Museum days in Berlin

Wednesday morning we walked to the Hamburger Bahnhof Art Museum. It’s a contemporary art museum. I had never really been to a museum for contemporary art, I had seen some of it in galleries, but most museums (that I’d been to) don’t really go past modernism or post-modernism. This works in this museum were highly concept-driven. I’m still not sure I understood most of them. There was an entire wing of Joseph Beuys’s work. He is a German artist who worked internationally during the Cold War. Most of his works deal survival; some deal with education. Many of his pieces were installations or video performances. I was especially intrigued by a series of large sculptures made out of tallow, which is like lard and can be used for fuel. In another part of the museum, we saw some large-scale sculptures by Anselm Kiefer. There was a lead plane with books and rotten plants on top of it. These items were meant to weigh the plane down, but it’s made of lead and, therefore, cannot fly anyway. The museum was somewhat unsetting because I haven’t really come into contact with that many conceptual works in one place.

Next we headed toward Checkpoint Charlie passing through the high-end shopping area. Checkpoint Charlie was one of the main crossings through the Berlin Wall. It’s the one most diplomats used when visiting the city. Now, there is a replica guardhouse with two men dressed in uniform “guarding” it. You can pay to have a picture taken with them. You can also pay to have East German stamps in your passport. Large photos of soldiers are on display in the middle of the road. From one side you see a soldier from the Allied Forces. The other side shows a Russian soldier. Their photos are there to make you understand what you would have seen had you been at that spot between 1961 and 1989.

From Checkpoint Charlie, we walked to a place where a substantial amount of the wall still remains (actually most of these bits have been moved there). It’s also where the SS offices were. They’re building the museum, but an open-air exhibition called “Topography of Terror” gave a lot of historical information about the space and the city.

We ended our day by spending three and a half hours at the Berlin Jewish Museum. Jess hadn’t been there and I had learned about the building and wanted to see it in person. It’s insane. It’s one of the most complicated museums I’ve ever visited. It was designed by Daniel Libeskind who is an American architect of Polish-Jewish decent. He does a lot of Jewish/Holocaust museums and memorials and also did a building at Bar Ilan (I’ll update you on what it’s like). You start in the basement where there are three axis (aka hallways): the Axis of Exile which describes the flight of the Jews and ends in the Garden of Exile, the Axis of the Holocaust which introduces the visitor to victims of the Holocaust and ends at the Holocaust Tower, and the Axis of Continuation which takes the visitor to the rest of the permanent exhibition. The Garden of Exile is the only place in the museum that has right angles. It’s a grid of tall towers covered by Russian olive trees which form a canopy over the space. It’s meant to be disorientating: to show what exile and moving to a new place is like. The Holocaust Tower is an empty trapezoidal room, 42 meters high with the only light entering through a slit in the point. It’s not heated and doesn’t really have much of an explanation. The visitor is supposed to make his own interpretation (this is a common Libeskind theme). Also, these axis were not level; they sloped upward. We found upward sloping areas in other parts of the museum as well.

We went up the Axis of Continuation to a side gallery which had a photo display celebrating “100 Years of Tel Aviv.” The city had been founded in 1909 and this exhibit – put together by Magnum – included work by Robert Capa, Abbas, and other photographers. I really liked the Abbas photographs especially because he’s Iranian-French, yet spent time working in Israel. Photographs spanned from the creation of Israel up to present time.

At the end of the photograph exhibit, we found ourselves in the Memory Void – an indoor courtyard space where we encountered a pile of metal faces meant to represent victims of the Holocaust. We could see this space from the upper floors of the museum.

Upstairs the exhibit started with the history of Judaism. First we were introduced to three Jewish villages from the 10^th Century. Called Worms, Speyer, and Mainz, they are generally referred to by an acronym of the first letter of their names Shum which means garlic in Hebrew. We watched a 3-D video which was terrible. The information in German was really basic – “The town had a temple and a bathhouse; the Talmud was studied in the temple” – and even more abbreviated in the English subtitles. Continuing along the zig-zag hallway we learned about the Hebrew alphabet on computer screens which told you how to write your name in Hebrew. Throughout the museum, there were also three large black stones. You put on headphones and moved around the stone. As you moved around the stone you could hear different voices talking and music playing. It was like scanning the radio except you were moving.

After the stone, we came to an exhibit about Glikl bas Judah Leib (born Hamburg 1646) who wrote the oldest autobiography of a Jewish woman. She was a merchant and we learned all about her family and work. One of the hands-on sections had a computer game where you had to pack her bags for her trip to Amsterdam. You had to pack things like “kosher snacks” instead of a “bunny rabbit” and “cell phone.” In that area of the museum were three video monitors with animations about objects (host, cup, headscarf), locations (Lourdes, Garden of Eden, Niches) and actions (pilgrimage, wedding). These were written in simple language to teach children about Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The animations were brightly colored and used symbols to convey their messages. The one about niches talked about the mihrab, the arc and the apse as different variations of the same idea. It ended saying that “every religion has a niche.”

The rest of this level of the museum dealt with Jewish traditions: as merchants, philosophers like Moses Mendelssohn, and how celebrations have changed over time. There were more interactive games and hands-on sections for children and adults. We spent some time looking at information regarding the various holiday celebrations. They had a chuppa and you could play wedding music while standing underneath it.

Downstairs we walked through an exhibit on what it meant to be German and Jewish at the same time. We started getting tired, so we sped through the exhibits about modernity which presented Jews in the arts and sciences along with the building of modern synagogues. There was a section dedicated to the Jewish experience during the WWI and the Weimar Republic and then during the Holocaust. The museum ended with present time and computer monitors which asked questions like “Should Turkey be allowed into the EU?” We said yes, and learned that half the museum-goers also said yes, while 50 percent said no.

