Around wintery Potsdam

At the end of January  a wintery trip around Potsdam took us to Lake Sacrow in Brandenburg and the beautiful chapel "Heilandskirche". 

frozen Lake Sacrow - in the distance you can just make out a lonely ice skater

Heilandskirche was built in 1844 in Italian style with a campanile and arcades collecting warmth in the sun. Here the river Havel is half frozen.

On the following picture from 1981 presented in a documentation inside the chapel, you can see the situation from 1961 until 1989. The Heilandskirche  was then in No-Man's-Land between the river Havel, which separated West- from East Germany, and the "Todesstreifen" (death strip) behind. The church has been rescued from its sorry state and was restored from 1991 to 1993.

View from Sacrow park towards Glienicker Brücke and Potsdam across the Havel.

... and looking over from the Berlin side.... 

the other direction : Glienicker Bridge ("Bridge of Spies") in the distance

Further upstream another island gem in the Havel is Pfaueninsel (peacock-island). Like Sacrow and the many Prussian Castles of Potsdam it has been classified as UNESCO Cultural World Heritage Site.  

Ferry "Luise" takes you over. 

This romantic small Castle was built by the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm II. for his mistress on this idyllic island. It is made from wood and nowadays rather looks like a theatre stage decoration (these pictures are from a summer visit).

 a keyhole view of the castle

The Kavaliershaus for staff and guests

Peacocks roam freely and are of the less-aggressive kind, at least when we visited. 

To top off a perfect day, one might visit the new superb museum Palazzo Barberini in Potsdam. Hasso Plattner, the co-founder of SAP company, has created a private museum and rebuilt a palace in the historic centre of Potsdam with modern museum technology to house his huge art collection. Monets, Sisleys, Munchs, Picassos, Richters ... a visit is very highly recommended! 

Potsdam's Alter Markt with St. Nikolai, the Obelisk, Altes Rathaus,  Museum Barberini and Stadtschloss. 

For the moment they have curated a very fitting "winter" exhibition. 

The Bridge of Spies

Have you seen "The Bridge of Spies" ?

Glienicker Brücke, today

I visited the bridge last weekend, as a tourist, in bleak grey end-of-January-weather. During the Cold War spies were exchanged here: in 1962 the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in exchange for the US fighter pilot Gary Powers. This is the topic of the latest, immensely fascinating film directed by Steven Spielberg with Tom Hanks, one of my favourite actors, acting the lawyer who represented the spy and organized the exchange. The film has been nominated for six Oscars. It was filmed in the famous Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam; one of the nominations is for the production design. To recreate the original scenes and atmosphere, the studio's craftspeople even produced their own barbed wire to make it authentic...

in Filmpark Babelsberg

This is the view from the bridge across the Wannsee towards several old and disfunctional castles of the bygone era of Prussian kings. The area has been peacefully neglected over the past 70 years and is still in need of repair.

As it was an especially nasty and grey cold winter day, the rendering in Black&White seemed appropriate.  

Schloss Babelsberg in its large parkland area. 

Babelsberg studios are actually quite close to the original location of the exchange. 

out-buildings

 Another building with a gruesome history is the House of the Wannsee Conference, close-by. Nowadays it holds a museum with a chilling documentation of the path leading down towards the Holocaust and an extensive collection of written artifacts. 

the House of the Wannsee-Conference

Wannsee in winter