Libeskind!

We started the day off, my walking around the historic Wilhelmstrasse, which is the street we live on, and saw all the plaques depicting how the street looked during Hitler's time. We saw were Hitler's bunker was supposedly and where he died, although some say he escaped. We also learned that the giant face, that we pass on the way to the grocery store is actually the outline of Georg Elser's face, and serves as his memorial. Elser attempted to assassinate Hitler, by planting a bomb under his chair at a meeting, but Hitler unexpectedly left the meeting earlier than planned.

After that we walked to the Topographies of Terror, which is a memorial/museum at the ruins of the former SS Headquarters. Outside we walked along the crumbling wall, and read the history, and stories of some of the Jews during that time. Some Jews were offered deals by the Gestapo to be secret police, in order to receive favors for them and their family, but many times the Gestapo still sent them to concentration camp, work camps, or sentenced them to jail time. On the inside we walked around and it was still informational, but more personal depiction of what happened to people during this time. It wasn't a very cheerful place to be, but I did like it.

After that we went to the Daniel Liebskind Jewish Museum, which we've learned about in class, but it is way cooler than the pictures we had seen. There was voids going through the building, which is a zig-zag shape, and the only way to enter the building is to enter the older building next door and go underground. I love the voids that went through the building the most, and on the first floor the ground is a continuous surface with no flat landing spaces, so that was different. On room I didn't like as much was the room, that had all of the faces symbolizing those who died, and you can walk across them, it was kind of eerie. Also There was a pomegranate tree in the beginning of the exhibit, where you could make a wish and hang it on the tree. Apparently some people believe that Adam and Eve actually ate a pomegranate and not an apple, which I wasn't aware which was interesting as well. This was by far my favorite thing we did that day.

 This is the inside once we went underground to get there, and you can kind of see the slanted floors.

One of the voids.

 This is a model of what the building looks like from the top, you can see the zig-zag shape.

 Tree's planted with soil from Jerusalem, in the garden outside. Similar to the Memorial for the fallen Jews, you can walk through, but all the blocks are the same height.

 The room of the faces.

The last thing we did that night was go to the Reichstag Building, and go up to the Dome for a view of the city, which was really cool. The Dome is a recent addition to the building, and you take an elevator up, and then there is a giant cone like structure in the middle of the room, and you walk along the outside edges up a spiral ramp and once you're at the top, you can see that it is completely open air. When it rains the water falls into the cone, and I don't no where it goes after that.