Our Berlin Adventure: Day Two

We could have slept much, much longer, but the Reichstag beckoned and we didn't want to get stuck in a queue like the one we saw last night. So, after long, hot showers, we tucked into a simple breakfast of bread, juice, and fruit. The random supermarket loaf I picked last night turned out to be a stellar sourdough rye (travelling in places where good bread reigns is always a pleasure), and the creamy fig-cheese spread added a nice touch of sweetness to the tangy bread.

As early as we were, plenty of other people made it to to the Reichstag before us, and we waited in the queue for about half an hour before we were shown inside and whisked up the speedy lift to the glass cupola just visible in this photo:

A towering representation of the German flag watches over the entrance:

The cupola looks a bit like London's city hall, which makes sense when you learn that they were both designed by Norman Foster, who won the Pritzker Prize in 1999, the year that the cupola was completed. Said to represent the transparency of the democratic process, the glass dome is the only part of the Reichstag open to the public without prior arrangement.

From the roof, you can look down into a narrow central courtyard

in which the words "the population" appear:

We didn't know anything about how the courtyard came about until we got home. Artist Hans Haacke began the controversial piece in 2000 by placing a trough on the site, filled only with words whose neutrality was intended to draw attention to the nationalistic motto inscribed on the outer facade of the Reichstag: "Dem Deutschen Volke" (to the German people). He then asked MPs to each bring 50 kg of dirt from their constituency to surround the words. Nothing was to be specifically planted in the soil; anything that grew was to come from random seeds or cuttings contained in the original soil contributions. Some MPs were slow to contribute, and the idea was criticised on the grounds that it had the appearance of being eco-minded without actually having any ecological purpose. Additionally, many MPs who refused to take part did so because of their belief that the installation reinforced the Nazi slogan that called for racial purity: "Blut und boden" (blood and soil). Political analysis aside, without knowing anything about the installation, we both found it underwhelming and probably spent less time looking at the piece than it's taken me to type this explanation. Turning our attention upwards, we entered the cupola and slowly spiralled up the ramp

to the opening at the top.

The promised views were indeed spectacular.

Back on the ground, we were drawn to this line of irregular discs almost directly outside the Reichstag. Although we could tell that the monument was remembering a group of people, providing their names as well as their places and dates of birth and death, our inability to read the explanatory plaque meant that we had to wait until we got home to learn that each jagged piece commemorates an opposition-party member of parliament murdered by the Nazis, with many places of death being concentration camps.

We cut through a small part of Tiergarten, directly beside the Reichstag,

and had a look at Potsdamer Platz's Sony Center, a dazzling whirlwind of buildings around a courtyard topped with a roof that changes colours at night. As unabashedly corporate as it is, the space is pretty impressive.

We were confused as to the presence of this enormous Lego giraffe, until we noticed the long queue for the Legoland Discovery Centre just behind it.

We weren't headed for Legoland though; since we bought 3-day museum passes today, we started our museum crawl with the nearby Gemäldegalerie, which houses an amazing collection of 13th- to 18th-century European paintings. The fact that the audioguide was included in the price of admission (something that was true of most of the museums we visited on this trip) made the €19 price of a pass seem even more of a bargain.

(By the way, since all the explanatory captions in the Gemäldegalerie were in German only, most of the titles that I have are German ones.) Francesco di Giorgio Martini's Architektonische Veduteg (1490/1500) is part of a series of images he produced of the ideal, mathematical city:

Other pieces that I liked included Giovanni de Paolo's Zwei Tafeln einer Predella (1455)

and Masaccio's Wochenbett einer vornehmen Florentinerin, which is interesting because it was made as a congratulatory "birth plate" given to the mother immediately after birth and depicts this use on the plate itself:

The museum features a large space at its centre, reserved for temporary sculpture exhibitions; the only permanent resident of this space is Walter de Maria's The 5-7-9 Series, whose title reflects the fact that the metal pieces have five, seven, or nine sides.

