More Berlin

....sorry I have been slow on the updates! Working on catching back up!
Thanks for reading.
N


June 5, 2007

Dessau, Germany

These past few days in Germany have been incredibly busy. I have tried to fit in four days what I probably should have spent a week or two doing, and as a result my feet and my legs are tired from endless walking, and I cannot wait to settle in a smaller, less busy place for the next little while. Not to say that Berlin was not wonderful! I enjoyed every minute I spent out and about. I have seen more art and architecture than I can possibly digest in one sitting, and (of course) am dying to return.

Two days ago was museum day. It was a Sunday, and I did not realize until after I had visited my first museum that most of them are closed on Mondays, so instead of leisurely seeing a mix of sites and galleries, I switched up my itinerary so that I would spend almost all of my time on Sunday in museums. I was really happy to have seen everything, but by the end of the day I was so tired it was all I could do to get home.

The morning started out easily enough, I woke up early before most of my roommates, and snuck into the kitchen to have some breakfast. I came back and Jane was awake; Stefen had left very early that morning and I found curled up in my sandals a short note from him saying how nice it was to meet me and that he hoped (again) that I would make my way to Vienna instead of Zurich. Jane was getting ready to leave also, I found out through talking to her that her parents had moved to Munich, and she was just stopping in Berlin about halfway through her long drive home. She asked me what I was up to that day, and I told her that I would probably go to the Museum Insel. She seemed interested, and I told her that a museum there contained a famous piece of Hellenistic sculpture originally located in Pergamon, Turkey, which I had been lucky enough to visit.

She offered to give me a ride to the nearest train station, which I greatly appreciated. Being able to bypass the long bus rides made my commute significantly shorter. Along the way, she asked me about where I was from and what I thought of Berlin—I told her that in general I thought that Europeans dressed much more fashionably than people in the United States. She told me that folks in Sweden are even more concerned about their dress—because they do not get to show off their bodies because it is so cold, they put all of their effort into what covers their bodies, the result being a high heeled and crazily dressed (yet highly covered) population. I told her that my sister at UWF sometimes wears PJs to class. She seemed understandably shocked and concerned. But she told me that she expected it in a place where clothes were not as important as staying cool (which in some cases, I believe to be the truth). Soon enough she dropped me off at the station and said that if I was ever stopping by Munich, which I told her I was, to send her an email. Which is something I think I shall definitely take her up on.

So I got on the metro and headed out to start my day. The first place I visited was the Bauhaus Archiv. It is housed in a kooky white (of course) building with a roof that looks like a set of sails frozen in the wind. I walked along a long winding concrete walkway in between two parts of the building, which swung me around to a glass curtain wall courtyard that housed a café, complete with steel and plastic red chairs, and the museum itself, which was just opening its doors.

I grabbed an audioguide and my notebook and took a leisurely tour of the place. The museum held tons of original products from the Bauhaus, including Marcel Breuer’s famous tubular steel chairs, which worked by the process of cantilevering in order to support the seat. The chair balanced in a truncated s-curve, which started along the floor, came up the front legs, back to support the seat, and up again to support the back rest. The seat and backrest were both made of a laminated wood, painted a bright hue of orange. Such chairs have now become standard in most offices and schools, but for their time they were considered to be extremely revolutionary, foregoing the normal four legs for the two loops of steel tubing.

Marcel Breuer did more than just one chair, however. Scattered among the collection were a number of space-age looking furniture. Chairs, tables, and cabinets, mostly constructed of wood, steel, and glass abounded. All of them were incredibly simple and elegant in design, the minimum number of supports needed to hold a person in place, or to support the table, or whatever. However, interspersed between some of the decidedly minimalist furniture were other types more common with the early Bauhaus school—one in particular called the Africa chair had five roughly carved legs ending in a circular seat, with a square pad on top. The backrest rose up with three posts, weaving supporting the backrest in tribal looking patterns, and all of the wooden supports crossing at the top. This incorporated textiles from the weaving department in the Bauhaus, and the circle inside of the square may have directly referenced the Bauhaus teachings, which emphasized the simple geometric shapes of squares, circles, and triangles.

Elsewhere, some orignal paintings by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lionel Feininger, and Lazlo Maholy-Nagy adorned the walls. Some of them were part of the Bauhaus’ primary course in design and composition—a class taught by one of the painters that taught the essentials of line, color and composition. Many of the works were dominated by the Bauhaus’ three primary colors—red, blue, and yellow, and the primary shapes. Most of them were abstract—works that looked at the elements of design and tried to simplify even the forms of people down to their constituent parts. Some of the color theory developed during this time period is still used today, and I recognized the familiar color wheel and complementary color diagrams from art classes I have taken at Davidson.

The Bauhaus sought to incorporate all aspects of craft, art, and design, and as a result they worked to design everything. There were teakettles and pots from the metal workshop, dominated by what looked like a grouping of simple geometric shapes—spheres and cubes. There were lamps, constructed mostly out of metal and glass, in the modern clean lines and simple forms aesthetic. There were also typefonts—the Bauhaus being as interested in graphic design as everything else—in which they sought to eliminate unnecessary and cumbersome elements of writing, such as capital letters and serifs. Instead, the letters all assumed a rounded shape, flowing easily into one another.

