[Helen’s been a friend for a great number of years now, as
readers of ROT will already know. A few weeks
ago, she wrote me that she and her daughter had just gotten back from a
five-day visit to Berlin between Sunday, 16 June, and Friday, 21 June. She commented off-handedly, “I remember your
telling me that you were stationed in Berlin – isn't that right?” It is, in fact—also as ROTters might recall (I’ve written about some
of my experiences there often enough!).
I spent 2½ years between 1971 and 1974 in West Berlin—it was a divided
city then—as a U.S. Army intelligence officer.
Needless to say, Cold War Berlin was vastly different from the
21st-century reunified city Helen and her daughter saw. (For a comparison of “my” city with the one
Helen and Rava visited, see “The Berlin Wall,” 29 November 2009, and “Berlin
Station,” 19 and 22 July 2009.)
[Helen originally composed this journal in note form after her return to Tel Aviv, with truncated syntax and abbreviations which she asked me to expand and adjust. (I checked with her whenever I had questions, so her intent was never altered.) I also took the opportunity now and then to insert remarks for clarification, translation (both to and from German as well as Helen’s British usage), or just personal asides. Those insertions are all enclosed in brackets so readers can distinguish my prose from Helen’s own. (The dates in the headings below are when Helen composed each section of her journal.) ~Rick]
* * * *
Berlin
today is 'just a big city' that tries not to be burdened by its past, a remark
that might well be hindsight, because while we were in Berlin, My daughter Rava and I were
too busy soaking up impressions and looking at things. We neither of us spoke
to a single echt [it means ‘real’ ~Rick] Berliner. We neither of us
spoke more than 3½ words of German . . . and I don't know why. Nor did anybody
speak to us.
There
are thousands of Israelis living and working in Berlin. We didn't meet a one of
them, or any Israeli tourists, except for one time in a subway station poring
over a map, and then, strange coincidence, the same family appeared at
Corroborree in Sony Center. I said nothing to Rava, who'd not noticed.
Our
hotel was in a Muslim area, or apparently a largely Muslim area. Whether these
were descendants of former gastarbeiter [‘guest workers’—immigrant laborers]
or not, I couldn't say because they all spoke German.
By
the way – at no time was public transportation crowded, nor were the streets
traffic-clogged, not even at rush-hour. Alex explained to us that a lot of
people had already gone on vacation – once the kids were out of school, the
families take off. Out in the country, like on the way to Treptow and Potsdam,
we saw enclaves of little vacation homes, each with its own patch of garden to
which families come for a 'pastoral' summer. [These are sometimes called Grünstücke,
“patches of green,” and often contain little more than a hut or lean-to
surrounded by a large vegetable or flower garden where Germans spend a sunny
afternoon or warm evening with a snack and a glass of tea, beer, or wine while
they garden or just relax. Some more
substantial Grünstücke include houses in which the owners can spend a
weekend or longer. ~Rick]
BERLIN
PART I
23/6/2013
Here I am, all bright-eyed and
bushy-tailed after the best night’s sleep I’ve had since we left for Berlin
Naturally (for me), I did not sleep a wink
before leaving for airport at 0245 [that’s 2:45 a.m. in American—what we’d have
called “oh dark thirty” in the army ~Rick].
Rava, who can sleep anywhere, immediately dove into a deep sleep on
the plane for a couple of hours, so that by the time we got to our hotel I was
quite literally reeling with exhaustion.
The Pension Galerie is on Hedemannstrasse, a
quiet street . . . if you type in “pension galerie berlin” in a search engine, you’ll
get to the site . . . then go to pix 58 & 59 on the photo gallery and you’ll
see our room.
It was on the ground floor in the back of the
building overlooking a courtyard into which the sun never penetrated. Given
that it was blisteringly hot every day we were there – this was a very good
deal as the room stayed cool and comfortable. Indeed, we were snug there and
enough drawer space for five times as much luggage as we brought. Rava and I
travel light.
Anyway, on arrival we were offered breakfast
which we gratefully accepted . . . and then both of us fell into bed. I managed
to sleep for a couple of hours, and then it was off exploring. We didn’t do
much that first day – walked up to the Potsdamer Platz, a huge space dominated
by the glass cupola of the Sony Center.