The softly trickling water makes a magical, soothing sound in the enormous space, and we appreciated the museum crossing its own boundaries by featuring contemporary sculpture in a building dedicated to early European paintings. Going back a few centuries, the next few paintings that caught my eye were Canaletto's Der Canal Grande mit Blick südöstlicher Richtung auf die Rialtobrücke (1758/63),

Jan Vermeer's Woman with a Pearl Necklace (1662/65),

Pieter Claesz's Still Life with Wine Glass and Silver Bowl (1635),

and Lucas van Valckenborch's Winter 1595.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Netherlandish Proverbs (1559) illustrates more than a hundred maxims of the day, and a key next to the painting outlined the entire list. For example, in the lower left corner, you can find "to even be able to tie the devil to a pillow" (obstinacy overcomes all), "to be a pillar-biter" (a religious hypocrite), and "to carry fire in one hand and water in the other" (to be two-faced), while near the centre, a woman puts a blue cloak on her husband (cuckolds him).

Hieronymus Bosch's St John the Evangelist on Patmos
is on the reverse of his Scenes from the Passion of Christ and the Pelican with Her Young (both 1488/89):

The last Gemäldegalerie painting I'll share with you is Lucas Cranach the Elder's The Fountain of Youth (1546), which shows women moving from left to right through the water as they are rejuvenated, with the landscape reflecting this transformation. The audioguide pointed out that the pool's fountain features the figures of Venus and Cupid, suggesting that love is the secret to the fountain of youth.

After about an hour in the Gemäldegalerie, we decided that it was time for lunch, and as we passed this bus stop, we did a double-take:

We needed food and we needed it now! Luckily we found the perfect spot nearby, Joseph Roth Diele, which has a dreamy combination of cosy atmosphere, friendly people, and cheap, yummy food.

With a room full of locals and a waiter who answered my "Sprechen Sie Englisch?" with an embarrassed smile and a "Nein," we had a look around the room and realised that most people had the same two plates in front of them, which our waiter told us were the lunch specials. With two specials on offer at €3,95 each, we picked out the words humous, yogourt, and salad in one and potato in the other, and ordered one of each, hoping for the best.

While we waited for our food, I asked Bob to put on a serious face. "Why?" he asked. "A bit more serious," I prodded, in an attempt to get a photo of him resembling the café's namesake, whose portrait was directly behind Bob.

Since we ordered rather blindly, we decided to split the specials, both of which ended up being delicious. One was kind of like a peppery meatloaf covered with a mass of gooey potatoes

and the other was a familiar combination of Greek delights: humous, dolmades, and tzatziki (some of the best we've had, actually). And I have to mention that the bread was fantastic!

When we first entered the café, I noticed about a dozen plates lined up on the counter, and correctly guessed that they were today's dessert offerings. When we asked about dessert, our waiter just pointed to the plates and motioned for us to have a look and grab our own, if we liked what we saw. We ended up sharing one of the homey apple-raspberry squares along with two excellent cups of coffee. We lingered for a while, reluctant to leave such a comfortable place,

but eventually we did, taking the U-Bahn (whose stations can be works of art themselves)

west to Charlottenburg to search out our next art destinations of the day. Schloss Charlottenburg is one of the big draws of the area, but we just had a quick look at the outside of the palace
before crossing the street to wander through three museums that were included on our passes--the matching domes of two of them are visible from the palace grounds.Our first stop was at the right-hand building, Museum Berggruen, home of the private collection of Heinz Berggruen, a Jewish exile from Berlin, who left in 1936 to spend time in the US before moving to Paris, where he became Picasso's art dealer. In 1996 Berggruen returned to Berlin and left his collection to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. The same year, the city of Berlin provided him with a building to showcase his stellar collection of Picasso, Klee, Matisse, Braque, and Giacometti under the heading Picasso and His Time. Berggruen died in Berlin in 2007, but his museum is an amazing legacy. Once again, an extremely useful English audioguide was included with admission, and we were in the museum for quite a while, poring over the many highlights, including three by Matisse: Le Silence Habité des Maisons (1947),

Le Dragon (1943/44),

and Intérieur en Étretat (1920).