But the Bauhaus is of course most well known for its architecture. Although I could not see many of the actual buildings in this small museum, there were a good deal of models, ranging from the actual Bauhaus school designed by Walter Gropius in Dessau, which I would visit in the following days, and the Barcelona Pavilion designed by Mies Van Der Rohe. They had plans, and ideas about modern housing—elements of design that would make a tasteful, clean, efficient, and affordable house. The perfect union of art and technology that would benefit the middle and working classes in an entirely new way, which was one of the goals of the whole Bauhaus experiment.

I really enjoyed getting the chance to finally see all of these things I read about with Dr Denham last fall, and hearing names and ideas that I was actually familiar with demonstrated on a real world scale was incredibly rewarding. It was the same experience that I had when stepping into an art museum or an art gallery and seeing a piece that I had studied, and being able to see things besides what the little placard on the wall said. I felt extremely educated in these moments. Now, the Bauhaus was not just a far off idea, born in the late 19-teens and extinguished by Hitler’s Nazi conservativism, it was an actual, living, breathing school, with relics and ideas that live on to the present. What a wonderful feeling!

I also saw in that facility an exhibition on women in the German gymnastics movement, something which I will have to research more later. Unfortunately, though, the archive that was attached to the museum was closed for the day, and I would have to return on the following day if I wanted to do any more reading. So I regretfully exited the Bauhaus Archiv, snapping a few pictures before moving on. After all, I had a lot that I wanted to see!

I walked along the Tiergarden, the massive green space in the middle of Berlin, which was dotted here and there with an occasional sculpture or road that led through the garden and into the rest of the city. On the other side of me, the city continued—I passed a number of embassies, I think, before the gold studded structure of the Berlin Philharmonie loomed up in front of me.

This building was designed by a contemporary of the Bauhaus architect Mies Van Der Rohe. His name was Hans Sharoun, and he built the Philharmonie in 1963, and it was later expanded to also house a smaller concert hall by one of Sharun’s devotees over 20 years later. The Philharmonie is notable not only for its unusual shape—from above it almost looks like a crumpled umbrella, and its unusual golden studded exterior—it also has perfect acoustics, part of the result of shaping the internal concert hall in a pentagon, and not the usual square. I knew that I had to see the museums today, before they closed, but I stopped inside just to ask if there was some way I could see the inside of the concert hall itself. She told me that tours took place every day at 1 pm. I thanked her, and told myself that I would definitely return. I also noticed out in front a large sculpture of a metal wall—a dark arc that sliced into the pavement and rose up far above my head. Behind it, another arc echoed the same curve. It jogged something in my memory from the Contemporary Art class I had taken last semester, an artist who erected a huge curving dark wall right in the middle of Washington DC and had caused so much commotion because he blocked easy access into the major buildings on the square. I could not for the life of me remember his name—something like Richard Harris or Robert Morris. I will have to look it up when I get back home. These little things just pop out of nowhere!

I kept walking east along the Tiergarden, before swinging up north to see one of Berlin’s most famous sights, the Brandenburg Gate. But before I had reached the gate itself I also ran across something else I had learned about with Dr Denham—the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe. It is a recent addition to the space, built in 2005, it consistes of a grid like pattern of a number of blank stone slabs, set about in differing heights. It looked almost like a graveyard but for the size and the blank surfaces and that the area that would be grass was also gridded with a number of small flagstones. Surrounding the barren strip of land is a number of embassies, and I walked as the other people did through and around the slabs, marveling at their immense size. The slabs looked like they took up a whole city block, and underneath their regular sides the ground dipped and rose, creating a sea of stone. I don’t think I had ever seen anything like it before in my life.

The Brandenbury Tor was built in the 18th century by some nobleman, and later it became the symbol of a divided Berlin- it formed the center of the city and the gate to nowhere—the Berlin Wall stopped all entrance. It is a huge structure, a towering Greek-looking gateway of Doric columns topped with a massive bronze quadriga (a chariot with four horses). The gate was sculptured all along the entablature and on the interior of the passages, all with scenes that looked like they belonged in the Greek and Roman lands much farther south.

On the other side of the massive gate I could see the Tiergarden stretching out before me, the wide street choked with stands and booths for what looked like another festival. There were people milling about everywhere, and music was playing, and there was a stand for a band and everything. I stopped here for a while and grabbed a seat on one of the benches set up before the empty stage, and watched as people huddled over tall pitchers of beer in some of the booths, or others walked around, and took in the general noise and movement. I saw a sign saying “umweltfestival,” so I am assuming that’s what it was, although I have no idea what “umwelt” means. So I moved on, to where I could see the gleaming dome of the Reichstag building in the distance.

The Reichstag looks like a modern building trying on 18th century skin. The windows and dome are all of modern looking steel and glass construction, with huge panes of uninterrupted glass, while on the outside drapes a cloak of sculpture encrusted stone. Like most of Berlin it is an odd mixture of old and new, and I stopped for just a minute to take in the sight before moving on toward the Museum Insel. I would return to the Reichstag later, to climb the dome, but the day was quickly running by and I had only seen one museum so far!

