Germany

Germany

   Much like France, Germany was another country we only really intended to pass through on the way to other countries, but again much like France it was a country we really enjoyed and wished we had allocated more time to spend there.

   The first thing we noticed about the Germans was how friendly they were, especially after the comparatively cold and unwelcoming Swiss. Apologies to any Swiss people on my facebook  who may read this; everybody who I have met from Switzerland outside of Switzerland has been very warm and friendly and sociable, but for some reason the Swiss inside of Switzerland seemed to take a natural distain towards tourists, or maybe it was just us in our rusty old transit van. It must also be noted that our views of Swiss people were only based on a handful of conversations with waiters, shop owners and caravan park managers. I’m sure that there are plenty of happy people in Switzerland; it’s just that we didn’t happen to meet them. Germans on the other hand were by far the friendliest people we met on our travels. Literally as soon as we crossed the border (which just meant crossing from one side of the river Rhone to the other) every single person would say hello and wave to us in the street, and often stop and try to have a conversation when they realised we spoke English, and especially once they worked out that Andi was Australian and not English. This was a frequent occurrence in every country without exception actually; the inevitable “so where do you come from?” question would arise and the response that I was from England would be greeted by a half-disappointed, almost offended “ohh...ok.” but when andi chirped up “But I’m from STRAYA”, she would be immediately exalted and praised like some kind of celebrity;”WOW! AUSTRALIA!!! That’s amazing! Where abouts? Do you live on the beach? Are there kangaroos in your garden? I bet you find it cold here...” and other such typically banal but very emotive statements and questions. In the end I found it a lot easier to just let andi speak first and let them think that I was from Australia as well to save any kind of disappointment at my Englishness.  Even though we spent our first night in Germany camped out in the car park to a minigolf course on the side of the river Rhone, the next morning as we were making our breakfast every single person who passed by us walking their dogs or running or cycling along the riverside path would give us a wave and say hello. It seemed so strange coming from Switzerland where everyone would stare at the street as they walked past.

   The other thing that was such a relief arriving in Germany was the price of the food; it was like we could finally afford to eat again after Switzerland. It’s amazing how you can cross over a river and the price of food literally halves. I can’t imagine supermarkets just over the Swiss side of the boarder do very much trade. Despite sharing a border Germany and Switzerland are polar opposites in food pricing, Germany has the cheapest and best range of food in Europe (in the supermarkets anyway) and Switzerland (along with Norway), has the most expensive. We stocked up hard on kilo bags of spinach for like 3 Euros and all kinds of other fresh goodies that we couldn’t afford the luxury of in Switzerland.

   So anyway, our journey into Germany started as we crossed the river Rhone into a town called

Waldshut, where we spent the night parked up after having a refreshing swim in the river, much needed after the long drive in the summer heat and sun through northern Switzerland. Waldshut is on the southern edge of the infamous “black forest” region in the south western corner of Germany, so our journey took us immediately north into the lush rolling hills and dark conifer woodland of the black forest. Our eventual destination was a small tourist town called “Triberg”, which had a number of slightly eccentric claims to fame; Germanys highest waterfall, the home of the original black forest gateaux, plus the world’s largest working cuckoo clock. It’s probably the kind of twee, tacky tourist town that has the majority of Germans tutting and shaking their head at the grossly stereotypical representation of “old Germany”. As well as containing the world’s largest cuckoo clock it also seemed as if every other shop sold nothing but cuckoo clocks, with the majority of the other shops stocking a wide selection of Lederhosen (traditional German costumes which I’m sure the majority of people have seen people wearing whilst doing funny dances much akin to Morris dancing). I had to look up a picture to put in the end; this is lederhosen, for sale in the majority of shops in triberg:

  The clocks stocked however weren’t your run of the mill factory produced cuckoo clocks, each was hand crafted and carved into the most intricate patterns and details of forest and mountain scenes, some as big as 5 feet tall! I was thoroughly impressed by the workmanship, although the price tags more than reflected the work and love that was poured into each one:

And this is a picture of the worlds official biggest working cuckoo clock, which personally I felt was a little of an anticlimax after seeing the ornate works on the smaller ones. We did see it chime however and watched the little (or pretty fucking large) cuckoo come out of his door at the top to tell us the time. The pendulum at the bottom actually swang from side to side, and probably weighed the best part of half a tonne. You certainly wouldn’t want to get hit by it that’s for sure:

As mentioned before the other main claim to fame touted in all the tourist info centres and guide books was the fact that Black Forest Gateaux was invented here. There is one bakery which follows the original recipe and is still owned and ran by the original baker’s apprentice who invented it (now well into his 60s). Obviously we couldn’t come to this town and not have a piece. It was nice, but so drenched in cherry liquor that I worried I might be over the limit after eating it:

Aside from the touristic aspect of the town it was actually in a very beautiful area, surrounded on all sides by thick forest and hills. The architecture of the buildings was very pretty, but very obviously highly modernised and made to look old and stereotypically “alps-y”

                                      

                                     

Germany’s highest waterfall is a short 5 minute walk outside the town centre, plunging 163m down the river Gutach in 7 stages:

    As mentioned before we had a very limited timeframe to spend in Germany and after a brief look at sights to see in Germany we decided to give most of the major cities a miss as it is a major headache travelling into inner cities with a campervan over 2.2m in height (the height restriction on the vast majority of inner city multi-story car parks all over Europe is 2m). Even with two bicycles on the back it takes a long time to find a suitable place to leave a van for the day and cycle into a city and back out in order to find a place to camp for the night. Plus we are very much active, outdoorsy people and would much rather see the natural sites around Europe than travel into yet another major city with the same shops, department stores and fast-food outlets that occupy all city centres. With this in mind we chose to snake our way through the very southern edge of the country along the much revered “Deutsche Alpinstasse” (German alpine road) which carves its way through the northern foothills of the Alps.    