These ten Picassos barely begin to show the wonderful breadth of the collection: Picasso arrivant à Paris (1901),

Au café-concert (1902),

Bouteille, verre à absinthe, éventail, pipe, violon, clarinette sur un piano (1911-12),

La lecture (1953),

Le verre d'absinthe (1914),

Le grue (1952),

Merle (1943),

Dora Maar aux ongles vert (1936),

Le chandail jaune (1939),

and Piano (I) (1920).

Alberto Giacometti's tiny La place II (1948-49) is wonderfully displayed on a large table--and to begin to give you some idea of Berggruen's generosity, another casting of this piece sold this year at Christie's Manhattan for USD$14,601,000. The art market is insane.

The top floors of the Berggruen are reserved for Paul Klee, and in a strange way, I may have enjoyed seeing these pieces the most, since I haven't had the chance to see so many Klees in one place before. Here's a sample of seven: Burg mit untergehender Sonne (1918),

Landschaft in Blau (1918),

Tempel-Wandmalerei I (mit der gelbgrünen Kreissscheibe) (1920),

Traum-Stadt (1921),

Im Alten Stadtteil, Numero drei und dreissig (1923),

Partie aus G. (1927),

and Drüber und drunter (1923).

After we were done at the Berggruen, we headed next door to:

A gorgeous array of Art Deco and Art Nouveau ceramics, furniture, and accessories, as well as complementary paintings comprise the personal collection of Karl Bröhan, which he donated to the city of Berlin on his sixtieth birthday. Photography wasn't allowed in the museum, but it's probably for the best, considering that today's post is going to be too full of museum photos anyway. I was thrilled to be able to see another dining room designed by Hector Guimard, and I don't think I've ever coveted so many teapots, plates, and pieces of cutlery as I did in the Bröhan. Our third Charlottenburg art stop was actually one that we didn't plan--because we weren't even aware that the Collection Scharf-Gerstenberg existed. After I found out that the collection just opened last month, I didn't feel so silly for being unaware that such a wonderful museum was right across from the Berggruen.

We have the friendly ticket-desk person at the Berggruen to thank for this find; when we showed our museum passes there, she told us that there was another museum just across the road that was also included on our pass, even though it wasn't listed. "What's in the museum?" I asked. "Oh, if you like the Berggruen, you'll also like that one," was all she said. Turns out she was right. I couldn't tell if the current exhibit made up the permanent collection or if it was just a temporary exhibition, but Sur Reale Welten (Surreal Worlds) contains a fascinating mix of Surrealist art, including familiar names and pieces as well as completely new (to us) artists. We felt a bit strange showing our museum passes at a place that wasn't listed on them, but the ticket clerk waved us through, we picked up our free audioguides, and started exploring this unexpected treat. This first piece, Untitled, or: Evocation of an Island (1870), is by a rather surprising artist--Victor Hugo!

Other highlights include Horst Janssen's Crows over the Houses--After Méryon (1975),

Odilon Redon's Hommage à Goya (1885),

and four images from Max Klinger's series, Fantasies about a Found Glove Dedicated to the Lady Who Lost It (1878), a wonderful study of sublimated attraction, as a man finds a woman's glove at a skating rink--at the time, a new phenomenon of classes and sexes mixing freely--and then dreams about its adventures.

Another collection of Klees added to what we had already seen at the Berggruen, including these three: Friendly Game (1933),

Utility Poles (1913),

and View of the Severely Threatened City of Pinz (1915).

At this point, we moved into the second part of the museum, set at ground-level in a long corridor that resembles a church crypt.