By now I had reached the river, and I walked along the side of it, encountering a mixture of new and old—buidings which loomed in silver and white concrete and glass, large portions of it open to the surroundings and towering, and then smaller buildings with monumental Greek temple facades, and still others that looked like they would be perfectly at home when Germany was still under the rule of kings, with imperial splendor. But they were all in Berlin, fitting into the city skyline as if there was not a span of 400 years between their construction.

I finally reached the Museum Insel, which contained four huge museums, all done in a neoclassical building style. I came up to the columns and façade and felt like I had been transported back to ancient Rome—I had not seen so much marble and elaborate decoration since we had been in the imperial Forum. The museum I most wanted to see loomed up in front of me, an imposing structure with a big flight of steps leading into the interior, and the words “Pergamon Museum” emblazoned on the front. This was the museum that I had wanted to see, containing in its interior the enormous Altar of Zeus and a number of other finds from ancient civilizations.

The Pergamon Altar was the first thing that I saw when I entered the museum—its two wings projecting forward, with a flight of steep steps leading up to a colonnade of ionic columns that ran all of the way around the exterior. However, the most important part of the Altar was the Great Frieze, a huge ring of statuary well over human-height strung along the bottom of the Altar and continuing on the walls around the interior of the exhibition space. There, a swirl of movement and emotion greeted my eyes. Hellenistic sculpture is well known for exhibiting moments of severe pathos, and this sculpture is supposed to be the best example of it all. It contains a huge battle of the gods and the giants, locked in intense struggle for control over Mt. Olympus, and everywhere I looked I could see the press of muscles, the swing of weapons and the fall of drapery. It was amazing to see, and as much as I was thoroughly saturated in the classics, I did greatly enjoy this museum.

The best part of the museum was that it did not just contain Hellenistic and Roman works. It also contained some of the most important finds from ancient near eastern civilizations—stuff from the Baylonians, the Assyrians and the Ottomans. I saw the Ishtar Gate, a huge façade in shiny ceramic brick, decorated with heraldic lions and griffins. I saw huge statues of the fierce curly bearded Assyrian and Babylonian gods, and a reconstruction of what the actual tower of Babel might have looked like. The Ottoman rooms contained ornate rugs and tiles like the ones I had seen in Turkey, looking much more sterile when simply placed upon plain walls rather than in the context of the ornate palaces of Istanbul and the like. It was then that I realized how different a museum experience and the actual experience of the place is. I had seen things in Turkey that I was seeing now in this museum in Berlin, but in Berlin the smell was gone, the street vendors were gone, the bright colors of spices and incense and the crowded bustling streets that we had to walk were gone. I was seeing here a shadow of Islamic art, because I was not seeing it in context. I felt like I understood so much more about that culture when I could experience it in all four senses rather than simply see the selected bits of it placed behind glass or put on a wall. Once again, I felt so rewarded for having gone on this trip. I never would have known what I was missing otherwise.

I reemerged from the museum feeling impressed by everything that I had seen. I came out in the middle of a street fair—booths were set up selling costume jewelry, glass, and books. Unlike in the other places I have been with open air markets, this one had a more subdued quality. No vendors came out of their stall to call me into their shop, and everyone seemed happy just to browse the merchandise. I walked along the road until I reached the river, where I hopped aboard a train to get to my next destination.

I wanted to go see the Neue Nationalgalerie. It was a must-see for me for two reasons: first, it contained pieces of modern art that I was interested in seeing, and second, it was built by Mies Van Der Rohe, one of the Bauhaus architects, and remains a very important piece of architecture to see and study. I arrived to a huge crowd of people milling around, and became worried—would I have to stand in a long line? There was one other place that I wanted to see and it closed at 6; right now it was nearing 3:30. I discovered that the museum, instead of operating on a first-come-first-serve basis, operated like a lottery system. Upon purchasing the ticket, my ticket number was entered into a database that assigned a specific time of entry. I looked, and my ticket number was not due to appear until 4:00, and until that time arrived I was freed from having to stand in line. So, I decided to make efficient use of my time and drop by the next museum on my itinerary—the Gemaldegalerie.

This museum, unlike the Nationalgalerie, contained works dating from the Renaissance up to the 18th century, and contained at least one work from my Roman friend Caravaggio, in addition to Bottecelli and Titian. I knew I did not have much time, so I walked around briefly, entering the first few rooms which contained the Italian Renaissance works. I came upon a study that looked as though it was intended for the Birth of Venus I had seen in Florence, and I was right—it was by Bottecelli. I felt glad that I could recognize a few works without having to look at the placards first. But as I walked around, I could feel the time ticking in my head, so I turned around and headed back to the Nationalgalerie, just in time to make my entrance slot at 4 pm.

