klub7 in brooklyn.

yesterday we went to williams & bailey (grand between lorimer and union) to watch the champions league final and stumbled upon a klub7 mural. klub7 is a totally awesome berlin based collective that gets busy making art around the world. right now they are diggin' brooklyn, and i am pretty obsessed with them... check out their blog.

dear berlin.
i miss you.
sincerely,
kristen.

topographie des terrors.

topography of terror...

the reichstag.

tiergarten.

the bricks represent where the berlin wall was...

bebelplatz.

The Bebelplatz is the site of the Nazi book burning ceremony (May 10, 1933). The Nazis burned around 20,000 books, including works by Thomas Mann, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, and many others. In speaking of remembering what is no longer there, Micha Ullman created a memorial consisting of a glass plate set in the cobblestones, revealing empty book cases. A nearby plaque reads, "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen," or, "Where they burn books, they ultimately burn people." (-Heinrich Heine) Students at Humboldt University hold a book sale in the square every year to mark the anniversary.

altes museum.

museumsinsel on an early morning run.

occasionally we would come across buildings with reminders of WWII.

museumsinsel.

(akenaton and nefertiti)


i posted about visiting nefertiti at the neues museum before... here are the photos... you can see the guard who chased me down afterward in the background.

ja order nein...

so i made up this game while we were in germany... whenever i learned a new german word i would say the word and then "ja oder nein." if the word had a nice ring to it, it was a ja word. if not, it was a nein word. we were at dinner one night and there was homemade apple studel on the menu... hausgemachter apfelstrudel. hausgemachter apfelstrudel, ja order nein? JA! JA! JA! JA! resoundingly so. hausgemachter. great word. similarly, we were at dinner another night and i was talking with this fantastic guy from munich who taught me a few bavarian words and phrases, most notably, na schmarrn. na schmarrn, ja order nein? JA! JA! JA! JA!

it was a great game for remembering new german vocabulary... language is always one of my favourite parts of visiting a new place... i flirted with the idea of quitting french and finding a german tutor when i got home. but then again, without steve (my french tutor), i would never have gone on this trip. so, i guess i will stick with him.

also, i need a public access time slot for my the ja order nein show.

i would like to thank my berlin roommate danielle for humoring me with this game day in and day out! JA! JA! JA! JA!

denkmal für die ermordeten juden europas.

I mentioned in my post yesterday how the Garden of Exile at the Jewish Museum reminded me of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

There is a museum underneath the memorial... in one of the last rooms, there are telephones set up where you can listen to first hand accounts of death camp survivors. In one of the accounts, a man speaks of his job clearing bodies from the gas chamber; he goes into detail about how bloated and bloodied they were... covered in vomit and excrement...

I spent a lot of time sitting there. One of our group leaders had to come find me... everyone was already on the bus ready to go and I hadn't even noticed.

superman was a jew...

jüdisches museum berlin.

The Garden of Exile also reminded me of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe:

The Holocaust Tower

The Screaming Room

I know they were being liberated, but how did they even remember how to smile?

The view of the Garden of Exile from above:



Emotions that hadn't been processed after our visit to Sachsenhausen began to surface at the Jewish Museum. It was the architecture (Daniel Libeskind) that elicited the response from me more so than the actual artifacts and information in the museum. I had been excited to experience the building after reading and seeing photos of it for so long. There was so much beauty, strength, intelligence, brilliance, compassion, and attention to human psychology in the architecture... every detail moved me.

I was most touched by the Holocaust Tower. The tower, a tall, empty silo, isn't heated, nor cooled and the only light comes from a slit in the ceiling. The affect of the concrete architecture enclosing empty space as a memorial was powerful, and I quickly became overwhelmed looking up at the sliver of light in the darkness. In asking how to memorialize the dead of the Shoa, a question that arose quite a lot during our trip, this came closest as a possible answer (for me).

After visiting the Garden of Exile (it's tilted foundation is uncomfortably disorienting), and the art installation where we walked on metal plates carved as faces, creating disturbingly clanging, almost scream-like sounds, that echoed through the room's interior, I wanted time to explore and reflect alone.

When I came to the photos, 1933 - 1945... I can't really express the emotional affect with words... but... I guess I will say... I was glad to be away from the group.

at the end of our street.

frank gehry, dz bank building.

berlin street art.

see the ampelmännchen?

alana outside sammlung boros.

sammlung boros.

one of my favourite parts of this trip was our visit to sammlung boros. we were lucky enough to know somebody, who knew somebody, who got us a guided tour of the private collection at the bunker. the collection there is insane, as was the inspiration i felt upon completion of the tour. we were not allowed to take photos once inside, but... it was amazing, to put it mildly. olafur eliasson was featured prominently, so as you can imagine, these were collectors after my own heart.

afterwards, a few of the people expressed their distaste for modern art and its lack of place, purpose, or function... i won't comment too deeply on that... if you are reading this, chances are you know my thoughts and most of you feel the same way. i responded only with a, 'you are entitled to your opinion,' and a few words on the importance of art in society. heh.

some notes on the space: the nazi era bunker is owned by christian boros. built in 1942 to protect passengers of friedrichstraße station from aerial bombardment, the structure was used postwar to store tropical fruit (east berliners then dubbed it the “banana bunker"). It also had a brief stint as a hardcore techno/fetish club, until city authorities shut it down in 1996.

anyway, the work was bananas, and if you are ever in berlin, check it out.