Deciding that a cup of coffee and a piece of
cake were called for we trotted over the Artscafe down the block where sitting
in a window alcove with delicious coffee and a piece of rhubarb (sorry!) streuselkuche [crumb cake in American] we
looked down (or up) the Pariser Platz toward the Brandenburger Tor [the
Brandenburg Gate] – Berlin’s indisputable signature landmark – gleaming
goldenly in the sunlight.
We didn’t actually get there. I was too
tired, and beside we had The Marriage of
Figaro at the Komische Oper in the evening. We went back to the hotel,
rested, then Rava went out in search of food, coming back with crispy duck,
rice and Thai rolls.
Then off to the opera, a modern conception of
Figaro with an incredibly inventive
and saucily irreverent direction – Mozart would probably have loved it, but I
found it a bit cluttered. The second half wasn’t quite so busy. The set was
dominated by a huge square pillar which rose to reveal at least a cwt. of
apples [that’s a hundredweight,
equivalent to 112 lbs.]. Yes. Real ones. Why??? Original temptation of Eve???
And nobody related to them, except Susannah in passing. Never mind. All the
really lovely bel canto arias are in the second half anyway so we just sat
there and melted even more because musically and vocally it had sparkled from
the first notes of the overture.
I woke up with a headache because of the down
pillow – later changed to fiberfill – but it quickly cleared. Then off to the Berlin
landmarks – the gate, the lovely Marienkirche [St. Mary’s Church] that miraculously escaped the World
War II bombing that flattened most of Berlin, the Nikolaiviertel [Nicholas Quarter]
which is now the only remnant of medieval Berlin – though most houses were 18th-and
19th-century.
Speaking of destruction, what characterizes
Berlin is construction. Everywhere, but everywhere those huge cranes loom like
a swarm of mantises – do they swarm? The whole center of the famed Unter den Linden
is fenced off while they do something with the subway system.
From the Brandenburger Tor we
walked to the Holocaust Memorial, but I didn't remember that until I looked at
our pictures. That happened after I'd written this “Berlin diary.” I saw the
series of shots I took, and realized I'd blocked it from memory. The Holocaust Memorial is overwhelming, huge,
obtrusive, ugly and shocking as it's meant to be. A huge oblong of nameless
concrete 'tombstones' of different heights and thickness. You notice the first
one of 2 cm.
[a little over ¾ of an inch] thick, laid in the pavement, by chance. The
narrow, uneven alleyways between the stones are claustrophobic. The associations come thick and fast, of ghettos, of the
paths to the gas chambers, of depersonalization, of despoiled cemeteries, of
despair, oppression. Not many people were there. We noticed young people
dancing on top of one of the tombs. Children play on them, and that too is
intentional.
Rava said, “Imagine
all the people in those fancy apartments looking out of their windows at this.
Bet they didn't anticipate the memorial when they bought them.”
No. But I couldn't feel for them.
In the afternoon Alex, a colleague of Rava’s
who lives in Berlin, picked us up in his car and off we went to the Russian War
Memorial at Treptow, the site of the former chancellery of the “1000-Year Reich”
and other places most tourists don’t get to. He also fed us all kinds of info,
for instance that while Berlin has a central mayor, the city is actually
divided into several small towns, each with its own council and mayor!
Of all the things I saw in Berlin that
memorial was the most moving. it’s a place of pilgrimage for Russians on May 9
[Victory Day in Russia and the former Soviet republics, celebrating the Soviet Union’s defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945] to this day.
It’s huge, little h, an epic place where in four mass graves in the center of an
immense green lawn are buried the 7,000 Russian soldiers who fell in the battle
for Berlin [called the Berlin Strategic Offensive
Operation by the Soviet Union, 16 April-2 May 1945]. It’s anchored at each end by an
immense and very fine granite statue: a grieving Mother Russia at one end and
her son at the other – about a kilometer [a little over 1000 yards] away at the
opposite end of the lawn.
