Ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...

A few summers ago, we spent a most enjoyable week in Berlin taking in the sights, strolling through the pleasant streets, and visiting nearby Potsdam. We enjoyed sunny, balmy weather bordering at times at uncomfortably hot. So for a return visit to the German capital, we chose a few very cold days shortly before Christmas.

We enjoyed old favorites such as the bus rides on Routes 100 and 200 past all the main sights, strolling down Unter den Linden and Kurfürstendamm, browsing in shops, and again seeing the Kaiser Wilhelm I Gedächtniskirche. However, the main purpose of our visit was to get to a few sights we missed the first time and we were mostly not disappointed this time round.

In the summer of 2002, the Brandenburg Gate was undergoing its umpteenth restoration project and was covered by construction sheets featuring Deutsche Telekom and Bild advertisements. We missed its reopening by weeks but this time round we could enjoy it in all its splendor and finally stroll through this enduring Cold War symbol.

The queues to the dome of the Reichstag were still present but not as long as on our previous visit. This time round we spent fifteen minutes queuing and finally did one of the must-sees of modern Berlin.

I had been craving the reopening of the German History Museum in Berlin but once again left disappointed. The museum in planning since the late-1980s had still not opened and is now due to reopen mid to end 2006 – decades behind schedule. The IM Pei-designed annex had interesting temporary exhibitions to somewhat make up for the disappointment of not being able to see the main museum.

Berlin has over 170 museums, so anyone can be excused for culturing out long before having seen them all. On the previous visit, that moment hit shortly before we could make it to the Gemäldegalerie. This time round, we made it a priority and so should anyone interested in the great masters of European art.

I have long been fascinated by the history of modern Berlin in which the Wall naturally features prominently. Surprisingly little of the wall remains but the short piece at Bernauerstraße offers more insight into the purpose and functioning of the wall than all the other remaining pieces pieced together.

Quick Tips:

Berlin offers splendid value for money. The city has more hotel rooms than it can fill on an average night making for good bargains most of the year. Especially for better hotels, prices are less than half of what similar establishments would charge in most other West European capitals.

Furthermore, several discount passes are valuable. The most spectacular value for money is the Schaulust Berlin Museen card, commonly known as the museum pass – it allows unlimited entry into 70 museums for three consecutive days for only €15.

The WelcomeCard allows unlimited travel on public transportation in Berlin and Potsdam for €16 (48 hours) or €22 (72 hours). Day tickets are also available from vending machines and are worth it if you plan to use public transportation more than two times.

Best Way To Get Around:

Berlin is geographically a large city. It is nine times the size of Paris but the tourist attractions are in a much more concentrated area. However, even in central Berlin, distances can be long making the use of public transportation necessary to get around between areas of interest. It is a long haul on foot from say Kurfürstendamm to Unter den Linden but by bus, it is a short and very pleasurable ride.

In general, buses are the most enjoyable way to move around in Berlin. Traffic is generally light and buses never seem to be stuck in traffic jams. The views from the double-decker buses are worth the effort of ascending to the top deck in a moving vehicle – my two-year old insisted whether we went two stops or the distance. Trains, both U and S-Bahn are very useful too but the views are more limited.

When the octogenarian painter Max Liebermann saw from his apartment window how the Nazis marched through the Brandenburg Gate, he observed, "Soviel kann ick jar nicht fressen, wie ick kotzen möchte."
(Roughly translated, I couldn’t possibly eat as much as I want to throw up.)

One of the enduring images of the Cold War is the Brandenburg Gate open to none stuck just meters from the Wall inside East Berlin. Westerners could peak over the wall from a specially erected platform and actually get closer to the Brandenburg Gate than Easterners could. For the Communist regime, the gate was too close to the border for comfort and thus in the special exclusion zone.

The Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburg Gate) is the symbol of Berlin. It was built between 1788 and 1791 to the designs of Carl Langhans as one of the principle gates allowing access to the capital of Prussia. Its portico has twelve large Doric columns allowing five access gates – the 18-feet wide central portal was reserved for the royal carriage only while the other four were for all comers. It was certainly the best looking of all the gates, as it was the only one of 14 not destroyed with the rest of the city walls during the nineteenth century. It was damaged during the Second World War but restored during the 1950s before the Wall was erected. The timing was fortunate, as it required East-West cooperation that would have been hard to realize after the border was firmly shut. The quadriga topping the gate was destroyed during the war and the casts of the original was in West Berlin.

