Our first trip to Berlin

Last week we drove from Frankfurt to Berlin, going through many miles of what used to be Communist East Germany. We arrived in Berlin early Friday afternoon, and spent several hours getting acquainted with the stake center where we were to provide a training program the next day.

Saturday morning we arrived back at the building early enough to setup and be prepared for a 10:00 beginning with over 60 stake members in attendance. We ran three groups in two sessions dedicated to getting the members signed up to use FamilySearch programs, get their computers loaded with the programs, and then start using them.

Our part of the project was FamilySearch Indexing. We taught two sessions, and had about 20 come to each one. We started with an introduction all together, but soon broke out to work with the people using computers of ours or those they brought at six tables. Our sessions were successful. A counselor to the stake president was in one session, and he got excited to teach this to some of the elderly German sisters in the Stake. They could read the German script! Another sister commented "This is like a treasure hunt!" That is really true when you are trying to decipher the old Handwriting.

After the first session, they provided everyone an "Imbiss" (Snack Lunch). It was much more than we expected, and included a very hearty soup. Yumm!

Historical Berlin

The Berlin Stake building is located just at the edge of the area known as "The Tiergarten", which could be translated as "zoo", but in this case it means the large natural park set up a few hundred years ago by the nobles so they would have a place to hold hunting parties. It covers several square miles in which the nobles maintained herds of deer and other animals for their hunting pleasures, but woe be to the non-aristocrat caught poaching. It would probably have led to the death sentence.


This is in the very heart of Berlin.

As the town grew up, the Tiergarten was off limits for construction of buildings, and it is absolutely amazing that the Church was able to build a stake center right on the edge and on the side of one of the two roads that have been built across it. The stake center is on the side of "Klingelhöfer Strasse" which becomes "Jägers Allee" (Hunters' Alley) as it continues North cutting across the Tiergarten at one of its narrower parts. There is only one other road that crosses the Tiergarten going North and South.

Only one road goes through the Tiergarten going East and West. It is now known as "The Seventeenth of June" on the West-German side. This street was formerly known as "Unter den Linden" (Under the Lime Trees), and it still carries that name on the Communist side, but the name on the West side was changed to recall the shame of the Communist tanks attacking demonstrators who were on foot on the 17 June 1953.

At the intersection of this road and Jägers Allee there is a huge monument which is called the "Siegessäule" (Victory Tower or Tower of Triumph) celebrating the German victory over Napoleon's army. We could see it from the church, and that prompted our walk up the road where we took the pictures above.

Berlin has been a capital city of one of the most powerful parts of Germany for many hundreds of years, and during the cold war era it was the focal point of tensions between the Communists and the free world. The Communists didn't like having their people flee to freedom through Berlin, so they built a wall through Berlin to prevent it. That wall converged on the famous Brandenburg Gate at the East end of the Tiergarten, which is the most widely recognized point on which all of the tensions of the cold war between the freedoms of Democracy and the totalitarianism of a Communist dictatorship were focused. While we were taking pictures at the Victory Tower we noted that we could see the Brandenburg Gate up the road, so we decided to walk up there too.

We found that there is an abundance of "political advertising" scattered throughout the area in the form of statues, memorials, government buildings, etc. The Famous Brandenburg Gate, where East and West Berlin met in cold war, is at the East end of The Tiergarten and many political buildings are found on both sides of the dividing line, each built to try to leave an impression on the world. The German Parliment currently meets in a building here, but on the other side there are similar buildings that were used by the Communists. Both sides have a TV antenna tower - in the free world it was a functional 350 feet high, on the Communist side a braggadocios 1100 feet high, and therefore something of a joke in the eyes of everyone in the West, especially considering the poverty of the East Germans. That tower is visible in the picture above.

One of the memorials displays Russian tanks and guns in an attempt to convince the world that the Russians had saved East Germany when they arrived, but the street name reminds people of the time those tanks were used to suppress people demonstrating against the Russian Dictatorship. It is truly an area that communicates political strife.

There is a large open area on both sides of the Brandenburg Gate. Hitler used these areas for public display of his huge, well-disciplined armies, and he had the display captured on film and distributed to the theaters throughout the world. Germans have long been very skilled with propoganda. We walked through the Brandonberg Gate and found quite a different environment from what is on the West.

There, the large open area where Hitler had demonstrated his marching soldiers to the world, still exists, but the buildings crowd around the space almost as if to hide the poverty that exists behind. On all sides, the buildings look plain - almost as if the builders didn't have much heart to put into their work. The contrast is very stark.


Here we found a photo opportunity with an American, a German, and a Russian soldier available for taking pictures. Sister Lund took the position of the German on top for a cute picture.





From the East side we could see the statuary on the top of the Brandenburg Gate in the sillouetted against the evening sky.




Crossing back to the West side we got a picture of some of the government buildings that are in use today for the re-unified Germany. The East-German Communist government eventually failed economically, and the Russians lost the propoganda war. They eventually gave up and allowed the East Germans to be re-united with those of the West, so the German government has moved back to Berlin. These are some of the buildings, and there are a whole lot more not far away.



We were pretty tired after walking this far, and we still had to walk back to the church, so we decided to make our way on a more leisurely path through the Tiergarten. We found this statue that represents an earlier time when the Tiergarten was used to the sound of horses' hooves. Unfortunately, those times were also times of political stress, but the tension was then between the upper and lower classes in the German society.

We took advantage of some of the benches in the Tiergarten and along the road for a little rest, and Sister Howlett really needed it. This was a fun picture I took at one of those stops.

Later, we were able to have dinner together with all of the missionaries who had come to help with this presentation. Three of us couples work together in the same office, and the fourth couple are part-time missionaries from Germany who could really teach in German.

Sister and Elder Howlett are on the left. Elder and Sister Schlotz are at the other end of the table. Then Elder and Sister Lund from Cache Valley Utah and Sister and Elder Call from Portland, Oregon.