      This was our plan anyway but after a slight wrong turn in a town called Lindau on the banks of Lake Constance on the Austrian border we found ourselves driving along a motorway heading into Austria. I must point out at this point that every country in Europe has a different and unique system regarding toll roads. We were not initially planning to cross the border into Austria so hadn’t taken the liberty of researching into how their system works, but luckily pulled over into the first toll information centre we encountered. We found out that in Austria they have not opted for the French or Spanish style toll booths which force you to stop at various intervals along the motorways to pay the toll for that specific piece of road, but rather you need to buy a special sticker that you place on your windscreen which will allow you to use all of their major roads. It seems the Austrians of all people have managed to install the most technologically advanced system of tolls in Europe. They have installed cameras over the motorways at regular intervals which take a picture of the front of every single vehicle as it passes and if it is found to not have a clearly displayed sticker in the top left corner then you are automatically issued a 100 euro fine through the post! They rather amusingly refer to this fine as the “tourist tax”, as thousands of uninformed tourists cross the border into Austria every year without this sticker in the windscreen and are automatically issued a fine. Luckily we pulled over soon enough, but still had to buy a 10 day pass to use Austrian roads and escape the fine. Seeing as we had already paid for the roads we decided to amend our trip and drive through the top of Austria, as it is widely reputed to be one of the most scenic and dramatic landscapes in Europe. Despite the scenic beauty of this leg of the trip we actually took very few photos, partly because it rained heavily for 2 of the 3 days we spent in Austria, but also I guess we just didn’t feel like taking many photos at this point. Here are a few from the German side anyway:

And a few more of a rather rainy Austria:

Our eventual destination in the south east of Germany was the Berchtesgaden national park. Arguably the most stunning area of Germany, it contains parts of 6 different mountain ranges and a number of beautiful alpine villages set amongst formidable forest lined slopes. But the Berchtesgaden also plays host to a much darker side of the German psyche by housing Adolf Hitler’s mountain stronghold, where he planned and implemented much of his reign of terror upon Europe’s nations. The remains of his government headquarters which wasn’t completely obliterated by Allied bombing now houses one of the most detailed museums and insights into Nazi Terror,  including Hitler’s near mythical appearance, his radical politics, the resistance movement inside Germany and the infamous death camps. Needless to say it was a suitably traumatising and yet intriguing experience but I will save my full views and commentaries on it until later on in this blog. All I will say at this point is that it flew so far in the face of what we saw and experienced from the kind and humble German people that it’s barely possible to believe it even happened. Unfortunately our time in Berchtesgaden coincided with the heaviest rain and grimmest weather we had encountered on our trip so far, which completely obscured any kind of scenic Mountain View we would have experienced. It looked absolutely lovely on the postcards in all the gift shops, but I'll just have to take their word that there were dramatic mountain ranges lurking somewhere through all that mist and rain. Because of this adverse weather we spent most of our time either drinking coffees in cafes or wandering for several hours around the aforementioned museum, such a shame for such a beautiful place but you can’t have good weather all the time. (Not in Europe anyway, this isn’t Australia anymore).

     After our thoroughly enjoyable time at Boom festival in Portugal (see earlier blog if you haven’t already, it’s a good one: Boom ) we made the decision to regularly check the internet forums and websites that advertise Psytrance parties throughout the world in search of another party in Europe that lined up roughly with the route of our trip. We had hoped to find one whilst in Switzerland, the idea of going to an open-air party with a backdrop of snow-capped mountains was highly appealing. But although it seemed there were regular parties throughout Switzerland, most of them required you to park your vehicle at the bottom of a mountain and catch some kind of 4x4 taxi to the party site itself as the more remote, and hence more interesting, party sites are not accessible using your average car, and certainly not using a fully loaded campervan. Even though it was the middle of summer a lot of the websites stated that during the night the temperatures could be expected to approach zero with the possibility of snowfall! I’m sure the venues would have been spectacular but without our van we were thoroughly unprepared for those kinds of conditions. We did however find note of a number of parties in Germany, mostly scattered around Berlin.  We found one that looked promising near a small town called Perleberg, about 100 miles north-west of Berlin and decided to attend.

   Unfortunately Berlin is a long, long way from Berchtesgaden and the weekend was rapidly approaching so we made the decision to drive the entire distance in one day and an afternoon after seeing the Hitler museum. Yes we had the use of the super-efficient German Autobahn, but we also had the added hindrance that the torrential rain I mentioned in Austria and Berchtesgaden seemed to pound us relentlessly up the entire length of the country. It was as if we managed to chase the storm front for every bit of the 1500-odd kilometre journey. I must point out that although the autobahn with its limitless speed is a rapid way to travel through a country, it is absolutely TERRIFYING in a large, right-hand drive van in torrential rain. It’s not too bad when simply driving in a straight line and staying in a single lane, but the problems come when attempting to overtake any one of the thousands of heavy haulage vehicles cluttering up the autobahn. It was hard enough on any road in continental Europe simply because your steering wheel is on the wrong side and you have to take your eyes off the road for a second to squint into the passenger side mirror way over on the other side to check for cars overtaking in the left lane. This is made a lot harder driving through a sheet of thick rain, when the mirror fogs up and you are peering back through the heavy mist of your own spray at any vehicle which might be bearing down upon you. But the thing which makes German roads in particular so terrifying is the fact which I’m sure everyone knows but fails to realise the significance of; there are NO SPEED LIMITS on the autobahn.  This means that that tiny vague blob you can kind of see through the mist and rain in your passenger side mirror for the brief second you take your eyes off the road could be driving in the outside lane at 70mph, or then again they could just as easily be doing 170mph. It’s very hard to gauge which one it is until you’ve had several brief looks into your mirror, by which point you are fast approaching the truck doing 50 in your lane and it is too late to overtake anyway. It’s no exaggeration that we were overtaken by cars, whilst doing 70mph ourselves, which made us feel as if we were merely stood by the crash barrier on the side of the motorway watching the traffic zoom past. It’s a nerve racking experience.