The bronze quadriga of four horses and the goddess of victory has quite a history. It was designed by Gottfried Schadow as Irene the goddess of peace but he was unable to place it on top of the gate at the latter’s completion. By tradition, the goddess rides her chariot bare breasted and the king was not amused. Only in 1794, after she received an appropriate cloak was she allowed to grace the gate.

Napoleon passed through the gate in 1806, took a liking in the lady, and had her carted off to Paris, horses and all, in 12 crates. Blüchner sent her back in 1814. A staff with the Iron Cross and Prussian Eagle was added to transform Irene into Nike, the goddess of victory. During the 1950s restoration, the Communist regime refused to place the Iron Cross, a symbol of German militarism, on the statue but it was promptly returned in 1991.

It was with great disappointment on my first trip to Berlin that I failed to see this Cold War icon. Although the quadriga was visible, the rest of the structure was covered by large Bild newspaper and Deutsche Telekom advertisements while undergoing its umpteenth restoration – this time to repair the damage done by the previous three restoration projects. Restoration work was completed in October 2002, just weeks after our first visit, but the second time round there was nothing preventing us from enjoying the Brandenburg Gate in all its splendor.

It was wonderful seeing the Brandenburger Tor for real. Being on foot, it did not bother me at all that the authorities banned private traffic from passing through it. It is best seen from Pariser Platz, where a branch of Starbucks may sell horribly weak coffee but still offer the best views of the gate. The views from the Hotel Adlon’s restaurants are not better and camera-touting tourists certainly are not welcomed there.

Approaching the gate for the first time, I oddly did not think about its history, or its involuntary role as symbol of German division and now unity. No, I thought about an anecdote a German woman told me years earlier in Tokyo. She was working as translator for Fuji, a Japanese television station that covered the Berlin marathon shortly after the reunification of Germany. Expecting a German victory, she stood by ready to interpret the live interview with the victor. Lo and behold, an Australian won it! Now, she would be the first to admit that speaking English is not her strongest asset and was completely lost with the very strong, somewhat out-of-breath Australian accent. She only caught the words Brandenburg Gate, sensed, free, one, and triumph and promptly translated that when he passed through the Brandenburg Gate he sensed the feeling of freedom that its re-opening gave the crowds that passed through it when Germany again became one and freedom triumphed. On reflection, she realized he actually said that when he passed through the Brandenburg Gate he realized that he had broken free from the pack and sensed that this must be the one race in which he could triumph!

Planning for a German history museum in Berlin was well under way when the Wall unexpectedly collapsed. Original plans were abandoned as new venues and exhibition items from the collections in the former East Germany became available.

The decision was made to use the Zeughaus, the oldest building on Unter den Linden, as the venue. This building was already used by the Communist regime to portray a seriously skewed view of German history, so a reorganization of the material as well as a total revamp of the building itself were necessary. Somehow, arguments raged long enough and work was delayed sufficiently for the museum to miss it's scheduled reopening time. (It reminded me of a museum in Florence, where the English announcement of the reopening time of the museum had the date deleted while the Italian announcement, without a hint of embarrassment, had an opening date three months prior to our visit.) Mid to the end of 2006 is the latest planned opening date–about a decade late–but with a collection of 700,000 items covering German history from the Middle Ages to the present, it should certainly be worth the wait.

However, in the meantime, a modern annex designed by star architect IM Pei opened and hosts a wide range of temporary exhibitions. Most are of superb quality and usually tour through Germany, Europe, and occasionally further afield. Admission depends on the specific exhibition, but is generally €2 and often free.

We went to see the exhibition Bilder, die lügen (Images that Lie). It showed around 300 photos that were manipulated to suit the needs of the users. Famous photos include the speech made by Lenin where crowds were added for extra effect, or where Stalin had himself inserted and those out of favor cut out. The motto seems to be a favored Hitler saying "...if you repeat a lie often enough, people will start to believe it."

More contemporary photos showed how the media altered photos for more dramatic effect. In a photo following the massacre of tourists at Luxor, a German tabloid changed the darker spots left by rain into a pool and stream of blood. Even more famous is the photo used by the British tabloid The Mirror of Dodi Fayad and Princess Diana. For dramatic effect, Fayad’s head was turned almost 90° so he faced Diana rather than looking away. Also on show is a photo of two soldiers and a captive–one soldier points a gun at the captive’s head while the second soldier is offering the captive a drink of water. This photo has seldom been used complete–depending on the users’ motives, either of the soldiers was cut out of the printed version. (The photos can be seen at the bottom of this page.)

