Berlin Part III: The Jewish Museum

Wielding our 3-Tages-Karten, one of the things at the top of our Berlin to-do list was to visit the Jewish Museum—I’d heard great things and wanted to refresh my memory regarding Jewish history leading up to and during World War II, in particular.

As we walked through the door of the museum, the first thing important thing I saw there was an aggressive reminder of how much history lives with us and persists daily in our contemporary world: a security checkpoint, more rigorous than that at the entrance to the Louvre and like I’ve seen in no other museum I’ve been to in Germany. Very much like the airport, visitors empty their pockets, walk through a metal detector, and send their bags through the x-ray machine on a conveyor belt. Needless to say, I felt a little ashamed that I was there to “brush up” on the history that makes this kind of security precaution completely necessary.

The museum itself was designed by architect Daniel Libeskind and is shaped like an enormous zig-zag. I’ve never been in a building like it—it’s very beautiful and very disorienting. Libeskind says the structure’s unusual shape is not supposed to represent anything; rather, what is important is the spatial experience that visitors have within it. Trying to write about it reminds me a little of trying to describe coming down the narrow staircase in St. Michaelis’s church of Hamburg when the enormous bells started to ring: words don't suffice, but anyone on the staircase could feel the tolling through the entirety of her body. Though much more quietly, so, too, with great buildings. Nowhere in the Jewish Museum does the Jewish Museum disappear or fall away from the consciousness of the visitors. It is fully present all of the time, which is what the museum, in turn, demands of the visitors—I thought this was really amazing, and it’s so fun to be inside of for several hours at a time.

My favorite thing about the design of the museum is that Libeskind created empty spaces, referred to as voids, in several parts of the building. The voids, which are meant to represent the absence of Jews from German society, are openings that cut vertically from the top of the building to the ground floor (about 20 meters), sort of like large, irregularly shaped elevator shafts. In the walls of these shafts, narrow windows allow one to look out into these spaces while walking through the different levels of the museum.

One of the voids, known as the Memory Void, contains an installation by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman, entitled “Shalekhet” or “Falling Leaves.” There are over 10,000 metal, 2-dimensional faces scattered throughout the space of the Memory Void, which are dedicated to innocent victims of war and violence. Also, the faces are created by a negative process—the features of the faces do not protrude from the metal discs, rather they are places where the material has been cut away—reiterating the voids throughout the museum. But, again, it’s the space in which the installation appears that makes it so arresting; it is quite dim, narrow, and angular, and it echoes when you speak or walk inside of it. One can’t help but whisper, though when we went in no one else was there. The Memory Void felt as bleak and isolate as it sounds.

The museum exhibits themselves were really great, too. Along one of the corridors, or “axes” of the building, windows opened into display cases containing various possessions and personal belongings of Jews who had lived in Germany in the late 1930s to early 1940s. Beside the objects were descriptions and pictures of the individuals who had owned them, brief accounts of what became of them under Nazi power (most were sent to labor or concentration camps and died in there), and correspondence they maintained with friends or family as long as they were able. It was sort of eerie to be able to read parts of these letters in German.

Another exhibit was all about a Jewish tradition called Sukkah, which seemed very important within the context of Libeskind’s architecture. If you’re not familiar, a Sukkah is a small, temporary dwelling, which is meant to be constructed with three walls and a roof of foliage in late September through late October (during the Hebrew month of Tishrei) for worship during and celebration of Sukkot. This is a tradition I really don’t know much about beyond what I saw in the museum and have read on Wikipedia, so if anyone can say something more and detailed about it, please leave a comment! I would very much like to understand this better. But what I did learn by way of the exhibit is that the Sukkah are meant to serve as a reminder of the make-shift dwellings where ancient Israelites lived during their 40 years of wandering in the desert after the Exodus from Egypt, and symbolize abstract places of belonging. I really liked this in relation to the building of the museum—the two kinds of structures both work with cultural memory and displacement, and interact in some way with the idea of the structures as manifestations of the transitory (the museum, for example, is covered in a layer of zinc; as it gradually oxidizes with exposure to the elements, the building will turn the color blue! Exposure to “damage” or change seems to be a key principle of the construction of Sukkah as well, i.e. three instead of four walls.)

Lastly, the Jewish history exhibit is really impressive, and because of it I recommend going to the museum early in the day so you can spend as much time as you want to go through it. It is so gigantic and comprehensive—covering everything from Jews in the Middle ages through World War II, from telling the stories of important Jewish figures in history to detailing a number of Jewish traditions (synagogue architecture, for example, or the Kosher diet)—that I was in the museum for close to 4 hours and didn’t come close to finishing this exhibit. I was chased out by employees very promptly at closing time (which was 8pm on a Sunday).

