Meet the Germans | Rory's Berlin Blog | Goethe-Institut

    Dahlem -- a leafy residential suburb on Berlin’s south-west fringe – was created to be the Oxbridge of Germany. In 1910 Kaiser Wilhelm II called for wealthy industrialists and financiers to fund a couple of elite research institutes.  Fritz Haber, the chemist who had ‘fixed’ airborne nitrogen and so created modern fertiliser, was the first director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (later the Max Planck Institute).  Einstein worked here, and did dozens of other Nobel laureates.  



    Last month Dahlem once again set about changing the way we look at the world.  After two years of work its wonderful Ethnological Museum – originally Museum für Völkerkunde – has been joined to the renovated Museum of European Cultures as well as the Museum für Asiatische Kunst.  The result is a single museum complex which tries to put aside the old colonial concept of advanced and primitive societies, and encourages a comprehensive overview of human culture.

     The Ethnological Museum is one of the finest in the world, housing over half-a-million pre-industrial objects, most of which were collected during German voyages of exploration and colonisation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Its collections includes Native American headdresses and beadwork, Incan temple gods and Benin bronzes, plus a complete sailing ship from the Pacific island of Luf whose culture died out in the 1940s.  Its African exhibits equal those of the British Museum.  Its Mexican and Peruvian collections are the largest to be found outside central and south America.   

    Now nestled alongside it, the Museum of European Cultures is devoted to every day life and popular art in Europe.  Visitors gaze at clockwork Christmas mountains, ponder the origins of the doner kebab and the cult of Napoleon, wonder about Halloween, listen to the music of Sardinia and follow pagan ‘Perchten’ processions in the Alps.  At the museum’s heart the permanent exhibition ‘Cultural Contacts - Life in Europe’ explores social movements and social boundaries, diversity and integration, as well as current moves to return to ones ‘own’ culture, with its comforting sense of familiarity, in response to globalisation.

    Meanwhile across the hall is the Museum of Asian Art with Japanese jade, Ming Dynasty calligraphy and the fifth century Buddhist ‘Cave of the Doves with Rings’.  At the centre of the East Asian throne room stands conceptual artist Ai Weiwei’s Teahouse.  His simple, beautiful and aromatic construction was created from 378 cubes and 54 prisms of compressed tea and is surrounded by a ‘lawn’ of scattered tea leaves.  Its purpose is to shed new light on the museum’s traditional collections, and so encourage a dialogue between tradition and modernity.



    The complex also houses one of the world’s original ethno-musicology collections of sound recordings (the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv), a film archive, a children’s museum, and a museum for the blind.

    At the centre of Berlin, Museum Island – with the Altes and Neues Museums as well as the Bode and Pergamon – is one of the world’s most spectacular cultural complexes, and very busy.  In contrast, the Museumsquartier Dahlem is an oasis where one can  still stroll alone among remarkable artefacts, while gaining a fresh new outlook on the richness and inventiveness of mankind.

    ‘It’s one of Berlin’s few ghost stories,’ said Fritz, gesturing at a blank wall on the north side of Oranienburgerstraße, the long, famous street in central Mitte.  ‘But I don’t believe it.’
    I ran my hand along the wall.  Pennies and other small coins had been lodged between the bricks.
    ‘According to the legend, the spirits of two children are sometimes seen running across the street and disappearing here into the Gespenstermauer, the ghost wall,’ he explained.  ‘The idea is that if you give them a coin, your wish will come true.’
    ‘Any wish?’ I asked.
    ‘As long as it’s not too selfish.’



    I’ve long been puzzled by the absence of ghosts in Berlin.  Almost every English village boasts many more spooks than the German capital, despite Berlin’s abundance of suffering and death during the last century.  The past may be ever present here but it does not manifest itself in the paranormal or ectoplasm.
    I asked Fritz, a sixtysomething painter who has lived all his life in the neighbourhood, for an explanation.
    ‘Berliners don’t have much time for the ethereal,’ he volunteered.  ‘We trust our senses.  We prefer experiences which we can taste, feel, grasp in our hands.’
    ‘Which of course is Oranienburgerstraße’s other claim to fame,’ I pointed out.  The street is known for its prominent street prostitution, which is legal in Germany.
    ‘I hardly notice them,’ he said with a laugh.  ‘You know, prostitutes have worked Oranienburgerstraße since the start of the twentieth century.  They vanished from the street in 1933 but within days of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 they – or at least their daughters -- were back.’



