Berlin; Sunday, 13 February, 2022

Breakfast taken and my luggage left with the hotel I headed over to the Humboldt Forum to explore the inside of the building. Whilst it may look like a 17th century palace on the outside the inside has been built as a modern exhibition and museum space, though the first place I headed was to the basement.

When I visited Berlin in 2006 demolition work on the old DDR parliament was well underway, and during part of that process some of the ruins of the old palace’s cellars had been discovered – a surprise as it was assumed everything had been destroyed. At that time you could stand on the surface and look down into the cellar spaces. 16 years later and you can now stand in those cellar spaces – the Schloßkeller – albeit from within the Humboldt Forum and back as underground, undercover spaces.

From the Schloßkeller I climbed up through the building to the Ethnographic museum that covers much of the 2nd and 3rd floors of the forum. At the time of visiting only some of the rooms in one wing of the building are open as others are still being fitted out, once complete it will be a very impressive museum, arranged in continental themed areas.

From the museum I stopped off at the café for a quick cup of coffee before it was time to head down to reception and take the lift up onto the roof of the forum for some of the best views of the city. Whilst the roof isn’t that high up – only 4th floor level – it’s location and the surrounding buildings make for an impressive backdrop with the Berliner Dom and buildings of the Museuminsel (Museum Island) visible directly in front of you, the imposing bulk of the TV Tower and in the distance the domes of the Bundestag and the French and German cathedrals, along with the impressive dome of the forum itself – still copper brown waiting for time to slowly start the process of turning it green.

I spent quite a bit of time up on the roof before descending back down to street level and heading over to the U-Bahn.

You can spend time exploring the old East Berlin without taking into account the Elephant, or in this case Secret Policeman, in the room. So much of life in the DDR was lived under the control and fear of the Stasi, and it was from an office complex in the suburbs of East Berlin that they attempted, and eventually failed, to control the population.

The complex has been turned into a series of museums and centres, dedicated to peace, but the main corporate HQ so to speak of the Stasi has been turned into a museum and that was my final stop on my tour of East Berlin.

The museum is housed over three floors of the former Stasi HQ with two floors of exhibitions on how the Stasi was formed and how it operated, as well as exhibits on some of the ways they kept tabs on people and some of the tools they used – including wire taps, hidden recording devices and the always creepy collection of smell samples of the population.

On the upper floor the conference room and offices of the senior members of the secret police – including the office of the head of the service – have been restored to how they would have looked in the early 1980s in the times when these guys (and the head people were all guys – they even dismantled the ladies loos because they saw no point in having them) though that they would be in power for ever.

From the Stasi museum I caught the U-Bahn back into town, grabbed my luggage and headed over to Alexanderplatz station to pick up the train out to the airport to start my journey home.