Berlin

I am happy to report that I have secured an e-mail reservation for visiting the Reichstag Dome tomorrow morning at 8:45—so I won’t be out dancing much tonight (not that I had even planned on it).  In my younger (and prettier) days I spent many long nights enjoying Berlin’s intense gay scene.  But now that I don’t do that anymore, I can watch the neon lights and still get to bed at an early hour.

Rain clouds cover the city this morning, so my plan for the day is more museums and shopping. After breakfast I’m off to explore the new construction at Potsdamer Platz, which was the commercial center of Berlin between the wars, but was wiped out by allied bombing and Soviet shelling as WWII was coming to its end (the area had the misfortune to be very close to the primary buildings of the Nazi government and war machine). During my first visit to Berlin in 1986, the Wall ran through the center of the square—even cutting off underground transit lines—and the surrounding streets were literally no-man’s-land. On my last visit in 1994 the square was just beginning to become alive again.

Today Potsdamer Platz displays the works of the world’s best-know architects. The Sony Center (Helmut Jahn) with its swirling red and blue interior, resembles the Civic Center in Chicago; the Beisheim Center (David Chipperfield and others) is a miniature Rockefeller Center; the Arkaden is a three-level glass-enclosed shopping center; and the Daimler Quartier’s series of nineteen office and apartment buildings is topped off by an orange and green condominium by Renzo Piano. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nearby is the Kulturforum, West Berlin’s response to East Berlin’s Museum Island.  Among its many cultural organizations (think of an architecturally-eclectic Lincoln Center) are two amazing painting collections:  the Gemäldegalerie, one of Europe’s finest gatherings of Great Masters from the 13^th-18^th centuries, highlighted by rooms full of Rembrandts, Bruegels and Caravaggios; and the Neue Nationalgalerie, a beautifully austere metal and glass building designed by Mies van der Rohe, offering a chronologically-arranged selection of 20^th-century art.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The “Topography of Terror,” built on the site of former SS headquarters, provides a detailed history of Nazi genocide, as well as retaining a block-long section of the Berlin Wall.  In 1994, if memory serves, this was a small outdoor exhibit.  Since then, it has become a full-fledged museum and library that establishes the atmospheric gloom of the period.  Just a few blocks away, the former “Checkpoint Charlie,” has become a kitschy tourist photo op, and the “House at Checkpoint Charlie Museum” is so cluttered and disorganized that it fails to have much impact. 

The “Jewish Museum in Berlin,” designed by Daniel Libeskind, is, on the other hand, intentionally disorienting.  The metal-clad structure beautifully evokes the complicated history of Jewish Berlin.  Even though the museum uses all the tricks of contemporary interactive design, for me it contains so much material that its intentional disorientation soon becomes tiresome rather than instructive.  Libeskind’s much smaller “Jewish Museum” in Copenhagen is much more successful.  But maybe it’s just one too many museums for one day, so I’ll call it quits for now.