After easily the longest single day of driving on our trip so far we eventually pulled up highly relieved at the gates to the Psytrance party (named “Fantasy Experience”), to find it all locked up with no one about. This was a little strange as the website clearly stated that you were welcome to come and camp at the site on the Friday night even though the party didn’t start until midday on the Saturday. We chose to drive the entire length of Germany in one go with the thought of a guaranteed camp site right outside the party firmly in our minds and a nice lay in before the party. Another guy pulled up beside us who knew somebody inside but explained to us that the organisers had shut the gates because of something to do with licensing restrictions. Luckily he made a number of phone calls and eventually a couple of the organisers came out to speak to us. They had what sounded to us like a heated argument, although I’m sure it was all very civil but to the untrained ear three people speaking very quickly in German can sound a little confrontational. It went on for almost 5 minutes and I have no idea what was said, but at the end of it they let us in and told us in English that we could camp up for the night as long as we promised not to have a party. This suited us fine and we cooked a big dinner and went straight to sleep.  

        As we had been fortunate enough to have slept right outside the venue we were among the first people there when the music was turned on the next morning. We spent an hour or so dancing and walking around taking pictures of the decor, which were the only pictures, we took of the whole party in the end.  It was really very small scale, compared to Boom anyway, maybe 4 or 500 people on accounts of the heavy rain leading up to it, but as with most psytrance parties a painstaking amount of time had been devoted to creating a brightly colourful and vivid environment to dance in. Just the hand painted backdrop alone must have taken days if not weeks to complete to such a detailed standard, it was really very impressive. I also particularly liked all the various birds, dragon flies and other wild animals hovering above the dance floor, suspended with a network of steel wires. it looked a lot better at night when everything was lit up with UV lights and there were a few hundred people dancing in front:

Shortly after we took these pictures it began raining again so we went back to the van for some lunch and watched the poor arriving revellers attempting to set up tents in a good old European rainstorm. I felt a pang of guilt that I wasn’t going out and helping some of them, but then that van was awfully dry and warm, plus my cup of tea would have gone cold.

    It was around this time that three car loads of people pulled up right next to our van. As I’ve said before the Germans are remarkably friendly people, so as soon as the car stopped a couple of them were straight out and banging on our van windows and jabbering excitedly to us in German. Once we’d explained in very basic German that we don’t speak German they seemed even keener for a chat and started speaking in English instead, which was by no means fluent but certainly a lot better than our German. Unlike Boom with its 152 different nationalities it turns out we were a bit of a novelty at this party. I didn’t met a single non German person all party other than one guy from Switzerland (who was German-Swiss in any case), but they were all highly interested in our story and our journey and wanted to hear about it, even if they only spoke very basic English. People would walk up to us in the party and they may have only been asking if we had a lighter or knew where the toilets were or something, but as soon as they realised we spoke no German at all they would stick around for a chat. We got to know the Germans parked next to us really well in the end. Once they found out my name was Bob they delighted in singing “Bob der Baumer!” (Bob the builder) at me repeatedly. It’s good to know some things out there can cross boarders and language barriers and build bridges between the nations. One guy named Eddie came and sat in our van for 2 hours during the night asking all about our travels. I must add at this point that whilst on the road we were sporadically finding instant photo booths from which you could print out photos from a camera memory card. By this stage we had already travelled through 7 different countries and attended three music festivals and the vast majority of the cupboards/ walls/ surfaces in our van were covered with all manner of different photos from our travels around Europe. Eddie spent a good two hours meticulously studying each photo and asking us in broken English the full story behind each one. He was so enraptured and respectful of the journey we were on and kept emphatically professing his admiration for it, exclaiming how much he would love to be able to do a similar thing one day. He really helped us re-realise what an extraordinary thing we were doing. Recently I guess we had become almost normalised to the day-to-day routine of living on the road; finding places to get clean water/ do our laundry, working out which routes were the most scenic but would have petrol stations on them, trying to hunt down supermarkets and cheap places to eat, finding out information on each new place we had entered and what was there of interest. It almost became a bit of a monotonous struggle at points, but having that late night conversation with Eddie made us realise how lucky we were and what breathtaking places we had seen and how much of a wonderful, once in a lifetime journey we were on. It filled us both with a very warm and content feeling which I don’t think we lost again for the entire rest of the trip. It was definitely a journey-changing (if not life changing) conversation.

   The next morning Eddie came back repeatedly and brought different friends with him to show our van to each time. None were quite as impressed by it as Eddie, but all were very hospitable and friendly, and at some points we had every seat in our van taken up by German party goers keen to find out about the travelling English speaking couple. They even shared out a big cauldron of soup with us that they had prepared. I forget the exact flavour but something along the lines of carrot, pumpkin and ginger all pureed up together, “Gut electrolyte” as they kept telling us (meaning good electrolytes, stuff the body needs after a party).  Seeing as he was so in love with our van and photos we insisted on getting a photo inside the van with Eddie, this is him on the centre right in the orange bandana with his friend Toby on the left:

You can also make out some of the photos on the walls above us that Eddie spent so long inspecting the night before. We promised him we would put this photo up on the inside of our van once we had it printed, a promise which we kept, his photo still pinned up proudly in our van just beside a picture of a colourfully painted section of the Berlin wall and just below a picture from this party. We especially wanted to put his picture up to remind us of his emotional admiration of our journey, just so we wouldn’t forget how extremely lucky we are.