The Neue Nationalgalerie is a very simple looking building. It is one story, rectangular, with a huge glass curtain wall ringing the outside, and roofed with a flat black slab. None of the exhibition works occupy the ground floor—it is simply occupied with some light wood blocked furniture for checking bags and coats, and a staircase leading below ground. It only makes sense to put the paintings underground—the ground floor has not “back” and no walls to hang anything—the placement of any painting would obstruct the views into and out of the buildings because light freely penetrated both, and the sunlight streaming in would undoubtably damage the valuable works of art.

I went down the flight of stairs and entered wide, whitewalled painting heaven. It was not what I expected though. Instead of Warhol and Lichtenstein and all of the modern artists, I was wandering through the likes of Monet, Degas, and Delacriox. What had happened? My Let’s Go Germany guide had never been wrong. As it turned out, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC had switched exhibitions (or something, all of the signs were in German so I only got the gist of what was going on) and so all of these things I was seeing were originally there. I don’t know what happened to the modern art exhibitions that I was supposed to see—whether they had been moved to other places in Berlin or were in the Met where these works were supposed to be, but I enjoyed what I did see immensely. This 18th and 19th century art is some of the stuff that I am the least familiar with, and I would love to learn more. There were so many different types of art from this time period—stuff ranging from the impressionists to expressionists and beyond. The museum was fairly crowded, but I spent a lot of time there, looking at wonderful painting after wonderful painting, awed and humbled by each one.

Just as I was leaving the exhibition, I saw a branch of a bookstore that Dr Denham had mentioned was a very good one for studying architecture, and I stopped in to thumb thorugh the pages. Unfortunately most of the books were in German, and incomprehensible to me. I did find one book that looked promising, and as I was walking to the checkout aisle the cashier asked me in German “do you know that this book is in English?” or something along those lines… I did not need to speak the language to recognize the word “English” and the quizzical look that he gave me as he pointed to the book’s bright red cover. I nodded and said back to him in English “yes, I know, English is the only language I speak.” To which he replied in English “ah yes I see, well OK then.” Its amazing how much I can understand of the world around me through context: gesture and body language, without being able to know anything in German. And although I don’t think I could ever have an especially meaningful conversation with someone on the basis of gesture and a few broken phrases, it certainly is enough to get me my essential needs: food, water, shelter, and transportation. Which is all I can ask for, really.

I left the museum happy that I had seen more great art there, but I still had a little bit of time left before the Gemaldegalerie closed, so I walked the 10 minutes and re-entered the museum there, taking an audioguide and a museum handout with me so I could navigate the hallways. This museum also appeared brand new, with a crisp white interior and lobby that linked it with a large library and a number of other smaller exhibits. The Gemaldegalerie itself was shaped in a gigantic U, with the space in the center of the U occupied by a skylighted hallway filled with rotating exhibitions of scupture—the only type of art to withstand the direct sundlight that this hallway afforded.

Since I had seen Bottecelli on my first visit, I bypassed that room and made my way farther into the galleries, moving past the Renaissance and into the Baroque, where I was happy to finally see my old friend Caravaggio. This work was called The Triumph of Earthly Love; and was quite controversial for its time in its blend of allegory and reality. It was well known in this time period that the models for the artists were usually people off of the streets, and Caravaggio’s highly realistic depiction of the nude mischevious looking boy with wings does not neglect to include details such as the dirt under the boy’s fingernails and the tan from being outside all day. At the same time, the allegory is equally powerful—love in all of his naked glory stands tramping on all other aspects of humanity—the arts, literature, and science, vanishing as so many objects underfoot. I love Caravaggio’s treatment of light, and this painting was no different than the others, sliding in at an oblique angle to cover the boy in light, throwing the sides of him and the background into shadow.

Right next to this work was another in a similar style, by a painter who wanted to contest Caravaggio’s triumph of earthy love. His painting shows a cupid fully clothed, in the garb of an angel, stomping on a figure that very much resembles Caravaggio’s mischevious boy. They were hung side by side in the gallery, and as I looked from one to the other I could see this second artist using Caravaggio’s signature style with slanting light and realistic figures to undermine Caravaggio’s message, and rectify the scandal. This is a perfect example of some of the dialogues that are sometimes hidden in the art world for the careful observer to see—rivalries between different artists or differing ideological viewpoints presented in their works of art.

Art does not exist in a vacuum. All of it responds in some way to the world around it, whether it be the economics behind it, or the ideological views of its artists, or the public’s reaction to it. And all of it is so interesting. Would this second artist have produced this painting if Caravaggio’s Triumph were not so scandalous? Would the Bauhaus have existed if advances in engineering during the Industrial Revolution had not happened? Would Michelangelo have been as important to us if he had not caught the eye of the Vatican? Probably not.

