So my friend Ashley and I went to the Jewish 'New' Synagogue in Berlin. It was very interesting to attend their services - we had a woman rabbi and you most definitely have to be a good singer to be Jewish. For almost 2.5 hours the people there sang Psalms, prayers, etc.! I was very impressed!

Afterwards I decided to show Ashley something that my German teacher showed us (my old German language school was just around the corner) - Dorothea cemetery. This cemetery is full of famous people! The building that is behind Ashley is where Bertolt Brecht (he wrote 'The Threepenny Opera' - one of the songs was 'Mack the Knife') lived towards the end of his life. The West and East Germans tried to get him to move to their part of Berlin - East Berlin offered him his own theater, Berliner Ensemble, and so there he went...




And here he is with his wife, but apparently he was quite the philanderer...













This is Heinrich Mann. He was a famous German novelist, but probably even more famous as 'Thomas Mann's big brother'. He fled Nazi Germany and died in California....















Here are the world-famous philosophers, Fichte and Hegel. I tried to read their ideas (Hegel THREE TIMES!!), but I don't understand such things, so...there they are! ;)












This is Karl Friedrich Schinkel. He designed just about any famous building in Berlin that you can name. He died in 1841.















I love this guy's last name: Schadow. He was Schinkel's 'mentor/predecessor' and designed the Quadriga, the 'Horse statue' on top of the Brandenburger Gate.










I don't know for sure of course, but these look like bullet holes. There is a 'mass grave' in the cemetery full of people who died April-May 1945. This was during the 'Battle of Berlin' in which tens of thousands of German civilians, German soldiers and Soviet troops died within a matter of a few weeks.....