    His friend Toby (also in the photo) was also very welcoming towards us and even offered us to stay around his house once we left the party, he said he lived in the woods just outside Berlin and that we could come and stay with him for as long as we wanted! Unfortunately he left before we managed to exchange details, which was a great shame as it would have been a very eye-opening thing to do. I find that whilst travelling opportunities to actually live amongst the locals are very rare, most of the time you are merely a tourist in their country and are treated as such. It’s only really when you catch locals either at work or at play that you can really get to know them and be invited into their homes and lives. Some of the best experiences I’ve had while travelling have actually been whilst working and getting to know the locals that you wouldn’t normally meet, going out for drinks with them in local pubs and such. It would have been a great experience to go and stay with Toby for a few days; he mentioned going out into the woods around his house and picking wild mushrooms for a wild mushroom soup (a VERY German thing to do). These kinds of experiences are very hard to come by and it is my biggest (maybe my only) regret of the entire trip that we didn’t manage to go around there for a day or two.

    During the many conversations we had at this party we learnt a lot about the German music scene. I often find it fascinating to learn about different alternative, underground music scenes and cultures from around the world and this was a very unique opportunity to do so from some genuine local people.

   I guess I already knew that Germany, and in particular Berlin, was pretty much the epicentre of trance and techno music in the world. Dating back to the early nineties when dance music exploded the world over there was one style of music which the Germans seemed to have a particular fondness for and a particular aptitude for making and producing very well, that style of music was trance. It seems that not much has changed in the last 20 years and Berlin is still infatuated with all things techno and trance and plays host to the largest electronic music scene in the world. From the rather scattered conversations I had with various people we met at the party it would seem that you can find several venues or parties playing trance/ psy or techno every single night of the week, provided you knew where to look. They told us if we were in Berlin in the week then a good club to check out was “matrix”, which has 7 different rooms playing various types of techno, trance or house all night whichever night you choose.

     I looked into clubs on the internet before we got to Berlin as its reputation definitely precedes it and I already knew they have some of the world’s biggest and best nightclubs there. One of the clubs I came across was called the “Berghain”, which has been voted as the best club in the world several years in a row by a whole host of DJ and music magazines. Unlike a lot of the other clubs on the list however which are multi-million dollar, no-expenses spared lavish affairs with private VIP booths and table champagne service, the Berghain is set up inside a disused East German power station. It contains little more than a colossal, semi-derelict, bare concrete building, an incredibly loud sound system, and shit loads of Germans going crazy to techno music. And yet consistently beats pretty much every other nightclub in the world, they must be doing something right. They have ripped out all the machinery and the main turbine hall is now one single room that can hold 1,500 people, with the rest of the building holding 5,000. The ceilings are 18 metres high and held up by 5ft wide concrete pillars down the sides of the room like a cathedral. The rest of the place has pretty much been left as bare concrete or spray painted with artwork. They have one of the loudest funktion one soundsystems in the world set up in there and play nothing but heavy hardcore techno continuously from Friday afternoon until Tuesday morning. None of this “some people get too drunk and get into fights so everyone has to go home at 2am”, the music doesn’t stop inside the berghain for over 72 hours. There is another upstairs venue above it which plays house and trance and has floor to ceiling windows and a large terrace with view over the nearby river back into the centre of berlin. The rest of the place is a sprawling labyrinth with all kinds of tucked away rooms and chill out areas. People have been known to go in there on Friday night, go home, get up and do their grocery shopping, cook lunch and then come back for a dance before dinner. Other people have been known to spend a couple of days in there at a time. It sounds brutal; the Germans we met even complained that it was too loud. That and there are far too many tourists and there are better places to go out. Apparently it is incredibly touristy though, as you would expect from a nightclub voted as the world’s best. The club owners try to keep it as underground as possible however and almost seem to begrudge the publicity and praise it gets. They have never agreed to any kind of interview or promotional material, in fact it’s a bit of a mystery who even owns it and puts the nights on. Cameras and even phones are strictly forbidden inside and you will get instantly thrown out for taking any kind of pictures or video footage, you certainly won’t find David Guette or any other commercial “superstar DJ” playing there just to pull crowds in, and they have a door policy which makes it far easier to get in if you’re wearing doc martin boots with a skinhead (especially if you’re a girl) than if you are wearing all the latest designer fashions. They once famously turned away Britney spears and her entourage for looking “too glam”. Apparently the Germans don’t come out on Friday or Saturday nights because it’s too full of tourists and instead go to bed early and get up and come down at like 8am Sunday morning and spend the whole day and night there. It sounds like an interesting place. Here are a couple of photos I stole from the internet of the outside of the berghain:

It looks like it’s on the verge of being condemned. You certainly wouldn’t expect there to be any kind of nightclub inside, and yet here is a picture of the main turbine hall from the sound engineer’s booth at the back:

This is just one of many such raw, underground clubs scattered throughout the old communist areas of East Berlin. What you have to remember is that it was only 25 years ago when the Berlin wall was demolished. At which point the east side of Berlin was living largely in abject poverty with a huge number of decaying soviet buildings left over from 40 years of oppressive Russian rule. When Berlin was split into east and west the west was pumped full of cheap American loans to rebuild whilst the east had to repay massive war reparations to Russia and rebuild from scratch. It has taken a long time to improve and traditionally there has always been large areas of poverty and high unemployment in east Berlin, with huge numbers of people living in trailer park homes (or stellplatz as the Germans referred to them), old soviet housing estates and squats. These types of areas are usually ripe for all kinds of artistic creativity, which can be seen in cities all over the world. It is a widely observed phenomenon that throughout history most of the greatest breakthroughs and centres of innovation in art, music and food have occurred inside economically challenged and often immigrant areas. This seems to be particularly true for music; From the rise of jazz and later Rock and roll in poor African-American communities in the southern united states, to punk rock and the sex pistols in an economically depressed 70s London; Disco and soul founded again by African and Latin American immigrant populations in New York, to the rise of house music in slum areas of Chicago in the early 80s. Whether or not you personally enjoy these genres of music is irrelevant, what matters is that the founders of each style had such passion and dedication for what they were able to achieve in spite of their circumstances and went on to create some of the most iconic genres and sounds in music history.

