aelle_irene asked : : What are the historical sites you recommend visiting for those who want to avoid 20th Century History?

Given Berlin was heavily bombed in WWII and had to be rebuild, it's next to impossible to avoid the 20th century, but there are still sites from previous centuries to visit and enjoy, of course. Bear in mind I myself am talking as a tourist here; I never spend more than a week in Berlin, and the week was decades ago; in more recent years I was only there for one or two days.

In general, since you're travelling in May, I reccommend a boat tour on the Spree, like this one. It will surprise you with how much greenery Berlin has to offer and give you a true sense of location of the city core. On to buildings and museums.

Now: in Berlin itself, there is the Museumsinsel, the island mid-River Spree full of interesting museums. (Link goes to the English version of its website.) This is where you find the famous bust of Nefertiti and a lot of other pieces of Egypt's Armana period, for example, the Pergamon Altar (currently getting renovated, but there's a 3 D model), the Ishtar Gate, but also a lot of 19th century art (including arch romantic Caspar David Friedrich). I can also reccommend the big museum shop for all the museums located near the James-Simon-Gallery, if you want, say, a mousepad that looks like a Persian silk carpet, or that shows all the Roman emperors, or books about any of the eras and people featured in the museum (not just in German, also in English).

Then there's Charlottenburg Palace. I just linked you to the English version of the museum website again, but for a recent personal pic spam (from last year) of this baroque palace and its park, check this out. Aside from offering really well restored Baroque and Frederician Rokoko, this palace also includes in one exhibition a panoramic view of mid 19th century Berlin, a city that was gone even before WWII. Also, if you don't have the time or inclination of joining a tour, all the rooms offer biligingual or trilingual signs (i.e. German, English and French) explaining the context of what you're seeing, and you learn a lot about Prussian history.

We'll return to (some) Hohenzollern later, but on to non-royals. The Mendelssohn Remise, at the location of the Mendelssohn bank, is a small museum devoted to one of the most fascinating artistic families in German cultural history. The most famous members were Moses Mendelssohn (the 18th century philosopher), Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (grandson), the composer, his sister Fanny (equally a composer and musician), and their aunt Dorothea (nee Brendel) Schlegel (writer and translator). Depending on how into the Mendelssohns you are, you can also visit several of them (including Felix and Fanny) at the "Friedhof vor dem Halleschen Tor", where there is also a crypt reworked into a permanent museum on the history of the Mendelssohn family. Other famous artists buried at the same cemetery include Rahel Varnhagen (famous Jewish femme des lettres of the late 18th and early 19th century) and E.T.A. Hoffmann. The Mendelssohn Society even organizes In the Footsteps of Fanny tours through Berlin, as well as In the footsteps of Rahel Varnhagen through Berlin.

Speaking of Berlin history for special interests, there's the Hugenottenmuseum. When Louis XIV revoked the toleration edict of Nantes in the later 17th century and tried his best to kick all Protestants out of France if he didn't terrorize them into converting, a really huge part of them ended up in Brandenburg and Prussia in general, courtesy of its ruler, another Frederick William, "The Great Elector" (Prussia wasn't a kingdom yet). This is why for a long time you had a lot of French speakers there, why for example one of Germany's most famous writers, Theodor Fontane, grew up pronouncing his last name the French way (his father being Louis Fontane, and grandfather Pierre, and so forth), and why there is a museum devoted to the Huguenots in Berlin. The "French Colony" really was an important part of the city for several centuries.

If you have enough of buildings and the weather is nice, I reccommend a visit to the Viktoriapark in Kreuzberg. This park was created in the 19th century and named after Queen Victoria's oldest daughter Vicky, she who married the Prussian Crown Prince who only briefly became Frederick III, the mother of (boo, hiss) Wilhelm II. As the website I just linked you to says, it is however nothing like an English park but goes for wild landscape romanticism with waterfalls. There also some nice beergardens where you can sit down and have a drink and something to eat.

Outside of Berlin:

I really reccommend a trip to Potsdam, which is easily reachable from Berlin Central Station by train, bus or tube. Mainly, of course, because that's where you'll find Sanssouci Palace and Park, i.e. Frederick the Great's palace(s) (there are actually three belonging to the overall Sanssouci complex). I just liinked the main palace's website in English again, but of course, yours truly has personal pic spams to offer: Sanssouci in summer (that's the pic spam with the interior as well), Sanssouci in spring time (only outside pics). It's 18th century "Frederician" Rokoko at its best, and surrounded by a beautiful park. If you like bread: the famous mill next to the main palace actually offers freshly baked bread for sale.


