Berlin

After the Museum, I spent evening and the next day wandering the city. If in Germany, it has to be CURRYWURST. In this case, deep fried with Potato Salad.







When in Berlin, one has to make a visit to the famed Checkpoint Charlie. That, along with a visit to the Museum of the Berlin Wall the next day, got me thinking about who I am. If I had been an East German citizen, would I have been one of those people who risked everything to get out? Or would I have been passive and simply accepted it, and even liked, the order and rigidity?






I'm scared to admit that there's a 50/50 chance I would have been the accepting citizen.






Can it really be today, 20 years after the wall, that the advertisement right at Checkpoint Charlie is for an Apple product? And in the area below the billboard, where the stations and used to be is now a makeshift beach where people can go for drinks? Amazing.






Brandenburg Gate at night. Peaceful and beautiful. Berlin has such great amazing old architecture and some crazy new stuff.





This block sculpture park is the Memorial to Murdered Jews of Europe.





All I could think about was how fun it would to play capture the flag here.





Walking around town, I loved the stop and go signs.





How could you not be cheered up by the jaunty green man!

Pergamon Museum

Berlin! First stop (because I got on the bus going the wrong direction and therefore stuffed my backpack in a locker) the Pergamon Museum





So, this is the model of the Pergamon Altar. The alter, at Pergamon in modern day Turkey, was constructed in the 184 BC by Eumenes II in honor of the goddess who brought the Pergamene's victory over their enemies.




Here you can see the altars location within the city of Pergamon.





Here at the museum, the western side of the Pergamon Altar has been reconstructed. It's awesome and so amazing to be able to climb up the stairs and walk all around it.





Beyond the great structure itself, is the frieze that runs around the entire temple. While on the steps, facing west, the museum has reconstructed much of the eastern frieze. The entire frieze is a gigantomachy, the defeat of chaos and giants by the Olympian gods. Here we have Artemis throwing down and a giant/serpent.





The frieze is HELLENISM at its finest. It's the movement and emotion in contrast to the static and "emotionless" of classicism. Here on the right, we have Athena, with her left hand, lifting up a giant by the head before throwing him to the ground, while with her right hand she beats off an attack with her shield.





Notice the goddess with the calm face and the pain/terror on the gods face.





The frieze even is squeezed into the area bordered by the steps. Here the ocean gods are forcing the enemy towards the mouth of a waiting lion.





Here, in another room, is the reconstruction of the gate to the Temple of Athena, also excavated by Pergamon.





Just seeing the Pergamon Altar would have made me happy, but I step into the next room and find the Market Gate of Miletus. Created in the 2nd century AD and was the grand portal to the towns central market. It is so well preserved because it was buried in an 12th century earthquake.






And the hits keep on coming with the reconstruction of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. It was constructed by King Nebuchadnezzar in 575BC.





The door here is the 8th door to the inner city of Babylon. Actually, the one reconstructed here in Berlin is the SMALLER of the two. The larger one is in storage.





This is the reconstruction of the processional walkway leading to the gate. The actual processional walkway was actually wider.





One of the lions (there are also dragons) that guard the door. Each brick was individually fired and glazed and set into place.





The Germans, back in the early 1900's were quite active in archeological work in the Middle East. There is a great islamic art section. Here is the wall of a Umayyad winter palace commissioned by Al-Walid II in 743BC.





The Konya Prayer Niche









There was a great exhibit about a private art collection that was bombed during WWII. The collection was broken into pieces like this.





It's amazing how the historians can piece together the original piece. Can you imagine finding fragments of a frieze and then trying (such as the gigantomachy of the Pergamon Altar) and then piecing it back together, without actually knowing what the original picture is?





A last view of the amazing Pergamon Altar. One great event that happened during my visit to the museum was I met a fellow Bay Area museum goer. We ended up hanging out during our museum stay and then met up for drinks the next day.

Bauhaus and Lutherstadt Wittenberg

Leaving Leipzig with the goal of reaching Berlin, I got on the train headed for Lutherstadt Wittenberg, but while reading my guide book, I saw that if I took a small detour I would end up in the town of Dessau, which is famous for being the home of Bauhaus architecture. So, in the spirit of, "follow where the wind takes you", I made the detour and stopped off in Dessau to walk through the Bauhaus campus of Gropius.

This is the backside of the original Bauhaus "Bauhaus". What I take from this is that when these buildings were first designed and built in the 1920's, they were sparse and non-detailed in comparison to the richly ornamented buildings of their predecessors.

They are stripped to their essence, radical for their time....

...they seem just kind of "run of the mill" today. But to put myself into the shoes of a citizen in the 1920's and having only seen the highly detailed stuff from before, this must have been radical. I guess that's how we might see those Frank Gehry buildings today.

Martin Luther, yeah THAT Martin Luther.

Here in the Saxony-Anhalt Region's town of Lutherstadt Wittenberg (formerly just Wittenberg) was where on October 31st, 1517, Martin Luther posted his famous 95 theses criticizing the Catholic church.  

I arrived in the early evening and took a walk around town as the sunset. Beautiful. Here's the Stadtkirche, in which Martin Luther gave many a sermon.

This is the tower (added after the 1500's) of the Schlosskirche which is across town and where....

....on these doors, Martin Luther posted his famous 95 theses.

Ok, actually, that was a picture of the real door. The church is undergoing renovation and this is what it really looks like.

The evening I was out walking around, there was some kind of performance going on and I ducked into the back to listen to some religious music (I think, or it was opera). But one of the best things of the night was I was out at a cafe getting tea and cake and it turns out the cafe I was at was run by Sicilians who had come to the former East Germany because ten years ago, there was a demand of Italian food and gelato (much like the same migration of Italians to West Germany after WWII). They were so happy to meet an Italian "speaker."

This small chapel, right next to the Stadtkirche, is the Corpus Christi Chapel, in which in 1518, Martin Luther appealed to the Pope to set up a council to try Luther as a heretic.

In 1520, at the place of this oak, Luther burned his document declaring his excommunication from the Church. Man, the early 1500's were full of action in Europe with both the Renaissance and the start of the Protestant Revolution. Whew.

I like this statue of Martin Luther that I found in my hotel.

Life Behind the Iron Curtain and Leipzig Today

In a museum about life during East German rule of which I forget the name is this chart showing the number of East German citizens that fled to the West each month between 1949 and 1960. The units on are in thousands.

Here are the beautiful buildings of Leipzig today.

In 1954, the DDR raised production target levels without raising incomes. The citizens rioted in the streets and the government responded with military force. A sign of times to come in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Poland.

July 18th, 1961 -- Four Thousand East Germans fled to West Berlin in one weekend. Weeks later, up went the Berlin Wall.

A sign in West Germany calling to help their brethren in the East.

The city of Karl-Marx-Stadt voted to return to its former name of Chemnitz after Germany reunited.

There is tons of construction happening in Leipzig and Berlin and probably most cities in the former East Germany.