    Depending on your view point there could be a number of reasons for this increased level of artistic endeavour in poorer areas: You could argue that these people take on these kinds of projects because they don’t have much else positive happening in their lives and are looking for some kind of escape or way of bettering an unadvantaged situation which they were born into. Or you could see it that these people are lazy, jobless bums who lay around all day painting on things and holding wild parties all night and never hold down a proper job, which is why they are poor. But then maybe you could see it that these people value something more in life than the mere acquisition of wealth, maybe they would rather put their efforts into artistic, social and cultural enterprises and live a little simpler on account of their increased fulfillment and happiness  and decreased levels of stress and responsibility. I’m sure there are people out there who would think either one of those statements to be a true reasoning behind it. I’m not going to try and argue which is true or indeed which way of life is right, ancient western philosophers have been pondering  this question for thousands of years, I’m not going to solve it in a single paragraph. It’s fair to say that we all have our own version and aspiration of the “good life” and it’s not something that can be seen as right or wrong, but more a difference of opinion and circumstance. Whatever the reasons behind it, if these people are artistic because they are poor or if they are poor because they are artistic, the evidence definitely points towards these areas having a certain edge or something about them that makes them exciting and appealing places. I think Berlin has a great deal of these such places, particularly during the mid-nineties, as the Berlin wall was ripped down in 1989 and people from the deprived east finally had the freedom to pursue any previously outlawed artistic endeavour available in the west, coupled with the abundance of empty derelict buildings, high unemployment and the recent explosion in electronic house and techno music across Europe, they rapidly poured all of their energy into creating an enormous, pulsating, techno rave scene which still thrives to this day.   In 1993, a few years after the fall of the wall, they are credited as the creators of what we now refer to as Trance music. Obviously as with nearly all emergent music scenes it began as a very esoteric and underground sound but quickly grew into a scene of immense proportions. Nowhere is this more evident than Berlin's infamous “Love Parade”, which started in 1989 as a political demonstration for peace and international understanding through love and music. An entirely trance/ techno based event, the first love parade was attended by 150 people but within ten years numbers had swelled to over a million, making it the largest single street parade in the world at the time, still celebrating peace and the unification of Germany by pounding the streets of Berlin with trance and techno music. It’s fair to say that the sound of trance is ingrained into the very fabric of Berlin as much so as the sound of jazz is the life and soul of New-Orleans.  

         Along with its burgeoning music scene there is also a very visible art scene in Berlin, the two often going hand in hand. There remains a 1.3km long section of the Berlin wall known as the “Kunstmeile”, or art mile in English, which is proudly the longest open air art gallery in the world. This section of the wall (which actually runs only a few hundred metres from the berghain nightclub) is covered in large artworks and murals, mostly of a political nature condemning the ideals behind the wall and calling for a stop to war, discrimination and segregation all over the world. It’s a very colourful and imaginative display; here are a few of our favourite pieces:

And I thought id include these two, the first to show the length of it (its considerably longer than the photo shows) and the second to show the rather comical contrast of the glistening headquarters of Mercedes Benz in the background with a guy freely spray-painting the wall on a sunny Tuesday afternoon:

   Shortly after visiting this section of the wall we biked over the river and started to make our way back into the centre of Berlin through a district known as Kreuzberg. Kreuzberg is one of the more arty districts of Berlin and we stopped at a cafe under a block of flats which had a sign outside proclaiming “Berlin wall art gallery”. I assumed it was a museum about the Berlin wall of sorts but after we worked it out it became clear that it was a collection of art pieces that had been painted on ripped up chunks of the Berlin wall in a large courtyard out the back. This wasn’t your average art gallery however and after asking the guy behind the till a little about the place as we brought our coffee it became clear that the entire block of flats was actually a squat, or “free space for artist” as he phrased it. We saw a number of these squats on our bike ride around Berlin, one down by the river in east Berlin was a humongous 15+ story brick monstrosity that looked like it could have been some kind of workhouse during the industrial revolution which had “FREE SPACE FOR ARTISTS” painted across the top 3 or 4 floors in 10ft high letters. I think there are still a lot of old, crumbling buildings dotted about which the owners are actively encouraging squatters to move into as they will at least maintain the place and not let it go into complete rack and ruin and add a lot of colour and life to an otherwise wasted building. The place we had coffee in must have been 10 stories high and was in the process of being renovated, not sure if it was by the squatters or if they were helping a development company. It was quite an interesting place to see anyway. Here are some pictures of the art gallery, in this first picture the pieces of art in the foreground are chunks of the Berlin wall and the building in the background is the squat:

Here’s some more of the artwork outside:

These two are of the building itself:

And this last one of us having a coffee inside:

   Kreuzberg is an area in Berlin which is rapidly undergoing gentrification, known to happen to all kinds of “hip” and “cool” communities in cities around the world. In fact gentrification usually takes place in the exact same kind of communities I mentioned earlier, economically challenged communities where people pour their hearts and souls into artistic and cultural endeavours, which leads to the rather peculiar process of gentrification, whereby these hip, cool and exciting areas become attractive to the comparatively wealthy, young middle class who start buying up properties to get where the action is and end up forcing out the very people who made it what it is. Examples of this are everywhere; whether it’s Soho or Camden in London, the meatpacker district in New York, the height-Ashbury district of San Francisco or Brunswick in Melbourne. Obviously the argument is usually made that gentrification is a good thing, bringing investment and modernization into a previously rundown area, which I have no doubt that it does, but it often comes at a cost, pushing out the locals and detracting from the previously edgy and visceral quality that an area might have had before. It seems a bit strange to move to such an area because it’s creative and exciting and then complain about the late night parties and the latest piece of artwork that appears on a wall you really quite liked the way it was. Classic example of this is the Notting hill carnival in London; set up in the 1960s by west Indian and Caribbean immigrants living in the area it has become one of the biggest street parades in the world and is one of the most celebrated and colourful displays of multi-cultural England that we have. Unfortunately most of the original west-Indian and Caribbean residents have all been pushed out by the massive increase of house prices in London and the new white, middle and upper class residents repeatedly form mass petitions to try to get the carnival shut down, which would be a crying shame for what little free music events there are left in London.

