Student Exhibition night!

On Tuesday we held our exhibition of student work at the Adalbertsrasse apartments. Each student installed his or her work in one of the apartment spaces, along with an artist statement explaining the piece. Then we all wandered around and enjoyed their creations, just like at a real art opening.

Everyone helped out with setup, including a lovely spread …

… and the student projects were inspiring! Each one revealed a unique and interesting response to Berlin. (Shown here: Annie’s audio project and Robert’s flip book.) Several guests joined us for an evening of wandering through the building, listening to a spoken-word and music performance, and enjoying being together!

A trip to Wittenberg

This Tuesday we took a day trip to the town of Wittenberg, about an hour away by train.

Wittenberg’s most famous resident was, of course, Martin Luther, who lived here in what was an Augustinian monastery and, after the Reformation, a school and his private residence.

The building is now an excellent museum on the history of the Reformation. One of its best features is the many paintings by Lucas Cranach, who was a close friend of Luther’s. Here are Cranach’s portraits of Luther and his wife Katharina, a former nun. Their marriage has become such a legend that it is reenacted every summer by the locals in Wittenberg!

A few of the rooms are wonderfully preserved, as well. Here is one of the rooms that Luther used as an everyday living space.

(John and Eleanor paused for a quick photo under the portal to Luther’s house.)

The other important site in Wittenberg is the Schlosskirche, where Luther famously nailed his 95 theses on the door in 1517. The church has burned down and been rebuilt since then, but it’s still a pretty amazing piece of history!

One thing that has really been brought home to us – especially in these last weeks, as we discuss contemporary German identity – is just how integral Christian, and in the north, especially Protestant, history is to an understanding of what many people believe it means to be German. This is where it all started, after all! And, as the history of the Reformation shows us, changing people’s assumptions can be difficult. As Germany moves into an age where multiculturalism is increasingly a feature of the social landscape, it will be interesting to see how they make sense of the shifts in religious identity, as well.

A tour of three Holocaust memorials with Ryder, Cassie and Michelle

Our student-led tour this week took us to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a large memorial in the center of Berlin. Our guides Michelle and Cassie explained the history of the site, and encouraged us to experience it for ourselves. The memorial, designed by Peter Eisenman, consists of a field of stelae meant to engender a highly personal experience for each visitor.

Our tour also included a visit to a lesser-known, though still centrally-located, memorial: the Memorial to the Roma and Sinti Murdered by the Nazis. Because of problems with the materials, it’s still unfinished. Ryder introduced us to the history of these groups, as well as some of the controversies surrounding the building of the memorial.

We also stopped to take in the memorial honoring homosexual victims of the Holocaust, and learned a little about gay history in Berlin and Germany. Together, all three of these memorials represent important gestures by the German government toward honoring the victims of the Nazis and ensuring that such a tragedy does not occur here again. We were especially lucky that our students took the time to point out the two lesser-known memorials that augment the powerful Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

Treptower Park with Anna, Mariah and Janet

The student tour this week brought us to Treptower Park, home to …

… houseboats (one of three colonies in Berlin) …

An observatory built for a world’s expo in the park around the turn of the century, and later supposedly used by Einstein …

… and an absolutely massive Soviet World War II memorial and cemetery. Since the park lies in what was formerly East Berlin, it was a natural choice for the Soviets to honor 7,000 of their men who died here. The site is now under the official protection and care of the German government, thanks to a line in the treaty signed by the Soviets in 1989.

The main attraction is a 38-foot statue of a Soviet solder saving a child, posed over a broken swastika. Though it’s a bit over the top, one can’t help but think about the staggering number of men buried here. It’s another sobering facet of Berlin’s complex, and often tragic, history.

An afternoon with Mark Curran

Artist and educator Mark Curran spent an afternoon sharing his work with us on Monday. Focused around issues of labor, his photographs, interviews, journals and the resulting installations speak directly to many of the issues we’re wrestling with in our course. He took us through the process of utilizing ethnographic techniques to document and participate in various environments, as well as how he presents his work in a multi-media format. Mark’s work is gripping in its own right, but since I’m asking the class to document their own experience of Berlin using media-based methods informed by ethnography, his talk was very applicable to their work for the course. Several of them expressed how moved, inspired and encouraged they were by his presentation.

