What a long, depressing day of witnessing the products of the reign of National Socialism! Although I had already visited the information center under the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, this second experience of it was certainly different in the context of my 4-years-older brain. I consider myself pretty well informed as far as WWII and the Holocaust go, but this memorial is very powerful in that it paints a much more personal picture of the atrocities of the Nazis’ “final solution”. Boris, our tour guide, gave a very interesting and informative talk prior to our entrance into the exhibit, in which he described to us the degree of controversy and the many years of planning and re-planning that went into the construction of the monument and the information center below, and tried (only somewhat successfully) to engage us in a discussion of some of the potential meanings of this intentionally ambiguous memorial. We then proceeded into the exhibit itself, which consists of various rooms with various focus. The first room has rectangles of light on the floor with fragments of writings from survivors and witnesses of the different stages of Jewish persecution in Germany during the Nazi era. One of the most striking of these was a poem written by a Hungarian Jew which gives a vivid description seemingly from the perspective of a living person in one of the mass graves, corpses of his neighbors falling onto him. The next room provides short biographies of different Jewish families from various areas of Nazi occupation, describing their lives and their fates. This was a very sobering experience and Boris’s attempts to entice us to discussion after our trip through the various rooms even less successful.

We then proceeded directly to the Topography of Terror which stands on the former site of the SS headquarters and is dedicated to documenting their rise to power and the subsequent horrors committed by them throughout Europe. At this point, though, it seemed as though everyone–including myself–was pretty much Nazi-ed out for the day, and our lack of enthusiasm was almost certainly apparent to our tour guide.

The best thing about this outing, for me, was seeing the lengths to which modern-day Germany has gone to be transparent about their bloody and terrible past. It was also very heartening to note that neither of these two memorial sites charged entrance fees–perhaps in order to avoid profiting from the atrocious deeds of their past.

After some miscommunication that lead our group to two different meeting spots, we finally came together in front of the information center of the outdoor memorial to the Berlin wall. We began by watching two short documentaries about life surrounding the wall, and the different phases of its use and construction. We then proceeded outside and walked through the park/memorial directly across the street. There was a section of the wall standing in its original spot, and we walked though what during the war would have been the space between the two walls separating east from west, where 30 years earlier we would have all been shot, if we had not already fallen prey to land mines or any of the other myriad forms of discouragement to any would-be escapees. It was interesting to learn that in the east the wall was strictly referred to as the “anti-fascist protection rampart” (because they had always been socialists in east Berlin and couldn’t possibly had anything to do with the actions of the nazi fascists). Further interesting bits of information included: the length of wall that stood along the memorial was in fact one of the first sections to be torn down during the people’s revolution that ended the division of Berlin, but had been replaced for the creation of this memorial; the guard tower on display next to the re-created “death zone” had been similarly replaced after having been purchased back from a private collector on E-Bay; and that the church that stands on the sight of the Church of Reconciliation (which was originally between the two walls and was consequently demolished by the DDR) holds in its basement a disarmed American bomb.

Monday we went as a group to the Jewish museum. We met in front of the building, whose facade was somewhat misleading as to the actual contents of the museum as it was a very typically German-looking building with no traces of modernity. Upon entering, the reality of its contents were revealed. The entrance to the museum itself–beyond the security check, gift shop, coat room, etc.–took us down a set of stairs into a slanted and skewed floor. Our tour guide asked us to interpret this design choice, a request which few of us were eager to answer. He brought us next to one of the 3 or 4 levels of the museum, in which was held information about Jews in the late 19th to 20th century Germany, and gave us some insight into the influence that Jewish people held in those periods. It was refreshing to hear things about German Jews other than the terrible crimes committed against them during the third reich, which seemed to be the main focus of many other tributes to the history of Jews in Germany. It felt like it took agency on the subject of Judaism away from the Nazis and put it in its rightful place.
I’m somewhat biased against these sorts of tours, and they generally make me somewhat uncomfortable, so I was relieved to be able to explore some of the rest of the exhibits independently. It was very interesting to learn about the centuries-long history of Jews in Germany, and to see relics and accounts from before and after the genocide of the Holocaust. Again, it was great to have the focus put on the Jewish people rather than on their victimization during WWII, which I think usually overshadows the hundreds of years that Jews spent as influential members of German and European society. It framed them as something more than victims of a horrific genocide, without ignoring or brushing aside that terrible fact, but also not focusing on it as the most important part of German-Jewish history.