(the arial picture obviously isn't one I took myself--I borrowed it from the Jewish Museum's website, which is cool and gives a lot of great images of the building if you're curious!)

Berlin Part II: Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders, and my Walking Tour

Finally getting to travel to Berlin was like putting a face to the name of someone you’ve heard so much about; someone you’ve never met who’s somehow a friend of all of your friends; someone you’ve stalked on Facebook but, though there are thousands of pictures, most of them are blurry or out-of-date, their wall comments are incomprehensible, and their “interests” are so general—“art, music, German, history, cheap rent...”—it sort of sounds like a list of freshman year General Ed. requirements.

So Berlin and I finally got to hang out, and I sort of understand these rave-if-vague reviews. Berlin is a giant city and there’s so much to do. I think it’s easy to leave feeling like you didn’t get to see enough of it even if, like me, you spend 6 full days tromping around in the snow trying to see everything you’d heard about plus everything you hadn’t. It’s hard to give a precise and accurate description of a place so diverse and abundant with itself.

Though it’s true I didn’t prepare much in advance for the trip, with retrospect I think one of the better if unwitting sources of information I had about Berlin was a good memory of a great movie. Before traveling to Berlin, I recommend watching Wim Wenders’ 1987 movie Wings of Desire*. It is beautiful, shot in black and white, in German (subtitles in English of course), and is sadly the basis for imitation that birthed Brad Silberling’s 1998 blockbuster City of Angels, featuring Meg Ryan and Nicholas Cage. And while I never appreciated Sarah McLachlan’s mawkish contribution to the soundtrack (that is, Angel), as a 12 year-old I guess I might have been convinced by Meg’s 429th performance as an adorable, unjustly burned heroine of a former, destructive relationship, now recovering and finding solace in the arms of…oh why not, an angel.

But I really, really recommend Wings of Desire instead. Because the dialogue is excellent (Wenders employed Austrian novelist/playwright/poet Peter Handke to write much of the script), the shots are amazing, and the movie really avoids cliché in a way wholly unlike its Hollywood counterpart. And through its Berlin setting Wenders conveys a very profound sense of how full of remembrance and monument the city is. As the movie is produced before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it’s among several really great movies that allow you to see the city before that change took place in ‘89.

Below are the pictures of my end-of-2010 city walking tour, spread out over several days:

The Brandenburg Tor

The Jewish memorial

Graffiti in the frost on the stone slabs of the Jewish memorial

War memorial, Neue Wache

The Berliner Dome

Checkpoint Charlie

Leaving the American sector, Checkpoint Charlie

Bertolt Brecht!

The German National Library (figures prominently in Wings of Desire)

The Russian War Memorial

Siegessäule (The Victory Column--under construction, but also makes a great appearance in Wings of Desire)

more Siegessäule

Part of the Berlin Wall along the Spree

Eastside Gallery (Berlin Wall)

Eastside Gallery (Berlin Wall)

Eastside Gallery (Berlin Wall).

So other than a compulsion to see in person the beautiful monuments and buildings shot by a talented director of a late 1980’s German film, my trip was governed largely by two factors. The first being (I realize this theme is becoming tiresome but bear with me…) the cold, and the second being frugality, or cheapness in the disguise of frugality in the disguise of a 3-Tages-Karte. In Berlin, I learned that one can purchase a ticket that allows 3 days of unlimited museum-going for 9.50€ (student discount)! Which is obviously a great deal, and as I noted in the Strasbourg post, a day—or several days—of museums goes very well with insane winter temperatures(-11 C?!).

Coming next to the blog: The Jewish Museum, the Topography of Terror Museum, the Berlin Modern Art Museum.

*originally entitled Der Himmel über Berlin for release in Germany.

Berlin Part I: How and Why I Came to Visit Berlin for Christmas 2010

The trip I took to Berlin, between the 23rd and 29th of December, wasn’t really mapped out ahead of time. I admit most of my trips aren’t, but Berlin was a little different, even, than the usual disorganization and unpreparedness. For example, I booked a train ticket and hotel fewer than 24 hours before I left. And considering the intense awesomeness that’s associated with Berlin, and how badly I’ve been wanting to go, it’s sort of hard to believe that my first visit there over the 2010 holidays was actually a sudden and tearfully made B-Plan. What the heck, I know. Here’s what happened.