I moved on through the galleries, seeing Italian and Northern works, and I got to a room where one painting in particular drew my eye. It was a picture showing the calling of some saint, and the slant of the light caught my eye in the way that the ray spread out from the left hand side to illuminate the stunned saint on the right. The angel who was calling was standing in the origin of the light, and he pointed a figure toward the saint in a movement that seemed familiar as well. The whole structure of the scene struck me as very similar to another of Caravaggio’s works, called The Calling of Saint Matthew. The light, the heavy chariooscuro, all of it seemed like a later incarnation of this model. And when I turned on the audioguide, that is one of the first things that the distended voice told me—that this painting was heavily influenced by The Calling of Saint Matthew, as well as the fresco of the Birth of Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, both images of which were heavily imprinted in my visual memory. I was surprised and happy to see my suspicions confirmed. It is instances like this that truly make my education feel worthwhile. I took something I had seen in an art history class ages ago and applied it directly to a painting that I had never seen before, and to be proven right by the audioguide gave me a sense of elation that made me practically skip through the rest of the gallery. I did not have much time, so I scrutinized some Titian and a few more notables before the sound of warning bells caused me to beat a hasty retreat.

I was exhausted by then, but completely satisfied with everything that I had seen that day. I practically fell asleep on the bus ride home, and returned to the hostel with aching feet and the need to sit down and REST. I had new roommates, which I introduced myself to, before exiting to the common room and settling on the couch to check my email and review in my mind the events of the day. One of my new roomies entered, and introduced himself as Mike from Edmonton, Canada, and we spent a good portion of the rest of the evening talking about our travels. Some of the staff at Jetpack came in also, and I asked them about more places to go the next day—one of the guys told me about a great WWII exhibit that was free, and the best way to reach the Jewish Museum. And he pointed out to me the best place in Berlin to get good Turkish food. I was all set!

The following day was one of the busiest days I have had since I started traveling. I was on my feet for hours at a time, and when I returned to the hostel that night, it was all I could do to get ready for bed and fall asleep. I could not believe everything that I had done, and although I loved seeing Berlin, I was happy to know that I was going to a smaller, more relaxing setting for the next several days.

The day started out easily enough, with a return trip the Bauhaus Archiv, this time to see the Library, which was a small building with a curtain of windows and stacks and stacks of books on the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, and design. Most of the titles were in German, but I found a small section on theater design and found myself lost among the pages. I looked up several hours later surprised at how much time had gone by—and I had to go to the Philharmonie tour at 1 pm! I did not have much time left! I wrote down the names of most of them, which I discovered were mostly published in NY or London which would make them easily accessible in the States, and walked out into the afternoon, making my way once more briskly along the Tiergarden toward the Kulturforum area, where I had seen the museum exhibits from the day before.

The Philharmonie is a huge building with an exterior that looks like the crunched up sides of some huge ship—bolts protrude all over the metal exterior, which is all painted a bright yellow. It definitely stands out from the other more nondescript grey and glass structrures with their smooth surfaces nearby. I found the entrance to the tour, only to discover that on Mondays, which this was, that the tour of the main stage was closed. However, the tour for this reason was completely free so I decided to go anyway. I walked inside, to a grand open space with flights of white metal stairs and industrial railings, and the windows filled in with tons of small circles of green glass. It turns out, my guide informed me, that the inside of the Philharmonie was organized in the same way a ship was—the portholes and metal railings a more obvious allusion to the sailing world. A less obvious reference was that the right and left sides of the building were colorcoded—red for one, green or the other, in the same manner that a ship is. Thus, the whole building could be navigated by following the colors on the signs. I found this incredibly interesting, and she directed us deeper into the building as she kept pointing out its main features.

Hans Sharoun was an architect contemporary with Mies Van Der Rohe, and as a result much of the ideological underpinnings of his work was similar. The building eschewed a monumental entrance way for something small and welcoming, and all of the seats inside of the concert hall were guaranteed excellent acoustics, making the art accessible to all that wanted to see. It was also concerned with linking the exterior world of the tiergarden and the street to the interior world of the Philharmonie, and wide windows along the outside walls let in sunlight; a garden was placed inside to bring the two together. Everything in the building was highly functional, from the roof of the lobby that turned out to actually be the floor of the concert hall, curving from a low point to high up where it connected with the outer walls. No elements in the design were wasted—any pillars that appeared were structural, and for the stairs and balconies, the steel and bolt construction was clearly exposed, adding and element of the utilitarian amid the fantastic shapes and the swirls of color all along the insides.

The tour guide took us to the smaller concert hall, which was designed by Sharoun’s disciple and lacks some of the strict functionalism of Sharoun’s larger building. Nothing is coded by color, it only seeks to echo the model of the predecessor, and the elegant spiky supports that held up the floor-ceiling of the concert hall were completely frivolous, the actual support appearing in the joints with the walls. It was only meant as a visual reference with the larger concert hall building.

Stepping inside, however, all of the failings and modifications of this apprentice-building fell away as we entered a sloping space that all converged on a single hexagonal stage, filled with high school students rehearsing for an upcoming concert. The music was absolutely beautiful in a totally unfamiliar way—all of the words were in German, of course, and the melodies almost had a Celtic tinge to them that made the music twist and turn in those complicated series of knotted lines that adorn most Celtic art. I could hear the piano player whose big black instrument occupied a prominent position in the foreground, while behind her ranged the rows of kids, the music out of their mouths soaring and swelling as it came up to the balcony where we stood and watched. The inside of the building was all done up in a series of creams and tans, light colors that gently reflected the light that came in from a magnificent chandelier, one that looked more like a silver and white mobile than anything else. I learned that the chandelier, in fact, had multiple purposes—in addition to reflecting light and drawing the eye down to the action on the hardwood stage, it also acted as a damper upon the sound. The ceiling too was designed to achieve perfect acoustics—different sharp shaped pockets and holes to take in the more powerful lower pitched frequencies and make it so that nothing was lost between the origin and the reception of the sound.

