Arrival in Berlin

Trip to Berlin
Reise nach Berlin

by N. Richard Wagner

Arrival in Berlin

On this latest trip, my plane landed at Tegel Airport, one of three commercial airports in Berlin. Tegel is in the Northwest, in the former West Berlin. The other two are: Tempelhof just south of the city center, built during the Nazi era, and Schönefeld in the far Southeast, built by the East Germans as their only Berlin airport. In 2003 my wife and I landed at Schönefeld, while I must have landed at Tempelhof in 1962, although I don't remember this.

In 1963 I took a train from Hamburg to West Berlin, travelling through East Germany to get there. The train was run by the East Germans for the traffic from the West to Berlin. One of my prized possessions is a sign that I stole from the train, written in four languages, none of them English (German, French, Italian, and Russian). (Click image for larger picture.) What do you think it says?

Recently officials decided to turn the Schönefeld airport into the single international airport for Berlin. Eventually the use of Tegel and Tempelhof would be discontinued. On the other hand, Berlin's recent financial crisis and the extreme cost of a new Schönefeld airport might lead to delays or even a change of plans.

Tempelhof is the only interesting airport of the three. It is a short walk south from the Kreuzberg area where my son John lives, and I went there twice to look around. The Wikipedia article gives the full history of this airport, but in brief it was built in 1936 by the German government to be "the mother of all airports". The buildings rival the US Pentagon in size and are in the style of Nazi architecture. As you can see from pictures below, even the stone eagles survive, without what must have been swastikas below them. ("die Swastika" is also a German word, but the other German word for it is: das Hakenkreuz, literally "hooked cross.") People like to maintain that all Nazi art and architecture had no merit whatsoever. But the architecture here has a strength and unity that is genuinely pleasing. And the memories here are not all bad -- this airport was the key landing site for the Berlin airlift of fuel and goods carried out in 1948-9 by the Americans. One of the photos below gives a sculpture dedicated to the Berlin Airlift. Perhaps partly because of these good memories, this beautiful set of buildings may be spared when Tempelhof is shut down as an airport.

The Kreuzberg section of town has a large number of buildings that survived World War II. John claims that the Allies wanted to use Tempelhof after the war, and so partly spared it, also sparing buildings in nearby Kreuzberg.