It was around mid-November that I started feeling pretty homesick—the days had become dark, cold, rainy, and snowy. The novelty of immersion language learning was wearing off, and I was starting to feel frustrated by how much I still couldn’t express or understand in conversation. I missed my family and friends; I turned 25, and though I’m a currently a fulltime student, I’m also unemployed. I was feeling kind of bad about all these things and I decided I needed a break to sort through my German experience and soak up some vitamin D.

So I got a plane ticket home to visit my family in Southern California for the holidays. Just what I needed, I thought, it was going to be brilliant! I was going to see everyone I love the most! I was going to come back bearing all the gifts I’d spent the last several weeks accumulating. I was going to sit in the sun in my parents’ backyard. Run outside in shorts! Sleep late and eat way too many Christmas cookies! See my best friends from high school! Get a haircut, which I (still) badly need but have been avoiding in Heidelberg, given serious hair-cut fears and a limited German vocabulary. I was going to buy all the things that I need to make my life work properly that are unavailable in Germany (Frank’s hot sauce, an Oral-B soft cross-action toothbrush, a few new books of contemporary poetry in English).

But as the date of my trip approached, it started to look a little complicated for air travel. For over a week before my flight, newspapers were filled with the headlines of travel hubs all over Europe shut down by winter weather—by snow, ice, and would-be air travelers, all piling up portentously on every runway and in every flight terminal. I was checking the weather reports 3 times a day, hoping the skies would clear! That the ice would melt and an army of snow plows would be working around the clock for my special benefit.

And then it did get better! With two, full days before my departure, the sky was dull and cloudy but precipitation in all of its forms had stopped and the weather had warmed a little. Things were still hectic, but the tangle of missed connections and holiday-travelers-turned-airport-campers was finally beginning to get sorted out.

But just after the alarm went off at 5:30 in the morning on the day of my flight—I leapt out of bed! I was scrambling around in the darkness! throwing things in my purse! making last minute changes to the contents of my over-stuffed suitcase! packing my laptop and pulling book after book of well-intentioned airplane reading from the shelves!!—my phone started to ring, too.

It was U.S. Airways: “Flight’s cancelled due to prior weather conditions. Sorry……”

I really thought I could hear sucker!, as in, “Sorry, sucker!”, hanging at the end of this terrible little memo. Prior weather conditions? Prior? Are you kidding? No arrangements were made for a different flight and, as several thorough searches determined, a last-minute ticket with another airline would have to be business class, would cost another $1,000.

I didn’t know what to do! It seemed impossible that there was really this enormous immoveable wall between me and getting on a plane back to the U.S. After all, I’d bought a ticket already at great expense. I’d bought train tickets to and from the airport, packed 85% of my Germany-based life into a bag.

But there’s really no sense writing about it. Everyone has their own personal annals of travel disaster and frustration, and certainly mine are no worse than anyone else’s. In fact, with the retrospect of just a couple weeks it doesn’t even look so bad. I still really miss home and everyone there. But I didn’t have to stand around at the airport for 18 hours fighting with bureaucrats about getting a refund or another flight; I didn’t crash on a plane into the Atlantic or have to de-board a plane because of an engine fire or bird’s wing caught in the propeller. Etcetera. It's embarrassing to say, but at the time the word to describe how I was feeling would have to bitter. Bitter mixed with disbelief, bitter mixed with self-pity, bitter mixed with disappointment the size of seventeen airplanes, bitter mixed with totally devastated. Sorry friends and fam, it was not my finest moment. Or day, or couple of days.

The alternatives to my now cancelled California-bound flight were either to stay in Heidelberg, in an all but entirely abandoned 12-story, dilapidated student dormitory, or buy a last minute train-ticket to Berlin and spend the Holidays with our very good friends, Aaron and Lily. Of course, once I took a three hour stress nap and recovered a little from my disappointment, I happily opted for the latter. And they were nice enough to have me stay, even on such short notice. (Thanks, you guys!)

So that is the story of how I ended up going to Berlin for Christmas, instead of peacing out to California or Hawaii or Costa Rica or any of these other places one might think of as desirable, mid-winter holiday destinations. And while I’m not sure I’d recommend being one of a handful of travelers slugging north when everyone else is flocking south, this turned out to be one of the best trips I’ve taken here in Germany, to what's now maybe my new favorite city. Because Berlin really is as awesome as it’s rumored and I can’t wait to say more about it. I should have Berlin Part II posted later this weekend—and I’m pretty sure it should be more interesting than my airing of grievances with U.S. Airways and northern European weather patterns :)

The Way-Back Machine: Strasbourg, Late November

Heidelberg is a great place. I really mean this. It has some very beautiful buildings and quiet streets; it has a river that flows through the shallow valley where the city is situated between several forested Bergs (I translate this to mean “sort of big hills”), a public transit system that I’d rank about 6/10, and it even has its own castle! Plus the lectures at the university are public, there’s a Deutsch-Amerikanisches Institut (where I can attend lectures in English when I realize I have no idea what’s going on at the German ones), there are some good and very regular music events going on at a place called the Karlstorbahnhof (public transit by day, music venue by night), and throughout the month of December there was a great Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas market) going on, which I will definitely say more about in another post.

