Footloose with Diana

A wander about town

Another day of sightseeing. First, the Prussian Victory Tower commemorating the victory in the Danish-Prussian War, now in the middle of a traffic circle - it was the location for Barack Obama's speech in Berlin as a US presidential candidate during his visit to Germany on July 24, 2008, a bit controversial as it celebrates German military victories. No one able to tell us who the handsome chap in the statue is:

Quite dramatic from a distance:

On to the Reichstag and Bundestag:

Memorial to members of the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic murdered by the National Socialists:

The lovely Brandenberg Gate is now crowded on all sides by later buildings, which is really a shame:

Checkpoint Charlie - well, don't bother. Nothing original left and mostly taken over by street performers.

Reminders of the Nazi past include the Topography of Terror, an open-air museum built on the site of buildings which during the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945 were the headquarters of the Gestapo and the SS:

There is also a dramatic and touching Holocaust memorial, a five-acre site of 2,711 concrete slabs arranged in a grid pattern on a sloping field:

Pergamom Museum

There are a number of museums on Berlin's "Museum Island," but we chose to focus just on the Pergamom Museum, which houses primarily Middle Eastern and Islamic art, including a stunning reproduction of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon:

The Market Gate of Miletus, a second-century BC gate destroyed by earthquake in the 10th or 11th century AD, was excavated in the early 20th century. Only fragments remained, so there is a lot of new material:

The Pergamom Altar was excavated from the Pergamom acropolis (modern-day Turkey) between 1878 and 1986 and reassembled in the museum:

The Mshatta Facade is the decorated part of the facade of the 8th-century Umayyad residential palace of Qasr Mshatta, one of the Desert Castles of Jordan; it's about 33 meters long:

Plenty of other delicious stuff, too, including Assyrian reliefs and some beautiful stonework:

Wittenberg

On the way to Dresden, through lovely countryside, we stopped in Wittenberg, where a university established in 1502 attracted such thinkers as Martin Luther. Here's the door of the church to which he supposedly nailed his 95 theses against the selling of indulgences by the church, marking the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Honestly, the door looks a little new to me for that, but still...

The church's dramatic tower:

The University itself is rather unprepossessing from the street:

Martin Luther's home is a bit more impressive:

Mrs. Luther, Katharina von Bora, raised in cloisters and monasteries, with which she became disenchanted. Escaping with several others, with Luther's help. He eventually found homes, marriages, or employment for all but Katharina, whom he married.