    Whenever I’m travelling I will always try to find the kind of areas that I have mentioned above, anybody can tread the same tourist trail taking the same photos as every other package holiday goer. I find there is a lot more interesting and alternative places to visit in cities if you make the effort to find the local underground scene, although it’s often very hard to find. I feel as if Berlin would probably have a lot of neighbourhoods like this if you knew where to look, it certainly had an undeniable bohemian air as a whole, and seemed to have little in the way of out and out tacky tourist attractions or “must see sights” to go and take a photo of. Here are a few of the sights we did see from the rest of Berlin:

    These are a few pictures of a holocaust memorial mosaic built by schoolchildren in an old Jewish community that was all but cleared out by Hitler before the war:

  These murals and indeed most of the artwork around Berlin is of a very positive nature, all geared towards peace, unity and international respect and tolerance. The message of peace and love is displayed everywhere throughout Berlin, which understandably stems from the monstrosities that took place here in the 1930s and 40s and the German peoples insistence that they cannot ever happen here again. As previously stated we toured the Nazi museum in Berchtesgaden, which was an eye opening and very sombre experience. I don’t need to go over the atrocities again as I’m sure everyone out there has a good idea of exactly what happened during that period, but what I did find interesting was how it has changed the political landscape and system in Germany. One of the more interesting aspects I have enjoyed whilst touring through so many countries so quickly has been learning about the difference in politics in each area, which is something I’ve never really taken an interest in before.

     Unlike the changes in food, architecture and landscape between each country the changes in politics aren’t immediately clear and I probably wouldn’t have noticed them at all if it weren’t for the lonely planet guide for western Europe that Andi's friends brought her as a leaving present (great gift by the way girls, it came in most useful). At the end of each countries section there was a 10 page or so history of the formation of each country and their various political systems through the years all the way up to present day. Whilst this blurb in the back was by no means exhaustive it got me interested enough to look up further information about the countries we were travelling through. Coming from England and having lived in Australia and new Zealand I kind of assumed most developed nations held a very similar political system to the anglosphere countries whereby there are only really ever two main political parties, one centre-right catering slightly more for the rich, and one centre-left catering slightly more for the working class (but both looking out heavily for their own interests and the interests of whoever pays their campaign fees above all else). Obviously there are other parties but they were generally always seen as a “wasted vote”. This system is roughly repeated in France, Spain and Portugal as well. Germany on the other hand, having witnessed the dangers of 1 party totalitarian rule first hand, has 5 main political parties (it must be noted that 2 are larger than the others but don’t hold as much of a monopoly as in other western countries), any of which could be elected at any election in some kind of coalition with some of the others. Generally only one of these leans slightly towards the right, and in complete contradiction to most of Europe and the rest of the world, one of the biggest parties in Germany is the green party. Germany occasionally elects green Chancellors (Prime ministers) and was one of the first countries in the world to do so way back in 1998, which given their enormous manufacturing industry and predilection towards fine luxury cars I was most surprised to hear. Its generally touted by the mainstream media and other political parties in England and Australia that if the green party were to ever get into power they would immediately destroy the manufacturing industry and cripple the economy before stipulating that every person in the country needs to live on a diet of organic mung beans and chick peas and meditate for 2 hours a day in order to preserve the cosmic karma. So it seems most odd that Germany, which has one of the strongest manufacturing industries in the world and by far the healthiest economy in Europe, could have voted in the green party several times. They are a working example that environmental responsibility and social consciousness doesn’t need to come at the expense of the economy. They are one of the only countries in the world that looks set to not only meet their emissions targets set out by the largely forgotten Kyoto agreement, but to substantially beat them. They have also set aside over one third of their total landmass to national parks, nature reserves and forests, a figure over three times higher than the UK despite still having a thriving manufacturing industry, extensive transport network and the highest population in Europe. Personally I found it very surprising and encouraging to know that there was a progressive political system from such an industrialised country. It is becoming common to hear of largely green parties being elected in South American countries which have massively improved the quality of life for most of its residents, but I actually had no idea that Germany was this green and progressive. I think this all stems from what happened here in the 30s (and all through the cold war into the 90s), Germany has become convinced that there is a better way and we need to look after each other and our environment, rather than our own selfish interests, but sadly they are one of the only developed nations to have come to this conclusion (aside from the Scandinavian countries, which I will leave for a later blog). In fact it seems that the vast majority of the rest of the world is headed rapidly in the opposite direction. Apologies to anybody out there who isn’t a fan of international politics, you can stop reading now if you want, there’s no more photos to see, just a massive rant about the current state of international politics as I see it, in which I compare a lot of our current politicians to Adolf Hitler, you have been warned...

