Berlin. The Cold War. Museums. Nefertiti. Four days was no where near enough; we will definitely need to go back for more time.

When we started thinking about spending a couple weeks in Germany before heading to Greece, the flight to Munich was the best option and we almost decided to just mosey around in southern Germany and forgo Berlin. Thank goodness we didn’t. This might be the first city I’ve come to in the two-plus years we’ve been traveling where I thought “We should come back here for four or five weeks to do it right!”

For me there were three highlights: spectacular museums; great neighborhoods, bars, & restaurants; and the unique situation of having been two cities in separate countries at the center of the Cold War less than 30 years ago. Altogether it was quite the package.

The museums are really the main attraction. Berlin is the home, Wikipedia tells us, of 138 museums. For $24 Euros – under $27 today – you can get a three-day pass that lets you in to maybe 50 of them. Of course, you can’t really tour 50 museums in three days so you have to be selective. That’s facilitated by the decision made many decades ago to put five of them, five world-class museums, on one tiny island (conveniently called Museum Island) near the center of the city. Today, the five museums collectively are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as well-deserved as any UNESCO site could be. In our all-to-brief four-day stay we made it through four of them, but the lines at the Old National Gallery with it’s collection of 19th century masterpieces were just too long. We’ll go back, and next time we’ll reserve a time slot weeks in advance.

Amusingly, the museum that I enjoyed the least was also the one that I enjoyed the most. The New Museum was built in the mid-19th century and heavily damaged a century later in World War II. The ruins were left to decay for decades until in 1986 the East German government started to make plans to rebuild the museum, but then after reunification the plans were put on ice again. Finally in 1997 rebuilding got underway and the new New Museum was reopened in 2009 at a cost of some $400 million housing the Egyptian and Prehistory and Early History exhibits.

Since then the museum gets great accolades for the architecture and the way they incorporated pieces – literally, individual bricks and so on – into the new building. The problem for me was that for the most part I didn’t think it did a decent job at all of telling a story of Egyptian history. To be fair, my knowledge of Egyptian history is pretty weak, so to work for me the exhibit would have had to have been pretty basic. Instead it was all just a jumble of stuff, with no flow from one room and one era to the next. Descriptions of various pieces on display would talk about how it fit into the architecture of the museum and who funded its purchase and so on, things that just didn’t seem that important to me.

But – and it’s a huge but – the museum included one room that had the iconic bust of Nefertiti dating to 1345 BC. Over the years we’ve seen a lot of great art, a lot of old masterpieces, but this one took my breath away. The colors, the shape of her face and neck, the intensity; the history of her unusual status of ruling with her husband. It all looked so real, so current, even modern. And just so beautiful. Stunning, really. I didn’t really like the museum, but that one piece made up for a lot.

(Worth noting: at one point early in the exhibit, the official description of some items noted that the Russians looted a bunch of stuff when they took control of that segment of Berlin after the war. At no point in the room dedicated to Nefertiti did they note that the Egyptians think the Germans took Nefertiti inappropriately and want her back.)

We enjoyed the other three museums on Museums we made it through enormously. The Pergamon Museum houses original-sized, reconstructed monumental buildings, and was built originally to display the Pergamon Altar, a massive structure built in modern-day Turkey in the second century BC. Unfortunately, last year the authorities decided it was time to renovate the Altar and redesign the space where it is displayed so there is a sign outside noting that the Pergamon Altar will be closed to the public until 2020! Still, there were some pretty spectacular pieces still there, including the gate of Ishtar and a piece of the processional entrance from Babylon, and the Islamic Art exhibit.

And then there were lots of other great things to see. The Old Museum – the first to be built on the island – houses a great Greek collection on the first floor with Romans up on the second. It seemed a little strange to be touring the Greek antiquities just days before flying to Greece, but it was a pretty good introduction.

I could go on, but you get the point. We never made it into the Reichstag, where apparently you should reserve a time weeks in advance. We stayed just a few blocks from the Brandenburg Gate and from there could walk into the peaceful 500-acre Tiergarten, where several lovely afternoon hours were spent reading. Just walking around the city you would notice little plaques showing where the Berlin Wall had stood, and you could observe that parts of the formerly Eastern quarter was still just a little grittier, a little less happy, than over to the west. Which, of course, also made them more interesting.

So that was it. We loved Berlin and will most certainly going back in a year or two for a more extended stay.

Dresden. Wow. All I knew about Dresden before we got here was the fire bombings of World War II. And even then, all I knew was that there had been some serious bombs that pretty much wiped out the city. At least I got that part right. In mid-February 1945 American and British pilots dropped nearly 4,000 tons of bombs and “incendiary devices” on the city, killing perhaps 25,000 people, mostly civilians, and leveling much of the city. While there is a plausible case that Dresden’s military and industrial significance warranted this level of death and destruction, it seems clear that the intensity – savagery, really – had as much to do with German psychology as with military needs narrowly defined.

Whatever the moral and ethical implications, Dresden was wiped out. As late as 1984, when Mark was here on a college trip, the city was still a bombed out mess. Today? Wow. After German reunification – Dresden had been part of East Germany – the investments came and many of the grand old buildings were rebuilt. The museums are world class. The restaurants are great. Cool hip neighborhoods. The running trails along the Elbe are heavenly. (OK, that’s idiosyncratic, but they have great biking/running trails for miles and miles along the river. Truly heavenly.)

A little quick history is worthwhile here since it’s pretty interesting and I knew nothing of it before we came. Dresden was long the capital of Saxony, one of many German states that made up the Holy Roman Empire (which was, of course, not holy, Roman, or an empire, but whatever). The Duke of Saxony was a Prince of Europe, but he was much more than that: he was one of just four lay Electors of the Holy Roman Emperor, along with three spiritual Electors. The role of Elector was highly prestigious, even though by the 15th century the Emperor had become an inherited role in the Habsburg dynasty. Electors ranked above all other Princes and just below kings in terms of royal hierarchy. In fact, the electors’ title was Elector rather than Duke or Prince or whatever and, amusingly for me at least, their wives were called Electresses. Kind of like calling Michelle Obama the “Presidentress.” I wonder if we could get that to take off?

Finally, when Napoleon dissolved the empire in the early 19th century he raised the state of Saxony to a kingdom. Thus Dresden was a Very Important City over hundreds of years of European history. (And I should note that, looking a little further back, Saxony is also where those Saxons who crossed the English Channel to mix with the Angles and give the world the Anglo-Saxons came from. Being there was like finally being home.)

So now fast forward through World War II, the bombing, the emergence of the Cold War, and the dreary “recovery” experienced by Dresden and the rest of East Germany. Finally 1989 arrives, the Iron Curtain falls, Germany is reunited, and Dresden is rebuilt. The Catholic cathedral, the Frauenkirche, the Zwinger Museum, the Opera House, the Palace, and much more all rebuilt and beautiful. So today it is again a rollicking example of baroque and rococo masterpieces. What fun!