Mark’s most recent project centers around the strip mining industry in Cottbus in former East Germany. You can read more about the project here. And here’s a clip showing the installation of the project in a recent exhibition in Portugal:

an installation of EXTRACTS FROM EDEN/AUSSCHNITTE AUS EDEN a project by Mark Curran from Mark Curran on Vimeo.

A trip to Weimar & Dessau

This weekend we traveled to the beautiful city of Weimar, home of Goethe, Schillar, Liszt, and the birthplace of the Bauhaus! Our first stop on Friday afternoon was the Bauhaus museum – a small but unique little space with treasures from the first years of the school’s existence. Unfortunately the Bauhaus school was forced to leave Weimar after the Nazi party gained power in the state of Thüringen in 1924.

This opened a difficult chapter in Weimar’s history, and on Saturday we visited the nearby site of Buchenwald concentration camp.

The most striking thing one finds on entering the camp is the view: the camp is set in the middle of the forest (Buche means “beech” and Wald means “woods”), on a hill that allows a view across the valley. It’s difficult to believe that such horrible things could transpire amidst such natural beauty.

The original barracks are no longer extant – most are now marked with dark loose stones, but one has been rebuilt in its original form. One of the few other buildings still standing on the grounds is the crematorium, which was strangely located adjacent to a little petting zoo built for the children of the SS.

The Goethe Eiche – Goethe’s Oak – was an oak tree left standing in the camp by the SS. The prisoners named it in remembrance of Goethe’s trips to this same forest. It was damaged in an Allied bombing in 1944 and subsequently chopped down.

Buchenwald was also used as a Soviet internment camp after the war. It’s thought that about 7,ooo people died during this time in the camp’s history, and they were buried in unmarked graves in the woods surrounding the site. Because Thüringen became part of East Germany, the deaths were not acknowledged during the Cold War. The fall of the Berlin Wall finally allowed the victims’ families to speak up and publicly remember their relatives.

The Soviets left another highly visible legacy: a huge memorial to the camp’s liberation, on a hill overlooking Weimar. Buchenwald’s many layers of tragic history gave us much to consider …

The class was free to spend the rest of the day exploring the town. Chance and I took a stroll through the park and admired the “Roman House,” the amazing landscape and the first Bauhaus demonstration house, the Haus am Horn.

Today we left Weimar and headed back to Berlin, with a stop in Dessau to visit the most famous site of the Bauhaus, their school building, designed by Walter Gropius and built in 1925-6. We got a fantastic tour from a very knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide, and I think our students might almost be convinced that Modernism isn’t all horrible … (those of us who study architecture are already sold).

We couldn’t have asked for a more lovely day to see this truly seminal piece of architecture. This week we dive into the study of the specter that haunts both the history of the Bauhaus and Buchenwald: the Nazis and their influence on Berlin and Germany.

Viktoriapark walk with Annie, Melissa and Rachel

Our students Annie, Melissa and Rachel took us on a tour of Viktoriapark this week. As they explained, the park is home to the “Kreuzberg” (literally “Cross Mountain”) and gives its name to the surrounding neighborhood. The “Kreuz” – really a monument to the wars of liberation against Napoleon – was designed by this week’s featured 19th-century starchitect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

It’s a bit of a climb …

… but it’s worth it! There are beautiful views of the city, and of course, a lovely gothic monument to admire as well.

Schinkel isn’t the only artist to have left his mark (whether officially sanctioned or not) on the park. Our guides showed us an artwork commemorating a recent act of sexual violence in the park, another in honor of the uprising of Communist workers in 1953, and one (a spray-paint-covered statue of Heinrich von Kleist) that attests to one of Berlin’s biggest vandalism issues – graffiti. As in the rest of Berlin, Viktoriapark is packed with history, and our tour guides did a lovely job of uncovering some of that for us.

