Break ended and I hit the ground running. As per usual. The last month in Berlin flew past, and it’s such a blur that I mix up the chronology of my memories! Who knew such things could happen…
My museum island class had its final trip. We went to the Pergamon museum, where I learned quite a bit about restitution battles and about how audio-guides can be used. The paper we read about the restitution battle over the Zeus Alter is available at http://www.princeton.edu/~artspol/workpap/WP13%20-%20Bilsel.pdf. It’s worth looking through, mainly for the historical background of the controversy. Another side note: I learned that the Pergamon is actually a combination of three museums, with different directors and curators. This explains the different styles in the different wings, something I had wondered about on previous visits. The plan to redirect traffic on Museum Island will also redirect traffic inside this particular building, and I would be curious to return in a few years to look at what changes.
May 1st is traditionally a big day in Berlin. On its eve, there are bonfires and maypoles at festivals around the city. I went to one in Mauerpark with some friends, including a Wiccan friend who explained a bit about the typical May Day (eve) rituals. Apparently, we were supposed to jump naked over a fire and then give each other sheep. Instead, we walked through the crowd of police at the park entrance and followed the sounds of drums to a small square where everyone was gathered. On the left was the bonfire, and people were gathered around it dancing, playing drums, blowing bubbles, and talking to each other. The area to the right looked almost like a small open amphitheater, with a raised “stage” and stone stands worked into the hillside around it. Someone had printed out Saint Anthony’s Canticle of the Sun and hung it from a tree on the bottom of the hill, while the silhouettes of waiting police officers lined the skyline at the top. As the night went on, many of the drummers relocated to the stands as fire-spinners and dancers (and some bubble-blowers) took the stage.
The next day, I headed to Kreuzberg. “Labor day” brings Leftist demonstrations in many cities, and it has for many years. In 1987, however, the demonstrations in Kreuzberg (by SO36…right next to the wall) turned into violent riots. The “us versus the police” riots have become something of an annual tradition over the years. They moved to other parts of the city for a bit, but are now back where they started. The neighborhood now sets up a street festival each year in hopes of minimizing the violence. Between festival-goers and gawking tourists (I’m admittedly guilty of being both)the streets end up totally packed during the day, and it does seem hard to imagine a demonstration organizing and moving through the crowd. It happens, though. I didn’t stay to see the “riots” because I—like other speculators—worried about a particularly violent year in reaction to the February evictions at one of (if not the) last Berlin squats. It turned out that the year was actually a relatively peaceful one, but I did have a friend narrowly escape being hit with a firework…so I’m glad not to have stayed.
In Prague, I had become accustomed to seeing Police everywhere. They were all over the streets, on public transit, at hockey games…everywhere. In Berlin, I really didn’t see that many of them. In fact, I saw so few that seeing them usually came as a surprise, and I would find myself looking around wondering what was going on that they were out. On May 1st though I saw more officers than I have ever seen in one place in my life. On the one hand, the massive police presence made me uneasy. In Germany, it is illegal for demonstrators/protestors/pedestrians-near-demonstrations-or-protests to wear “indirect weapons.” That means anything from a bullet-proof vest to padded gloves to a bicycle helmet, and the rationale is that these items lessen the effectiveness of police weapons. You can get arrested for wearing a bicycle helmet if you get too close to a protest. Really. On May Day, knowing this and seeing all the police in their full gear made me feel irrationally defensive. A week later, however, I would stumble across another demonstration—an anti-government demonstration—and watch officers (again in full gear) patiently standing along the road while protestors waved banners that read things like “Police cooperate with Neo-Nazis! Down with the Police!” in front of their faces. I can’t imagine being one of those directing traffic around the group, being the target of such accusations but respecting the demonstrators’ right to freedom of speech (it’s in the German constitution, too) and knowing that such demonstrations sometimes lead to brick and bottle throwing or lighting cars on fire. Not a job I would want, in any country really. To clarify, I would say that a demonstration calling attention to police brutality, racism, and the incidents in which the two are connected would be understandable and even desirable. These are problems in Berlin, as in most other major cities of the world. The problem was that, at least from what I heard and read, this wasn’t so much a focused or organized demonstration as a gathering of angry people who that day had decided to be angry at the police. It was an interesting situation to witness, for lack of a better adjective.
