Berlin - Museums

There are at least nine museums that are a must to visit in Berlin. The first five are co-located in what is known as Museum Island. This cluster of five museums was the gem in the golden age of Berlin, at the start of the 20th century. Then all kinds of things happened to them: the Nazis confiscated a lot of the art as "degenerate art". Then the air poundings of the Allies destroyed the buildings. When the Soviets took over after the War, they actually took a lot of the paintings and sculpture to Russia for awhile.

When the Soviets decided to restore some of the museums, they returned a lot of the art. And since reunification of Germany, the museums have been completely restored, one by one, so they are in their previous glory. Their history is, in itself, an amazing one.

Museum 1: our first stop was the Pergamon museum, which houses not only the Pergamon altar, but a Roman facade from the western coast of Turkey, and the gates of Ishtar. To have these three magnificent pieces of ancient sculpture in the same city is breathtaking, but to have them in the same museum is really unbelievable. We had studied the Pergamon altar in one of our first art history classes that we took at Southern Methodist University several years ago. I never thought I would be in Berlin to see this gorgeous piece of work, but here I was, standing in front of it, taking in the larger than life figures.

This altar was designed and constructed in the 200 BC era, during Greece's Hellinistic Age, later than the 400 BC Golden Age of Athens when the Parthenon was constructed. It was located on the western coast of what is now Turkey,though it was all Greece until about the 1930's AD. It is not far south from the city of Troy, right on the coast. When Jack and I went to Turkey in 2008 we visited the site, which is now called Bergama. The ruins of the great city are still there, and we walked all around the site, climbing down and then up where the amphitheatre ruins are, and standing on the site where the Pergamon altar was built.

German archaeologists had gotten permission from the Ottoman Empire sultan to do excavating, and I guess part of the bargain was to take most of what was found. The altar is huge; think of a mansion with stairs that look like about three stories high. The relief figures are all around the altar and up the inside of the altar steps. In Art History speak, these relief figures are different from the classical figures of the Parthenon: they are much more emotionally expressive; their arms and legs show bulging muscles and straining poses. The scenes depict the fight between the gods and the satyrs, so the whole scene is of frowning and desperate men and women, determined to be the victor over the other.

The altar stairway is huge; and this was just one of the altars of the grouping. Again, one wonders about having Greek sculpture in Berlin, but the Germans saved the ruins from complete degredation. Since we had been to the windswept coast of Turkey we only had to imagine how all of this fit together. We visited the museum and this room a couple more times before we left Berlin.

The other rooms in the museum were just as fantastic - the facade of a Roman library and the Ishtar gates. They also had many other relics of the past: burial stele and sarphogagi and burial statues. We wandered through the rooms, just awe-struck at the age and the beauty of these pieces.

Museum 2: the next museum to visit was the New Museum. We wanted to see the head of Nefertiti. We knew that the city was working on restoring these museums to their former glory, but part of that restoration was the changing scene of the venues of certain collections. The Egyptian collection had been housed in several different places. The guide books told us the collection was now housed in the Old Museum, so off we went. However, we found out as we got there that the collection was now in the New Museum! Fortunately, all of these museums are in walking distance of each other, so we turned around and entered the New Museum.

We have seen a lot of Egyptian artifacts in many museums, but this one held the head of Nefertiti, so we went looking for her. The museum saved a special room for her, a circular room at one of the corners of an upper floor. This piece was made as a model for sculptures throughout the Egyptian country, since she was the wife of the Pharoah Amenhotep IQ, who changed his name to Akenaten. It was painted and in seemingly perfect condition. Her eyes are made of jewels, but one of them is missing, so when I looked at the statue straight on, it was a bit distorted because of the one missing eye. But the shape of the head and the neck made it a gorgeous piece of work. We stood there, taking it in, when a guard came up to us and started telling us about the head and why the German government had this piece. He said that the Egyptians really didn't want it because it was only a model made of some kind of plaster,not the usual marble or stone. It had literally been passed around for many years but the German government felt that it was a beautiful rendition of a very famous wife of one of the most powerful Pharoahs, so they wanted to give it a special place in their museum. This head draws many visitors to Berlin.

Museum 3: the Bode museum is another gorgeous building on the island, one that was designed and built by Bode, a rich German industrialist, at the beginning of the 20th century. The building, also destroyed during WWII, had just been completely restored. It is a beautiful Baroque building, with huge rooms, 30 foot ceilings, and marble staircases. The art in this building is not much to speak of - mostly 18th German scenes, but the building itself is just exquisite.

