This place was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I want to stay away from describing the history of this place because it is intricate and complicated and there are many things to say about the experience of it that is somewhat separated from that intellectual history in my mind. With that being said I do want to give you a sense of what you are walking into when you step inside this crumbling facade. It’s original purpose was a children’s hospital intended to combat the rising infant mortality rate in Berlin. This building has since changed ownership and purpose many times over the course of its life. Since 1997, when it last changed hands, it has been unused and abandoned because it failed to meet many of its funding goals and struggled to file the correct bureaucratic documentation required to move forward with renovations and reconstruction. It has since experienced many fires, various structures collapsing, decaying, and/or purposefully being destroyed. Along side this destruction is the appeal of why you would even consider going here. The artwork.

And the artwork.

Tags!

Architecture!

Murals!

Nature!

Colors!!!!!

And this is only a small part of the work there. It’s is like diving into an abyss of color, texture, space and light unlike any possible museum. I was amazed to be immersed in this subject of culture that is coming from the ground up. It has as little influence from the higher forces of society because it is intentionally temporary and transitory, always under danger of being smashed, painted over, defaced, crumbled, etc. It has no possible monetary gains to be made by the artists. It shows how these peoples individual culture shows through in their work. So it is a part of society and possibly the overhanging powers of society are dominating these individuals in their own lives which then projects itself into their work. I get this sense of convulsing within that control though. Of seizing in it as the body rejects that authority when they do this work. Those spasms shape the work out of a madness or maybe just onto a chaos that can transmute these flailings into something of value.

Adorno says in his essay The Autonomy of Art, “art is not autonomous in the sense that it is metaphysically removed from and independent of society. It is autonomous in that it is not reducible to the requirements of society, namely in the presentation of a harmonious and meaningful whole… relevant parts of Leibniz’s theory are… They reflect the universe from their own individual perspective.” p240

(West Bank, Palestine 2007)

“All rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victory invariably benefits the rulers.” (Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” VII)

We visited the Jűdisches Museum on Monday and it’s now Friday morning, so I’m pretty late with this reflective note. This is mostly accounted for by the fact that I’m lazy and forgetful.  Part of it, however, is due to the fact that I don’t think I took very much away from the visit. Our tour guide was very knowledgeable, and he was more critical than you typically get from official tour guides. It was interesting to learn about the role of department stores in the history of Jews in Berlin (and vice versa), and I’m glad to have learned who Grete Löbenstein was. With rare exceptions I am really not a fan of guided tours. Especially not in places which already present an extremely produced experience to the visitor. I took too long eating lunch and did not get to see the section on the Jewish faith, and that is my fault. I can’t remember when it happened, but I bought a book by Martin Buber in the museum gift shop and I love it. I should maybe go back when I can wander around at my own pace and visit that section on the Jewish faith.

We started at the Visitor/Documentation Center. While watching the two movies I felt a little feeling of sympathy and desire to better understand the context of peoples lives and the history of east Germany and the Soviet Union. Simple narratives always tend to put me off. I don’t know why but humans never got out of the habit of writing myths. This historical notion that the eastern block was enveloped in Ideology and false consciousness, thereby implying that the west was not at all in the midst of anything like that and not only brought down the eastern block but in the words of some historians brought an end to Ideology brings me back to Adorno in his essay “Art, Culture, Society.” In this essay he tries, as he always does, to describe the sneaking pervasiveness of false consciousness and how the slippery, bamboo-like fascistic tendencies can sneak their way into any uncritical gardener’s garden. He writes, “…the semblance of freedom makes reflection upon one’s own unfreedom incomparably more difficult than formerly when such reflection stood in contradiction to manifest unfreedom, thus strengthening defense.”(198)  Adorno understands the difficulty we have today in deciphering what is free, what our our freedoms and what is a free state, what are these things and what do they mean under free market capitalism? It is interesting to think about how much the definition of the word ‘free’ is augmented once conjoined with a noun.

I did also really enjoy learning about the process of demolishing, privatizing, monumentalizing, and reselling of the Berlin wall. Capitalism digested the iron curtain through a series of stomachs and valvic transfers much like a happy cow.

Yesterday we toured the Berlin Wall Memorial, complete with two interesting short films providing in depth detail about the Wall and the history surrounding it. The tour itself consisted of a long narrow park that followed along the nearby road. Along this road, the rebuilt wall had occasional openings for gates and passage through, until the outline of the church that was destroyed was reached. The face windows are a great effort to help remember those that died due to this division. Halfway along the park, there is a building across the road with a tower which we climbed all the way to the top. From there one could see the whole layout of the Memorial as well as a region of sand surrounded by walls that indicates the death pit which separated the different layers of walls. There are newly renovated apartments that seem to be on the park, but are actually just on the edge. They are right next to the indicated tunnels, which many people used to escape to the west. Maybe the tunnels still exist and on,y the people that live in those apartments know about it.