Weimar

June 11, 2007

Nuremberg, Germany

Still trying to catch back up from the whole week’s madness… there are only 8 days left in my travels and it is feeling like it has flown by! I cannot believe how much I have seen and done but I am starting to get a little bit road weary. Its annoying to figure out how the shower works and where to get food every place I go. Enough already! Get me to something familiar!

That said, this whole trip has been incredibly awesome. I feel like I have done and seen more things in the past few weeks than I will see for the next few years. (Hopefully not, but it seems likely.) And Germany has been remarkably easy to navigate and the people immeasurably helpful. Almost everyone I met after the fiasoes in Dessau spoke very good English, and whenever they caught me with my forehead scrunched up and half-frowning, turning my map and myself around and around, they were quick to jump in and point me in the right direction. Which I greatly appreciated, especially when I was loaded down with all of my bags, computer case, etc, and was looking desperately for my hostel. After a long day in the train the last thing I wanted to do was wander around a strange city for hours and hours. But with their help I usually found it in no time.

I regretfully said goodbye to my incredibly comfortable digs in the Bauhaus, grateful that I had one night where I did not share a room—preventing me from talking away my sleep time and letting me laze around as much as I wanted without risk of being disturbed. Then, I hiked all of my things down to the train station, and whizzed off into the German morning. I was headed to Weimar, the capital of Germany at the time of the Bauhaus’ infancy in 1919 and considered by Let’s Go Germany to be the cultural capital of the whole country. Goethe, a famous German poet largely unknown to myself, was born and spent a signficicant amount of time there, and I found a number exhibits about him and his contemporaries in a nearby museum.

The train rolled up to the small station, I hopped on a bus, and arrived completely disoriented in Goetheplatz, what I though was one of the main centers of the old town. All around me buildings rose in rough hewn timber and stucco, with sloping slate or tiled roofs. I felt like I had stepped out of the contemporary world and back some 500 odd years, where any minute a horse and a knight in shining armor would come charging around the corner. Luckily for me, burdened as I was, the cobblestoned streets remained relatively calm as I trundled along, my rolling bag clicking over the gaps in the stones. (One side not for future travel: use a heavy duty backpack! The small towns are not equipped for rolling suitcases!) After making a few wrong turns and backtracking I finally found my hostel, a self proclaimed unconventional and student run hostel set in an 1800s house close to the main square, with a huge bronze fountain out in front spouting water, and the walls crawling with ivy.

I rang the bell, and after a short wait a scruffy looking student opened the door, and invited me to haul my bags up one flight where I entered a dimly lit and eclectically furnished living and dining room, which upon paying I was lead to a cramped and even more eclectically furnished bedroom, stacked to the ceiling with all kinds of different bunk beds. I found myself a nook high up, with a convenient shelf over the headboard where I threw my camera and other things as I got myself settled.

The Hababusch Hostel quite lived up to its reputation for being unconventional. It looked like someone working at Satchel’s Pizza had decided to open up a hotel. (For those of you that don’t know Satchel’s, it’s a great locally owned and operated pizzeria in Gainesville furnished completely with mismatched salvaged furniture, lights, and dishes. It’s a wonderful menagerie of different styles and aesthetics—there is even one table constructed in an old VW van. And, of course, the pizza and signature Satchel’s Salad with homemade dressing is delicious. Lunch special with one slice and small salad for $5, totally cheap and absolutely mouthwatering. Nothing better in the whole world—its still my favorite restaurant, and I always go there when I come back home.) This Hostel looked like it was furnished from bits and pieces of trash-turned-treasure. There was a huge wrought iron chandelier over the dining room table, which featured an assortment of plastic, metal, and wooden chairs. The bathrooms looked like they had been refurbished by the students who ran the place—the shower controls looked like something originally intended for a sink, with a tube running up overhead from which the water emerged. In the bathrooms, a series of mismatched white pedestal sinks paraded in front of a huge mirror, and one of them had been flipped upside down and wired through and through and stuck overhead to make one of the most unusual lights that I had ever seen. The walls in the living rooms were covered with what looked like student paintings, and old couches and ripped up auditorium seats rested against the walls to make more seating area. It was incredibly bohemian, and a really fun change from the white acerbic cleanliness of the Bauhaus, and the spare utilitarianism of the Jetpack hostel in Berlin.

I stayed in long enough to breathe in the atmosphere and drop my things off. So far I had two roommates, a shy Asian girl who I discovered was taking exams for entry into the music school in Weimar, and a Russian guy with a bald head who only spoke enough English to introduce himself, and continued to look at me with a strange quizzical expression as I got out my maps and wallet and got on my way. I left him standing in the door looking at me as I walked out into the Weimar morning.

I was delighted to find Weimar in a bustle of activity. Simply walking around I saw the most charming little buildings, and crazy streets that turned at odd angles and tehn would suddenly open up into a larger square framed by an impressive building on one side, usually with a statue or a fountain as accompaniment. I came out into a square just like that—framed on one side by the Weimar theater and on the other by the Bauhaus museum, which was the whole purpose of the trip.

The Bauhaus Museum in Weimar is neatly tucked into an old pastel colored building, but the interior is painted completely white with a central exhibition space made of curving walls and a mechanical looking set of stairs—a bit of modernity in a wrinkled skin. The exhibit contained more of the paper works of the Bauhaus masters—Feininger and Kandinsky, as well as a good deal of the student exercises and works, experiments with color and composition. It was interesting to note how much more organic most of these works appeared than the architecture that the Bauhaus produced. While all of the objects—the lamps, the coffee pots, and the furniture, seemed to be firmly based around the grouping of primitive solid objects, the painting seemed to express a different variation on the Bauahus theme. Granted, some of Kandinsky’ pieces were dominated by scattered circles and vague grid patterns, others like Lionel Feiningers were much more painterly—resembling cubism more than anything else. His works even had a relatinship to the concrete world—they were vast cityscapes, patches of color as though the city was being seen through a wavy old glass window. But it was never distilled all of the way down to black and white, solid simple lines and shapes. And the fabrics too—they almost seemed tribal in appearance.

I guess the Bauhaus is more multifaceted than anyone gives it credit for. I also was beginning to receive some information about the ways in which the school changed from its inception during the Weimar heyday until its move to Dessau and its later confinement in Berlin before Hitler closed it down altogether. In its earlier incarnations, Gropius spoke of the Bauhaus as a union between art and craft—bringing together the functional and nonfunctional aspects of design. Such would explain the prevalence of fabrics and an emphasis on more organic principles. After the move to Dessau, however, Gropius released a new statement on the mission of the Bauhaus to unify art and technology. Such a change would lead to a departure from the craft guild atmosphere of the Weimar school and towards a machine-manufactured world. The upper floor of the gallery contained some of the objects from the Dessau Bauhaus, and the difference could be seen in some of the objects—the shiny cups and bowls and in the space age looking lamps and chairs.

