these are bullet holes left over from
the second world war
and they're everywhere in berlin
dude they even shot at the red baron's
old grave
i have an american education so i
thought the battle of berlin was like
something i'd seen in a world war
II movie that only lasted like three
days in a couple of blocks in Mitte
I was wrong! It went from April 16th to May
2nd 1945.
When I first started coming to berlin in
the early 90s they were even more
prevalent.
In fact, if somebody asked you for
directions you would say turn left at
the building with machine gun spray
then turn right at the red brick
building with the bomb shrapnel wounds
and then pass the brown building with the
pink graffiti and the bullet holes
and it's right next to the church with
the bomb damage.
Dad, no one ever said that. A lot of
people see them as the visible scars
left over from World War II
and for a long time i wondered why the
bullet hole seemed to bother me more
than anything else - like a visit
to a museum or a concentration camp - and
then finally i realized that with those
places it's easy to compartmentalize
what happened here in World War II
but with the bullet holes, they're there
every day!
Jesus, i sound like an a$$hole. Sometimes
they've been left out of neglect
and other times they've been left as a
reminder of the horrors of war.
Sometimes they left the bullet holes as
a reminder and other times
they left the entire facade of a wrecked
train station.
The bullet holes are so pervasive that
at some point you stop noticing them
and it was only when i started filming this
video that i realized how many have
disappeared.
For example, I was going to come out
here and show you this crater that
was created by a bomb in the sidewalk
near my house
only to discover it's been filled in.
Most of them have been plastered over or
the ones you can still see have been
filled in
like here on the Romanian embassy in
Mitte
or the Brandenburg Gate about 500 meters
away.
They said when they repaired it in 2002
that  they filled in like 30,000
bullet holes, which is too bad
because I used to like to stand here and
look at the bullet holes and think of
everything this gate has seen since it
was finished in
1791. I'm kidding. You couldn't
actually stand there back then.
Back then you could still drive
through the Brandenburg Gate in a real-ass
car
and it was a major thoroughfare because
it connected the Stasse der 17. Juni with Unter den Linden.
And i'm not the only one who noticed
they were disappearing.
This is the Neues Museum in Mitte and
when they renovated it in ...
they protected all the holes under
historic preservation laws.
So now they'll be here forever
or until they change the law.
They were fighting in the graveyard?