Museum 4: the Alte Museum is another beautiful building on the opposite side of the island. It is not a large museum, but its rooms are huge and beautiful. It houses mostly sculptures, which are copies of the famous Greek and Roman ones. We didn't see many new pieces, but strolling through the building was an experience in itself.

Museum 5: the Painting Gallery is across the street from the New Museum. It is probably the least monumental of the museums but it is impressive in and of itself. Most of the art here is German, not too memorable, but they have two whole rooms of David Caspar Friedrich, a German artist living from 1748-1850. We were introduced to his art in our art history survey class. He paints mostly dark, wintry scenes of mountains, lakes, trees, etc. The subject matter is not important in itself; it represents the futility of life and the darkness of getting to the end of it. A lot of his work is kind of spooky, but the detail is good. Artists didn't start going out into the scenery itself to paint until Monat and the Impressionists - in the early 20th century, so one has to believe that all of his nature is by memory.

We went to about five other musuems, located all over Berlin. We visited the art gallery near Potsdamer Platz. We had to return to this museum more than once. There is so much art one cannot take in everything in one afternoon. It has a fabulous collection of all famous artists from every era. We saw Rafael, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, some Spanish artists, all of the Impressionists and even some British art.

The modern art is located in two different places: one museum designed by Mies van der Rohe is near Potsdamer Platz in his signature minimalist building. Since the whole building is glass, the art is located in the underground portion of the building. There was another modern art museum, in a former Hamburger train station, near the Hauptbahnhof. The building was the usual Renaissance/Baroque design, but once we got inside, it really looked like a railway station - huge, and I mean huge, open spaces where the modern art could be set up. A lot of modern art tends to be gigantic, so this was the place for it. We also went upstairs and the building in the back stretched at least a mile and half, with rooms full of the weirdest stuff you have ever seen. Some of the German modern artists were very odd - I am thinking Beuys and even Raushenberg (though he was born in Port Arthur Texas). Anway, these rooms could hold huge displays. We had three semesters of modern art at SMU but still, some of this stuff is really weird. There is an exhibit at the Ft Worth modern art museum, a film that shows a man digging a post hole. It just loops and loops - well, I found a similar film in this museum. Either it was the same artist, or someone copied from someone.

We went to the photography museum that is dedicated to the Helmut Newton. This museum was very interesting; it had a lot of his memorabilia and all of his photographs he had taken, for the covers of magazines and for his own shows. His wife was also a photographer, so lots of her photos are on display also.

Let's see, what other museums. We went to the ethnology museum; German archaeologists loved to go to places like Bali and Mexico and islands of South America and sponsor digs. They evidently made arrangements with the host government to take some findings. The display of Mexico was about the Mayan ruins. They were beautifully displayed. The museum also had huge boats from islands I had never heard of - it was a great museum, and one that takes a long time to wander through. Really, if we had the time, we could have spent a few days there.

The museums dedicated to the history of Berlin I will describe in another post.

Berlin - Transportation

The first thing to learn about Berlin is the transportation system, unless you have a private driver who can take you everywhere. I love subways, so I was looking forward to learning all about it. The first thing I learned is that the subway system - the Ubahn - is not an "it". There are two systems which are separate but meet in certain stations.

I was used to the Paris metro, which I thought was confusing enough. But that one is pretty simple, compared to the Berlin system. In Berlin each line is numbered, and the signs direct you by the numbers only. Then I had to learn the destinations of each line, which is similar to other subway systems; they are named by the end of the line. So first we had to learn the numbers and then the names of the lines to figure out which direction to head.


Since we were going to be in Berlin for several weeks, we decided to buy a monthly pass. In the little station near our hotel we punched in our requests - these machines are also in English - and got a card, saying that our money was lost in the machine and we would have to go to some address to redeem it - no subway ticket, just a voucher. Of course we had no idea where in Berlin this addres was, so we were very frustrated.

We had already learned that there are not always information booths in every station, so we must have asked which station to go; I can't remember now. Anyway, we rode the U2 toward Pankow to Alexanderplatz to find the subway information booth to find out what happened to our money and get a monthly pass.