Throughout the zigzags you could look into “voids” – empty spaces like courtyards which could be seen from both levels of the museum. These were integral in Libeskind’s design and are meant to make the visitor think about the space between the lines. In the end we decided that the museum was probably the best value (it only cost 2.50 for students) of any of the museums we had had to pay for thus far in our trip. Like the museum in Glasgow we appreciated the desire to teach and the hands-on approach in many of the exhibitions. Each section had something for people of all ages: children could color and watch cartoons drawn by Jews, while adults could read and listen to traditional songs sung during services. The building itself was worth seeing and experiencing.

As if we hadn’t had enough museums on Wednesday, we decided to spend Thursday on Museum Island, a small piece of land in the middle of the Spree River. We started at the Pergamonmuseum, which contains the Collection of Classical Antiquities, the Museum of Islamic Art and the Museum of the Ancient Near East. Entering the building, I was immediately struck by the enormous size of the Pergamon altar. Pergamon was in Western Turkey. The altar is shaped like the Ara Pacis, but five or six times larger; it’s in the Hellenistic (late-Greek) style. It’s a huge marble staircase surrounded by a ten-foot high frieze of sculptures. You can climb up the altar and take pictures. They’re removed the side and rear sections of the frieze and put them up around the room so it’s easier to see. In the next room we found a façade called Market Gate which is also from the same region in Turkey. This façade was greatly intact and had Roman imperial (1^st/2^nd century AD) sculptures around it. Walking through the gate, we were met with another gate: the Ishtar Gate. This alone would have been enough to draw me to Berlin: not just to the museum, but also to Berlin. Constructed in the 6^th century BC with blue stones and covered with lions and other animals, the Ishtar Gate lead up to the palace in Babylon. All that remains is the lower gate, but even that was way to big to fit into the frame of my camera. The colors are bright and a large amount of the mosaics have been reconstructed. You can start at the far end of the gallery and pass the lions lining the hallway as you walk up to the gate. That part of the museum also contained reliefs, sculptures, and paintings of the areas done at the time of German excavation.

Upstairs was the Islamic art section which had calligraphy, carpets, parts of mosques and a small section with a Moroccan/Andalucian room. It also had a façade from a palace in Jordan which had been constructed in 743-4. Another small room called the Aleppo Room was covered in carvings and decorations. You could walk into it and get a 360 approach to the art. Basically, the Germans lifted entire sections of buildings and brought them to this museum.

The other half of the museum was the Greek section where we walked through an exhibit about Greek Gods. The pieces, which had not been displayed since 1939, were recently sent to Brazil for a big show there. They have since returned to Berlin and are back at this museum. This exhibit was good, but the pictures of the Brazilian version looked like it was much better organized.

Museum number two on Museum Island was Altes Museum which was largely under construction. We saw more Greek objects like vases, coins, helmets, jewelry, and statues. This museum houses Queen Nefertiti’s bust. She was the wife of Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten and lived from 1370 BC-1340 BC. She’s really beautiful, but I was surprised that she only had one eye painted on. People clustered around the case taking pictures like crazy (I was one of them).

Continuing along, we went to the Alte Nationalgalerie, another bizarrely laid out museum (this is becoming a theme here). This time, the actual museum was a rectangle (for the most part), but the galleries were difficult to navigate and dark. On the first floor we found one tiny room that was not renovated with the rest of the museum. It was meant to show how the museum used to look (which is better than it looks now). This floor was somewhat dull, with tons of dark pieces. I did like some of the works by Adolph Menzel, but nothing was that great. Upstairs we wandered through some more German art and some French paintings as well. On the upper floor we found Romanticism and the Dusseldorf School which turned out some pleasant paintings which I enjoyed. These focused on light and color and were mainly landscapes with a few cityscapes thrown into the mix.

Finally we went to the Bode-Museum which houses the Sculpture Collection, Museum of Byzantine Art, Numismatic Collection and Works from the Gemäldegaleria. The building was newly redone and probably the best space of all the museums. It had a room with a large dome and one with a small dome; these were connected by a room dubbed the “basilica.” Around the sides were wings with more galleries. I didn’t love the collection. It was mostly religious art: Baroque, Renaissance, Romanticism, and Byzantine. I did like how some of the altars were displayed – on metal stands about four feet in the air allowing the viewer to walk around them. They had a few other interesting pieces and the store was well stocked. There was also a coin collection in some of the upstairs galleries. Even though the building was newly redone, the floor plan was a bit confusing and it was difficult to walk around the museum without having to retrace your steps through certain rooms.

We were allowed to take pictures (without using a flash-light) in all of the museums. In the Pergamon, we could bring our bags in and no one said anything to us. At the Altes Museum we were allowed to bring bags in, but not water, and the bags had to be in front of us (not on my shoulder, but across my chest). As we were leaving, a girl was getting yelled at for trying to bring a tote on her shoulder. She then checked it, but brought her water bottle with her. The guard sent her back to the coat check once again. I should also point out that she spoke German and still wasn’t getting it….oye. In the Alte nationalgalerie we had to check everything and by the time we got to the Bode-Museum we decided to just check it and not bother with the crazies guarding the museum. At the Pergamon, we were stopped at the exit and asked to fill out a survey. The girl (about our age) asked questions in English about our experience at the museum and in Berlin. She typed the answers into a blackberry, which I thought was nifty.