A walk through Schinkel’s Berlin with John Toews

On Wednesday John took us on a tour of Berlin’s historical district, known as Mitte. The focus of our walk was the city as it was in the 19th century, when its inhabitants included some of the leading intellectuals of the time, and the city styled itself as “Athens on the Spree.” We began at the Brandenburg Gate, designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans in the late 18th century as a kind of propylaea leading into Berlin. Karl Friedrich Schinkel had a hand in redesigning the staff held by the goddess of peace who crowns the monument.

We continued on to Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus (now called the Konzerthaus) on the Gendarmenmarkt, a somewhat early commission and an example of the architect’s turn toward neoclassicism.

On the Forum Fridericianum, a square built under Frederick the Great (whose monument you see on the right), there is now a memorial to the book burnings that took place there in the 1930s. The square is home to the former Royal Library, now housing Humboldt University’s law school. Interestingly, we learned that the book burnings were not carried out by Nazi officials, but rather by zealous student party members.

Next stop: the Neue Wache, a guardhouse designed by Schinkel along Unter den Linden. The building has been the site of numerous memorials over the course of the 20th century, including both East German and reunified German commemorations of World War II.

One of Schinkel’s masterpieces, not only of architecture but of urban planning, is the Altes Museum. Sitting across from the site of the royal Prussian palace (not currently extant), the building housed the first true modern museum in Europe. Schinkel designed it to integrate the viewer’s experience of art with that of the urban environment: he provided a viewing platform on the interior of the building, from which visitors could contemplate the royal gardens, palace, and the cityscape beyond.

The tour wrapped up near the site of Schinkel’s Bauakademie – his architectural and design academy. The building is also considered one of his masterworks, and was unfortunately torn down in the post-WWII period. This nylon-covered scaffolding has been here for years, but there’s no money to rebuild it. Its ghostly presence reminds us of the many memories and layers that reside amongst one another in Berlin’s cityscape.

A walk through our Kiez with Manuela Mangold

Manuela Mangold, a long-time Kreuzberger, gave us a fantastic tour of the students’ “Kiez” in Berlin on Tuesday afternoon. Kiez is a local word meaning “neighborhood,” but it denotes not just a district of the city (in this case, Kreuzberg), but one’s immediate, local surroundings — the place where everyday life is lived.

We started our tour at the Heinrich-Heine-Strasse U-Bahn station, the stop where the students regularly get onto the subway. During the time when Berlin was divided, it was a border crossing used mainly for commercial traffic. Below, the subway station was a “ghost station” — because the wall ran in a zig-zag manner from roughly the southeast to the northwest, trains going from this part of West Berlin would pass under East Berlin on their way to other parts of West Berlin would pass through a completely darkened (and sometimes guarded) station.

Next on our tour was an example of Stolpersteine (“Stumble Stones”), an art project begun in Cologne, but which has left its mark all over Berlin. A form of Holocaust memorial, it marks where victims of the tragedy once lived. People are meant to “stumble” over these on their daily walks, a constant reminder of the importance of remembering the Holocaust, and its impact on life here.

We continued with a look at the path of the Berlin Wall and death strip. Manuela is sitting right between former East and West in the picture! As in most of Berlin, it’s been restored so nicely now that barely a trace of the division remains.

Oppositional culture has been a huge part of Kreuzberg’s identity since the 1970s. Here are two examples of “squatter” culture — both built right up against the Wall. One is a famous house squat, and the other a garden built right in the shadow of the wall, in what was technically East German territory!

We continued along the path of the wall, which is (in some places) marked by a strip of brick set into the ground. (Dominic represented East Germany, shaking hands with a West Berliner!)

Leaving our Kiez and crossing the Spree River, we continued on to talk about the politics of development along the river banks, another area where squatters and other oppositional movements have traditionally made their homes. Now big developers are buying up large swaths of property, driving up rents and bringing a whole new feel to the neighborhood, garnering vehement protest from locals. One glaring example of this is O2 World, a large concert venue whose undeniably corporate aura conflicts tangibly with its surroundings. Its VIP entrance along the river was heavily protested, but got built anyway.

We ended our tour at the Oberbaumbrücke, which was also divided by the Wall. Now, as you can see in the background, the U1 train line can run all the way across it again!

Our Kiez is in some ways the perfect spot for the students, sitting uncomfortably amidst the former East and West, scarred with layers of memory and history – and still transforming before our eyes.