Yesterday we went on a little tour around Kreuzberg, visiting some of the larger street art pieces in the district with a heavily tattooed and pierced local street-artist/freak show performer/burlesque dancer. Many of the pieces that we saw I had already witnessed on my previous explorations of Kreuzberg, but it was interesting to hear what our guide had to say about the pieces and the general street art culture in Berlin. I felt a little conflicted about being on a tour of this thing that is supposed to be counter culture, though; it felt like we were actively participating in the absorption of that subversive art form into the “culture industry”. But it was a beautiful day, and our guide was great, so I’ll keep my complaints to a minimum. Needless to say, I’m glad it wasn’t one of those tours where they hand out supplies for creating your own street art at the end.

(Pictures not from this particular trip, but all are of pieces that we visited/passed on Wednesday)

This Monday we met up outside of the imposing Boros Bunker, a private art collection housed in an air-raid bunker from WWII, owned by the Boros family who now occupy a penthouse they had built on the roof of the building. As we were congregating outside of the large, windowless, grey steel doors a buzzer sounded–to my surprise–and we were allowed entry to this fortress of the aesthetic. We were greeted in the lobby by a man whose name escapes me now, who introduced us to the history and the layout of the bunker, and who would guide us through the exhibitions. Once we had all stashed our belongings in a back room, he lead us into the first room where we were confronted with a pair of large conglomerations of rubber cords anchored to different points in the walls/floor/ceiling and then intricately woven together into nebulas of depth which were very difficult for the eye to fully comprehend in their repeating and overlapping layers. The larger of the two also held plastic bubbles within it, and the cords between the walls and both pieces were arranged in such a way that one had to duck under them to move about the room and inspect them from different angles. These would be some of my favorite works throughout the whole of the tour, which was filled with extremely varied styles, mediums, and concepts. Our guide did a wonderful job of leading us through the exhibitions and of providing information about the artists, their works, and the bunker itself, which had quite an intriguing history as a bunker (obviously), but then also a concert/party venue, a paintball arena, and many other things I’m sure. The walls appeared to have been left pretty much bare and in the condition in which their new owners had found them, which I found to be quite the addition to the general ambience of the place. There were other great pieces that reacted to their viewers upon entering their little alcoves, such as a tire against a wall that was designed so that it would start spinning when a person came in to look at it–destroying itself and the wall that it was placed against little by little as long as it was being viewed. There were too many great pieces contained in this bunker for us to see them all, let alone for me to write about (600 altogether, including the members of the Boros collection that weren’t currently on display), and the hour and a half that we spent inside seemed to me to fly by. I think it’s also interesting to note that the Boros family supports artists–some of whom they have been following for years–by funding/purchasing their works

I think that this has been my favorite of our group outings thus far, and I only wish that I could have spent  more time there and seen the rest of the works that were on display (130-some, if I’m not mistaken) because they were nothing if not impressive.

Jules and I spent our Monday meandering through Kreuzberg, looking for our chosen Kulturbingo location: Galerie Open. We passed a lot of Halal and falafel places on our way, as well as the ubiquitous signs for Berliner-Kindl beer, and generally took it pretty slow as we were walking towards our destination. The feeling of the neighborhood changed drastically as we started to move into the more residential areas further from the U-Bahn, but the architecture and the layout of the buildings remained about the same. It began to get much quieter, less crowded, the buildings and doorways less covered in quickly-scrawled tags and peeling stickers, and the shops fewer and farther between. It still felt very lively but in a more subdued, domestic manner. As we followed the blue line on my phone leading us to our destination we took the time to grab a beer from a corner store and eventually came within site of the small park and pond that were shown in front of the gallery on the map, which was ringed on all sides by a road and shops, laid out in a manner similar to a cul-de-sac, with the park in the center, lowered beneath the level of the street surrounding. As google told us that we had arrived at our destination, though, Galerie Open was nowhere to be seen, and in its place stood a fancy boutique clothing store. Jules was less quick to give up than I, and decided to ask the people in the shop where we might be able to find this mystery gallery, and we were disappointed to find that it was now “Galerie Closed”. Nonetheless, it was a lovely day spent wandering through an area we had yet to experience, and we ended our adventure with a couple of consolation drinks at an interesting bar nearby.