Word of the Day: Schauspiel

Berlin is a city filled with Schauspiel, or “spectacle.”  Our hostel sits next to a grand theater, the Friedrichstadt Palast-Berlin.  The theater markets itself as “Las Vegas in Berlin”.  The night life in Berlin really is extraordinary if you are in to that kind of thing. Tara and I are discovering that we are old.  The late night hours that some of our hostel guests keep made for a restless night for Tara.  My white noise app kept me sleeping relatively well.

I chose Schauspiel as today’s word because our family spent most of the day at the Olympiastadion in Berlin.  We did not regret our decision.  The stadium served as the site for the 1936 Olympic games, Hitler’s showpiece to the world.  This stadium is all about Schauspiel.  The parade grounds located in front of the bell tower served as space for Nazi rallies and propaganda films, and the iconography of the old parts of the stadium remind one of the Roman coliseum, complete with a special box in the best viewing era of the stadium for Der Führer, who patterned himself as a modern Caesar.  With audio guide in hand, our family made our way around the stadium, learning the fullness of its history.  This is the stadium that most Americans remember as the site where Jesse Owens won four gold medals as Hitler watched on.

Tara and I took on all of the great scenes from the grounds, which were virtually abandoned on this cold January day.  One of the great benefits we’ve discovered of travelling in January is that we don’t have to compete with the crowds of sweaty tourists that one must deal with during the summer.  I’ll post more pictures of the stadium on Facebook when we are back in Leipzig.  Our two youngest got weary during our three hours at the stadium and took to doing something that they have little chance to do in Texas: play in the snow.

The history tour of the stadium was great, but what I loved most of all was the walk we took through the Hertha BSC training grounds.  The Olympiastadion is the home ground for Hertha.  I’ve read derisive online comments about how this amazing stadium is wasted on a club that is persistently in the bottom half of the Bundesliga table, but so it is.  The main squad of this Bundesliga club is currently at an away match scheduled for tomorrow, but as we were walking the grounds I came across a training field where it appeared that members of the Hertha youth academy were about to play a training match with another club from Berlin.  The picture I’m posting here will show the back of the kit of some of the players who were on the field (not Hertha, but I’m not clear what youth club they may have been playing).  Outside the grounds was a van with the words Hertha BSC Fussball-Akademie imprinted on the side.  I’m not certain if this was some sort of scrimmage, but I’m a big football fan, and anything that puts me this close to professional soccer is, well, all Schauspiel:

After coming back to our hostel, we rested for a few hours and then made our way to Alexanderplatz, the heart of East Berlin and one of my absolute favorite places in the city. The plaza embodies the clash of ideas that has shaped the city’s recent history, with large DDR-era apartment buildings standing in the distance, in plain view from a plaza dominated by a western-style department store that would make Marx turn over in his grave.  Sadly, my camera battery died before I could take any pictures.  Arggh.

That’s all for now!  I’ll close this post with a picture from our visit to Brandenburg Gate.  A spectacle by itself, these days the gate is Berlin’s message to the rest of us, a promise of future Schauspiel for the world to enjoy.  Here’s hoping to 2024!