We sat for a while, taking in the music and the well proportioned music hall, complete with its profusion of balconies and perforated walls and massive central chandelier. I felt like I was getting the benefits of a concert without having to pay a thing—there were very few people sitting in the audience besides our tour group, just the parents of the children and a few teachers, and the only difference in the quality of their performance was the stirring in the ranks after the completion of a song and the extremely informal dress. But it was, after all, only a tour, so the woman leading the group signaled to us after a while and we quietly exited the way we had come, returning to the lobby where we made a quick exit.

Throughout the tour she had been comparing Sharoun’s Philharmonie with the likes of Mies, and it made me think really hard about what possible influences each might have had on the other, and why two German contemporaries with much the same ideological program could have come up with two radically different building styles. The Philaharmonie and the Neue Nationalgalerie were within a block of each other, and the contrast could not be greater. One was spare and simple, leaving only light to filter through the building, with all of the art on display hidden underground. The other is a play of color and crazy angles, and while the interior does contain large windows, it does not compare to the increadible openness of Mies’ building. Did it have something to do with the personal artistic vision of the artists themselves? Or was it that a space devoted to music could be more innovative, whereas an art museum necessarily had to take a back ground place to the visual art that adorned its walls? In the concert hall, there was nothing else to see—people came to the place to hear, so the visual reference point is the building itself, but the art museum is represented by both its external appearance and the art it contains. The Nationalgalerie was certainly sober enough to take a second row seat to its usual occupants such as Warhol and Klee.

However, in looking around at a lot of museums, sometimes the function of the place does not prevent the architect from brining the building into front-row center, upstaging the art that it is supposed to contain. One example of this is a building by an architect that I would see later, Daniel Libeskind, who after building the Jewish Museum in Berlin would go on to build the new WTC and the Denver Art Museum. One of the biggest complains abou the art space, however, was that it detracted from the art because the building was so unconventional most canvases could not even be hung on the walls, which were decidedly non-perpendicular. Would Libeskind have been better off designing a concert hall, where the art inside was of a non visual nature and the contortions of the bulding would not interfere with the display of the art? Was this perhaps why Sharoun was so exuberant and Mies so simple and subdued? As I walked out of the Philharmonie I could see an essay topic formulating overhead. Something to consider when I return home.

I jumped back on the bus and hopped off in former East Berlin, where an exhibit called the Topograpy of Terror was located. Placed in an abandoned lot, with plans but not funds for an actual permanent building in the works, it was instead located on outdoor signs and cards that were strung along a fence and along the foundations of a buildng that used to house prisoners and enemies of the Nazi war machine. And, preserved past the exhibit, was a large section of the Berlin Wall.

I was surprised at how thin and fragile it looked—this now broken stretch of a wall that stood for so much more than itself—for a divided Germany, for ideological opposition so strong that it took bombs to resolve the conflict, for a whole world involved in struggle. But now it was just a relic of the past—a scar that would mark the landscape of the city for years to come. Written on the wall in different colors of ink I could see the word “hopeless” and a little farther down, a simple question “why?” It was certainly a question that would turn out to very hard to answer.

The exhibit itself catalogued the different prisoners who were incarcerated and tortured during the course of the war, how Hitler and the SS took power, and who resisted his growing stronghold over the city. I found the exhibit informative, but after seeing the names and faces of so many people who were killed or sent away to death camps, I found myself too overwhelmed to even complete the whole exhibit. So many people died—Hitler made it illegal to even question the activities of the government, and not even the artists were spared. A famous pianist died for making a comment in his dressing room before a perfomance; a cartoonist was arrested and killed for much the same thing, and countless others of numerous talents. It was so sad, and viewing it all in these broken bits of building, with the shadow of the Berlin Wall behind it all, I could not but feel the destruction of the war and all of its suffering.

So I left the exhibit, stopping quickly to see a buildig that had acquired the name “Wedding Cake” but was actually built by Martin Gropius, a relative of Walter’s, and whose sensibilities were as different as night and day. This was a neoclassical building done up all in red brick and encrusted with medallions and sculpture, appearing very much like ribbons of icing. I was not surprised that it got the name. And then I made my way briefly over to Checkpoint Charlie, a reconstructed toll booth set in the middle of the street that re-enacted the border patrol checkpoints between the two halves of the divided city.

And then finally I rounded a corner and came upon Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. The entrance to the museum itself was actually located in an older solid neoclassical style, while the new one jutted out in all kinds of schizophrenic angles, covered in sheetmetal and with windows on every angle except for the horizontal. I was excited about seeing the place; I had done quite a bit of reading about the Jewish Museum in school and I wanted to finally see it for myself. The museum is very self conscious about the symbolic and psychological effects it has upon people. After buying the entrance ticket I walked out of all normality and into the new part of the museum.