Bonus reccommendation:

Now, this inevitably and poignantly does include the 20th century. But it shows all the centuries before as well. I can really reccomend the Jüdisches Museum, the Jewish Museum of Berlin, which you can find here. The core exhibition, about Jewish life in Germany, goes back all the way to the time of the Roman Emperor Domitian. One highlight is the story of the very successful Renaissance Jewish merchant woman Gickl of Hameln, whose memoirs, the first written by a woman in Jiddish, I believe, were later translated into standard German by none other than Bertha Pappenheim (a Jewish feminist who also as Anna O. entered the history of psychotherapy as she was one of Freud's earliest patients). Obviously, a considerable part of the museum does tell the story of the Holocaust, because how could it not? But if you can avoid it, you can stop before that point. The story of Jewish Germans is just so fascinating and important - for Germany in general but also for Berlin in particular - that I think it's worth visiting.

The other days

I took part in a conference there last weekend, which took place next to one of the Berlin VIP of Arts cemeteries and it so happened that September 3rd was also open door day for the Reichstag, our Parliament which I had not had the chance to visit post spectacular Norman Foster restoration, so between conferencing, I visited both. Pic spam time!




( Berlin Sights, Compressed )

You know, during the last two years or thereabouts I more than once had the experience that a tv show was available on Netflix (or Amazon Prime) outside the US and thus to me while US viewers either had to pay or be attached to a particular channel to watch it. Well, with Babylon Berlin the reverse was true; while mostly a German production (with international money), it has been available on US Netflix for eons while it only became available (and not on Netflix) in Germany now that it’s been broadcast at one of our major tv broacasting channels, the ARD (which also serves as coproducer).

What it is about: it’s a noir series set in Berlin, 1929, based on a series of mystery novels by Volker Kutscher which I haven’t read but am planning to, not least because I’m going to meet the author next year. Anyway, I can’t compare the source material to the tv show yet, and thus am reporting on tv only impressions. One of the driving forces behind the tv version is Tom Twyker, known to overseas folk mainly for Run Lola Run and also, if you’re a Sense 8 fan, for his involvement with the later. The main actors and their characters: Volker Bruch as Gereon Rath, our main detective, originally from Cologne but newly transferred to Berlin, as befits a noir cop traumatized by his past (he’s a WWI veteran with PTSD and a secret beyond that), self-medicating with morphine and generally a repressed emotional mess; Liv Lisa Fries as Charlotte Ritter, certainly deserving to be the show’s breakout character, trying to make a living as a police typist by day and dancer with a sideline in occasional prostitution by night but harboring the burning ambition to become the first female detective in the Berlin police force; Peter Kurth as Bruno Wolter, whom Batman afficianados might be tempted to regard as the Harvey Bullock of Berlin (i.e. corrupt cop but with a good core due to his jovial, cheerful attitude towards our two heroes), which would be a mistake. These, however, are but three of a big ensemble, which doesn’t get confusing (at least imo), and it’s to the show’s credit that supporting characters, like Stefan Jänicke (temporary sidekick of Gereon and good friend to Lotte) and his two deaf parents (btw: said parents being deaf and Stefan talking to them in sign language (and vice versa) throughout without this being made a big deal of strikes me as a great way to include characters with a physical handicap without falling into a „very special episode“ attitude) or Lotte’s friend Greta feel real and fleshed out.

Occasionally, there’s a bit of „Weimar Republic Clichés Check List“ feeling (of course there’s an androgynous singer, Svetlana Sorokina, played by Severija Janušauskaitė, who performs in drag, and before you can say Doctor Mabuse, there’s a hypnotist doctor, too), but not in a way that irritated me. You can tell this wasn’t written by a Brit or US American by the fact that the Nazis, while present, actually aren’t the main villains (yet), and that the fact the army is full of disgruntled monarchists with no loyalty to the new republic, going all the way up to the time’s most prominent ex-soldier, President Paul von Hindenburg, is the far more immediate menace. The show also uses the infamous „Blood May“ incident where over 30 civilians died when the police went down mercilessly on a May 1st demonstration, and the Stalinists versus exile Trotzkytes rivalries to paint a far more diverse political picture than you get from, say, just about any story set in the same era where the pov is a British or US visitor.