I spent the rest of the morning in the museum, and emerged quite ready to rest up a bit and have some lunch. I returned briefly to the hostel to drop off a few things—notebooks and such, before heading out in a different direction. My guidebook told me that one good area to look for food was in a market square not far from my hostel, and when I emerged from the tunnel of streets into this open space, it was into a wonderful splash of color. Tents had been set up facing the one large red gothic building that dominated the square, the rathaus, I think. Most of them were striped like candycanes—red and white, and different booths were set up selling all manner of foods. Most of them were fruit and vegetable stands, and when I saw a man hawking a whole box of strawberries for 99 cents, I immediately walked over and bought some. I sat on a bench facing the market area, watching tourists and residentcs come and go with their ice cream or their fruit in hand. I sat next to an older couple dressed out in khaki pockets scribbling postcards. But the berries were delicious! It had been ages since I had strawberries—they are normally so rare and expensive we avoided them. But not here! I was so happy.

When I had about half exhausted my berry supply, I decided to get up and get some real food, so I found the nearest rostbratwurst stand and picked myself up a Thuringer Rostbratwurst, a huge dark colored sausage that the vendor stuck in a completely inadequately sized piece of bread. It looked funny to me—the sausage was sticking for a good several inches on either side of the small roll of white bread. But it was delicious, and I returned to my bench to watch the people milling about as I finished up my lunch. Since I was there, and since there looked like an overabundance of fresh food around, I bought a few apples and things to supplement my peanut butter and bread for dinner. Satisfied that I had fulfilled that basic need, I ventured out into the town again, wandering toward the Schloss Musuem, but first finding the Anna Amalia museum and what I thought was a part of a castle, the dark outline of a turret tower reaching skyward.

Turns out the dark turret was actually a part of the Schloss, a huge complex set in a great square around a courtyard, its very tall windows looking into the cobblestoned space and on the other side outward to where a lazy river and a sprawling park meandered. It was so beautiful, I was almost reluctant to leave the museum and simply spend the rest of the afternoon whiling away the time on the grass by the side of the river like I saw many other people doing. But I always knew that I could do that later, and I had heard some good things about the museum, so I approached the entrance with the most banners around it, supposing it to be the main entrance. Turns out that it was a special exhibit to Anna Amalia—the name kept popping up, and I had no idea why.

So I asked where the permanent exhibition was, and was directed to a less-adorned entrance with the simple gold lettering declaring “Schloss Museum” over the top. The woman there spoke no English, but she sold me the ticket readily enough, and I gave a sight of relief as I entered the quiet echoing halls of the museum. The first museum contained a good number of portraits by Northern Renaissance artists, including Albrecht Durer. They were very different from all of the Italian works I had seen, darker in color, with a profusion of mahogany wood and forest green, with the sober expressions of figures placed less realisitically in their setting. The emphasis here was on a clarity of line and image, not necessarily with exuberance of light and color. The word that came to mind when viewing them was sober—they looked serious and stern in a way that the Italian works did not. Perhaps it was the lack of a Mediterranean atmosphere or something.

I broke out my sketchbook but I had lost all of my writing utencils except for a felt tip black pen, which was a radical departure from my ball-point and pencil scribblings. I decided to adapt by trying some simple line drawings, instead of trying to build form by the addition of more line and volume in repeated strokes of light lines, I had no choice here but to go dark. So I simplified my drawings down to contour lines, focusing not on strict versimilitude, but upon simplicity and economy of line. They looked very different from anything that I had done before but they were a good exercise. Normally I don’t even like ball point because it takes me a lot of experimentation to get the forms the way I want—I liked acrylic paint the best because I could quickly repaint over an error. Here, the errors could not be erased or drawn over without creating great dark lines. So I had to simply draw very carefully my first impressions of the faces of the people in the painting and be satisfied with that.

I kept walking deeper and deeper into the gallery, stopping to admire painting after painting—most of them by artists unknown to me but consisting primarily of portraits or of scenes from the Bible or mythology. There were also some miniature sculptures—something that perhaps the Northern artists specialized in (they were certainly fond of minature paintings, I thought) with intricate carvings in ivory and bone of chubby cherubims or angels. I could not believe the level of detail carved into these tiny, Christmas-tree-ornament-sized objects. I would step really close and press my nose almost to the glass to try to get an impression of it all.

There were also ceramics, decorated with genre scenes of everyday life—ladies in huge flouncy dresses and men in their pantaloons sitting in a romantic setting by a pond. It all looked kind of like something out of a Fragonard picture, too delicate and too picturesque to quite be believable. But the craftsmanship on the vessels was excellent. I kept moving through the museum, looking in curio cabinets and on the walls until I suddenly turned the corner and dead ended into a wall. I walked slowly back through the exhibit, stunned the I had come to an end so quickly. But I had. I exited the museum and was about to leave the place to return to the hostel, much earlier than I had expected, when I saw the Anna Amalia exhibit that I had avoided previously. Figuring that I needed to occupy my time somehow, and thinking it might be interesting, I got myself a ticket and an audioguide—a great feature when all of the placards and signs are in German—and let myself inside.

I ascended a big flight of steps to reach the main exhibition gallery. It turns out that Anna Amalia was the duchess of this region before it was incorporated into the German state, and she lived contemporary with some of Germany’s greatest poets and thinkers—Goethe an Schiller. The exhibition contained stories about Anna Amalia’s life, the state of her duchy and political events surrounding her reign. Anna Amalia had taken on a duchy saddled with debt, but she could not rectify the situation and the problem was not solved until her son came of age and relieved her of her regency. Then she was free to pursue more pleasurable pastimes, such as music and painting—some of her original works lined the walls. And, later in life, she embarked on a grand tour similar to the one that I am near the end of now. The audioguide explained the fascination with the classical world, and I entered rooms full of romantic paintings of Rome—I recognized the Piazza del Popolo, and the Pantheon, not from pictures, but from my own experience! What a great feeling, to feel like I have followed in the footsteps of a German duchess.

Other parts of the exhibit showed some of Goethe’s contributions to the area. More than just a poet, as most intellectuals were those days, he discovered the mid-jawbone in humans, a trait that linked them with other mammals. He was also interested in music and theater, and took control of a local theater in the region, directing all of the plays and performances there. He was at the forefront of a number of intellectual movements simultaneously. The museum showed other developments contemporary with Goethe—experiments in electricity and navigation, and I found myself engrossed in the exhibition. I drew occasionally, but mostly listened and watched as this world completely unknown to me unfolded in the high walls of the old palace.

The exhibit eventually spit me out in the bright light of the afternoon, and I took a long route back, meandering through the park whose paths were landscaped by Goethe. The place alternated between some landscaped regions on the bank of the river closest to towns, to sprawling greens and drooping trees on the part which I walked. It was a place that would almost make me believe in the idyllic settings created by Fragonard. I walked until the sun looked like it would beat me on the way down, and so I quickly retreated to the welcome bohemian hostel.

It turns out our odd Russian friend was there again, and he seemed very happy to see me. He kept trying to talk to me in Russian, or German, or whatever it was, when all I really wanted to do was to eat and read in peace. I tried moving out of the bedroom that we were all sharing and into the dining room area, where I seated myself at one end of the long table away from the residents, who spoke quietly in German to each other. But he followed me there! I buried my head in my book and hoped that he would not talk to me, but he kept trying to get my attention, and when I would look up, he would stare at me with a kind of blank look on his face as he tried to scrap together bits and pieces of English. Which usually resulted in bits and pieces of German emerging from his mouth.

