The Cistercians founded this gothic abbey in Chorin/Brandenburg in 1258.
After centuries of power and influence, secularization in the 16th century led to a long decay, until it was partially restored under Karl Friedrich Schinkel in the 19th century.
For me, it is a place of contemplation:
Walls and missed opportunities
Passages and impossibilities
Age and decay
Time and loss
Any mention of a Winterreise evokes Franz Schubert’s song cycle from 1827 based on the poems by Wilhelm Müller.
Anselm Kiefer’s tight installation with the same title at the Diversity United exhibition in Berlin displays a wintry landscape on a stage in a narrow optical perspective.
Actors appear as labels on wooden tags: Names like Joseph von Eichendorff, Madame de Staël, Ulrike Meinhoff, Hermann Hesse and many others make it clear that the scope is larger than German Romanticism from the 19th century.
The extension happens in space, towards France, and in time towards our century.
The choice of objects include mushrooms from a fairy tale forest as well as war relics: A discrepancy between imagination and reality that has only been partially processed by the actors-writers on stage.
Schubert’s and Kiefer’s Winterreise both warn us about illusions. Why do we never listen?
Below is a stereo pair for creating a 3D illusion for those of us capable of cross-eyed viewing.
The Dorotheenstadt Cemetery is permanent home of more eminent German writers than any other cemetery I know. It is located in in Berlin-Mitte and belongs to the former eastern part of the city.
There are very famous ones like Bertold Brecht with Helene Weigel above or Anna Seghers with Johann-Lorenz Schmidt below.
The style of the tombstones varies enormously – permitting individualism that the living did not necessarily enjoy.
While looking for a proper quote from one of all these writers that have come here together, I came across this little sonnet by Wolfgang Hilbig:
Blätter und Schatten
Nicht neu kann sein was du beginnst –
denn immer nimmst du was dir längst gegeben
und gibst es hin:
wie in der Liebe da es mir gebricht
an jeder Kenntnis: rot wie die Buchen Laub verstreun
maßlos am Wegrand wo ich schon sehr frühe ging …
und kannte nicht den Weg
und kenn ihn jetzt noch nicht
und kenne nicht das Kind des Schatten mir vorausläuft
und weiß nichts von der Sonne die ihr rotes Gold
dem Blattwerk einbrennt.
Und weiß nicht mehr den Herbst
der ernst in meinem Rücken ging und dem ich Schatten
war: stets neu entworfner Schatten ungezählter Herbste.
Leaves and Shadows
New cannot be what you begin –
because you always take what you’ve already been given
and give it away:
like in love where I lack
all knowledge: red as when the beeches scatter leaves
along the trail where I walked so early …
and did not know the way
and still don’t know
and don’t know the child whose shadow runs ahead
and know nothing about the sun that burns its red gold
into the foliage.
And don’t know the autumn anymore
that once walked solemnly in my back and to which I was
its shadow: Always newly drafted shadow of countless autumns.
Having become a shadow doesn’t mean to be forgotten.
The words still reach for us, like the hands in George Tabori’s tomb stone below.
Berlin has no Pate Hollow trail, but it offers many lakes that can be walked around, and that are, alas, similar in the type and amount of gratification they offer.
The Krumme Lanke is one of them, and a part of a chain of lakes in the Grunewald, connected by streams.
The lake itself is elongated and curved, as the name suggests.
In the summer, the water level rises considerably when hundreds of brave locals immerse. I don’t know.
I prefer the dark winter hours when the scraggly trees start to talk to each other.
Do ducks write such long poems elsewhere, too?
Off iconic Berlin Friedrichstraße is a little dark side street soon to be renamed into Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Straße, after the 18th century philosopher.
The name Mohrenstraße raises interesting questions: About the German word Mohr, which has been used since the 8th century, originally to designate inhabitants of Mauretania, which is derived from the Latin Maurus, which in turn might derive from the Greek μαυρός for black. But usage changes, and what once might have only designated origin, has long been a designation of a specific caste by another specific caste.
Then there are the speculations why this specific street carries that name, with even historical sources conveniently contradicting each other — was it a single black resident or a group of slaves from Africa that gave cause for this naming?
And, much more generally, it raises the question: What does give us the right to name something? I suspect that Genesis 2-23 has played a role.
It seems that philosophers, psychologists and writers agree that names are powerful. So if we inflict a name on a person, or, like here, on millions of people a once, shouldn’t we be a bit careful about how we use that name?
