2024 Oct #11: Wannsee

Friday, nice weather (high ~60), took the S1 out to the southwest suburb of Wannsee. It’s an affluent suburb on the shores of a wide stretch of the Havel river, with a storied history.

It’s Berlin’s sailing Mecca, home to several yacht clubs:

Many villas dot the shoreline; one is the former home of a famous artist, Max Lieberman, now a museum. He was active in the resistance to the Nazis in the 30s. Not a happy story. A beautiful place though, carefully maintained & curated to honor his memory & the plight of his family:

Back home to Friedenau in time to meet our airbnb hostess Evelyn for coffee at Cafe Witty Stories in Perelsplatz:

Saturday, another nice day, back to Wannsee. Passed through an open air market (they are literally everywhere), this guy takes bitcoin for coffee…

Back in Wannsee, we toured the exhibit at the location of the ‘Wannsee Konferenz’, where the details of the Final Solution were hammered out by high-ranking Nazis in 1942. Pretty grim. It’s a beautiful place, adds to the outrage:

On the west end of the island (Wannsee is separated from the mainland by a narrow waterway) is Schloss Glienicke, built for Prince Carl of Prussia in 1826. Now a park:

Next: The point Schloss Glienicke is on is the western-most point of the former West Berlin; there’s a bridge from there to Potsdam that spans the Cold War iron curtain - Potsdam was in the DDR. The bridge is famous as the ‘Bridge of Spies’, where spies & hostages were traded.