I retreated to the room, to find myself in the company of a girl who looked about my age and who I spoke to rapidly, pointing at the door through which the Russian would emerge. She told me she didn’t speak much English but she seemed to understand the gist of what I was saying, and when a friend of hers entered the room, she explained the situation to her also… Then the Russian returned, and stared at the three of us as we made a quick exit. The two girls, who I later disovered were German, were on summer vacation and offered to eat some dinner with me. Although I had already had a peanut butter sandwich, they were cooking up some good looking pasta in the kitchen and I desperately wanted their company over the Russians. So we hung out while the water boiled. The Russian kept coming in and leaving, trying to talk to us, and we told him to go away every time. The situation got stranger and stranger until I finally just went upstairs to where the art students lived. I told them that this guy had been following us around for the past hour, and they promised to help—they would get a friend who spoke Russian to talk to him.

In the meantime, the two girls and myself had seated ourselves at one end of the very long table and began talking, trying to ignore this strange man who had taken it upon himself to sit down next to us. I found out that they were from the southern part of Germany and that they were both just out of high school. They had traveled by train. We started talking about where we were from and what schools were like and what we liked to study, trying to talk over the huge white elephant sitting at the same table and staring at us. Luckily before the end of dinner the Russian speaking hostel person came and rescued us. Instead of having to share a room with this strange man, all three of us and the shy Asian I had met earlier got to change rooms.

Later that night, after we had settled in, the two girls, another guy we had met in the hostel who spoke Chinese and German, and myself went on a big meandering walk around the town. We passed the now mostly closed shops, and I asked Steffi (she was the one who spoke better English) about her favorite types of music, discovering in her a big affinity toward punk and indie rock music, although she said that she also really liked the Chili Peppers. I guess American media dominates the whole world; I don’t think I have been to a single place where American music has been absent. Its everywhere. She told me about where she was from, and how different it was from here. She said that because of Germany’s late unification there were a number of different German dialects and food, and cultural traditions that varied greatly from region to region. Which I of course found very interesting, and shared with her in turn my impressions of the American south. She asked me about the Civil War, and was shocked to hear me tell her that there are still placed in South Carolina that fly the Stars and Bars. She asked if the Civil War was a bigger deal in the States than WWII—and followed up her question by saying that, of course, WWII is huge for Germany. She told me that displaying the Swastika is outlawed, and that many Germans still feel guilty for the war, and that identifying oneself as a German outside of the country could bring trouble.

I was surprised that the ramifications from the war still resonated in her—someone way too young to have lived in it. But like in the States, there are reminders everywhere, and every history class speaks about it. The Germans are probably more highly conscious of the war than anyone else due to their involvement and the huge reparations that they had to make afterwards, resulting in such a big guilt complex. It was interesting to hear about though, and the four of us settled down in a table—myself and Seffi chatting in English, and her friend and the guy in German. I felt quite multicultural.

But soon enough it was bedtime, and we retreated back to our Russian-free room to talk some more, check emails and sleep. Although I would have liked to avoid the uncomfortable encounter with the Russian, meeting the girls was definitely worth it. We exchanged email addresses and I told them that if they ever wanted to visit the US they should look me up. Its amazing what friendly people I have met so far.

The Bauhaus at Dessau

The next morning I woke up and hiked through the woods and got on the bus to get on the train to go to Dessau, which was an easy ride. Finding the Bauhaus school was not very hard either—I went straight to the tourist information booth just outside of the train station and the disgruntled looking woman sitting there grudgingly gave me a map of the city and the Bauhaus buildings, and the Bauhaus school itself was only a short hop across a modern looking bridge to a residential district in the city. I shy looking Asian woman and her boyfriend followed me off the train—apparently they were Bauhaus devotees as well and were looking for a day tour of the city, starting with the main event—the Gropius designed Bauhaus school itself. So I trundled along, suitcase in tow, while they walked easily, only lightly burdened. But we turned the corner and entered an entirely different part of the city—complete with even more avante garde looking buildings and signs denoting some kind of school.

I stepped closer and I noticed that it was, in fact, a design school, and each building was different than the next. Some contained a scattering of marble and glass, open to the street, and another one looked like a reincarnation of a greenhouse, except where the plants were supposed to be, desks and chairs and computer screens lined the walls. Finally, just as we rounded the corner and I could see the distinctive porches of the Bauhaus school rising in the distance, I ran into the oddest building of all—what was called the Exposition Wurm. It looked like a tent and a spaceship all rolled up into one—white translucent canvas sheets stretched over curved wooden arches and closed off in one direction by a clear door. It was evidently some very experimental type of school... and I was interested to want to learn more.

But the first order of the day was to finally drop off my bags at the school. I knew from reading which of the buildings was for the students, but since none of the entrances were labeled, I had no idea where the reception was because I certainly knew that I could not waltz right into a room without a key. I actually ended up walking into the cafeteria area first, bags in tow, to find an only-German speaking staff that looked rather puzzled at my appearance. Luckily, one of the people waiting to get the food spoke enough English to translate my question, and sent me two flights up the stairs where I repeated my question again, and got directed up another flight, to be greeted by a stout but well dressed middle aged woman named Frau Oede who, in keeping with what would become the theme of the day, spoke no English (of course). But she called in another younger woman to translate, and without further ado I got my keys to my lovely student apartment on the fourth floor of the Bauhaus school. Which also meant that I had to take all of my bags back down the stairs, outside of the building, and up the stairs, admirably marked with a bright red metal banister. I reached the fourth floor to find my keys stuck, but after a few minutes a guy in dark clothes and dark rimmed glasses came to my rescue. He spoke perfect American English and I asked him where he was from. Turns out he was affiliated with the University of Ohio or somewhere in the Midwest and that he was giving a lecture on the Bauhaus in Dessau. He was here to do research. I asked him when he was lecturing, intrigued, but it was not for a few weeks and I told him that I was going to Weimar afterwards. He told me that was where he was going too—and asked me where I had come from. I told him I had just visited the Bauahus Archiv in Berlin, and he laughed. It turned out that we had the exact same itinerary, except, of course, he was staying much longer than I was. I thanked him and finally got to see my room.

I was immediately pleased when I opened the door to a perfectly clean, modern and sparely furnished apartment. The room was huge, and painted entirely white. On the wall near the window was a simple orange table, flanked, of course, by a modern plastic and metal incarnation of that famous Marcel Breuer chair. I was happy to see them both, and turning around to see a massive double bed with sheets that did NOT feel like they could have been made out of paper made me so happy I was ready to jump for joy. There was no bathroom in the room, but the sink was clean with fresh fixtures and the lights were streamlined and I almost did not want to leave to see the rest of it—I was ecstatic with my choice to sleep at the Bauhaus!

