reading between ze lines, zat is what is special about your band. I zought your show was so amazink. I zink zat if anyone wants to see passion, zey should come to one of your shows.”
Soo yeeah, haha, had a bit of an awkward “oh, thanks man, ummm, you guys were really great too”, and then a bit of a chuckle after he left. We might look like we’re having a good time on stage…
Today I was pretty determined to educate myself a bit more on the Berlin wall, so ventured out on the subway and went to two museums. The first was a look at life in the old GDR, or East Germany. I’d become fascinated with the topic after seeing The Lives of Others before leaving. It’s a film about a Stasi officer who writes false reports to save the lives of a writer and his girlfriend. The museum was packed full of people which made it hard to dwell too much, but I got to see lots of communist propaganda, listened to some East German pop music from the 60s and 70s (turns out the GDR government set a 60% local music quota on radio stations and clubs… kinda like what Labour is trying to do in NZ…?), saw some crazy Soviet-looking cars and looked at some Stasi files.
From that museum I walked down to Checkpoint Charlie, one of the main checkpoints to get into West Berlin from GDR, and a symbolic centre of the Cold War and East/West separation. There was a great timeline of events printed on a wall that stretched 50 or so meters down the street with some really amazing photos of a Soviet/US tank standoff, and of when the wall came down in ‘89. Walked along the line of where The Wall once stood, and saw some little bits of it that remained as monuments. Crossed into the ‘American Sector’ and went to the Checkpoint Charlie museum that was started while The Wall was still standing, and documented the many different escapes from the GDR to West Berlin. There were some pretty amazing and emotional stories. Quite a scary thought not being able to leave your country without the fear of being shot or imprisoned.