The various plot threads start out separately but turn out to be connected, as befits a good mystery. Some pot holes and/or illogical circumstances (such as why on earth the main underworld boss doesn’t kill Gereon Rath on at least two occasions when it would make sense for him to) later turn out to have an explanation, but it’s not always spelled out. (Such as Greta’s final realization in episode 16 when she sees a certain someone; it’s obvious what this implies but no one tells us the audience this in dialogue.) The extreme poverty of most people (except for a few) in the era is always present. (Lotte can’t afford to actually own the party dresses she wears; they’re a loan in the night club and part of why she’s expected to indulge the occasional customer. There are no hot, or for that matter cold showers for Lotte and her family; she and Greta go to a public bath. When someone dies, the obvious option is to donate the body to the Charité, the famous Berlin hospital, because that way you don’t have to pay for a coffin and funeral. And so forth.

Another great thing to this German viewer is that the accents are right. Meaning: Lotte Ritter and the other Berlin (and surrounding area) based characters speak with a strong Berlin accent, whereas Gereon-from-Cologne decidedly does not, while a lone Bavarian exile (an apothocary) talks with a Bavarian accent, and so forth. (As opposed to everyone speaking Hochdeutsch and/or speaking English with a fake German accent.) But really,the show’s greatest charm is Lotte dancing the night away when she’s not doggedly investigating and either charming or tricking or badgering people into telling her what she needs to know, and her brittle, slowly forming team-up with Gereon Rath who definitely did not come to Berlin looking for a partner in crime solving, least of all a typist who keeps surprising him.

Nitpick: I’m not really sold on the *spoiler* having their secret headquarters in *spoiler*, but that’s just unlikely enough to have been a historical truth (a superficial search won’t say one way or the other).

Not a nitpick: since the actual Berlin head of police, Zörgiebel, appears under his own name, I was a bit confused for much of the show why a character obviously meant to be Bernhard Weiß, one of the few really sympathetic Weimar era police figures (and the actor even made to look like him), the vice president the Berlin police force, appears under the nome de plume of August Benda, but then when a certain subplot came to its head I realized the reason was that Weiß‘ fate is historically certain, and the series needed to go into another direction with Benda.

Trigger: well, let’s see. It’s a story set in a besieged republic with loud extremists hijacking public attention. I don’t know, could this remind you of anything?

Some months back, we (meaning my parents & self) were invited to celebrate an 80th birthday in Berlin on December 20th. When we gladly accepted, we thought, might as well arrive a day earlier to stroll through Christmas season Berlin. Which is what we did.

You can guess where this story is going.

(Unless you managed to miss the news entirely. If so, good for you.) Now we, personally, were incredibly lucky. My parents were at the Christmas fair at Breitscheidplatz but an hour before the attack happened; we were telephoning at the time, because we had split up - I was visiting the Jewish Museum to catch a new exhibition there, had to switch off my phone, and wanted to tell them as much in case they'd be trying to reach me in the next two hours. Earlier, we'd visited another of the countless Berlin Christmas fairs, the one at the Gendarmenmarkt, and I had thought about going to the one near the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche as well but changed my mind and chose the Jewish Museum instead. My parents & self were all back in our hotel rooms, happily exhausted after an afternoon in Christmassy Berlin, and checking with emails, when the first news about the attack showed up on twitter. If I hadn't gone to tell my parents I was back as well, I'd assumed they might still be there, but again, I was lucky: I already knew they were safe, and they knew I was. Everyone else, though. Oh, everyone else.

Yesterday, we spent the morning walking around numb and clutching at each other, alternatingly grieved for the victims and increasingly infuriated at the vultures from abroad (the usual suspects) and from within the country (Horst Seehofer, making me throw up for about the 1000th time this year) who were yet again using demagogery and hate. Then the birthday happened, which started with everyone standing up in honor of the victims; the speeches all tackled the subject as well. In the evening, we watched the mourning service at the Gedächtniskirche again from our hotel rooms (it was far too crowded to get into the church itself); it was the opposite of the demagogic soundbites, with the Protestant and Catholic bishops as well as a Rabbi and two Imans all speaking of grief and of the importance to not let our values be taken away as well. One of the Advent songs sung was by Jochen Klepper, a German theologian and writer who'd refused to divorce his Jewish wife and, when she was to be deported, committed suicide with her. The song, which inspired some of the speeches, was about both night, and the hope that there will be light again, the proverbial star as hope in the darkest night. Which summed up sounds clichéd, but believe me, in that service, it felt anything but.

Today, we returned to Bamberg. Below the cut I offer some more of the pictures I made both before and after the attack, of Berlin, the city with already much darkness in its history, but also light.

( Read more... )