But, my whole purpose of the visit was to see the rest of the Bauhaus school and buildings, so I snapped a few photographs before I destroyed the perfect simple harmony of the room. I went back down the stairs, color coded by floor, and back up the stair into the main exhibition hall to see what there was to see. Although the woman at this front desk spoke no English either, the young woman who I later discovered was the tour guide helped me figure out what to do with my afternoon. I wanted to see the masterhouses, but was disappointed to discover that the only way to get inside of them was to take the tour, which (of course) was only in German. But I decided to go on the tour anyway, so I hung to the back of the group and followed the young lady out of the door of the school and down a wooded street to where three white block houses stood in a row.

The houses were designed and built by Walter Gropius and would house the Bauhaus masters—the first house was partially destroyed but originally held the house of Feininger and Maholy-Nagy. One half of it had been destroyed by bombs, but since all three of the masterhouses were built on the same plan it is easy to reconstruct this one by comparison with the next two, which held, respectively: Muche and Schlemmer, and perhaps the most famous of the six—Kandinsky and Klee. They were all designed along Gropius’ principles of architecture. They were houses constructed of highly elementary shapes—different cubes stacked up upon one another, curves interposed where metal balconies met the straight walls. A huge window allowed for light to enter the house, and it was placed directly in the location of the stair, which sought its way up to the top. Elsewhere, the windows had more of a ribbon-quality, and the entire exterior spoke of a kind of simple and rational housing.

With the help of the guide we entered the house. I was also pleased to discover that she usually gave me a little aside in English—a sort of Cliff’s notes version of the longer speech she had been making in German—whenever we were moving locations. I think she felt bad for the fact that I spoke none of the language and still wanted to come on the tour anyway. The inside of the buildings were just as functional, but quite a bit more colorful than the exteriors. All of the walls were painted crazy colors—usually a flat hue in a primary, but occasionally a more eccentric gold or green as well! And the building proliferated with built-ins. There were small shelves over the exposed radiators to make more space, and closets with drawers and shelves to suit every need. The kitchen was even divided into two parts to separate the washing and cleaning of dishes from their preparation, with a special dumbwaiter to bring up food from the cellar, without needing to make the trek all of the way into the basement.

Each of the houses had been converted into a different museum—one devoted to a local musician, and the Kandinsky-Klee house had (appropriately) been converted into a museum for some of Kandinsky’s smaller works. I really enjoyed seeing each of the houses, a duplex house with identical floor plans that were turned 90 degrees from each other so that a frontal view of the house afforts each side its own private balcony and entrance way, and private stair.

But the most impressive part of all was that the typical view of white boxy modernism was completely upended in this tour. The interior was anything but white—the furniture and the building itself were painted a huge managerie of colors, and even when I returned to the Bauhaus school itself I noticed cues on the interior to help navigate the building, up to the red stair that tied the four floors of the student quarters together.

Upon exiting the building, I noticed tons of art and architecture students, scattered among the pine trees sketching away like I had been scribbling in my notebook. It was an idyllic location, with different birds chirping away and a very nice cool breeze gently moving the trees. The group dispersed and I walked slowly back with the tour guide, who filled me in on some of the details I had missed in the German tour. She told me some more about the history of the Bauhaus, and when I returned to the school itself I discovered that she would be the tour guide for the following tour—the one of the school. And, for this one, I would be given an audio guide in English, so I got to be the only one following the tour who was allowed to pay absolutely no attention to what she was saying and get completely engrossed in my digital guide.

I followed the German-speaking group around to the more inaccessible parts of the Bauhaus. We started out on the main stair, which led to the auditorium area, which by a huge curtain wall was divided from the staircase and from the cafeteria area which I had run into earlier. It was there that the tour guide demonstrated some of the more technical innovations that Gropius incorporated into the Bauhaus school—columns of windows that could be opened by pulling on a single bar, which operated a multitude of hinges, and seats with folding parts made entirely of spare canvas and steel that looked more like director’s chairs than anything else, and a stage set that could accommodate multiple different types of performances. Oskar Schlemmer was the master who tended to stage these—fantastic performances with the players dressed up in outfits that made them look like different combinations of polygons. This was another element of the Bauhaus school that I had not explored very much—the theater school, in which those involved in woodshop and textiles could try out their skills on a live stage. The Bauhaus wanted to do everything.

Then we went on, up to some of the teacher’s quarters, which stood on the bridge area that separated the three parts of the building—the student’s housing, which stood in an upright block, the long windowed wall of the design studios, and the more traditional-looking classrooms. A street ran between the student housing and design studios and the classrooms, and Gropius simply spanned the space with a bridge, full of two floors of offices. Here, we could step inside one of the rooms, where a spare but efficient desk of a light colored wood and glass occupied one wall. The wall with the door had a built in closet with a tiny sink, and the rest was painted and wallpapered in different textures and colors. Quite different from the white walled modernism that I was used to thinking of—maybe my perceptions had been biased by the black and white pictures I had always seen of the place—knowing that the exterior was white made me assume that the grey interiors must have been that color. The desk was interesting two—it had a built in file tray made of glass that was supported not from below, as is traditional, but hanging down from a strip of wood that curved over the top, ending about six inches from the desk top and leaving the space underneath it completely free. Such is the innovation of the Bauhaus.

The last place we visited was a classroom, which was by far the most conventional of the places we saw, complete with rows of modern looking desks and chairs, and a ribbon of windows near the top. Looking out of these we could see the solid glass curtain wall of the design studios. This is one of the most impressive parts of the building, and is almost always featured in photographs—because one corner is completely glassed in—unstopped by any kind of roof support. In fact, the roof is not supported by the exterior walls at all, which simply wrap around the building like fly netting. The real support is found internally, which leaves the corner free to be completely glass. Such an innovation is now a normal part of the exterior of modern skyscrapers, but this was one of the first times that it was used. The walls were not even connected to the floors—a little gap allowed for the free circulation of air (which turned out to not be so advantageous—sound and smell could just as easily move). And we visited the student apartments, which of course I had seen already, because I was living in it!

And the tour ended, bringing me back to where I started in the main stairwell of the school. I was impressed with all I had seen. The Bauhaus truly was integrated—the lights, door handles, fixtures, and fabric had all been a product of a member of the school itself. The Gropius door handle was never patented and has since found its way into every halfway modern establishment. I am sure that Lowe’s probably contains a handle whose shaft is cubical and ends in a cylinder turned 90 degrees so that it is parallel to the plane of the door. The Bauhaus is so ubiquitous that it dosen’t seem revolutionary anymore.

I took some time to browse the permanent exhibition that I had missed on the way in; it contained more of what I had seen in the Archiv. Bowls, plates, typefont, teakettles, chairs, and publications lined the well lit cabinets. But I could feel myself fading. The excitement and the business of Berlin was finally catching up with me, and instead of spending more time seeing what was already familiar, I opted instead to retreat to my wonderful room and take a nap.