    Oranienburgerstraße runs south-east from Friedrichstraße toward Hackescher Markt and is popular with tourists and Berliners alike for its nightlife, restaurants and bars.  In days gone by it was also a centre of Jewish life with schools, orphanages and even a cemetery, all now lost, as well as the restored Neue Synagoge.  Perhaps the children of the ghost wall could even be Jewish, speculated Fritz, if he believed in them.
    ‘There’s always been a tremendous sense of community along the street,’ he told me, ‘among the old Jewish residents, among the hookers, among today’s artists, among those of us who lived here during the DDR days.’ He gestured at the Gespenstermauer.  ‘Look here.’  He point at a pair of neat, plugged holes in the bricks.  ‘In 1988 the East Germany government – specifically the Politburo member Günter Schabowski – wanted to demolish all the old buildings along Oranienburgerstraße, and replace them with pre-fabricated, concrete Plattenbau boxes.  He wanted to turn the whole neighbourhood into a soulless Neubaugebiet, a “new development area” like Marzahn.’
    Fritz shook his head at the thought.
    ‘So residents started to play a cat-and-mouse game with officials.  They drilled holes like these into all the old buildings, to be filled with dynamite.  But as soon as the wreckers turned their backs we stuffed them with stones, cement, anything to frustrate their plans.  The game went on for more than a year, until the Wall fell and Schabowski and his comrades were kicked out.  But it was a close call.’
    ‘Maybe someone had made a wish at the ghost wall in 1989,’ I suggested, gesturing again at Oranienburgerstraße 41.
    ‘Maybe,’ replied Fritz with a laugh.  ‘So maybe there are real ghosts in Berlin after all...’

    In New York in the 1970s a private art collector received a package from his dealer.  He untied the wrapping and found nothing inside it.  In fury he telephoned his dealer and complained, ‘The package is empty.  Are you trying to rip me off?’
    ‘Listen to me,’ said the dealer, taking a deep breath.  ‘Tie the package back together very carefully.  It’s a Christo.’

    As well as small packages and drawings, Christo – and his partner Jeanne-Claude – have created unique environmental works of art, for example surrounding eleven islands in Miami's Biscayne Bay in floating pink polypropylene, wrapping the oldest bridge in Paris, Pont-Neuf, in sand-coloured fabric and running a 24-mile nylon fence across Sonoma and Marin counties in California.  



    Wrapping was their thing, and the huge scale of most of their work remains both impressive and controversial.  But Christo (and Jeanne-Claude who died in 2009) always denied that their projects contained any meaning beyond the immediate aesthetic impact.  Their purpose, they said, was simply to make works of art or joy and beauty and to create new ways of seeing familiar landscapes.

    In 1995 – after almost twenty years of planning and persuasion and in their most important work – Christo (and Jeanne-Claude) wrapped the Reichstag.  The post-war division of Europe had had a major impact on Christo’s life: he had been born in Bulgaria, escaped the Communist bloc by hiding in a railway freight wagon, lived as a stateless person for 17 years, came first to public attention with Rideau de Fer (Iron Curtain) when he and Jeanne-Claude blocked off Rue Visconti, a small Parisian street near the River Seine, with oil barrels.  Wrapping the Reichstag was the realisation of a dream.



    But did this remarkable project really have no deeper meaning?  Is it true -- as Jeanne-Claude said – that ‘Our art has absolutely no purpose, except to be a work of art.  We do not give messages’?

    Until 1995 for many Berliners the Reichstag had been a blackened symbol of the failure of German democracy: Kaiser Wilhelm II had openly expressed his contempt for the ‘talking shop’, its effectiveness had been squandered during the Weimar ‘republic without republicans’ years, its burning in 1933 had enabled the Nazis to suspend all civil liberties.  At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the decision to restore the capital of reunited Germany to Berlin, the building was burdened by its tangled, bloody history and association with totalitarianism.