But despite its many fine attributes, Heidelberg is also small, vegetarian food selections are quite limited and, while this isn’t Heidelberg’s fault, the Studentenwohnheim where I am currently residing is under construction; the sound of jackhammers just outside my window, 12 hours a day 6 days a week (this is a work ethic like none other, right?? How is it possible, I ask myself daily.) is more annoying, distracting, and evilly undermining of thought than anything else imaginable. And though recent overdoses of travel have made me appreciate Heidelberg all the more, there came a time in late November when I was looking for an escape.

So as a dual celebration of Thanksgiving and my birthday, Matt and I took a trip to Strasbourg—a weekend we decided to make last through Monday, sort of like French people do.* We took the train to get there and back, which is a bit more expensive than other options (transfer 2 or 3 times on buses to reach the border, then switching to the train, for example), but worth it in my opinion—it's fast, easy to figure out, and the countryside is very beautiful; it was nice to be able to relax and enjoy it.

The Weihnachtsmarkt in Strasbourg has a reputation for being a pretty big deal (Strasbourg is, after all, the self-declared “Capital of Christmas”), so after dropping our bags in our hotel we spent most of the first day walking from one market site to another, experiencing as much of it as we could. This involved drinking headaching amounts of Gluehwein (that is, hot wine mixed with sugar and spices—a beverage which may or may not be more of a reason for the Weihnachtsmarkt phenomenon than Weihnachten itself), trying a variety of snacks (I'd never eaten roasted chestnuts before--they're delicious!), and doing a little bit of early and completely impractical Christmas shopping. There’s not a lot more I can say about the market that wouldn’t be better conveyed in a photograph—or several! From every possible variety of ornament, candy, crepe, plaything, and manger scene, to the densely packed crowds, street performers, and carnival rides, it’s a sensory fête to say the least, and to use the French :)

As much fun as all of this was, we were still running into a few weather-related off-season challenges—namely, it snowed! It was so cold I couldn’t feel my feet and my ears felt like they might fall off. So on the second day of the trip, we remedied these problems in two important ways:

1.)The acquisition of the following hats:

2.) a long afternoon escaping the weather in Strasbourg’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. I give this a rave review, hands down! The collection was very diverse and engaging, not to mention that, if you can get away with telling un petit lie about your age (under 25!), you can get in for just 3 Euros. We were lucky, too, because our visit fell between the November 6th 2010 and the February 13th 2011—the dates during which the Marcel Duchamp Prize** exhibit is being hosted in Strasbourg (so you can still go and see this! It’s not too late!). Works by about 40 different winners of the prize are on display—with particular emphasis on works owned by private collectors and public institutions. This seemed important to me because I’ve so seldom thought about how much visual art is simply unavailable for public viewing. As a writer, I usually forget and feel startled by the fact that only a single copy of a work of art can exist in the world.

In the snowy weather, we found out that we liked being in doors a lot; in particular, being in doors looking at art. So on the third day we checked out the Tomi Ungerer Museum, which show cases the children’s books, erotica, advertisements, political satire and agitprop art by the artist for whom the museum obviously takes its name. The Modern/Contemporary Art Museum was great, but I get it that not everyone loves hanging out at places like this. So skip it. But the Tomi Ungerer Museum is so incredibly worth seeing whether you’re an art fan or not, I give it my highest recommendation for places to visit. Ungerer’s biography is amazingly relevant to World War II history, and his work narrates decades of international (especially German, French, American) social and political change and revolution. Also, he's so funny! What’s not funny about erotic ghosts?

Anyway Strasbourg is completely beautiful. The French-German cultural mix is really interesting and unique in my experience, and the city is much bigger than Heidelberg but (despite the weather) easy to cover by foot, not at all unmanagable and pretty easy to find your way around.

At the very bottom of the entry are resturant recommendations (as people expect to hear of any trip to France, we did eat some really fantastic food) and more pictures below of some things I didn’t get a chance to mention above! Also: the 2 pictures immediately below are of the biggest rodent I’ve ever seen in my life, but there’s no possible way it was a rat, it was the size of a large house cat…I’d much appreciate it if anyone could tell me what this is.