I woke up much later than I expected. The sun was already starting to fade from the sky, but I got up and decided that I would take a short walk before I had dinner. I ventured out of the Bauhaus, past what I learned was a new incarnation of the Bauhaus school—a design and architecture school run in an unconventional manner, not offering any recognizable certificate, and taught in English. Something to look into for the future…

I came out by the residential area I had passed on the way in, and saw a sign for a tiergarden. I knew that there were a few notable buildings in the place, so I decided to take a look around. The paths were wide and well marked, and the park ended up being huge—I spend an hour walking past sunlit glades complete with some old stone urns. I turned down one road and found myself contemplating a footbridge over some still water, the whole thing framed by arching trees. It was all so romantic, and I took the time to let myself relax and slow down as I lost myself in this German fairytale.

After a while, I found the Schloss, a stately neoclassical white building set near the edge of the park where the shadows of houses and the hum of the road could just barely be seen through the trees. It was an art museum converted from a mansion, which had closed hours ago, but walking around to the back I could see rows of chairs and cars and voices. The chairs were set neatly into rows, and it looked like it could have been preparations for a wedding—highly believable in such a beautiful setting—but I asked some of the people standing around and it turned out to be an open air theater. I was standing behind the stage building, and the rows of chairs were for a very small but apparently attentive audience. I walked around the side to see folks in costume moving and gesticulating on the stage, and stopped for a moment to watch (I could understand none of it, being in German) before moving back into the forest.

It was a lovely walk. I am very appreciative that the Germans are so conscious about maintaining their green spaces. Almost every place that I have seen has at least one park, and ample room for pedestrians and bicycles. They are even allowed on the subway and on the trains, and I have never seen as many in use as I have here. This is an outdoorsman’s paradise.

After leaving the park, I took a brief stroll back across the bridge and into the city itself, passing a number of well maintained streets before reaching the National Theater, and I stopped to admire its lovely appearance before I realized that the sun really was fading fast. I headed back to the Bauhaus.

I still had not had dinner yet, but my trusty Let’s Go Germany had informed me that the best place to go was at the Bauhaus Kafe, located in the basement of the studio building. I walked down the stairs to a quietly glowing bar and a number of small black Marcel Breuer chairs and tables. A number of students sat there, sipping on tall beers and smoking cigarettes and talking about whatever art students talk about. I grabbed a table for myself and ordered some couscous salad, which was light but satisfying. And then after that it was some blogging and bed. I was exhausted from my long days in Berlin, but so happy to have seen so much. And there was more to come!

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.

Berlin

June 2, 2007

Berlin, Germany

Now I am really all alone. After gradually adjusting to life after following a human herd everywhere, I am finally a free person, able to wake up when I want, sleep when I want and go and do whatever I want. But it’s a strange feeling. I walk the streets and whenever I think of something funny to say, the only thing I can do is try to remember it so I can put it into a blog or an email. But there is no immediate gratification of being able to say it directly to someone else and get their input, and the only people I talk to are those who are helping me to navigate Berlin itself or those who I share rooms with at the hostel.

I was initially very intimidated at the thought of sharing my bedroom with a bunch of strangers, but it is actually turning out much better than I expected. Generally, the folks here are very friendly and nice and the hostel is clean. I am located in the edge of the Grunewald forest, which is in the far southwestern corner of Berlin, off of most of the maps. I have to walk through the woods to take a bus to be in the heart of the city. On the plus side, the location makes the place very quiet at night and the forest offers good running trails. But it also means a one hour commute which means that when I leave for the day I often do not return until dinnertime. Or even past it.

That first morning I woke up brutally early, and caught the bus to the airport in Thesaloniki, where I luckily did not have too long to wait before boarding the plane and falling asleep, as yet unrecovered from my late night with Elena in Xanthi. I woke up not long before we touched down in Berlin.

It was a long process to reach the hostel. The airport was confusing, and I went up and down several flights of stairs before I finally reached the bus depot, and made it just in time to grab the X9 bus from the Berlin Tegel airport into the city. The hostel had generously provided for me a list of directions that would take me to them, but I messed up on the first direction, failing to get off the bus and onto the metro at the proper time. So when I was finally dropped off at Zoo Station, I was understandably a little upset. I had no idea where I was supposed to sleep that night, and furthermore, I could not for the life of me think of how to get there. Soon enough, however, I remembered that I had copied another set of directions off of the hostel’s website, which would bring me through multiple bus changes to the place I desired.

So I set out, stuffing my bags onto the much-too-small space of the bus, and settling in for a long ride. I watched buildings and people whiz by, and soon I was entering what looked like the posh shopping district of the city—Louis Vuitton, Valentino, and others graced the sidewalk with their shiny high fashion clothes. I don’t think I had ever seen so many nice stores on one street since I had been at the Spanish Steps in Rome. Then, after a while, the neighborhood turned more residential, the shops fading into restaurants and into quiet but well maintained streets, with wide boulevards and trees. I was impressed—if this was where my hostel was located I was sure to have a good time. I got off of the bus at one stop and had to change busses, and I did a little bit of wandering to find the correct stop—sometimes there are several at one intersection. So I went into a bank and wrote down the name of the bus line on a sheet of paper. Luckily the woman spoke enough English to point me in the right direction.

And after another short bus ride I was off, on Pulkestrasser, another shady residential boulevard with a wide variety of architectrure, ranging from a highly industrial looking house with portholes on the slanting upper level, to an updated looking 2 story neoclassical. I walked with my bags as the numbers went up and up—I was looking for 54 Pulkerstrasser, and right at 52, the road dead ended into a forest. Then, back among the trees I saw a sign saying “JetPack Hostel”, and an arrow that pointed off to the left. I thought to myself “you have got to be kidding me—I am looking for a hostel in Berlin and the sign is taking me into the forest?!?”

It turns out that I was in the Grunewald forest, a 745 acre expanse to the southwest of the city. The hostel turned out to look more like a lodge than anything else—set up on a wide lawn with a variety of games in the back yard. The woman who showed me around was very nice, and the rooms, while sparse, were clean—they looked more like the housing of a sleep-away camp than anything else. I grabbed a bunk and got some sheets and took a short nap.

But, I could not fall asleep—the sudden absence of any true privacy was making me tune into every single sound in the hostel—people walking the halls, doors opening and closing, and the blare of the TV in the distance. So I gave up on sleep and asked about the quickest way into the city, taking a 10 minute walk in another direction through the woods and to a station where I could pick up the X10 bus down to the Zoo where I started my journey. I had a lot of things to do—in addition to seeing Berlin, I had to buy a bus pass, I had to go to the bank, find some food somewhere, and eventually book the rest of my trip. I had not done much planning since I had worked out my Greece itinerary, and it was time to book some more places to sleep.

I arrived into the noise and confusion of the Zoo—busses coming and going, people wandering about, and cars flitting by. However, this was a much more organized type of confustion than any other city I had been in before. The streets were wide and well paved, there were lighted signs and directions plastered everywhere, and above all, everything in this part of Berlin seemed so thoroughly modern. All around me rose high buildings faced in continuous walls of solid glass. I turned in a slow circle surveying the area before moving forward—first things first, I had to find a bank, which I did very quickly. Some parts of this city seem to have banks on just about every corner. Then it was to the information station at the huge intersection of bus, U-bahn and S-bahn lines at the Zoo—a small kiosk was set out in the bus lines where visitors could get maps and tickets. I had read in my Let’s Go Germany book that buying 48 or 72 hour passes was much cheaper than trying to buy individual tickets, so I went and set myself up with one. Then I happened to catch a glimpse of a sign across the street, stating loud and clear that it sold discounted theater tickets.