    But then along came Christo with ‘a 100,000 square metres of silver-coloured polypropylene in his pockets, and wrapped our Reichstag,’ recalled the Berlin historian and writer Niko Rollmann.  ‘And there we stood, for two warm summer weeks, five million people altogether, and couldn’t believe what we saw.  Had the hippies put LSD into the water supply?  Was it just a big hallucination?  Sure, this was our Reichstag – but not as we knew it!  Christo had wrapped it up like a little (or rather large) present, a present for a nation which was at last unified, democratic, free and on good terms with its neighbours!  It felt as if we could, for once, step out of the shadow of the past and be a little bit playful.’



    Christo – and Jeanne-Claude – had made the building disappear, thereby sweeping away many of Berliners’ haunting memories, enabling the Reichstag to be reborn and then reconstructed by Norman Foster.  As the art critic David Bourdon wrote, Christo’s wrappings brought ‘revelation through concealment’.  The breadth and daring of the artists’ vision helped Berliners and Germans – when they unwrapped the package – to see themselves anew.  Unlike the New York art collector, they discovered that there was much more than nothing inside the wrappings.

New Year's Morning in Berlin

    ‘This is the best New Year’s ever!’ enthused ‘Buffi’ Knabe, pushing his broom along the Straße des 17. Juni, a damp dawn breaking behind him and the Brandenburg Gate.  ‘I’m so happy that I could dance,’ he added, performing an impromptu jig with his broom’s handle.  
    ‘Because of the “Silvester in Berlin” party?’ I asked.  Over one million revellers had descended on the Straße des 17. Juni to eat, drink, ride the Giant Ferris Wheel and dance away 2011.



    ‘No,’ replied ‘Buffi’, the easyjet orange of his BSR overalls luminescent in the dull morning light.
    ‘Because of the music?’ I asked.  On the Brandenburg Gate stage Kim Wilde had performed along with the Scorpions, Cassandra Steel, Frida Gold and a dozen other pop acts.
    Again he shook his head.  ‘No,’ repeated ‘Buffi’, now anxious to get on with his work.
    ‘Then because of the fireworks display?’ I suggested.
    ‘No,’ answered ‘Buffi’.  ‘This is the best New Years’ because there’s no snow.  We’ll be through our work in half the usual time, and then I can put my feet up and have my own party.’



    Berlin – like most of Germany – becomes unhinged on New Years’ Eve.  Thousands of tons of kaleidoscopic pyrotechnics ignite in the night sky.  Thick clouds of smoke waft across the blazing squares.  Sparklers sparkle.  Sonnenvogel sunflowers spin above pavements.  Local people line the canals to launch Jolly Joker rockets at the opposite bank (especially along the Landwehrkanal between rival Kreuzberg and Neukölln). Teenagers – who are polite and considerate during the rest of the year – shower cherry bombs at passing taxis.  In Friedrichshain kids lob Superböller bangers under moving buses.  In Wilmersdorf sober fathers hold their toddlers in one hand while firing from the other roaring Devil’s Delight Roman candles into the sky.  The noise is deafening, and the resulting mess is dreadful to behold – especially when there’s snow.

    But this winter Berlin is yet to see snow.  So instead of gunpowder-blazed drifts and firecracker-stained ice pools, this year’s spent fireworks lie ready to be swept up by ‘Buffi’ and his mates from the Berliner Stadtreinigungsbetriebe.  Within thirty-six hours the gangs of street sweepers will clean central Tiergarten and Mitte, then branch out into the residential streets, working in teams of eight or ten men (and the occasional woman).
    ‘This year we need to work quickly and finish before it snows,’ ‘Buffi’ told me, sweeping the smouldering Laser rockets and Uranus batteries into a huge pile.  ‘So excuse me if I get on.’



    I love Silvester in Berlin, despite the noise, mess and danger (the city’s emergency services received 1,500 calls over the night – more than 15 times last year’s number – but no serious incidents were reported).  A kitchen psychologist might say that on New Years Eve the Germans unleash their pent-up frustration in a (mostly) harmless manner.  Perhaps that’s true.  Or maybe they simply know how to enjoy themselves and to let go for one kinetic night.  Whatever the explanation, in Germany at midnight, with a deafening racket and roar, the nation marks the passing of another year, forgets about its worries and woes, and celebrates with joy the hopes of a new beginning.  Hurra!  Wir leben noch…