The imminent renaming is one step, and it’s easy to nod approval. But will we, for once, readjust our own thinking?
I grew up learning little about the German colonialism in Africa from 1884-1920, or the Herero and Namaqua genocide between 1904 and 1908 (the first genocide of the 20th century), or the term Rhineland Bastard, used by the Nazis for Afro-Germans.
The Stolpersteine Project commemorates people prosecuted and murdered by the Nazis by placing a brass plate at their last place of residence of their own choice. There are more than 75,000 of them in Europe, in Berlin alone 8587 at the moment. Most of them commemorate Jewish victims. As far as I know, there are three such Stolpersteine for so-called Afro-Germans in Berlin, and another one in Frankfurt.
Martha Ndumbe‘s Stolperstein is in front of a day care at Max-Beer-Str. 24. She was prosecuted officially as a sex worker, which is why her mother didn’t receive any compensation after the war: She couldn’t prove her daughter was prosecuted because of her race.
Mahjub (Bayume Mohamed) bin Adam Mohamed (Brunnenstraße 193) was a soldier and actor. He was killed in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen.
Ferdinand James Allen (Torstraße 174) was the son of a black musician and his German wife. He lived with epilepsy and was first sterilized than murdered by the Nazis.
All three Stolpersteine are in Berlin Mitte and can be visited during a 30 minute walk. There are several others on the way.
During the second world war, Hohenschönhausen was a heavily bombed industrial area in the northeast of Berlin.
In 1945, one of the few still intact buildings was used by the Soviet Secret Police as Special Camp 3, a prison camp to intern Nazis and other undesired elements.
The pictures above are from the former cafeteria, converted into prison cells by forced labor.
In 1951, the East German Stasi took over and added a new building with nicer rooms.
It was used as a highly secret interrogation prison, with few people knowing about its existence. Dissidents and other people stubbornly seeking to leave the young republic were brought here into solitary confinement to solicit confessions.
At night, prisoners were checked on every few minutes and woken up if their sleeping position in bed deviated from the norm. The sound of the keyhole latches is still causing nightmares to the survivors.
The psychological torture aimed to make the prisoners feel utterly alone, disoriented, and hopeless.
An open door became even more terrifying than a closed one.
Close to the Havel — a famous place to drown — secluded, away from any popular hiking trails, in the largest forest of the western part of Berlin, the Grunewald, is a little cemetery.
It is for the misfits, the nameless ones, by fate or choice.
It is a somber place, but it doesn’t depress. Instead it makes us calm and serene. I would even say this is a place I could live.
The earliest graves are from 1900, many of them overgrown.
Some of the graves are mass graves, for fallen soldiers who had no other place.
I wish we knew all their stories.
Taste changes, as do necessities.
What you see here are impressions from the new Berlin-Brandenburg Airport, which has been controversial for two decades, mainly for financial reasons.
My own reservations are more of a more esthetic and, alas, political nature. At first, I was struck by its boredom.
We have low ceilings, steel, glass, and — brown decor.
The prevalence of the color brown (mostly in the form of dead wood and marble tiles) darkens the place, and, much worse, reminds me of an esthetic that I believed had been overcome long ago.
Curiously, the older airport Berlin-Tegel (which had replaced airport Berlin-Tempelhof, famous for the being used for the Luftbrücke during the Berlin Blockade) still feels much more modern, with its successful usage of simple geometric shapes like hexagons and triangles to create an efficient and stimulating atmosphere, was co-designed by the same architect, Meinhard von Gerkan.
Admittedly, here in Indiana I am used to the color brown, and I have always feared that it supports an unhealthy emotional state.
At least here, at BER, there is a solution built-in: Leave.
The Designpanopticum is a small but densely packed museum in Berlin’s Nikolaiviertel.
Vlad Korneev has been collecting technical relics for decades and arranged them to make them even more bizarre, as if this was necessary.
If there ever was meaning, we can be certain that it is gone now.
This place is the exact opposite of a tabula rasa; it’s what I expect to find in my own brain, if I had the ability to climb into it and have a look.
Still, and non unlike the tabula rasa, this overloaded chaos gives us the opportunity to commence again, to consider this as fertile ground instead of as a mess.
Following the loop, stairs up and down, we find new ways to see, to make sense again, in an entirely new way.
Lost function becomes purposed beauty. Maybe this is not for everyone to see. It’s my brain, after all…
The Inner Frame 