I had heard that Berlin was one of the entertainment capitals of the world, and not having a huge chance to see the nightlife of many of the other cities, I was eager to try to get my hands on a theater or concert ticket. I saw a sign for Blue Man Group, but even the half price tickets ran around 45 euro, which was more than I wanted to spend. I went up to the desk and asked the woman about some of the shows, and immediately knowing that I spoke no German she directed me to some shows that I could understand—a Disney adaptation and a show filled with various music imitators—anyone from Elton John to Tina Turner to Elvis was featured. I knew that it was kitchy, but at this point on the trip I was starting to miss anything American, so I bought my tickets for the show, which was located all of the way across town at a big hotel near Sonnenallee.

That task finished, I set about sightseeing. I took a big wandering loop out of the Zoological Garten, making my way toward one of the few old looking buildings on this block of shiny concrete and glass. It was called Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche—otherwise known as the “hollow tooth,” an 1895 church which had been blasted out in WW II and left in that state. It made a striking contrast to the other smooth-faced buildings that surrounded it-- a stone statue encrusted building left open to the sky. The points of the church were left shattered into pieces, and where a large rose window used to be gaped a dark maw. It looked like it could belong in a dystopian novel along the lines of 1984 or Brave New World, a relic of a past civilization, destroyed by war. Luckily the healthy sheen of the rest of the buildings kept that image from completely overwhelming my perception of the place. The outside of the hollow tooth was surrounded by a variety of fruit and doner vendors, with brightly striped umbrellas over their little stands.

Inside, the building was still full of a glitter of mosaics, cracked with the force of the explosion that blasted out the windows, which were only screened over and left largely open to the sky. The church was completely hollowed out—only the decoration on the walls still remained, and in its place were a bunch of photographs that showed Berlin during and after the time of the bombing—blasted out homes and partiallyshattered buildings. It looked in my mind very similar to the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum that we had seen so many months ago in Italy, but of course this damage was at the hands of man, not of natural disaster.

Then I kept walking, up to the northeast part of the city where I had seen a place marked on my map of the Deutche Oper. I continued up the wide streets, marveling at how clean and orderly they seemed in comparison to the cramped and crowded quarters of cities like Athens and Rome. I came to a huge intersection where the cars whirled about a big green roundabout in the center, and, suddenly realizing that I was quite hungry after my very early morning, long scramble through the metro, and walk across part of Berlin, I stopped at a cheap looking restaurant that advertised hamburgers and the like. I had a German version of a hamburger there; a slice of ham on a huge role supplemented by French fries and a small salad. It was delicious, especially considering that I had not eaten anything significant since very early that morning. I took out the map I had been given with the metro ticket I had gotten, and took out my book, highlighting and circling the things I wanted to see for my stay there. It was a lot. But it looked like all of the things I wanted to see were clustered around a few major areas—Musuem Insel, which contained a number of museums, the Tiergarten and the Reichstag, and then over in eastern Berlin were the remains of the wall and the Jewish Museum, designed by the famous Architect Daniel Libeskind. But with everything closed or closing at that point in the afternoon, I was content simply to walk around and see what I wanted to see.

Berlin struck me as an immensely modern city. I had not seen any of the more historic monuments yet, with the exception of the broken tooth, and here most of the buildings were imposing steel and glass structures, and the streets were wide with huge sidewalks. This was one huge difference between Berlin and anywhere else—I could walk along the streets without feeling like I was risking being hit by traffic. And, there were special areas on the sidewalk designated for bicycle traffic (not motorcycles, which dominated the cities in Greece and Italy) in red colored bricks that allowed for the separation of pedestrians and other forms of traffic. All in all, it felt very German—efficient, clean, and highly organized.

After a while, I came to the Deutche Oper, a massive cement building balancing precariously on an impossibly small, recessed base painted black. It looked like a science experiment where one had to balance a brick upon eggshells—the huge mass of the upper portion of the building dominated, making it look as if any minute it might squish the smaller supporting area underneath. The ground floor was covered along the front wall with movie posters and the like, but nothing looked as if it was playing during my short stay in the city.

So, I continued on my way, up and around the city streets for a bit, before hopping on the nearest metro and journeying all of the way across town, to Sonnenalle. I was now in eastern Berlin, and the metro quickly moved from being underground to an above ground track, and I had to change several times, emerging to turn of the century looking platforms complete with brick and wrought iron. Most of the area I saw in eastern Berlin looked like this—far more old world seeming, with narrower streets and heavier use of brick. Even the streets were cobblestoned in places. The housing apartments rose in stocky blocks, small windowed and textured by their concrete or block construction, which struck me as much more similar to the housing developments I had seen in Athens and in Greece than in anything in the western side of Berlin, which was dominated either by steel and glass, or even farther west and south to tree lined family homes.

I was going to see “Stars in Concert” at a huge hotel in the area, and I quickly spotted it because it rose high above any of the other complexes close by. It looked brand new, with lobbies that contained minimalist furniture and a multitude of levels to accommodate bars, coffee shops, and piano lounges. I felt like I had stepped out of my normal world of hostels and cheap hotels into an entirely different world. The women were dressed in slightly overdone outfits, and the men strutted about and smoked cigars and ordered overpriced drinks from the hotel staff. It really was like stepping into a casino or a resort, and I felt like an intruder with my practical walking shoes and bag. Nevertheless, I had some time before the show was supposed to start, so I settled myself into one of the simple orange chairs and ordered coffee—one of the cheapest items on the menu. I sat and watched the people, mostly middle aged couples and sometimes their children, which looked entirely bored with the whole affair, walk around and waste time until the show started.

When it neared 8, I walked through the doors leading to the concert area, and was surprised to find myself entering a large room set up with a series of small tables lit by glowing candles and graced with a wine decanter. The walls were black, and in the front was a small stage with a piano and some drum equipment. I had expected more of a theater type experience, but this was more along the lines of a lounge than anything else.

And the show began. It was cheesy, but very entertaining. Some of the “artists” were before my time, so I only recognized some of the songs, but everyone seemed to have fun. It was just so funny to be sitting there, in the middle of Berlin, at a show that wanted to imitate Las Vegas, which was itself an amalgam of all of the best parts of other cities, a place completely based upon the manufacture of spectacle. So this show was twice removed from the reality of the original artists—first through Berlin, and then through Las Vegas. Everything was mediated by stereotypes and images—the Elton John impersonator wore loud outfits and banged on the piano keys, while behind him on either side video of the real Elton John was synced with the song. But neither was the actual Elton himself—one was a live impersonator, and the other was a video reproduction several years old. This was a study in strategic inauthenticity if I ever saw one, and while I did enjoy myself, I thought it was strange that for me and for members of the younger generations not as familiar with these classic artists that my first introduction to them would be through the double-blind of the Berlin-Vegas Stars in Concert. But this was my reality, constructed by false images. I had never seen the real Elvis, and indeed had only heard some of his songs, so when I saw the gyrating hips of the man on stage and compared it to the grainy video of Elvis behind him I found a faithful imitation. But perhaps to someone who had seen the real Elvis it would be different. The aura would be gone.