Resturant Recommendations:

This seems like something I might be inspired to continue including in the blog entries, if for no other reason than the fact that where ever, whenever I travel, I inevitably waste a lot of time searching for someplace to eat. A lot of times I get sick of caving and going for the nearest pizza just so I can get on with my sightseeing; I'd like to try local and regional dishes but I admit I'm picky, somewhat cheap, and a "pescetarian." And this search goes on at least 3 times a day! Sigh. So these are just in case anyone happens to see the blog before also making a trip to Strasbourg.

Le Monceau: 6, Place Saint Thomas, 67000 Strasbourg. We arrived here more or less by luck and happy accident, but I would definitely go out of my way to eat here again. The restaurant seemed more like the casual living room of someone’s house than a restaurant, so the atmosphere was really relaxed and the lighting was great. The waiter and the chef (the only two people working there as far as I could tell) seemed to own the restaurant and were both incredibly nice. They gave free appetizers! And though the menu was absent a vegetarian option, I had some really great salmon instead, inexpensive but very good wine, and berry tart for dessert. Definitely the best French food I’ve had.

Feuilles D’Artichaut: 56, Grand Rue 67000 Strasbourg. Of all the many places to eat on Grand Rue, we ate here because it also had a nice, casual atmosphere and mismatched furniture, it’s co-operatively run, and the mention of vegetables—artichoke!—in its name said to me, welcome, vegetarians, you can’t go wrong! As it turned out, you really really could—pork knuckle and a handful of other unusual, little-thought-of body parts were listed on the menu, but a couple of great veg items were, too, including a spicy, mixed vegetable quiche and *maybe* the best salad I’ve even eaten, which was topped with something they called “Brocos” and copyrighted on the menu as their own invention—it was something like a cheese curd with spinach and herbs mixed in. The prices were really reasonable (by my experience, this is pretty unusual in Strasbourg) and the wine was great! Actually, we liked it so much we tried to go back a second time but ran into the everything-closed-on-Monday problem.

*Mostly all stores and businesses (excluding restaurants) are closed on Sundays as they are in Germany, but we also found many places (including restaurants) closed on Monday as well. Needless to say, this is something to keep in mind if you’re traveling there, though we found plenty of great places regardless.

**The Marcel Duchamp Prize is awarded to a French artist (or artist residing in France) creating in the medium of plastic and visual art. The winner is chosen by a committee to be honored as being among the most innovative artists of his/her generation. It was established in 2000.

This Blog Post is Not an Extension of a New Year's Resolution

I really have been away for the blog for some time. I’m sure anyone who receives my emails, has read any of the past several entries here, or is the imaginary friend to whom I compose all diary entries is not interested in another of my excuses for not having written sooner. But I’ll be honest, here’s what happened: Thanksgiving! My birthday! A trip to Strasbourg! A trip to Nuremburg! The panicky, procrastination-induced mania of holiday gift shopping! The sugar-induced mania of holiday break’s beginning! (yes this still happens for me.) Christmas! A trip to Berlin! New Year’s! The panicky, procrastination-induced mania of school beginning, again!

So In the next week I will really do my best to cover in retrospect the highlights of the past 2 months, most of which have to do with traveling.

A little preamble: traveling in the off-seasons of mid-late fall and winter is a lot cheaper than traveling when people would like to travel, in the spring or summer. Obviously, sun and warm weather are better than snow and freezing temperatures for spending much time outdoors hiking and/or taking city walking tours. And having been a student for, well, probably far too long and thus always having next to nothing in the way of disposable income—combined with a desire to travel, combined with a short memory for adverse weather conditions and little experience with them (oh, California, homeland of the tender and unprepared!)—has led me to the habitual planning of trips for the undesirable off-season. Forgetting the downsides of travel during these months has led me to do things like go camping with a cotton-stuffed sleeping bag in Glacier National Park at the very end of the season, or getting caught in a freak blizzard in Victoria (late November) and having to buy boots just to make possible the walk back to the ferry terminal.

Though I may not have learned all that I could have from these experiences, gratefully there are some places that are still really, actually fun to visit, even when it’s -5 degrees Celsius outside and your breath is turning to ice on your scarf and hair. I’d be happy to hear from anyone at all about other good places to travel out-of-season! As I don't expect my financial situation to improve any time soon, I'd really love the recommendations :) Anyway I’ll be focusing on Strasbourg, France and Berlin, Germany.

Please check back tomorrowish--it really takes a long time to upload each picture, I hope someone actually gets to see them!