Also on show was some of the "work" by once successful German freelance journalist Michael Born. Only long after programs were broadcasted was it discovered that he completely fabricated his dramatic visuals of Kurdish extremists and Klu Klux Klan activities.

While we are in Berlin and near the Reichstag, it is worth relaying details of the famous photo of the Red Army hoisting the Hammer and Sickle over the Reichstag at the end of the Second World War. It has long been suspected that the photo was staged, and since at least 1997 this was known as a fact. The soldiers were identified by Stalin as two Russians and a Georgian (Stalin was of course from Georgia), and they were feted for decades in the Soviet Union. Only in 1997 did the daughter of the photographer made it known that the names of the real soldiers in the picture were never known to her father.

The photo was taken by TASS photographer Jewgeni Chaldej on May 2, 1945; two days after the Red Army took the Reichstag. As a Russian Jew, he was particularly proud to take a photo of the Nazi’s ultimate humiliation. He knew he had a winner and rushed back to Moscow, developed the pictures, and presented it to his superiors. But oy vey, there was a problem, obvious for all to see. The hero had wristwatches on both arms. Standard Soviet Army issue or standard war booty? A little touch up removed both and ensured that the hero never came under suspicion!

The exhibition will be in the Musée d’Histoire de la Ville du Luxembourg until mid-2006. It seems to be its final stop.

Following the Second World War, Germany was divided into four zones and Berlin in four sectors of occupation. Berlin was an island in the Soviet occupied zone. In 1949, when the American, British, and French zones united into the Federal Republic of Germany, the three Western occupied zones also united into West Berlin, which became a special status territory associated with West Germany.

West Berlin became a somewhat helpless player in the Cold War. It started in earnest when the Soviet Union closed all land routes to Berlin in 1948. The Western allies supplied Berlin via airlift for nearly a year—at times, planes were landing at or taking off from Berlin’s two airports every minute.

In the 1950s, the West started to pour capital into West Berlin to make it an island of wealth and prosperity inside the increasingly impoverished East Germany. Initially, even after the formation of two separate Germanies, it was not particularly problematic to travel between East and West Berlin. However, thing progressively became more difficult. At first, it was necessary to walk across the border and take two different buses or trams. However, it was long possible to take the subway from East to West, and vice versa, without having to switch trains. (Long after the border was closed, West Berlin subways continue to run via a few sealed-off East German stations without stopping. Renting the tracks to the West was a handy source of foreign exchange, especially as the East in any case had no use for the tracks.)

During the 1950s, it became increasingly clear that life in the West was going to be more pleasant than life in the East. East Germans streamed across the border in Berlin to start a new life in West Germany. Fences were not stopping people and to make things more difficult, on August 13, 1961, the East German authorities started to erect a wall around Berlin and shot anyone trying to scale it. It was envisioned that the wall would protect the East from Western capitalism and imperialism for around a century.

Berlin is a big city so a loooong wall was required. At its completion, the concrete wall was 155km long, around 3.6m high and 1.2m thick. A further 55km long iron fence completed the formidable border defenses. On the East German side, the border had 293 watchtowers, a special 10m lane for patrols, and a further 100m exclusion zone. A shoot to kill policy was followed up to 1989—in 28 years, 239 were killed trying to flee while 5,075 persons succeeded in escaping over or underneath the wall. At first it was simply a matter of jumping through a window of a building right on the border but increasingly longer tunnels were necessary as the security zone on the inside was expanded. Several tunnels collapsed while under construction and many were never completed.

Although many German cities had walls during the Middle Ages to protect against attackers, Berlin has a tradition of erecting walls to keep the citizens in. Just as the Berlin Wall of the twentieth century was intended to keep people in East Germany, a wall erected in the early-18th century around Berlin, similarly had its purpose to prevent young, male Berliners from fleeing the city to avoid conscription. Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm shunned glamour and culture but spent lavishly on the army. He introduced conscription and built up Prussia’s army from an also-ran to one of the best in Europe. Ironically, although known as the Soldier King, he avoided war, possibly to prevent seeing destroyed what he held so dear. (Kaiser Wilhelm II similarly refused to let his fleet sail during the First World War in order not to have it damaged. A real irony and tragedy, as it was Germany’s expanding navy that lead Britain to abandon its traditional isolationist and independent stance towards Europe in the early-20th century.)