First, I walked down a steep set of stairs and emerged in a long gallery that looked like some sinister part of Alice in Wonderland. The passage sloped upward and narrowed near the top, and partway up another passage slashed through the first at an oblique angle. Everything was either grey, or white, or black, and some of the walls contained the names of different cities stamped upon them. The hallways were named according to where they led—one of them was a the Hall of Rememberance, another was the Hall of Oblivion, and just to one side of their intersection a statement of the architect left all of his intentions very clear: Libeskind wanted to create a home for the artifacts of Jewish culture and the Holocaust, of course, but he also wanted his manipulation of space to evoke certain feelings. The whole building was permeated with voids—long shafts that lead to nowhere, and this was supposed to be the loss of the Jewish people—their gap in the fabric of Germany where they had been eliminated. The sloping walls and disconcerting intersections made me at least feel disoriented and a little bit anxious—I am sure intended by Libeskind to evoke some of the feelings that many of the Jews themselves must have felt when their lives were falling apart at the hands of the Nazis.

To me, these entrance passages were the most effective parts of the museum. Libeskind did his job well when there was nothing to obscure the full force of the architecture. I just stood and looked up and down the long hallways, and in one area I could actually step into a void, and look up at the three floors of the museum rising high overhead, little gaps in the walls where the windows could overlook the vast echoing chamber. The floor was covered with a piece of three dimensional art—called “Fallen Leaves” or something similar, it was a bunch of disks of rusted metal, with holes cut out to convert it into flattened faces in varying attitudes. We were invited to walk along the floor, over these disks, and as I did so a sound emerged like the clanking of heavy machinery. The sound echoed off of the bare walls of the void. Perhaps it was due to all I had seen that day, but I thought to myself “if there was a theme sound for a concentration camp, this would be it.” The forlorn scraping of these sceaming metal leaves was more than enough to make my hair stand on end.

The actual museum itself was less impressive-- the exhibits were modern and a lot of them used sound and interaction to keep the viewer engaged. Mostly, however, the infusion of the noise and color in the stark setting of the museum itself struck me as incongruous. I think I probably got more out of the place walking down the empty entrance halls with simple words emblazoned on the walls than stepping into this carnival atmosphere. I did however, enjoy one video part of the exhibit that showed different scenes of the daily lives of the Jews, projected onto five different screens that shifted and rotated. But there was very little speech—it seemed like the purpose of this part was to show without telling. Which I very much appreciated—the language barrier would have made “telling” a useless endeavor anyway. And the play of these grainy black and white videos or the repetition of photographs seemed more in keeping with the museum itself.

I spent a long time there, pushing the buttons and turning the wheels on the exhibits to expose little bits of information. And at the and I walked out into the holocaust memorial—a set of olive trees set into towering platforms in a grid pattern. I walked far below their roots—between the solid walls of the platforms, looking up at the foliage overhead while before me everything was grey and hard-edged. It actually reminded me a lot of walking in the memorial near the Brandenburg Tor—people moving among a monochrome grid pattern. Except here the monoliths were tall and a little bit of nature poked shyly over the top.

I exited the museum, realizing with sudden intensity that I was starving, having not really eaten a meal since the cereal that morning. So I took the advice of the guy at the hostel and hopped back on the bus, heading to the southeast of the Jewish museum, where everything turned old and eclectc and where vegetarian and Chinese restaurants easily existed side by side. In fact, it really reminded me of the downtown area of Gainesville or Asheville—young and a little bit bohemian. It didn’t take me long to find a Turkish restaurant, where a sat down and ordered a dinner by looking at the pictures on the menu—nothing was in English. It was delicious. On the way out I even spotted a sweet shop that sold Baklava and Turkish Delight, and bought a box. I was happy, and full, and I had a taste of Turkey.

But I decided that since I had eaten already and it was my last night in Berlin that I should try to go and at least see the outside of some of the famous sites that I had missed—the Berliner Dom and th Reichstag. I knew there was probably no chance of getting in—it was well after 6 when most things close, but I felt reinvigorated by my dinner and was ready to go! So I hopped on the nearest U-bahn and rode it up to Alexanderplatz, one of the big squares in Berlin, to start my journey. I emerged from the station completely disoriented, having been turned around so many times from my emergence from the train to reaching the surface that I had no idea which way I was going. But eventually I did find the right street, and walked in the direction of the Tiergarden and Brandenburg Gate. Along the way I knew I would pass some of the most notable buildings in Berlin (besides, of course, the ones that I had seen already). I passed the huge TV or radio tower that sent up a massive skewered spire up into the sky, surpassing of the lower buildings on the Berlin landscape. It looked in many ways like a giant shish-kebab turned on its end, the cherry tomato part at the uppermost reaches. It seemed rather an incongruous shape compared with the rest of the more elegant and stately buildings on the Berlin skyline, but nevertheless, there it was.