     Seeing the Hitler museum made me realise how scarily close we are to repeating the conditions which lead to his rise to power. It’s easy to dismiss that era as a one off, a freak event brought about by one lunatic fighting his way to power, but really you have to take a step back and see objectively the circumstances that led to it. It’s easy to pin the blame solely on the actions of one man, but people often forget he wasn’t the only fascist dictator in power at the time; Italy had Mussolini, Spain had Franco, Austria had Dullfuβ, Greece had Metaxas, Portugal had Salazar and Poland had Pilsudski. All of these men were fascist, nationalist dictators ruling their respective countries in roughly the same time frame in Europe. What could cause such a widespread swing to the far right? I think part of the answer comes from 1929 and the great depression. In October 1929 the financial markets went into meltdown, millions lost their jobs and everything they had, previously successful men were starving in the streets, whole governments were on the verge of bankruptcy and the world was a dire and depressing place throughout the great depression of the 1930s. People blamed their respective governments for the situation and were desperate for some kind of alternative. Then low and behold these radical, straight talking, right wing politicians started popping out of the woodwork, promising change and relief from their strife and people lapped it up. The uprising fascists put blame on past governments mistakes for their peoples troubles when in fact it was financial meltdown caused by rampant stock market speculation in New York that had brought the world to its knees. This mattered little to the fascists and Nazis however who quickly shifted the blame onto another group of people, namely anyone else who wasn’t part of their great country or organisation. In almost all cases of fascism a strong emphasis was put on everyone working together for the good of the state and a strong sense of national identity, not exactly radical in itself but unfortunately this also came with the belief that anybody who did not identify with that national identity must be forced to, or eliminated altogether. Outsiders or foreigners were generally blamed for all of a countries problems, particularly evident with Hitler’s views towards the Jewish (although it must be noted that no other fascist groups were quite as fanatically racist as the Nazis in their quest for a pure race, most fascists accepted the fact that there were a certain number of minorities within their own country, which was fine, as long as they completely accepted their hosts national identity, if not they were terrorised and ostracized and forced to leave or imprisoned, but not necessarily exterminated) It’s no wonder that war broke out with all of these far right parties operating in the small confines of Europe, all believing that their national identity was superior to all others and that all foreigners were to blame for the financial misfortunes of an entire generation.

   Now fast forward almost 80 years, it is mid 2008, UKIP is a completely unknown name and the world is booming with cheap loans and large scale property construction. Then another worldwide financial crisis brought on by the rampant speculation and greed of financial institutions has brought the world to the brink of meltdown. Fast forward another 6 years to present day and the situation is looking disturbingly like it did in the 1930s; “austerity” has become the new buzzword and has infested its way into every facet of European life, bringing the standard of living down for millions of people, pushing millions more below the poverty line, whole countries are on the verge of bankruptcy again and millions of young people are unable to get work. And yet again people are becoming distrustful and blaming current governments for the situation and voting for right wing political parties. This isn’t just about the rise of UKIP, voters all over Europe are rapidly voting for far right parties. In France, which is traditionally socialist, left wing and heavily EU friendly, they have voted in almost a third of their seats in the EU to the Front National, a fascist, anti-immigration, anti-globalisation, anti-EU group. The Netherlands, often seen as one of the most liberal and understanding nations on earth have voted in a right wing anti-immigration prime minister to lead their country. The following EU countries have all voted in far right, highly nationalist (some full neo-Nazi) groups into the EU: Greece, France, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria, Hungry, Italy and even Germany have voted in one seat to a far right fascist group (England was on this list but the BNP lost its seat last election, although UKIP gained several more seats). The most worrying of these at the moment is Hungry, where an out and out neo-Nazi fascist outfit has risen to the second most powerful in the country with an open manifesto policy to bring back detention camps for Roma Gypsy’s and all Jewish people to sign a register and have their movements tracked as they believe they are a threat to national security (remember, this is happening TODAY, right now). This is a very worrying state of affairs; I would argue the most worrying state that European politics has been in since Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. In comparison to this UKIP looks pretty tame, but it is a very worrying step in the wrong direction. The amount of people voting UKIP as a “protest vote” is highly alarming and shows that most people don’t really understand what they are voting for. And who do all these groups blame for their current countries woes? That’s right, immigrants and foreigners. Never mind the fact that our country simply handed over £375bn of tax payers money to our own banking industry to cover their mistakes, which is the direct and only reason we are facing all these austerity measures today, it has absolutely nothing to do with immigrants who claim 5bn a year in tax credits (75 times less than the amount given to our banks) but are reported to pay £20bn a year more in tax than they receive in benefits. Germany has a very open doors policy to immigration and accepts more immigrants nationally than any other country in the world apart from america, almost 20% of their entire population is made up from immigrants and it hasn't done their economy much harm. This idea that immigrants are bringing down the economy is complete fallacy. Here’s an idea, next time you want to protest with your vote, why not vote for the green party? Or a party that isn’t actually going to make the situation much, much worse. UKIP and Nigel Farage have somehow been passed off by the media as the “people’s choice”, simply by posting lots of photos of Nigel down the pub with a pint in his hand, and people are buying it. Everyone has long forgotten that all of Europe’s current woes have been caused by the actions of the financial industry, and where did Nigel work before he became a politician? That’s right, he was a commodities broker, and nearly all of his backers and donors are from large financial and banking firms. This is the man who has become the people’s champion?  Who’s going to stand up for the everyday bloke and increase the quality of life in this country? When you look past his main pledge which seems to have given him so much support, which is to put a stop to open doors immigration and pull us out of the EU, he has pledged to reduce tax on the highly wealthy, stop any funding for the renewable energy industry and pour it into fracking, and issue further public service cuts and privatization to the already severe austerity measures imposed by the conservatives. These are hardly advantageous policies to the average man in the street but people don’t really care about these last policies, because at least he’ll stop all those pesky immigrants coming over here and taking our jobs.