King Friedrich Wilhelm was disappointed in his son, Prince Friedrich, who even as a boy loved the arts and culture. It is a well-known, if probably apocryphal, story that the king once broke a flute on his sons head. (Many parents probably have that desire but you have to be royal to do so and get away with it!) Disappointment turned into outright disgust when his son was one of the first young male Berliners to try to flee the city to avoid conscription. The king had every intention of having the prince facing the firing squad but was reluctantly persuaded otherwise to prevent a succession and constitutional crisis. Friedrich was forced to witness the execution of his accomplice and then jailed for a brief period.

Once in power, King Friedrich II der Große (1740-86), in English better known as Frederic the Great, used his father’s armies, excelled in strategy, and combined military might and skillful diplomacy to elevate Prussia to the fifth European power and the only German state that could rival Austria. Even though he never neglected the arts either, his father would have been proud.

Well, back to the more famous twentieth century wall, or at least trying to. Seeing the wall today is harder than you may think. Following the opening of the wall at then end of 1989, the wall was destroyed at the pace that bulldozers on double overtime could work. Nowadays, only four sections of the wall remain.

The longest piece is the 1.3km stretch, now called the East Side Gallery, in Mühlenstraße near the Ostbahnhof. It was painted in September 1990 by artists from 21 countries. It is a bit of a wasted effort in my opinion—the large paintings encapsulate none of the colorful graffiti that adorned much of the wall on the West Berlin side. The wall was a few meters inside East German territory so technically people left the West to do so. The Eastern side was of course pristine – if you made it that far you were going to scale it, not spray-paint it. Closer to tourists Berlin is the stretch at the Topographie des Terors near Checkpoint Charlie, and a very small piece in Stresemannstraße near Potsdamer Platz.

However, the most interesting part is in Bernauerstraße, near Nordbahnhof. Here parts of the defenses behind the wall are also preserved. The Berlin Wall Documentation Center, www.berliner-mauer-dokumentationszentrum.de, has interesting multimedia displays on the history of the wall. It is open Wednesday to Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is free. We visited on a cold and very windy afternoon – it was dark by the time we reached the wall and it was truly spooky. The best views are from the top of the documentation center. From here, the wall and the defenses behind can clearly be seen. Even though this section of the wall is only 70-m long, it is easy to imagine how the whole of Berlin must have been divided just over a decade and a half ago.

The division ended suddenly. On November 9, 1989, at 18:53, at the end of a press information session in the International Press Center, broadcasted live on East German television, Politburo Member Günther Schabowski received a slip paper from an aid. He glanced at it and proceeded to announce the new travel permissions for East Germans, i.e. that they may travel to the West. When asked when the new rules would take effect, he missed the date November 10 at the bottom of the page and said with all the nonchalant disinterest that only a twenty-year career in a centrally planned bureaucracy could breed "sofort, unverzüglich " (immediately, without delay). (Copy of the document with the instruction to release it only on November 10!)He certainly did not realize it at the time but he in effect announced the end of the German Democratic Republic. Chaos ensued as East Germans streamed to the borders where no advice had been issued yet. Tense moments followed but before midnight, the border posts opened and East Germans streamed into West Berlin. It was a real will-the-last-one-to-leave-please-switch-off-the-lights moment. Less than eleven months later, East Germany was absorbed into a greater Federal Republic of Germany.

In the days that followed, it seemed to have become a matter of patriotic principle to try to chip away at the wall. In the process, many Germans learned what could be of use to tourists: the wall was built with exceptionally high quality concrete – you need specialized equipment to break it. If you ever bought or received a real piece of the original Berlin Wall, just whack it with a hammer. If it crumbles, you have been had.

The Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery) is one of the world’s finest collections of European paintings from the 13th to 18th centuries. Like many other German art galleries, the list of artists on display reads like a who’s who of European painters, but seldom is the quality of the works of such consistently high standards. No minor works of famous artists are on display here–it is top-notch throughout. The reason for this is simple–from the 18th century onwards, the state of Prussia had specialists searching and buying top quality works of all genres to ensure that Prussia had a collection of art worthy of its recently acquired status as the fifth European power.