Favourites from this section include George Grosz's Coffeehouse 2 (1918-20),

Francis Picabia's Untitled (1920),

Joan Miró's Métamorphose (1936),

René Magritte's Untitled (1926),

Max Ernst's Who Is this Tall Sick Man ... (1923/24)

and Forest (1927),

Jean Dubuffet's Clear Beard Water (1959),

Crazy Cow (1954),

the wonderfully named Fat Shouter (1959),

and Underground Life (1951),

and Wolfgang Paalen's Untitled (1937).

Paalen's piece is a good example of one which we wouldn't have fully appreciated without the help of the audioguide, which told us that he invented the technique of fumage, or painting with candle smoke and soot. Black marks are "painted" by guiding candles along the canvas; in many of his other pieces, Paalen then uses these marks as starting points for oil paintings, but the work above has been left eerily devoid of anything but smoke. After about three hours spent in museums today, we were definitely art-ed out and decided to let our museum passes rest until tomorrow, even though we had barely begun to explore the many, many amazing museums dotted around Berlin. For now though, we were full of art and needed to be equally full of coffee, so we got on a bus heading southwest to a neighbourhood that we'd not yet visited, Kreuzberg. A flowery rooftop patio caught our attention after we got off the bus,

but we were soon fully focussed on our delicious coffee and chocolate-espresso cheesecake (I did mention that we needed coffee, right?).

Barcomi's is our type of coffeehouse, with a roaster on the premises and some 14 types of beans to choose from when ordering any espresso-based drink.

After finishing our treats while watching people stroll by our sidewalk table, we felt refreshed and got up to walk around the neighbourhood with smiles on our faces--not unlike this little guy we soon spotted doing a bit of his own people-watching:

West Kreuzberg is a great residential neighbourhood with many gorgeous buildings and leafy streets. Bob proclaimed this where we should live in Berlin, and who was I to disagree? With its lovely combination of cobbled streets, pretty apartment buildings, lively businesses, and a dash of rundown charm, Kreuzberg just felt right.

In spite of (or because of?) its dilapidated-looking upper floors, this building was one of my favourites:

Its brick has definitely seen better days:

I'm a sucker for stuffed animals gazing out of windows, in case you couldn't tell:

I was intrigued by this building's entrance, flanked by two impressive bears and large letters proclaiming "Bad":

After some Googling, I found out that it's the site of the last remaining public bath in Berlin, originally opened in 1901. I guess that's why the bears are pouring buckets of water! At this point, we crossed the Landwehrkanal and strolled along its banks for a while.

Plenty of people, swans, and boats (some more graffiti-covered than others) lined the canal.

This entranceway seemed too promising not to explore

and we found a series of linked courtyards that reminded us of the touristy Hackeschen Höfe, but without the crowds. I later found out that Elisabeth Höf was originally built in 1898 and was rebuilt in 1963 after considerable war damage.

This rather in-your-face graffiti is quite appropriate for Berlin because we've never been in a city where swarms of wasps seem to be everywhere--and I mean everywhere, not just in greenspaces.

Bakeries always had wasps buzzing inside their display cases. Wasps landed on us all the time. Wasps crawled into Bob's daypack. Wasps fought us for our coffee and cake. I should mention that wasps generally make me very nervous, but I became even more uncomfortable at the beginning of this trip when I noticed how paranoid Bob was getting about our little friends (he's usually the one telling me to ignore them), until I realised that they may be present in scary numbers, but they were extremely tame. They just seemed to be searching out sugar, and even when they landed on us, they weren't aggressive. Berliners take it all in stride, not even twitching when multiple wasps land and crawl around on them, their food, or their belongings. We never did find out if the problem has just been especially noticeable this summer or if it's a permanent part of Berlin's landscape, but in the end we agreed that the number of wasps was our only complaint about Berlin. Anyway, after about two hours of strolling through the neighbourhood, it was just getting dark when we arrived at our dinner spot: Henne.