It was there that we found out there were two companies running the U and the S. Jack did his best to communicate our dilemna, but the BVG man just directed us to another office where we could buy tickets from a real live person. So we trudged up steps and down steps, trying to stay out of the way of the streaming people going this way and that. The signs are clear if you know what you are looking for. We found the ticket office and Jack waited in line to find out about the ticket and where to go to redeem our voucher. The amount for the monthly tickets was 100 euro, so we couldn't just forget about the money.

While he was in the office I was over in the corner, trying to make out the map that the BVG man had given me. A young woman stopped and asked if I needed help. In English? I asked. Of course, she said. She explained the two systems, one literally on top of the other and how to read the routes, etc. She was very helpful and I thanked her profusely. By that time, Jack had the tickets and the directions to the BVG office.

In Paris and London there are machines to enter the metro, where one pushes in the ticket and it pops out on the other side and the gate opens to let you through. In Berlin there are none of those things. We are supposed to carry around our tickets but everyone just enters the subway station and goes to the cars. There are subway police who ride the rails and check tickets, and there are signs on every car, saying that if you don't have a ticket you will be fined 40 euro. It is nice not to have those machines to walk through - the traffic runs more smoothly. Are the Germans more trustworthy to buy the tickets? I wondered at the philosophy of each country.

We learned a lot that day about the system, since we had to report to an office in some god-forsaken part of Berlin - somewhere we never went again. It was way on the east side of town, in a huge office building, near the Soviet TV tower, that I remember. The people were very nice and returned our money. I noticed a few days later in our little local U station that the machine where we had lost our money had a sign saying "out of order".

I carried our monthly tickets in a safe place in my purse during the whole month and only once did we meet a subway policeman - on a Sunday - and he found someone who did not have a ticket and was escorted off the train and made to pay the 40 euro. Since a day ticket is about 6 euro, it is worth it to pay for the ticket.

We were going to be in Berlin for the first week of October, which meant we needed a weekly ticket after September. I persuaded Jack for us to go back to Alexanderplatz to buy the weekly ticket at our leisure, and then when the first of October rolled around, we could stamp it in the machine, to show when we started using it.

On October 1, we went to the subway station for our daily field trip and I remembered that we had to stamp the ticket. We got on the train, enjoying the sights, when we were aware that there were subway police checking tickets. The woman checking our tickets, I swear, was disappointed that we had it stamped correctly! I guess we just looked like dumb tourists who did not know the ropes.

The two sets of subways are very efficient and always on time and, during the week, coming every few minutes. On Sundays the trains do not run as often. One Sunday we noticed all kinds of subway police, with German shepherd dogs. They were riding the rails that day because one of the German soccer teams was playing and all the fans were riding subway out to the olympic stadium.

Once we understood the signs - and the long German street signs end mostly in "strasse" so you just read the first part of the sign - we were able to navigate everywhere we wanted to go. The stations themselves are huge - in Paris everyone just gets off the train and goes out or goes to the connecting train - but here the stations are very long and there are shops to buy snacks and papers and postcards or to eat lunch or buy magazines. The stations that connect the U and the S are huge, and we had to be careful to follow the signs to go up or down or around. We had to know where we were going before we read the signs so we knew what to look for. One time we got on the wrong train because I did not know the name of the destination. By the time I pulled out my subway map and studied it, we were at the next station so we hopped off and tried again.

The next big step in learning how to get around Berlin was to figure out where we wanted to go and then figure how to get there. We had museums, places of interest and neigborhoods on our list of required visiting, so the first thing to do was to get a detailed map which had the U stations superimposed to make our journeys easier. We soon learned that it would be necessary to walk a long way once we arrived at the appropriate subway destination. There is just a lot of walking in Berlin, no matter how good the public transportation is. We really were not prepared for how long the blocks were, but I think we got used to them and accepted the walks as good exercise.

The U2 was our primary U bahn that we rode during our two week stay at our first hotel. This hotel was more or less in the middle of the city, so it was connected to most of the tourist sights that we were interested in. It was a horizontal, east/west line, and the S line looped around the city and then headed out to the suberbs. When we stayed in the eastern part of the city, we had a more complicated route to get around, since the U5 ended at Alexanderplatz, so we had to transfer to the U2 or the S. Traveling around Berlin is just long and complicated because it is such a huge city. Now I need to talk about what we saw - unbelievable history in the city and they are still working on construction projects all over the city to build it up to its former glory.