I haven't been to Berlin for more than a decade, and then go twice in one year. Neither trip this year was to explore Berlin's history, but you can't avoid it.
In June I travelled to meet up with an old university friend and his wife, who live in Australia, and were travelling through Europe. We picked Berlin as it was somewhere we could easily meet.
Most of the time we spent talking, and wander through the city, stopping at interesting coffee shops we could find on our maps apps, and catching up. The one exception was visiting the DDR Museum, which has some interesting details of life in the old East Germany.
The second visit in October was also convenience; the children wanted to see dinosaur skeletons and trams - and Berlin is the closest place with both. We visited the Natural History Museum (Dinosaurs!), Lego Discovery Centre (cramped and bunker like), the Technical Museum (excellent, unintentionally spent a whole day there) and rode on the yellow trams.
But nowhere are the scars of 20th Century European history as obvious as in Berlin. If there was a city that encapsulates European history for the last 150 years, then Berlin would be it. It seems impossible to walk down a street or visit a location that doesn't carry with it memories of all that happened here.
On both occasions we stayed in the Prenzlauer Berg part of Berlin, and ended up going for a morning wander and coffee in the streets around Arnswalder Platz1.
It's medium sized green square with little playgrounds, and large red stone fountain that's flanked by two large outward facing bulls. The story of this square is a miniature example of how history is a mix of seemingly unstoppable trends and complete chance.
The dominating fountain, called the "Fruchtbarkeitsbrunnen" (Fruitfulness Fountain), wasn't designed for this square, not even for Germany. The sculptor Hugo Ledere submitted the design for a fountain in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1910 - but only getting 4th place - it was never built.
In 1927 the Mayor of Berlin, Gustav Böß, bought the rights, and commissioned its construction. At the time the fountain, featuring two large bulls, was meant for the Bersarinplatz2, because of it's closeness to the central abattoir (covering the current Blankensteinpark and its surrounds). It then turned out that the mass of the fountain was too great for the ground in the Bersarinplatz, and another location had to be found. In 1931 the stone cutting had been completed, but the project had run out of money.
In 1933 the Nazis came to power, who then provided funds to complete the project, and the fountain was finally installed in Arnswalder Platz in 1934. An interesting twist, since after 1933 Hugo Ledere seemed to be increasingly sidelined, and few of his works were included in exhibitions from this time onwards; even if before they'd been relatively popular. If Ledere ever saw it in place isn't clear. As of 1933 he suffered heavily from Neurosyphilis, was increasingly ill, and finally died in 1940.
Even the square's name is an abbreviated history; named "Arnswalder Platz" in 1905 after the historic German name for Choszczno, while it was part of the Prussia/German Empire. The name was changed in 1937, under the Nazis3 to Hellmann Platz, which was then reverted back in 1947.
While Arnswalder Platz may be historically insignificant, and is only a minor footnote in the incredible density of Berlin's history, it's also an example of how events great and small rarely happen as expected.
There may be grand plans, but chance and coincidence play a significant part, and it only looks inevitable from the present, once we've pretended to ourselves that we've understood why it happened like it did. Don't let that fool you. There was nothing inevitable about a fourth place Argentinean bull fountain design being built in a different hemisphere three kilometres from the nearest, not longer present, abattoir - and there's nothing inevitable about any other event.
I think that's something worth remembering, especially if the future looks bleak. You never know for certain what's going to happen until it's happened, but there's always a chance of something unexpected, that afterwards seems inevitable, but never was.
Most of this information is from the German Language version of the Arnswalder Platz Wikipedia page, which itself is based heavily on the text of a post on the square explaining its history. When I looked in at the sign in person it was covered in graffiti, and largely impossible to read. ↩
At the time called Baltenplatz, changed in Bersarin in 1947, after the name of the first Russian commandant of the occupying Soviet forces.↩
Turns out Nazis are very sensitive and easily offended. So much so that they changed the German spelling alphabet in 1934 to remove Old Testament (Jewish) names. Complete snowflakes.↩