The entrance is two immense triangular
cenotaphs [an empty tomb,
a monument in honor of people whose remains lie somewhere else], each with its own
grieving soldier. There’s nothing abstract here, just naked sorrow and – as I
saw it – the sculptor also snuck in reverence.
The red marble cladding (is that proper name
for it?) on the cenotaphs was taken from the ruins of Hitler’s chancellery
(according to rumor) – the site of which Alex also took us to. Today it’s an apartment
house and where the Führerbunker stood is a parking lot. There’s a diagram of
the bunker at the site. The Soviets filled the place with concrete so nothing
grows there and nothing can be built. It’s small, shabby, insignificant . . . so
marvelously ignominious.
After the memorial we drove to the river bank
for a beer on a barge – Rava loves beer and she drank it every day with our
main meal!!! It was so pretty there. The Spree River meandering beneath us, the
forest of Treptow Park at our backs.
We finished the evening with liver, apples
and onions [for the culinarily challenged, this is known as Leber und Zwiebel Berliner art—“liver
and onions Berlin style” ~Rick] at a ‘typical’
Berlin resto/bar.
Must say though that Rava did her usual thing
with maps and got us unerringly where we wanted to be. She loves it. A typical
Rava pose on vacation is her poring over the map which, by the end of the
holiday, is falling apart!!
BERLIN
PART II
25/6/2013
Day 3 was Museum Island [Museumsinsel] where we visited the Neues and Pergamon
Museums for, respectively, In Light the of
Amarna:100 Years of the Nefertiti Discovery and Uruk: 5000 Years of the Megacity.
The Neues houses the busts of Nefertiti and
Akhnaton. Of course, there’s no way of knowing whether the busts on view are
the originals, but seeing the actual Nefertiti in the flesh, as it were, was
glorious. The Amarna exhibition
itself was a disappointment, being a record of 100 years of excavations at the Amarna
site where Nefertiti was discovered. The only thing that really stuck in the
mind were the wall paintings on the tombs.
At the Pergamon – named for the Altar of
Pergamon in Asia Minor [now part of Bergama, Turkey] – we were
gobstruck by the 2nd-century BCE altar. The main hall of the Pergamon is a
kind of reconstruction of the altar with the frieze running around the side and
a huge flight of steps. The gates of Ishtar from ancient Babylon are also
there. These latter were shipped to Germany in pieces in 4000 crates prior to
WWI – and then, after the war, reassembled. They are beautiful.
The Uruk
exhibition was as similarly disappointing as Amarna – we both had the feeling that it wasn’t really geared to
the lay public.
Our tenderest memory of the
Pergamon (Philistines that we are!) is the piece of mango and blackcurrant
torte we shared in the cafe.
We’d already visited Checkpoint Charlie [the
official crossing point, located in the former American Sector of the occupied
city, between West (Allied-occupied) and East (Soviet-controlled) Berlin during
the Cold War era] to take the inevitable pix by the noticeboard – “You are
leaving the American Sector” – and sandbags of the little guard post. But that
evening we went to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum which was the life work of
human rights activist Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt . . . everything I’m telling you
about is extensively documented on the web, of course!!! My point is – we were
there.
In a way, the Wall defines Berlin, a huge
scar. There’s bits and pieces of it all through the city. Alex took us to the
longest still-standing section of it, about 1.6 km. [just under a mile] running
alongside one of the broad boulevards the Soviets built. There’s more of it at
a place called The Museum of Terror, which we didn’t get to, and which documents the activities of the Third Reich’s infamous Gestapo
and SS [on the former site of whose headquarters
the Topographie des Terrors is
located,]. Western artists were invited to paint panels of it and
there are four painted Wall panels on a sidewalk, one by an American artist.
It’s just one more instance of how the Wall remains part of Berlin
consciousness.. These stand on (I think) Alexanderplatz . . . . [There is also an exhibition of 105 paintings on Wall
panels by artists from all over the world, painted in 1990 on the east side of
the Berlin Wall, at the
East Side Gallery located on Mühlenstrasse in
Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. ~Rick]
Anyway – the museum that provides
pictures, records, videos, artifacts, etc., of everything and anything to do
with the Wall from the fall of Berlin in 1945 to the fall of the Wall in 1989.
