Berlin 2

First, I would like to thank (and link to!) my wonderful friend Julie's wonderful blog, At Home With Myself. She is the Julie who has often appeared in my blog posts, and without whom my time in the Czech Republic would have been rather grey. Here is a picture a nice stranger took of us today in Prague. Thanks for sending it to me, Julie!

Her blog, like Julie, is awesome, lovely, witty, and profound so you should take a gander. She gave me an award that was first given to her, the Lemonade Stand Award. I am very excited and touched to be given this award, many thanks!

We just enjoyed a four hour brunch at Cafe Cafe, followed by a leisurely stroll through Prague and across the Charles Bridge. As I am very busy procrastinating submitting my graduate school applications (last night I actually sat down in front of the glass porthole of the washing machine and watched my t-shirts and towels swirl around and around in the suds...for fifteen minutes) this morning/afternoon with Julie was especially welcome! Plus, besides her dazzling conversation and overwhelming kindness, people are nicer to me when she is there! Waiters and shop people, I mean. She speaks to them in Czech and suddenly they don't treat me like an annoying, stupid American anymore. Today we even got free cake!

And now for another method of procrastination--blogging! Here is the other post on Berlin that I promised.

On the way to Museum Island (an actual island, though criss-crossed with bridges,) that houses several museums in Berlin, I passed this monument to victims of war. Inside was a rather forlorn statue of a woman bending in grief beside the body of her husband or son or brother or father. Sort of a Pietà. Too sad. I liked the angels on the outside of the building, the way that they are carved in the round and emerge from the entablature.

Nearby is this huge church. Apparently King Leopold couldn't decide what architectural style he wanted, so he just threw everything up there.

Notice the sphere of the television tower between the dome in the middle and the baby dome on the right. You can barely see it through the fog. It wasn't a very sunny or warm day.

Across the street from the church is a large empty lot where a palace used to stand. I believe it was built by the East Berliners (we are in East Berlin now) or perhaps it was just used by the East Berlin government? Anyway, they tore it down. But now they are going to rebuild it. They only tore it down a few years ago, so the whole thing seems rather silly. To the left of the bus you can see a billboard with what the lot will eventually look like.
One of my favorite authors, Elizabeth Peters, writes a great series of funny mystery thrillers about a female Egyptologist in the early 20th century. (Peters has a PhD in Egyptology so she puts a lot of cool historical and archaeological information into the plots.) She also writes a series about a Minnesotan woman with a PhD in medieval art who works at the National Museum in Munich. In the latest novel, this woman goes to Berlin to the Alte Museum to talk to a colleague and march in protest on the steps of the museum. I had just finished this novel on the train to Berlin, so I had to go see the museum. A little odd, perhaps, to go to the museum primarily to see where a fictional character went...but it was awesome. Here is the museum.

And those columns are where Vicky and her rotund German boss Schmidt and her dashing reformed(?) jewel thief boyfriend marched with their sign painted on a bedsheet, and where they confronted the crooked Jan Perlmutter. Love it.

Next stop was the Pergamon Museum. I took some Greek Art and Archaeology classes at Duke and I have always had sort of a fascination for archaeology and greek art so I had to stop by this museum. It houses monumental ancient art and is awesome. The museum takes its name from the Pergamon Altar which is its showpiece. It was built in the 2nd century BCE, so only 2,200 years ago. Only.

Taken from what is now Turkey, the altar is a massive staircase surrounded by almost life-size friezes and huge columns with an altar on the top. They let people take pictures (hurray!) so here are some images.

The staircase--see how big it is? The altar is through the doors at the top.

One side.
A closer look at the frieze. It depicts the giants (with fishtails so they look like mermaids, ecxuse me, mer-MEN) battling the Olympian gods. Look at that drapery flow!

Some scale. The altar was a huge box, basically, with the frieze going around all four sides. They have only reconstructed the front part, so the frieze against this wall would have been on the back of the altar when it was complete. I thought this portion of the frieze was funny. How do they know that this chunk of marble went there and not three inches higher? Though I know that some very educated person with a hundred degrees probably devoted her life to positioning these fragments using all her expertise and knowledge, it still amuses me. The other holdings of the museum include this huge ancient Market Gate from Miletus (now Turkey.) This is only 1,900 years old. Thanks for the big picture, Wikipedia.

The room was specially built to house it.

It was amazing to see these monumental works of ancient architecture reconstructed instead of just pieces of a frieze or statues. Now, it would also be pretty amazing to seem them in situ...there is a lot of controversy about where these pieces should be. They were excavated by Germans which is why they are in Berlin, and they were dug up (in the 19th and early 20th centuries) before there were strict laws about what you could and could not remove, so most of these things were "exported" "legally." But.

Shouldn't they be back where they were originally built? But some of those places don't have the resources to conserve them. And it would be mean to remove them from the museums that depend on them to stay alive. But it is sort of mean for Germany to keep them when Turkey and Greece and Egypt have asked for them back. But.

If they weren't removed then there may not have been anything left of them today...

But.

Enough of that. At least until I talk about the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum.

The Pergamon Museum also has the Ishtar Gate from Babylon, which was constructed in 575 BCE. It was built as a road through the city for the ceremonial processions to use. Beautiful glazed bricks make up the gate. It is gigantic and so vibrant. Here is one tower.

The gate.

They have lots of pieces of the gate and could basically build a museum just for it. Instead they have only reconstructed the smaller gate (the big gate won't fit in the museum) and some pieces of the glazed walls.

I went to the Pergamon Museum first because after six pm on Thursday nights the other museums are free, but not the Pergamon. I planned to visit the Alte Museum after six to take advantage of that free admission. Well, like Cinderella at the strike of midnight, I was at the door of the Alte Museum right at six. (That comparison is actually not very apt--there was no fairy godmother involved and no magical ball gown or shape-shifting mice. Unfortunately.)

I walked right in and asked for my free ticket. But.

The Alte Museum, like the Pergamon, does not participate in the open-late-and-free-Thursday- night-thing. I was so disappointed and flustered that I walked right back out again. There wasn't much I wanted to see in that museum anyway. Vicky and Schmidt had gone back to Jan Perlmutter's office in the museum, but I didn't think the guards would let me follow my fictional friends that far. So instead I got a picture in front of the museum and then headed to my hotel.

Here is the museum without the obstruction of me. I don't know why they light it with green. It makes it look like a basilisk lives there.

Here is the church at night.

A bit blurry, but you get the idea.

Stay tuned for more Berlin!