Berlin, Erster Teil

In some respects, I have a tendency to be an all-or-nothing type of person, and this has meant that I haven’t particularly enjoyed keeping a journal in the past, or felt any type of desire to blog. If I’m going to keep some kind of record of the things I’ve done, it starts out in nice short order but soon morphs into a detail-burdened behemoth requiring me to catalog every event and impression along with labels and cross-references. That’s such a chore and I find it overwhelming (cross reference this paragraph with Reasons Why I Haven’t Finished My Thesis). I haven’t written about our trip to Leipzig because we saw so many things on our tour, even in only one day, that the thought of writing caused me to toss aside the computer and retreat to the twin solaces of peach ice cream and plum cake.

But I’m sitting in the park with the computer, hoping I’ll get a few things down to share. You should know that a dove just flew out of the woods behind to me, and someone at the nearby Liszt Musikhochschule is playing Chopin Prelude No. 15, and the blackbirds are singing. So that makes me a little less inclined toward list-making, and more toward self-indulgent prose. I’ll try to find a happy medium between the two in telling about our time in Berlin.

On Friday morning, Andy and I took the train along with the rest of the students and teachers for a weekend outing to Berlin. There’s a lot to see there, obviously, and while I feel like we only barely scratched the surface, we did manage to see a lot. These are the bare essentials, and I will spare you from reading them in haiku form:

· Two walking tours
· Two orchestra concerts
· One opera
· Three museums
· Currywurst
· Falafel
· Two very sore feet

Also important: I had cheese at every single meal for three days straight. I feel somewhat ambivalent about this.

You could stop reading here and feel very comfortable that you know the most important parts. But since you haven’t stopped, I’ll go on. The first city tour was on Friday afternoon, and focused mostly on Berlin prior to World War I. To a certain extent, this is a challenging prospect, in part because so much of the city was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War, and also because so many areas of East Berlin were rebuilt after the Wall fell. Several stops were for the site of something, rather than for the something itself. I'll post a link to our Berlin photos soon. In the meantime, here is the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, which was on the way between our hotel and the train station. After WWII, it was left in disrepair as a reminder of the destruction of war.



Our guide, though, was very interesting, and focused much of his tours (one on Friday and one on Saturday) on architecture and its meaning within the context of Berlin. If the old Berlin is stone, the new Berlin is glass.



This was a very conscious break with the political and social connotations inherent in the architecture of prior eras. And this, I think, is one of the biggest things I loved about Berlin. New is not built for the sake of new, but also not purely for the sake of replacing old. It means something.

We started the tour at the Brandenburger Tor, and mostly stayed around the Mitte section of the city (i.e., all around the famous Unter den Linden Straße). You can see from this picture in front of the Brandenburger Tor how well-behaved I've been on this trip.



In the photo below, you can see Andy using my sweater to reenact the epic moment when Michael Jackson dangled his baby over the balcony railing at the Hotel Adlon, which is just over Andy’s left shoulder. As you can probably tell, we came to see the most culturally relevant sites in Berlin.



At the crossroads of environmentalism, mass transit, and the quenching of thirst, I present The Beer Bike. And yes, there are two separate men who serve and steer.



After a break for dinner (Yes, that’s a cross-reference. Such is the nature of blogging), we headed over to see the Berliner Philharmoniker in concert. Have I ever mentioned that classical music is a small world? While waiting for the concert to start, I looked down the row in front of me and saw a French horn player who I had met last summer at a music festival in Virginia, the same place I’m headed after Germany.

If I said that the Jena Philharmoniker was really good, then Berlin is really really good. Or really really really really good. Everything about this concert was so much better than listening to a recording. The first half of the program was Beethoven’s Triple Concerto. Our seats were in the podium section, which is directly behind the orchestra. This means we had a great view of the conductor, but it meant that the soloists’ instruments were facing completely opposite from us. They say that the Philharmonie (the hall itself) is acoustically perfect, and one hears equally well from every seat. I do think, though, that in this case it makes a difference which direction the cello in particular is facing. Nevertheless, we could still hear well. In particular, we admired the pianist’s style a lot.

Given all the ruminations on architecture shared by our walking tour guide, perhaps it’s appropriate that the second half of the concert was a Bruckner symphony, No. 8 specifically. Bruckner’s symphonies are often described as architecture of sound, aural equivalents to the vast space and structure of Gothic cathedrals. Bruckner was an organist as well as a composer, and all that hanging out in big beautiful churches listening to the reverberations apparently got to him. I’ve heard Bruckner called “the poor man’s Mahler,” implying that he does the same thing in his music as Mahler, just not as well. You know—really loud late Romantic tonal and emotional overindulgence that lasts over an hour, after which the brass get all the solo bows and cheers even though the strings played way more notes. But for all this, I find that Bruckner is more reflective and—dare I say it?—more universal. (Back off! I’m not saying his music is better than Mahler’s. You can fight that out amongst yourselves.) By universal, I just mean that there’s a certain element of detachment from and acceptance of suffering in his music. Because Mahler suffered, the world suffered. But Bruckner, he suffered because the world suffered first.

I don’t know. Maybe I just made that up. Anyway, the Berlin Philharmonic playing in the Philharmonie conducted by Herbert Blomstedt is the way to hear Bruckner. You have no idea how much athleticism it takes to play the bass until your watch their bass section. And sitting two meters directly behind the timpani and four meters directly behind the brass is a good reminder that music is made of sound waves, waves are motion, and motion is meant to be felt. I feel very privileged to have come here for a concert.