I kept going and on my right a huge green dome began to appear, and I got excited because I knew that it meant I was getting close to the Berliner Dom, a huge church built in a Romanesque style on the Unter Din Linden, the major thoroughfare through the city. It seemed even larger than many of the churches I had seen in Rome; I don’t know if its because there were so many in that city, or that most of these surrounding buildings were smaller, but this building commanded presence in a way that was inescapable. It had one huge cupola, surrounded by a quintet of four smaller spires, one on each of the corners. The whole thing was filled with half columns, embedded into the walls and topped with floral Corinthian capitals, and the oval windows above were crusted with sculpture. The whole thing was amazing to see, and seemed so old-world in this glass and steel city. But I would later discover that much of the Unter Din Linden looks like it should belong on a main street in Rome.

I came around to the front, which greeted a wide grass pavilion with a fountain, enclosed on the other two sides by stately looking buildings resembling Greek temples. As I came closer, I realized that I was on the other side of the Museum Insel that I had seen earlier—this was the front entrance of the Altes Museum. I walked around to get the full effect of both buildings and noticed a neon glow between the pillars, which proclaimed “ALL ART HAS BEEN CONTEMPORARY.” It made me stop and think—yes, its true, that all art when it was created was at the crest of its temporal wave. But it is equally the case that all art is dated. Even the modernism of Gropius and the Bauhaus now seems a little bit old fashioned, and even in 2005 the New York Times was writing articles about the need to “preserve modernism” because we are now in a post modern age. But even post modern will get old…

Anyway, I moved to the front of the Berliner Dom and saw that I had 20 minutes before it would close, so I slipped inside the massive front doors and was greeted with another impressive dome. Paintings and gold leaf spiraled up in Baroque splendor to reach a culmination in the medallion on the ceiling. Everything was done up in panels of gold and spirals of angels, which overpowered me as I stood—one very small and fragile person, in the face of this fanfare of color and might. Which I am sure was the intent.

As the sky grew slightly darker, I continued down the grand thoroughfare, passing a number of university buildings, and more museums before coming to a region dominated by different car companies. I saw display cases for BMW and Volkswagen, and then Peugeot store that had all kinds of kooky cars ranging from soapbox derby vehicles to a one-person smart car to a car completely made out of wood. It was an exhibition that would have made most car conoseisseurs incredibly interested, but my own mild interest held me long enough to go “oh—that’s really different” before moving on to the next fantastic invention. It was fun to see though.

The last event of the evening was an excursion to the Reichstag. Built (or at least associated with) Hitler, it is a sturdy neoclassical building over top of a sleek modern one. Entrance to the dome was open until midnight, and I was determined to go up to the top and see what I could of the city with the failing light and look down inside of the Reichstag building itself. One of the new functions of the modernist dome is that it allows viewers to see the congress actually in session—a huge contrast to the secrecy and closed nature of Hitler’s regime. The new dome stood as a perfect testament to the change in power in Germany—the dome would allow anyone who wanted to see the actual proceedings of the government.

I was surprised at how long the line was to get inside of the building—even at 9, it stretched out of the door and down the street, a mass of people to see the dome even when the parliament was obviously not in session. Even when it started to drizzle, we all only clustered closer to the overhang to get some shelter from the rain and kept waiting. It was not very long before we were allowed in, through more security than an airport has, and were finally allowed to take the elevator up to the top level, where we could see the dome shining like some great diamond on top of the stone roof. The interior of the dome contained a massive chute that led from the very top and gradually widened as it met the outward curve of the dome along the bottom. It was entirely covered in giant mirrors—to guide and reflect the sunlight to the space below where the Parliament proceedings took place. Around the interior of the dome was a massive spiraling ramp—so different in character from the cramped staircases inside of Brunelleschi’s dome or that of St Peters. From here I could look down to see the building opening up beneath me, or equally easily out into the darkening night sky and the jewel-lit skyline of Berlin.

Reaching the top there was a small platform from which I could see the entire panorama of the city stretched out before me. I could even identify several of the buildings from the previous days—the Philharmonie, and the dome of the Berliner Dom, and the huge TV antenna, and others as I walked around and around the glassed enclosure. Like the Pantheon, this dome contained an oculus—it was open to the sky and little droplets of rain made their dark marks on the floor. I wandered around this platform for a bit before realizing that the oncoming darkness would add to my difficulty getting home, so I reversed my direction on the ramp and descended out of the crystalline structure, back into the solidity of the stone, and out, where I was met with an onrush of darkness.

By the time I got home that night, my feet were aching and my back hurt from all day on my feet. I had new roommates—two frathouse looking guys that were on a whirlwind 6-hours-per-major-city tour of Europe, which struck me as even too fast. I spoke to them some, but they seemed content to wander out into the common room, leaving Mike and I for some long conversations. We had such different growing up experiences—he in a town that had 8 months of winter, and mine the exact reverse. We swapped our impressions of Europe and facebooked each other and when it was finally reaching around 1 o clock we each realized that we had to wake up very early the next morning to catch the trains to our respective destinations. So we said goodnight. So far I have been very lucky with my roommates.