But perhaps that’s the anthropologist in me speaking. Half of the time in the concert I was thinking about my image-constructed false reality. Soundbytes from Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and pieces from other theorists dealing with our media saturated world kept filtering through my head. One guy named Appadurai (if I am remembering this right) wrote that South Pacific Islanders in some instances were more faithful to American 1950s music than we were in the US. In that same vein, is this music more faithful to the original? Does the imitation of an already false reality make this production more real? In other words, was it easier to imitate Las Vegas, than something less media and imitation based?

Anyway, the show was fun, and at the end of it, all of the “artists”, which included Elton John, Elvis, Rod Stewart, Tina Turner, and ABBA came on stage to sing a Beatles song, to which everyone stood up and clapped and sang as they exited. We were released back to reality, and I walked back to the subway to make my way back home.

I was on the train when a young man approached me and asked me where I was going. I had been studying the metro map quite intently, and I think he wanted to help. Pretty soon we had struck up a conversation in the flying darkness underground, and he invited me to stop at the next station and grab a beer. So I did.

His name was something unpronounceable, and he was originally from Turkey but had moved to Berlin and was enrolled in the Polytechnic Institute. I found out that he studied computers and mathematics and had also lived in Barcelona and was planning on going to Chicago for a while. Truly a world citizen. However, his English was limited, and a good deal of the conversation took place by scribbling images on the coaster we had in front of us, and a lot of pointing and gesturing. We ordered some of the local beer, which I surprised myself by actually liking (generally I don’t like beer), and passed a few hours telling broken stories and laughing at the confusion when sometimes the message did not get across quite correctly.

But by around midnight, I was practically snoozing over my beer—the long day of travel was catching up with me, and I realized that I needed to get back to the hostel with out any more attention than I had gotten. So this guy escorted me onto the metro, and when we stopped at the Zoo, I quickly hopped on the bus to take me home. Much to his disappointment and confusion I am sure, because although I had a good time and for him the night was young (as it always seems to be in Europe) I really just wanted to sleep.

I got off at the stop to find the streets at night completely foreign to how I had remembered. After wandering up and down the streets for a while, I finally gave up and hailed a taxi, which took all of 2 minutes to take me to the right street. I think I actually ended up paying more for the initial meter price than the distance that he drove. But at last, I was home, and walked the short walk through the woods, and being quiet not to disturb my as-yet-unknown roommates, I slept.

Today was another busy day. I woke up still in all of my clothes from the previous night, having been too tired to turn on the lights and dig around in my suitcase, and awoke to the shuffling of clothing and sheets as my fellow sleepers were getting up for the day. I saw two people, a couple or friends, who spoke rapidly in a language I did not understand and simply nodded when I said goodmorning. I headed down to breakfast and made a hasty introduction before setting out for the day.

I was on a mission to find the Olympic Stadium, which was fairly easily accessible via metro. Unfortunately for me it was a Saturday and the express bus which had aided me on the previous day was not working, and I realized just when I got to the stop and bus after bus with out the name X10 plastered on the front came and left that I probably needed to find another ride into the city. So I looked on the bus schedules to find a bus line that intersected with an S-bahn or a U-bahn and got on that one, extending my commute from 30 mintues to an hour. I got out and changed at Zoo station, taking the line all of the way out to Olympiastadion, emerging in the grey morning mist.

The complex was immense, and lacked all manner of openness that Calatrava’s contained. This complex was concerned solely with monumentality, and I could see it everywhere, in the high, imposing walls and the huge monolithic towers that blocked out parts of the sky overhead. The entire thing was arranged along two major axes: the first led from the S bahn which I had taken to arrive at the stadium, and from there the trees and sidewalk formed a promenade that ended straight at the arena. From my location facing the stadium, off to the left I could see the other major axis of the place, and this one was undoubtably bigger, judging by the way the huge towers and the grand entrance to the stadium faced this way. It also opened up to the U-bahn—the other access to the space.

Everywhere here things were done in strict linearity. Unlike Calatrava’s Olympic complex, which swelled and curved, delighting in the contrast between its organic forms and the boxy forms around it, this stadium complex seemed to want to constrict the organic as much as possible, dividing everything into an orthagonality. The stadium itself resembled the coliseum in many ways—several tiers of columns marching around the exterior, all done up in a somber dark stone. I could not see a bigger contrast between the flamboyant exuberance of the curves that graced the top of Calatrava’s roof. Here, the stadium ended simply and abruptly at the last row of columns, and the roof that was added later did not interrupt the orthogonal nature of the whole construction.

I walked around the exterior, moving in a clockwise direction, to see if there was any place where I could actually get inside of the building and see how it worked. I passed a Jesse Owens allee, a name change to compensate for Hitler’s poor treatment of the man after he won an indordinate number of gold medals in the 1936 Olympics. Continuing on, I passed an arena for use in horseracing; apparently it was one of the first structures on the site, and through the gate I could see the rooftops of stables and what looked like horse trailers. Then I kept going, until I came ¼ of the way around the arena, and I was standing on the primary axis of the site. Here, in one direction a wide road faded off into the distance, and in the other, a highly regular building confronted me, and standing in the direct center of this low colonnaded building was a huge tower, one which I had seen upon first viewing the stadium complex, but had never seen up close. The whole thing was made up of the same dark flat stone, and on the other side of the building I could see a massive field stretching in the opposite direction, terminating where the stadium itself began.

It turns out that this was the museum. I walked up to and through the columns before paying for my ticket and entering the galleries, where I learned the history of the site, its construction and its use. The current building was built over an earlier facility by Hitler in preparations for the 1936 Olympic Games. In the process the whole site was monumentalized and enlarged, with the addition of a swimming complex, and the huge towers that accented the primary axis of the site. The stadium was originally open air, and could seat some 70,000 spectators, and was later modified that it could hold close to 100,000. Significantly, it was also heavily used for Nazi party rallies: the combination of civic duty, military strength, and athletic spectale was something that Hitler himself promoted. I found it particularly interesting that in his mind the strength of the state was correlated strongly with a strong, healthy body, and the sporting events and other demonstrations that took place here served to link these two aspects in the minds of the German people.

I also found some information on a German “gymnastics movement,” which predated the construction of the stadium but also pointed to a link between national identity and athletics. Hitler would take this idea and turn it to his own ends, promoting “fitness” of the superior german people through athletic events and spectacle that would showcase their prowess. Naturally, he was a little bit upset to find later when he hosted the Olympics that Jesse Owens, a black man, would be one of the most highly accomplished athletes at the games, and some stories say that he refused to award him anything. The enumeration of a Jesse Owens allee around the stadium complex now is an effort to rectify the situation. All of this supports some of the ideas that are floating around for my thesi—the links between athletics and identity, the reinforcement of certain social values through spectacle, and the associations of these values with the symbol of the stadium complex itself.

