Kulturpark

This week (our second in Berlin and our third abroad) flew by. After a visit to the Turkiyemspor Soccer Club, a tour of the Sehitlik Mosque with our slightly uncomfortable "Islam 101" tour guide, and a few lectures at Humboldt throughout the week, I spent my free Friday guerilla interviewing at the Turkish market with Jen and exploring a "kind of abandoned" GDR theme park with Juliya, Katy, and Brian. Now I'm spending Saturday afternoon resting that hamstring, eating some 66-cent frozen pizza, and watching Stage 14 of the Tour de France. Discuss.

Before I get into all the cool abandoned things, and not-as-cool security guards, we found at Spreepark, let's talk about how this relates to the themes of the course. No, seriously. Our studies are, after all, the main reason we're here, and, surprisingly, urban exploring seems to be fitting in quite nicely. Forgetting, memory, urban environments, borders, guards, contentious histories--abandoned places in Berlin have it all!

Take Beelitz. Why hasn't anyone capitalized on all the stagnant capital in that massive compound? You can't get anywhere from the Beelitz train station, north or south, without going through the massive sanatorium compound. Renovate it, charge top dollar for tours of it, raze the whole thing and build condos. The same question goes for Spreepark. When we visited it yesterday a small boulevard of the park was actually up and running, with lights, music, bumper cars, and overpriced concessions to boot. A good 90% of the park, however, remained thoroughly roped off and abandoned, including the iconic ferris wheel we spotted from the Tegel Airport in our first minutes in Berlin.

So my big question is, how can so many people forget so much space? The uniting theme between the two sites we've explored, and among most of the sites we've heard of, is their association with Nazi or Soviet history (or both). To get more specific, both Beelitz and Spreepark seem to stand as examples of failed experiments in carrying Soviet environments over into (re)unified Germany. The Soviets walked away from Beelitz five or six years after the wall fell. Spreepark was Kulturpark, the GDR's most popular amusement park, from 1969 to 1989, at which point the name became Spree, the park got all Westernized, and visitor numbers steadily declined until it finally closed in 2000. (Incidentally, the new owner also got caught using the park to smuggle Peruvian cocaine and launder the related cash. Whoops.) Both places seemed to have overstayed their welcome, and at this point it may be easier for Berliners to simply forget their drawn-out pasts than to foray into the historical complications that privatizing either would certainly entail. Instead they (or at least, images of them operating at their peak) have exited popular memory. In a city trying to move on, they just don't fit anymore.

Now, on that note, check out those dinosaurs! (All of these photos are from Juliya, who valiantly recovered them from her memory card after the grumpy security guard we met on our way out made her delete them all.)

Paritally functioning teacup ride. That yellow hippo thing looks familiar.

Juliya conquering the dinosaur.