I spent the week writing exams. Then over the following weekend, NYU offered a day-trip to Leipzig. My German teacher, Denise, went to University there, and she suggested the trip so I went. We started off with a walking tour that included the church where Bach used to play the organ. We then went through the DDR museum together, and the whole time Uli (who grew up in the DDR) giggled with Denise about the “artifacts” she recognized from her childhood. From the museum, we went to Auerbach’s Keller for lunch (Faust reference, anybody?). After lunch we had a few hours of free time, and it was filled with odd happenings: We discovered that Denise’s university had been demolished…it just ceased to exist, disappeared. A clothing ironing service had set up an advertising event that featured people ironing clothes on a stage with loud music blaring. A groom-to-be was dressed up in a gorilla suit and selling bananas as his groom’s men led him around on a leash. Sam and I wandered around in a park, and on the way back to the bus we passed a mural about the peaceful protests of 1989 that took place in Leipzig.
My wonderful German teacher also took us on a tour of Charlottenburg castle. In the west of Berlin, the Prussian palace of Sophie Charlotte is the only one of its kind in the city. It was the original home of the famous Amber Room, and is currently known for the porcelain room and the elaborate garden design. Inside the palace we had an audio tour; however, Denise showed us around the garden. Apparently, she used to live a block away and used to go jogging there. Can you imagine?
My architecture class visited the Jewish Museum designed by American architect Daniel Liebeskind, because my professor had written a few papers on it. The building must be a curator’s worst nightmare; it was clearly designed without any thought given to the fact that it would, as a museum, be presenting exhibits. As an architectural statement and experience, however, the museum is incredible. I found the sunken Garden of Exile more powerful than the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which was created later and uses the same combination of stone columns with uneven ground to disorient visitors. There are also “voids” built into the museum; visitors can enter two of them. In the first, the door clicks shut and those inside the void are in a tower of metal plating with a small chink at the top as the only light source. The second void does not have a door, but the floor is covered with thick metal disks that have abstract representations of screaming faces on them. When people walk across the floor, the disks clang together and the sound echoes in the space. Even when I stopped walking because the noise was so disturbing, others continued to walk (of course) so the noise continued…inescapable inside the void. Going through the museum was something of a meditation walk. Memorial museums sometimes assume this function, but in this case it was the building that guided the meditation rather than the exhibits. I can see why there are so many critics of the project, but personally I found it effective.
Outside class, I attended the grand re-opening of Konnopke’s Imbiss, which is famous as the oldest Currywurst stand in Berlin.
On the day of the royal wedding (Prince William and Kate Middleton’s), I went to a second-hand-store with a friend. She bought wedding-esque attire and I bought a dirndl, and then we went to my apartment to drink beer and eat döner together. We didn’t actually watch any of the ceremony, but we had fun just spending time together.
In the last few weeks, I wrote all my exams, played tour-guide for some guests and took one last field trip. The school organized a trip to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp on the end of one of the S-bahn lines. The professor who led the trip also taught the Cities, Communities, and Urban Culture class that I learned so much from all semester. Other camps that are pilgrimage sites today have their old buildings still standing and exhibits to educate visitors. Most of the original buildings at Sachsenhausen were destroyed, and our guide—while excellent—was the only reason we were able to get the full history of each area we stopped in. Open and quiet, with a number of statues commemorating political prisoners and sites of slaughter, the camp felt more like a memorial site to a not-so-distant history than a haunted and haunting relic of genocide (as I’ve heard other camps described to be). It was still powerful: as we walked along a trench used by firing squads to collect bodies, a classmate explained that her great uncle had been brought to this camp as a prisoner in the 1930s. He survived, but walking in the fresh spring sunshine between a death pit and this classmate set my mind spinning. It seemed like everyone felt the same. Even my professor said that we were free to stay if we wanted but that the fatherly part of him wanted to take us all out of the camp and deliver us safely home. Which he did.