The stadium complex was taken over by the Americans and the British during their occupation of Germany in WWII, and they used it in similar ways, hosting their own party rallies and demonstrations.

However, it was largely left untouched until 1974 when it gained a new roof and some renovations due to the hosting of the FIFA World Cup. In 2000-2004 it was modified again to accommodate some of the requirements of modern sports—skyboxes were added in the division between the lower level of seats and the upper level, and a new roof was added, bringing the seating capacity back down to about 74,000. A track was added around the interior, painted an uncharacteristic blue color in part, I think, to divorce it from the shadows of its bright red Nazi origins. It hosted the World Cup in 2006, an event which many believe has finally allowed it to step out of its past and firmly into the present. The continuing use of the stadium is interesting to me for a few reasons—the fact that it was such a symbol for the Nazi party makes it a curious choice for continued use. Was it just too expensive to tear down? Or perhaps this is a perfect example of the ability of symbols to change their meanings over time, and the physical additions to the space make it a bit different than it was in its original 1936 incarnation.

Lots of stuff to think about at least!

So after seeing the exhibit I took the elevator up to the high tower, from which I could see the parade grounds and the stadium close to me, with another set of towers flanking the complex on the other side. There were four in total, grouped in pairs and set flanking the massive entrance to the stadium from the U-bahn entrance. Between each pair was hung a gigantic set of Olympic rings. Farther in the distance I could see the surrounding complex ranging about—training grounds with soccer fields, the pool, and forest stretching off to where the taller buildings of the Berlin skyline poked their heads skywards. Although I could not identify very many by name at the time, I am sure that some of them probably included the giant radio tower close to Alexanderplatz and the Reichstag.

The view was amazing. I stood with my mouth hanging open for quite a while, taking it all in. I could even see some activity going on inside of the stadium itself—a big screen TV was visible opposite the arena from my vantage point, and I could see colors and shapes flickering across it as it appeared that some kind of screen test was taking place. Curious, I exited the museum and walked all of the way around to the opposite side of the stadium complex to the U bahn entrance. I ran into a huge amount of noise and loud music—there was some sort of festival going on with food stands and a band and a number of other activities. I went over to the information booth and asked about what was going on, and they told me that there was a football game that day. “Football?” I asked, “you mean American Football?!?!?”

It turns out that there is an NFLeuropa league, which contains quite a few German teams, among them the Berlin Thunder and the Frankfurt Galaxy, who happened to be playing each other later that day, in the Olympic Complex. Naturally, I had to get a ticket. I did a bit more wandering around the festival area, which I could see now was plastered with the same signs I had seen in the metro—glossy pictures of football players and cheerleaders with the brazen heading “The Hometown of Touchdown.” I wanted to see other things before returning, so I walked down this avenue of tents before I jumped on the U-bahn and headed over to another part of Berlin.

This area was rather close to the stadium, and I got off at the station and took a long walk down a tree lined street to reach the Schloss Charlottenburg, a turn of the century palace which had immaculately manicured gardens and two huge museums, one that contained ancient Egyptian works and another dedicated to Picasso and his contemporaries. But by the time I reached the place, I got hit with a wave of exhaustion so heavy I decided to scrap the whole thing and go back to the hostel for a nap and some rest. I wandered around the outside of the grounds and then walked back to the metro, for the long ride home. I almost fell asleep on the way.

After my nap, I woke up quite a bit more refreshed and had just enough time to throw on a warmer set of clothing (Berlin gets quite cool in the evening, and after so long in a Mediterranean climate its hard to get used to) before walking to the bus stop and taking another hour long commute over to the Olympic Stadium.

It was not as busy as I expected—I saw a few people milling about and the last vestiges of the festival getting packed up. I walked through the entrance gate and game up close to the arena itself, even more imposing up close than far away, where the dark stone meets in rigid lines overhead. I took a wide set of stairs up to the second level, up to the nosebleed section where my seats were located, and got settled.

The arena was less than half filled, but the fans were very enthusiastic. They did many of the same things I had witnessed at the soccer game so long ago, but there were some differences, which included:

 A mixture of German and English over the loudspeaker. The officials looked and sounded like native English speakers, and all of the play calls were made in English, while the announcer spoke German.

 Chants included some songs, but by and large they included cheers that reacted directly to the events of the game, instead of going on in a continuous fashion. I think this may have been due more to the stop-and-start nature of football itself than anything else.

 Music was a constant feature, played every time the play on the field stopped. I know from being at pro basketball games that the same things happens there, and I wonder if it is a feature of the professional leagues. Never having been to a pro football game in the states, though, its hard to say whether this is a pro thing or a NFL europa thing. And, the music was mostly American pop music

 Cheerleaders were present, and they would lead some of the chanting, and would always dance between the plays in the game.

 As before, noisemakers and flags were a big presence, and lots of spectators wore jerseys and other paraphernalia.

Everything that I think of as standard football stuff was present—Cheerleaders with big hair and small outfits, a blaring announcer, a huge TV which replayed events over and over again, and even the stands-vendors, who in this instance sold huge pretzels instead of popcorn or whatever they sell in the states. It was just funny to see it in a European setting, where the spectators used whistles and songs just as enthusiastically as the regular cheering, and the announcer would shout “I can’t hear you BERLIN!!” At one point, I even heard the dreaded noise of the Seminole chant-and-chop, which left me all but frozen in my seat. I realized again there just how many meanings can be attached to a symbol like that. For me, the sequence of sounds and the chopping motion brought back memories of a particular Gator football game which I had attended in which we were badly beaten, at home, by FSU. But I am sure that none of the Berliners had anything remotely close to war paint and feathers in their minds when they started singing “aaaahhh-ahhhh-aaah, uhhhh, uhhh, uhhhh.” But I certainly did.

When the game ended, I was getting rather cold, so I walked briskly out with the stream of people and took a long ride back to the hostel. There, I found roommates I had barely seen in the past few days and began some conversations with them. The twosome I had seen earlier were from Veinna and the Netherlands, respectively, and they had been studying in Sweden and were on their way home for summer holiday. The other guy that was rooming with me was from Brazil, and was in Berlin for some kind of science conference. We all hung out in the common room for several hours and traded stories, and I showed them pictures on my computer from all of the places I had been. The one from Vienna, a blond guy named Stefan, was particulary interested in Egypt. He said that he wanted to go there soon, and afterward started to convince me to visit him in Vienna instead of going to Switzerland. He said it was much better than anything I would find there, and I told him that I had already bought my rail ticket. He looked disappointed, but he and I exchanged email addresses and I agreed to let him know if I was going to change my mind and see Austria instead. I agreed.

The woman named Jane was also studying and traveling, and she seemed more content to sit and watch the movie which blared in the background. Staying in these hostels is really like being on a freshman dorm—we share bathrooms, and everyone is new. As a result, I stayed up way later than I would have liked just talking to my roommates about what they had seen and what they wanted to see in Europe, comparing notes and stories. I went to bed tired but happy. The hostelling was working out much better than I expected.