OK, again sorry for the lack of posts over the past month but things have been very rough financially over the past few weeks and I just haven’t had the money spare to upgrade the blog so I could carry on posting. I could have just done some articles without pictures but too much of that can get a bit boring and, to be honest, I really haven’t felt like it as I’ve been too worried about other stuff that has been going on. Hopefully that has all been dealt with now so onwards and upwards and I’ll be able to get cracking on this again.
At the beginning of the month me and the missus managed to get away to Berlin for a couple of days to attend a friends 50th birthday bash (it was also my birthday at the same time so going was a no brainer really). We were staying with some friends in the Schoneberg district of town an area that has some great street names if you are a Napoleonic buff – our mates live on Bulowstrasse right next to Dennewitzplatz, indeed all of the streets in the neighbourhood are named after Prussian generals
We went to visit the DDR museum on the first day and it’s well worth a visit if you get a chance, the way that they use what little space they have and the exhibits on display are great and there’s a few bits of militaria from the time that would be of interest. They even have a recreation of a typical DDR flat which I must say made me a tad jealous as the kids room had far more room than the poky one me and my brother had to share in our place on the estate we lived on as kids, not to mention the cool design of the furniture!
After the museum we were due to go to see a light installation art piece in a chapel in a cemetery and as we were walking to it through the cemetery we rounded a corner where there was a gap between a wall and a building and we came upon a crypt which had a commanding view of the obvious entry point to the rest of the cemetery. As you can see by the photo’s it looks as if a fierce fight ensued to evict whoever was defending this. It was actually quite a sobering sight as it showed just how savagely desperate and ultimately futile the fighting at the end was. I was sort of glad that it had not been ‘fixed’ though as such things are great reminders of what happened and are just as much part of the city’s history as the ‘grander’ monuments (the Neues Museum has also kept its ‘battle-scars’ for this very reason).
The next day saw me head off to the Deutsches Historisches Museum on my own as my Birthday treat to myself as Luce was away looking at a couple of galleries. Now I’ve been here before and was keen to come again as I think it is a cracking place to visit – actually every museum that I’ve been to in Germany has been a good one – and as I had time to look round properly I was looking forward to it. And enjoy it I did, the only small gripe I had was with the bloke doing the tour in English. I happened to be near them when I was in the Napoleonic part of the museum and some of the information he was giving out was totally rubbish. There was no mention of the German States fighting on the French side or that Britain, the Austrians and the Russians helped defeat Napoleon and when he said that Leipzig was the last battle of the wars I couldn’t help myself and said ‘oh no it wasn’t’! Still apart from that there’s a wealth of fantastic exhibits on show ranging from Napoleons hat and sword swiped by the Prussians on the field of Waterloo to an 88 in the WW2 section (although I ballsed up my photo’s from the later part of the museum, still getting used to my new phone!). Highly recommended.
While on the subject of hats, I just had to take these. A whole cabinet dedicated to possibly the daftest piece of military millinery ever made, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Picklehaubes!
Tracks and Threads 
Gotta luv military millinery… 😀
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