Passing another cute sign asking for dogs to be left outside,

we settled into our table in this wonderfully atmospheric pub/restaurant. Since it was a gorgeous night, most people were sitting in the back beer garden, but that was completely full when we arrived, so we sat inside. The cosy interior (and lack of wasps) made us happy we were inside so that we could appreciate the time-warp interior of Henne, run by the same family since 1930.

The story goes that JFK was invited to Henne for a meal, but couldn't make it due to a tight schedule. He sent along a photo with handwritten apologies, and this bit of memorabilia has been behind the bar ever since.

Our drinks came first--and one of us definitely got more liquid than the other!

Ordering at Henne is easy because there's only one main course. Your only choice is whether to have potato salad or coleslaw as a side-dish. We both went for the potato salad and were surprised at the size of our servings of deliciously seasoned, mayonnaise-and-chive slathered potatoes.

When our chicken arrived, we realised that we had ordered way too much food. Each order consisted of half an organic, free-range chicken, "milk-roasted." The end result was incredibly delicious--maybe the best chicken I've ever had, with shockingly tender meat and skin that was just too good to discard in the name of health.

In hindsight, I should have taken a photo of our meal after we started digging into it, but my fingers were too greasy to even think about picking up the camera at that point! In any case, I regretted not being able to finish my portion, and even Bob (who's usually reliable for cleaning up my plate on those rare occasions when I can't) was so full that he couldn't tackle the rest of my half. I probably could have eaten more chicken if I'd had less bread, but, as was quickly becoming standard on this trip, the bread was too perfect to pass up--another loaf with an amazing combination of heft, texture, and flavour. When we left the restaurant, the Berlin night greeted us with an angel in the sky:

We were both too full to consider heading back to the hotel right away, so we decided to wander through Mitte in the general direction of the hotel until we walked off some of our supper. This striking 1952 mural of idyllic Socialist life graces what is now the Ministry of Finance (formerly the Nazi-built Reich Air Ministry), the site of the 17 June 1953 uprising against the East German government.

An enormous photograph of protesters is set into the pavement in front of the mural as a memorial, but I couldn't get a good photo of it in the darkness. Buildings which seemed rather drab by day took on a new life at night:

This building even featured a light installation that saw different windows flicker across its facade:

Back at Potsdamer Platz, these skyscrapers watched over the night.

We returned to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe to see it at night. The purple light in the distance in this first photo is the roof of the Sony Center:

With very few people walking around the memorial and only the odd pathway lit up in the memorial itself, the site took on an even more sombre feeling than it had during the day.

In contrast, Brandenburg Gate was ablaze with light:

In a city seemingly filled with memorials, I was especially interested in seeing the monument for the events of 10 May 1933, when Hitler's propaganda minister ordered more than 20,000 books which were deemed to go against Nazism to be burned in the square in front of the university. The 1995 memorial by Micha Ullmann, Empty Library, is simply brilliant. Do you see it in the centre of the square?

No? How about now?

In fact, from the street, there's no sign of the monument that lies below the ground.

The white cube is sealed and empty, with nothing on its shelves and no way to enter--a library unlike any other.

Next to the monument, a quotation from an 1821 Heinrich Heine play (one of the authors whose books were burned here) is chilling in its prescience: "Where they burn books, they will end by burning people." We had actually come by during the day to see the monument, but in the daylight, the glass reflects the buildings around the square, preventing you from clearly seeing inside--an effect that Ullmann intentionally created to initiate a consideration of the rebuilt buildings that now surround the square. By now it was almost midnight, and we were happy to have continued our explorations longer into our second night than we had on our first night in the city, although it would take until tomorrow for us to fully recover from yesterday's early start. As we walked up to the tram platform at Alexanderplatz, I barely had time to take this evening shot of the TV tower

before the tram arrived to whisk us back to the hotel for the night.