Before I knew it, I could count the “days left in Berlin” on my fingers. I went to Tempelhof park (the old airport) to grill with some friends. It started raining lightly and a young boy ran over to where we were tending the charcoal. In wonderful baby-German, he told us that it was time for us to go home. That we couldn’t stay outside in the rain and we should finish at our houses. My friend replied that we couldn’t because we lived in apartments, and the boy (maybe 6 or 7 years old) looked really sad at the thought. Then his parents called him, so he left us with a final “But it’s raining!” Too cute for words. The next two days were spent studying for my last final (German!), cleaning, packing, and souvenir shopping. Wednesday I had a picnic in one class, a dinner-focused field trip in another, and a NYU student curated art show at the Grimm Museum to attend. I may have also ended up at Golgatha, the wonderful beer garden that was inside Victoria Park…ie a ten minute walk from my home. Or that may have been a different night. Thursday I had my last German class, in which I had a debate—all in German!—with a politics major who…it’s easier to just give a character sketch and say that she is a proud vegan who also somehow eats eggs, dairy and gelatin AND thinks there is no reason why all European if not all world countries shouldn’t have a common currency. It was interesting. From there I met up with Sam and went to Mauerpark to people-watch. We got pretty sunburnt. Eventually we headed back to school for our last class with Professor Nader, and from there we went to a boat in Treptower on which the school had organized a party for all students, faculty and staff. We gathered on deck to listen to a song written by two of our students, sing a different song all together, and admire the double rainbow that unfolded above us. Then we went below deck to talk as we ate, drank, and laughed. The atmosphere was relaxed, and everyone just seemed to be really enjoying each other. With some people, I knew as I left that I would never see them again. I always find those kinds of partings—the ones in which both parties actually realize this is their last (most likely) time together—to be a little strange. Everyone tries to say “have a good life” in a way that sounds sincere. Acquaintances hug and try to make “it was nice knowing you” express “We didn’t talk much but I still think you’re an interesting and special person and I am really grateful to have had the chance to meet you but don’t want to say so because we aren’t close enough for it to not sound strange and here’s wishing you all the best of luck because I know you’ll be great.” That was also Michelle’s birthday, so from the boat we went to her room to eat cake and sing until the neighbors knocked (only time all year!) to complain of the noise. After that, I sat up late with Azzure and marveled at how much/little changes in four months.
Friday I actually finished packing and cleaning, and then I had a pantry-emptying party at my apartment. We just ate whatever was still left, with the exception of Nicky who ate his first pieces of baklava. He mentioned that he had never tried it, so we ran across the street to Pasam Baklava and splurged. Which goes against the goal of cleaning out the left-over food, but I couldn’t let him leave without trying Pasam! That night, we went to the Green Mango karaoke bar across the street. We noticed a lot of stern looking men with ear-pieces standing around the place, but we didn’t worry too much about it. The bar was across the street from our apartments, but it was in the back of a strange commercial building, so we weren’t expecting anyone particularly special to be in the heavily-guarded VIP room. And then the cast of the movie The Hangover walked by. Apparently they got stuck in Berlin (a volcano had started erupting a few days prior, and it led to cancelled flights all across northern Europe) and so had somehow found their way to our neighborhood. Go figure.
Finally, on the last day I met up with Michelle and we went to Teufelsberg. In the middle of Grunewald, Speer built a Nazi military academy. After the war, the Allies tried to destroy the building, but it was just too huge. They decided that they would instead pile all the rubble that bombs had strewn across the city inside and on top of the academy. In doing so, they built an artificial mountain. Realizing then that they had created a high point in the western sector of this super-flat city, they build a listening station at the top, with satellites to eavesdrop on GDR transmissions and broadcasts. Now the site is fenced off, graffitied, and “abandoned.” Which is probably why we found musicians, graffiti artists, and other curious people wandering the site with as much fascination as we were. Not to brag, but I took some pretty great pictures. Back home, I met up with friends for our last few hours. After an all-nighter, we left around 5 and went to the airport to catch our flight back to the States.
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