Berlin Day 5

   70 tunnels and one Mark summed up our time on this morning's tour. While our total day was eleven hours long, the first two were spent at Berlin Underground, a tour about tunnels people used to escape East Germany under the Berlin Wall. Our tour guide, Mark, had many stories and interesting facts about these tunnels and really made this tour an enjoyable experience. The tour had objects and models to give us perspective about the escape attempts, and we took a train to another location to learn about an especially interesting story about a tunnel digger love story and a Soviet border guard. We then took a train over to lunch where we got street food. I got bulgogi (yum) 👍. The square also had some great ice cream on a hot day, but the Berlin Underground experience was the highlight of the day. 

- Ethan "The Jet" '25

    After we ate lunch, we arrived at Museum Island. We crossed over the River Spree, viewing the grand museums and monuments from a distance before discerning the bullet marks and scuffs left on them by the war up close, before arriving at a monument created by a mother who had lost her son in World War I.  Mimicking the famous pieta of the Virgin Mary holding Jesus, the statue in the center of the otherwise empty room fully captured the individual grief of war. Next, we moved on to Brandenburg Gate. Its size served to glorify the might of Germany the country. Lastly, we walked a few blocks to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Each stone in the large site came together to represent the tragedy of a whole people.

    From individual to country to population, each monument captured a different scale of the complexities of life in vastly different ways and demonstrate the different forms monumentality can manifest.

- August '26

As the day came to a close, we visited artist Phillip Topolovac in his studio. There, we learned about his mediums of art and how they relate to the monuments and memories of Berlin that are the focus of our trip. First, he told us about how he takes photos of sand piles at construction sites in black & white to make them appear like mountains. He then showed us fused chunks of glass found at these construction sites formed from glass remains from buildings destroyed in WWII. On the same theme, he explained to us his project of taking discarded objects from the war and covering them in gold leaf to represent the past as an idealized concept. Lastly, we were shown his recreation of Orpheus's head from a damaged statue in Berlin. This copy of the Greek figure's head was placed in a river to mimic the end of the myth of Orpheus. 

Across the media of Topolovac's art, the themes of our time in this urban lab shone through. 

See you soon 🩷

-Charlie '26

Glass fragments gifted to us from Topolovac

After the studio visit, we wandered a brisk two blocks back to Mehringdammstrasse for our beloved array of street food vendors on this throughfare. Momentary rain graced us with a rainbow that some claimed was a double, nay, triple rainbow! As if the colored glass fragments forged in fires of tragedy were transposed into the culminating break, washing away the humidity that had been building in the air.