We spent a couple of hours there and tottered out, heads reeling. TMI. Oh, but
fascinating in every way – especially the methods of escape. One daring chap
actually constructed a kind of helicopter from all sorts of cannibalized parts.
Took real courage. Close to 1000 people were killed trying to escape from East
Berlin. There were Wall Helpers, brave souls who organized escapes and assisted
people to escape . . . and so on.
The following morning after breakfast – we
were bumped from “our” table for a more favored guest – we went to a market.
This was Wednesday [19 June] and the market was ⅞ empty with very few stalls.
Oh well. One of them was selling hand-painted pottery from Poland. I bought a
wee dish – I have a weakness for ceramics and china – which I ended up giving
as a gift to my upstairs neighbor who’d faithfully watered my plants while we
were away and whom I’d forgotten to buy a present for.
Another stall sold Italian pastries. There we
bought a hefty slice of almond bread to have with coffee later.
A bonus was the Catholic church
nearby that had splendid contemporary black, white and shades thereof stained
glass windows. Beautiful. Naturally we had to walk all the way around it to
find the entrance – our feet certainly had a workout in Berlin
The largest store in the city
is KaDeWe.
Like Macy’s in New York, it occupies an entire city block and is considered a
tourist Must See. [It’s more like Bloomingdale’s than Macy’s in my opinion. ~Rick] So we went. We wanted to get Yoav,
Rava’s son and my grandson, a gift and possibly some clothes for Rava, but
German women are not built in Rava’s size, so no joy there. The entire 6th
floor is the Deli.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” says my
daughter, and disappears. After more than 20 minutes I have been to the bathroom
twice – no Rava – and am getting frantic, envisioning disaster. I am just about
to summon the cavalry when she hoves into sight.
“Where were you?” I almost
shriek at her.
“Wandering around,” she says. “Figured
you would, too, and that we’d run into each other!”
“No!!!” I retort. “I’ve been
waiting right here.”
Oh well.
So she takes me around, especially to the
pastry counters . . . and we consume a slice of raspberry torte [Himbeertorte] with our coffee, harmony
well-restored.
The guidebook we took with us told us that
there are 1800 types of cheese on offer, 1400 breads and 2000 cold cuts. If I’m
going to be facetious, and why not, you could eat every day for 4 years or so
and never buy the same thing twice.
Wednesday and Thursday [19 and
20 June] were contemporary art days and they’re for part III
BERLIN
PART III
26/6/2013
You ask whether we ate food other than
pastries. Certainly we did. Berlin these days is multi-ethnic foodwise. There
are dozens of Italian, Chinese, certainly Turkish eateries everywhere. Remember,
I mentioned Thai food before the opera and liver and onions after our sojourn with
Alex?
As for the other days . . . Berlin was at the
tail end of the asparagus [Spargel] season,
the fat, white asparagus that is so delicious on its own, but which gets served
in a myriad ways by inventive German chefs, two varieties of which we ate
Wednesday and Thursday, as you’ll read.
One detail I didn't mention is that it was
HOT! as in 36º C [about 97º F, very hot for Berlin, which is farther north than
Fargo, N.D., and Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada ~Rick] on the Thursday, and because Germany, as the UK, isn't
geared to expect heat, public transportation, restaurants, etc., aren't
air-conditioned. The big KaDeWe (acronym for Kaufhaus des Westens [“the
department store of the West”]) thankfully was, and so was the theater, but in
the main we sweltered. Mind you, the Berliners, after the worst winter on
record for some 60 years, were reveling. All the outside tables of the cafes
were packed, packed, packed.
Another little nugget is the day we visited
the Brandenburg Gate, workers were erecting a vast outdoor stadium which we
learned later was for Obama [who addressed the city from there on Wednesday, 19
June], so it was lucky we went on the Monday [17 June]. The next morning at
breakfast one of our hostesses told us that the center of Berlin was in
security lockdown, so that there’d be all kinds of traffic jams, as indeed
there were, but we managed to avoid them traveling underground.
Anyway.
Back to Wednesday afternoon and the Hamburger
Bahnhof, a former subway station now converted to a contemporary art museum. An
amazing place! Its central hall featured sculptures and installations, one of
which was a bag lady whom I swore was a living statue and which Rava equally
swore was a sculpture.