Following the Second World War, this amazing collection was divided between East and West Berlin. It was only after reunification that the collections were reunited in the purpose-built Gemäldegalerie (Picture Gallery). This modern exhibition space has superb lightening and is an excellent venue to display these works. Wear comfortable shoes–seeing the whole collection of around 1,500 works involves a 2.2km hike.

We arrived at opening time, planning to spend 2 hours here before rushing back to Zoo station to catch our train to Frankfurt. Things started out well–the early German collection obviously had mostly religious-themed works but also wonderful secular portraits by artists such as Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein. However, my favorite work in this section was Fountain of Youth, which sees old, wrinkled women emerge as sprightly, slender maidens who extend the gift of youth to old men through amorous liaisons. Most surprisingly, this work is by Lukas Cranach the Elder, more famous for his rather stark religious paintings as well as portraits of leading members of the Lutheran Reformation.

I desperately tried to find a Fountain of Youth postcard in the gift shop to send to my mother and aunt but they were sold out. I settled for a famous work from the vast Dutch and Flemish collection, Pieter Brueghel’s Dutch Proverbs–a painting illustrating 100 Dutch proverbs. A plaque helps to find them all. We continued enjoying the collection with works by masters such as Rubens, Jordaens, Snyder, Frans Hals, and Van Dyck.

However, the museum is famous for its 16 Rembrandts. Most are on display in the hexagonal hall X. Apart from the inevitable self-portrait, works include Samson and Delilah, Simson Threatens his Father-in-Law, and Moses Shatters the Decalogue. A further masterpiece is Susanna and the Two Old Men–a theme that seems to have intrigued several artists of Rembrandt’s era but are little known now. In an adjacent room is the beautiful Man with the Golden Helmet, a work long attributed to Rembrandt but recently downgraded to Rembrandt School. This may have altered the appraisal value but none of the artistic merit.

Nearby is Jan Vermeer’s Glass of Wine. It is a lovely small painting, typical of the artist’s skill, of a young woman drinking a glass of wine served by a young man. I have subsequently read that this glass is considered the most beautiful wine glass in art history. It is hard to judge from the magnet on my fridge, but from memory, I tend to agree.

It is at this stage that we had to change our leisurely pace. No, cultural fatigue had not set in, but time passed fast and we found ourselves with only 20 minutes to try and enjoy the Italian collection. The Italian works fill close to half the museum so we obviously could focus (and that may put more weight on the word focus than it can honestly bear) on the major works. It would have been better to admit defeat, enjoy a drink at a café, and return another time to see them all. Inevitably, the Giottos, Botticellis, Raphaels, Tintorettos, Canalettos, and Tiepolos became just a blur on the way to the exit and soon forgotten. Only Titian’s Venus with the Organ Player stuck in my mind.

Anyone who has ever been at Berlin’s Zoologischer Bahnhof for any reason other than pushing drugs knows that it is a horrible station. The new Hauptbahnhof under construction at Lehrter cannot open soon enough. Having to wait here on a crowded platform for our train that was delayed close to an hour, did not alleviate the sense of loss having had too little time in the Gemäldegalerie. Typical German Railways, to make sure you do not sneak away to a café, the delay starts with an announced 5 minutes and then progresses to 10 minutes, at least 20 minutes, around half an hour, about 45 minutes, and then when you are ready to elbow through the crowds and go get the damn coffee anyway, the train is there accompanied by the normal, unfazed departure announcement as if nothing possibly could be out of order.

Admission is €8 and allows entry into all Berlin State Museums at the Kulturforum for the day. In addition to the Gemäldegalerie, this includes the Kunstbibliothek, Kunstgewerbemuseum, Kupferstichkabinett, Neue Nationalgalerie, and Musikinstrumenten-Museum.

Opening hours are Tuesday to Sunday, from 10am to 6pm, closing at 10pm on Thursday.

One of Berlin’s current must-see sights is the Reichstag just to the north of the Brandenburger Tor. It houses the German federal parliament but most visitors come for the views of Berlin from its glass dome.

It was built between 1884 and 1894 to house the mostly powerless Imperial parliament. However, being at the center of Berlin, it would see more than its fair share of momentous events in the first 50 years of its existence.

