Berlin to Zürich
May 28, 2022
Another short update, visiting Berlin. There was a time I thought Berlin would be the focal point of my travels. I passed through it eight times the first year I was on the road. The last time was in December, 2019. It’s taken me all this time to get back.
I got to fly into the new airport — Berlin finally managed to shut down Tegel and kinda-sorta retire Schönefeld1 — and it’s only after landing that I realized I’d need to leave to really get a sense of the place. The bulk of your experience at an airport is departures, when you navigate check-in and security and killing time at your gate. Arriving you only get a sense of the train connections. And they were confusing and delayed but once I figured it out it was all fine.2
I was crashing in Berlin with a friend of mine who’s graciously keeping several suitcases of my larp costumes in boxes at their apartment. I got to sort through it, find a costume for an upcoming larp, drop off some things, and stuff it all in the basement.
Other than that, I did a little sightseeing, caught up on some work, and cooked up a big batch of mac and cheese. Garlic, with gouda and Pecorino Romano.3
The two things I saw in Berlin that I hadn’t before were Teufelsberg Spy Station and Sanssouci. Teufelsberg is the highest spot in Berlin, formerly the site of a Third Reich officer’s college. The Allies needed a place to dump the rubble generated from repairing the damage from the war, especially after the Soviets shut down all the exits around the city making bringing stuff in and out rather expensive, and dumping it all in Teufelsberg proved a cost-effective way to destroy the school.
This eventually turned into the highest point in Berlin4 which came in handy when the Americans decided they needed to build a listening station to spy on East Germany. It’s got incredibly distinctive spheres which housed the equipment and the architecture would have become totally iconic for Berlin if it wasn’t completely obscured in a forest and off limits to visitors.
The Americans cleared out after the Cold War and the site’s gradually moldered over the past thirty years. Eventually someone had the bright idea to invite a bunch of graffiti artists in to decorate the place and charge admission. So it’s a weird place, part museum,5 part art project, part funky public park. But you can climb through the rotting corpse of the Cold War and stand on top of the building and look across one of the best views of Berlin. So that’s pretty great.
Sanssouci is one of the famous palaces of Frederick the Great. It’s located out in Potsdam and it, along with the other palaces nearby, is well worth the train ride it takes to get out there. Sanssouci is quite small and intimate, unsuited for royal functions but really a fantastic place if you just wanted to throw dinner parties and hang out in a winery, which you get the impression was where Frederick’s heart was at.
If you go, go earlier than I did on a nicer day and you can wander the gardens for a bit, maybe even have a picnic lunch among the vineyards. I went late on a day that turned rainy so my friend and I didn’t loiter, ducking into the New Chambers6 then making our way to the New Palace.
The New Palace is Sanssouci on a grand scale and that’s saying something for a palace that’s already in the rococo style. It has over 200 rooms7 and most of them are in a crazy over-the-top fashion that I’m beginning to associate with a particular more-money-than-God aesthetic among the nobles of the 18th-20th centuries. Some of that is Frederick’s fault, although comparing it to Sanssouci I get the sense Frederick was doing it for the effect. Much of it was Kaiser Wilhelm II, who lived there until forced to abdicate in 1918. The Kaiser is exactly the sort of rich idiot I’d imagine would love those kinds of settings, and by some strange stroke of fortune had packed up most of the furniture and sent it off to exile in the Netherlands, only to have the Dutch authorities discover most of it still in packing crates and return it in the ’70s. So you get a pretty good idea of what the Kaiser liked.
The audioguide for Sanssouci really goes a long way to avoid talking about Frederick’s homosexuality — yes, he had an arranged and apparently loveless marriage which failed to produce any children and his wife remained in Berlin while he partied it up with a bunch of male friends and courtiers in Potsdam — but, you know, wouldn’t want to read anything into that.8 This is annoying, because the palaces are kind of aggressively decorated with neoclassical paintings about love and romance and knowing Frederick was playing footsie with Voltaire feels kind of relevant to understanding it. But there’s almost as long a tradition of covering up homosexuality in Prussia as there is of homosexuality in Prussia, so no surprise there.
I’m now on the night train to Zürich from Berlin, continuing my attempts to find a way to travel around Europe by train that doesn’t totally suck. And, sadly, this sucks. It’s telling that in a 12-month period during which I made multiple transatlantic trips, two of the top five worst travel experiences were trains in Europe. This train is worse than the trip I had taking two nine-hour flights back-to-back with an eight hour layover in the airport between them.
I’m in one of those cabins with three seats along one wall and three seats along the other one, jammed in with five other people. It’s designed so you can slide the seats down to lie flat, although obviously that only works if the train isn’t full so I’m wondering what the point is, since you obviously have no control over whether the train is booked or not.9 The train left at 9pm and gets in at 9am. I can’t sleep sitting straight up — I’d have thought the seats would recline, but they absolutely do not — and the person opposite me has a full accordion in a case taking up half the floor space between us. I can’t plug my computer in because the power outlets require stretching over four people.
I can’t believe how abysmally bad the trip is. Trains in the United States are better than this, and I use the United States as a benchmark for shitty trains in first-world countries. There is absolutely no reason to subject yourself to it. A direct flight from Berlin to Zürich only costs about 20€ more than this train does, and even if you arrived at the airport three hours before your flight it still only takes just over a third of the time. If you really want the experience of trying to sleep near five strangers in a space the size of a double bed, get a room at a hostel when you arrive.
Footnotes
1 It lives on as Terminal 5 of the new airport.
2 I had forgotten the fact that you can buy a local transit ticket for about 3€ and ride on any trains to get into Berlin proper, so used was I to paying five or ten times that to catch airport trains from most city centers. And it doesn’t help that a lot of the trains swing far to the west before curving north into the heart of the city; I was sure I had gotten on the regional train heading the wrong direction for a solid 15 minutes before it finally turned in the right direction.
3 Mac and Cheese is one of those American comfort foods you can’t really get easily overseas. You might be able to find the quintessential box of Kraft in an American specialty shop next to the Cheetos and canned pumpkin, if that’s your jam. But if you want the classic, bubbly, homemade stuff with breadcrumbs on top, you have to make it yourself.
And it’s not hard, it’s just a bit annoying to heat the milk then the butter, then whisk together the béchamel sauce in stages while it clumps up and you think you’ve ruined it, before you can boil the pasta and add the cheese and put it all together. Plus when I’m cooking alone I’m exclusively cooking vegan these days so I can’t even use half of these ingredients. But my friend had a wifty Mac and Cheese recipe book and the only reason I didn’t demand the Jalapeño Popper Mac and Cheese is because my friend can’t handle spice. We both love garlic, though.
4 Berlin’s a remarkably flat place.
5 There’s a small garage area with a checkpoint and military police car where apparently nobody cares if you hop in and see if the siren still works — it does — and some informational displays and a recreated bar which might or might not be active (it was closed off and I suspect was just for atmosphere).
6 Another small palace with a few nice rooms but ultimately skippable.
7 Sanssouci had less than a dozen when it was built.
8 Not to promote stereotypes but it’s undeniable Frederick had a pretty enthusiastic flair for interior design, going so far as to have the Frederician Rococo style named after himself.
9 Wouldn’t it make more sense to install seats which were comfortable regardless of how crowded the train was?