“I saw her blink,” said I. “It’s the one reflex you can’t control.”
“No way,” said Rava. “You
imagined it.”
And when we left a couple of
hours later, there she still was. I still say she was a living person!!
Another piece that made an
impression was a reclining woman made of wax into which the sculptor had placed
candles, so that she was gradually melting.
The museum is huge but we managed to see most
of the temporary exhibits. The Central hall was one exhibit – entitled Body Pressure: Sculptures Since the 1960s.
Have you ever heard of Martin Kippenberger
[1953-97]? I hadn’t. The man was a genius who put out an extraordinary body of
work including paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, collaborations,
books, pamphlets – you name it. He died at 44 of liver cancer.
The museum is by the river, so
we garnered a table outside in the shade and ate asparagus with grilled salmon
and a big mixed salad. Delicious.
Rava took of her shoes and
wiggled her toes to the breeze while the river rolled by beneath us.
Ahem.
Made a mistake. It was the Wednesday evening
we went to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum.
Thursday we skipped breakfast
in order to get an early start for Potsdam ,
about an hour away from Berlin
What they didn’t tell us when we bought
tickets – tickets to museums, etc., are costly – was that if we wanted to see
the art collection, the kitchens and so on, it cost extra. So we saw only the
palace, which is a wee one as palaces go. It’s built like a railroad car, with
only 10 rooms. The audio guide told us that guests had to enter their rooms via
the French windows. We got an excellent explanation for each room. Frederick,
like so many of his contemporaries, was into Chinoiserie, so two of the
bedrooms were decorated in an oriental motif. One was like an orchard with
fruit, flowers and birds, especially parrots all around the walls and on the
ceiling.
He’d built ruins, too,
and a Chinese pagoda but we went to neither as it would have meant climbing
hills – not in that heat, thank you. If
the palace was small, the grounds made up for it – some 400, or maybe it was
4000, acres of parklands, woods, avenues, fountains, pavilions and so
forth.
There’s a resto there, in the park, called
the Drachenhaus [Dragon House], to which we went for lunch.
We were lucky. Got there ahead of a huge
expected party, so found a table in the shade and ordered carrot mousse wrapped
in bacon and a mango asparagus pancake with arugula and ginger cream. Both
yummy.
Then back to the hotel for a shower and a
rest, and off to the New National Gallery [Neue Nationalgalerie] for cutting-edge
contemporary art . . . lots of really huge, arresting canvases, many of which
pack a powerful and visceral punch. I was grateful for the chance to see this
work.
Our last meal in Berlin
And the next morning it was up at 6,
breakfast, and off to the airport for our flight home – well pleased with our
Berlin sojourn.
[I’ve known Helen
since I directed her in an Off-Off-Broadway production of Oscar Wilde’s Lady
Windermere’s Fan back in the ‘70s.
Born in Britain, she lived in the States for many years before she moved
to Tel Aviv, and we keep in touch regularly.
Helen directs English-language plays and musicals in Israel and writes
reviews and cultural features for the Jerusalem Post. Over the years, she’s not only covered
the culture beat for JP but she’s done a fair amount of traveling
for her own purposes, including two years teaching English at a provincial
university in China. Now and then, Helen
sends me articles about the cultural and theater scene in Israel, including the
2012 Acre (Acco) Festival (see her reviews posted on ROT on 9 November 2012), as well as other
experiences she’s had (“Help! It's August: Kid-Friendly Summer Festivals
in Israel,” 12 September 2010) and spot productions she’s reviewed, such as Harper
Regan in Tel Aviv (attached to my own
report of 20 October 2012 as a comment dated 28 October). Her reviews of an adaptation/interpretation
of Euripides’ The Trojan Women
directed by Yukio Ninagawa, the Japanese experimental theater artist; a new
Israeli play, The Tired Hero by Eldar Galor; and an old
review of a show she saw in Tel Aviv that also played in New York City, Not
By Bread Alone by Nalagaat, are posted on ROT as “Dispatches from Israel 1” (23 January 2013).]
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