The original building was controversial. Kaiser Wilhelm II described its modern glass and steel cupola as the “peak of tastelessness”. Being an absolute monarch, he was for starters not that fond of the parliamentary idea and occasionally described it as the Imperial Monkey House. Nevertheless it was the Kaiser who in 1916 had the inscription “Dem deutschen Volke” (For the German people) added to the frieze. Too late—the people had enough and it was from a window of the Reichstag that Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the German Republic on November 9, 1918. When told that he could not do that, Scheidemann merely replied, “I already did!” Contrary to popular belief, the Kaiser never abdicated by choice, he was simply informed post facto that he did.

With Berlin in the throes of post First World War revolution, the parliament high tailed it to Weimar but eventually returned to the Reichstag for most of the duration of the ill-fated Weimar Republic.

On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag burned down. There is no doubt that arson was the cause, but who did it was never satisfactorily cleared. Maybe the Nazis did it themselves, maybe not. Be as it may, Hitler knew how to exploit the event—blame the communist. He illegally banned the Communists and some other leftist parties from parliament to obtain the majority in parliament he never attained through the ballot box. From now on, his actions would be sanctioned mostly without question by the parliament leading to the observation that Hitler used illegal methods to become dictator legally.

The Nazis blamed the fire on a half-crazy, almost blind Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe. To have done the deed on his own, he must have run through the Reichstag building like a mad dog with a torch in his mouth and a can of gasoline in each hand. Hermann Goering himself was the lead prosecutor when the case appeared before Germany’s then highest court, the Reichsgericht in Leipzig. (This building incidentally still closely resembles the original Reichstag in external appearance.) Although Van der Lubbe received the death penalty, the court’s momentous “not guilty” verdict for his co-accused, shocked the Nazis.

Although the damage to the building was not structural, the Nazis took uncharacteristically long to rebuild it—probably because they could not envision any use for it. At the start of the War, the building was still under reconstruction. Nevertheless, the hoisting of the Soviet Union’s hammer-and-sickle standard by the Red Army at the end of the war above the Reichstag is still one of the most enduring symbols of German defeat.

After the war, the Reichstag was in West Berlin but uncomfortably close to the division line. Restoration of the building in simplified form was only completed in 1972 and it was used as assembly hall for the local government. However, after re-unification in 1990, it was decided by a slender six-vote majority to move the German capital from sleepy Bonn back to Berlin.

The Reichstag building was converted by Sir Norman Foster to house the German parliament. He added a more modern and much larger glass dome to the building. This dome, with two spiral walkways to the top, is the main attraction for most visitors. Opening hours are conveniently long—from 8am to midnight. Admission is free but the queues can be long, and with airport style security it is best to arrive without too many possessions. Parents with strollers can skip the lines forming in front of the building and up the stairs by simply ringing the bell at the wheelchair-access elevator to take the next lift up.

Arriving at the roof of the building there are two things to do, enjoy the views of Berlin or look into the Bundestag. (Although the German lower house of parliament is known as the Bundestag (Federal Diet), the old name Reichstag (Imperial Diet) is still used for the building.) The glass dome and a cone of mirrors allow natural light into the assembly hall and allow visitors to observe the meetings of parliament.

In Germany, half the members of the Bundestag are elected directly in constituencies and the other half is elected based on the parties’ national popularity. To be represented in parliament, a party must obtain at least 5% of the national vote—a lesson learned from the ill-fated, liberal Weimar Republic constitution when a plethora of independent candidates and small parties made government impossible. The Bundestag elects the Kanzler (Chancellor), who has the most power. The Chancellor can only be removed from his post through a national election or by appointing his successor. This prevents a political vacuum should opposition parties work together to remove the chancellor but be unable to agree on a successor. The Upper House or Bundesrat represent the 16 federal states with representation according to population size. Voting in the Upper House is by state, i.e. delegates from each state first vote amongst themselves to establish the position of the state and then all votes from the state are recorded as the majority voted irrespective of the real division within the state vote.

It is a long circular walk up to the top of the dome. En route, you can enjoy the views of Berlin, which do not really get much better by going all the way to the top. Once at the top, you can enjoy some more views or simply start the stroll back down via the second circular walkway.

Although this is a must see in Berlin, I personally was not disappointed that I did not visit it the first time round. The views are fine but if the queues were long, as they frequently are, I would rather spend time elsewhere.