    This sounds very familiar actually, a politician with the interests of the very wealthy, a distain for renewable energy, but made to look good to the everyday guy in the pub because of his hardline approach to immigration? We don’t even have to go back in time for this one, just to the other side of the world, bring in Tony Abbot. Since his rise to power Tony Abbott has cut money for every single social service that Australia has to offer, crying constantly about a budget crisis whilst simultaneously scrapping the carbon tax and handing billions of dollars of tax payers money to large corporations and mining companies as an incentive to stop them polluting. The only two branches of government which didn’t face cuts in his budget, and in fact had massive budget increases, were the military, and a fund to put religious chaplains in every school (whilst funding for regular school councillors was drastically cut, they have to be promoting “family values” of a religious context). It is the former which worries me the most, as within months of coming to power tony pledged full military support to the Americans in their war against ISIS. Even though the Americans didn’t ask him for anything, he decided to offer them the Australian air force as support to help deal with the “terror threat imminently facing Australians”. So can anybody out there remember the last time that Australia was the victim of a terrorist attack on Australian soil before Tony Abbott came to power? Anybody? No I didn’t think so, that’s because Australia has NEVER been the victim of a terrorist attack. Or it hadn’t, until two weeks after Australia sent their air force to Iraq, when a teenage Muslim stabbed two police officers in protest. A terrible and violent act, it goes without question, but would this have happened if Tony hadn’t pledged full support for the Americans in their war on Muslims, effectively signing the death warrant of hundreds if not thousands of Muslims at Australia’s hands? I highly doubt it. And yet every Australian now has to undergo drastic security changes to make everyone “safer” from this threat. I’m going to post a direct cutting from one of tony Abbotts speeches from a couple of months ago in which he announced sweeping new powers for ASIO (his surveillance police):

Regrettably, for some time to come, Australians will have to endure more security than we’re used to and more inconvenience than we would like. Regrettably for some time to come, the delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift. There may be more restrictions on some, so that there can be more protection for others.

After all, the most basic freedom of all is the freedom to walk the streets unharmed and to sleep safe in our beds at night.

Creating new offences that are harder to beat on a technicality may be a small price to pay for saving lives and for maintaining the social fabric of an open, free and multicultural nation.

I don’t know if anybody noticed, but this is scarily close language to the language that Adolf Hitler used when his Reichstag (parliament) building was burnt to the ground in 1938 by the communists (although it is now widely held that he burnt it himself and blamed the communists), in his announcements after the event he used much the same language, telling people  they would need to give up certain freedoms so that he could protect them all from this communist threat, which is why he needed to set up a secret security police force, the Gestapo. The passage above is pretty strong language for a nation that has never been the victim of a terrorist attack, and was quite happy leading its care-free, laid back lifestyle, chilling on the beach and surfing until suddenly overnight Muslims became an imminent danger. Personally I would have hoped that the Australian people would have seen through this blatant fear mongering, but it seems that far from objecting increased security measures and spying on its citizens, many Australian people are praising it! Popularity for Tony Abbott was at an all time high after making these announcements and Muslims were being attacked in the street and having their homes and businesses vandalized. It must be noted that Hitler didn’t exactly come into power with the pledge to wipe out Jews all over Europe, but rather launched a slow but persistent propaganda campaign which increased anti-Semitism to the point that Jews were feared and hated and seen as a threat to the ordinary German people. It took Hitler several years of being in power to enact “kristlenacht”, whereby ordinary German people took to the streets and smashed all the windows of Jewish stores and attacked Jewish people in the street. It seems Tony Abbott has managed to create the same distrust and hatred for Muslims in a matter of months. This may all seem a little melodramatic, I’m not really insisting that David Cameron, Nigel Farage or Tony Abbott are anywhere close to the same league of evil as Adolf Hitler, but there are some very worrying comparisons to that period in the 1930s and the present day. The thing which worries me most though isn’t so much the people currently in power at the moment, its more that if somebody else from the far right were to come to power in England or Australia then they wouldn’t even have to change any laws to wield the same power that Hitler did, the methods of control have already been put into place. Hitler had to make drastic changes to the constitution in order to get the powers he wanted, in England and now rapidly Australia we are changing our laws to make it a lot easier to lock people up without any reason at all. I was shocked to find out when I returned to England that a new secret courts law has been enacted by the conservatives which amongst other things means the following almost unbelievable set of  circumstances:

    "Defendants (or claimants in civil cases) can be excluded from the hearings where their fates are decided, they will not be allowed to know what the case against them is, they will not be allowed to enter the courtroom, they will not be allowed to know or challenge the details of the case, and they will not be allowed representation from their own lawyer, but will instead be represented (in their absence) by a security-cleared "special advocate"."

 This technically means that a person can be tried, convicted and sentenced without even having knowledge of the crime they are accused of committing. The first thing a defendant could know about the crime they have been accused of could be when the police turn up at their door to take them to prison to start their sentence! This isn’t some far off totalitarian ideal portrayed in a George Orwell book, this is current day England. You don’t have to be a political or legal expert to see how this law could be massively abused if the wrong person were to get into power. This is control that Adolf Hitler could have only dreamed of when he came to power, he had to work long and hard to push this kind of law through and yet here we are 80 years later and don’t seem to have learned a thing from the whole experience. 

   This widespread swing to right wing, nationalist and security obsessed politics deeply concerns me, and it seems to be happening all over the world simultaneously. People are becoming deeply distrustful of anybody who is of a different race or nationality to themselves. I know that the current rise of ISIS is a terrible thing, but in my opinion it has been widely brought on by 30 years of bombing, invasion and torture of Muslims in their own countries by our armed forces. Unfortunately the conflict has escalated to such a level now that there’s no easy way out and it seems destined to just spiral into a circle of ever increasing violence and hatred. My only hope is that once whatever is going to happen, happens, and the dust has finally settled that we will all take a step back and, like the Germans did, realise the full horror and inhumanity of what we’ve been involved in. Hopefully then people will realise that extreme rightwing politics and the securitised control and segregation of populations isn’t the answer. Maybe it takes the attempted genocide of an entire race for people to actually start voting for the green party?