I haven't got anything quite as poetic to say as Isherwood did but still, goodbye Berlin.

600% Fun at the Sportforum Berlin

Good times had at the Sportforum in Lichtenberg where we saw the Eisbären Berlin play the Grizzly Adams Wolfsburg. Having long been a fan of Ice Hockey (or at least the Disney classic 'The Mighty Ducks') it has long been a dream of mine to see a game, having not had too many opportunities to do so in Australia. And it really, really had it all. Grace, violence, loud music, spectacular outfits and even more spectacular chants. What more could you want? I would particularly recommend their anthem "Hey, wir wollen die Eisbären seh'n" (which approximately translates to"Yeah, We Wanna See The Polar Bears") to fans of decent techno, and I will be sure to crack it out at my next party because it has the best beat that I have ever heard in a team song. Am I conveying how much fun this event was? I hope so. It does have to be said that the atmosphere has sobered a little here since the end of the game though. Having done a little bit of post game research I have discovered that there is a darker side to my beloved Ice Bears, as the club was founded by the sports association of the East German Police, Volkspolizei and the secret service, MfS (better known as the Stasi). But hey, how much can you hold against a big furry logo? Nothing is going to ruin my memories of the best day had with the Ice Bears. Oh yeah, they won by the way.













Pilgrims setting off for the game

The players in action

Time for fun with "Flotte gags mit Garfield and co." - thanks for the scan Funm@ker.

If This Is a Man / The Truce

Se questo è un uomo/La Tregua

"It is not at all an idle matter trying to define what a human being is."

Finally got down to reading these books after many years- taking some stern advice from the title of one of Levi's other titles 'If not now when?'

His memoirs begin shortly after the collapse of Mussolini's regime, and opens with Levi trying to contact a partisan group in the north of Italy as a very inexperienced young man. "I was twenty-four with little wisdom, no experience and a decided tendency ... to live in an unrealistic world of my own, a world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phantoms, by sincere male and bloodless female friendships." He is captured shortly after joining the partisans in December 1943 and sent to Auschwitz.
This memoir then tells the tale of Levi working as a slave labourer at a company making synthetic rubber for the Nazi war economy. Through a variety of accidents, a friendship with a non-Jewish guest working and by happening to know that he could safely eat cotton wool and drink paraffin (because he was a trained Chemist) he is spared the gas chamber. Almost every other character is dead by the end of the book, and the closing pages of the festering snowfields of Auschwitz after the Nazi's flee are probably the most horrifying passages of writing that I have ever read.
Liberated by the Soviets in January 1945, its sequel, The Truce, tells of Levi's hungry wanderings in war-torn eastern Europe in Poland, Belorussia, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Romania, and really opened my eyes to how little the survivors of the war were attended to at all. Levi eventually returns home on the last pages of his account after a year of trying to get there, but he has a continual nightmare in which his present life turns out to be a mere illusion and he wakes up with Auschwitz's morning call: "Wstawac" (get up).

As usual I hesitate to actually write what I think in any detail about these excellent books , but hey, I can sure post a link to one here.

Herr Lehmann

One of my new favourite films that made me love Kreuzberg just a bit more than I already did: Herr Lehmann. It tells the story of Frank Lehmann, a bar tender living in the 3036 borough of Kreuzberg back in 1989 just before the wall came down. Largely shut off by the Wall from the rest of West Berlin for 28 years it was (and is) a notorious sub-culture of students, artists, bohemians and immigrants living amongst the crumbling buildings. The film goes through the usual subjects you'd expect from a film about 20 somethings, but what really made it memorable for me was Herr Lehmanns visit to the East to drop off some money to a relative and his interrogation by the Stasi, and the strong sense throughout the film that the East and West could and would never be reunified. So of course the film ends to the wall coming down, and its a great scene, giving you some sense of the excitement and joy that the moment must have held for so many people, in Berlin and everywhere else too.

The soundtrack is pretty fun too, full of the Eels, Ween, Cake and the Violent Femmes. Not very 1989, but anyway...

Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz

Haus der Wannsee-Konferenz
Now and Then

Today Steph and I took the S7 train to the end of the line out to the Wannsee Lakes to see if manage to say "I bet this must be beautiful in Summer" during our stay in Berlin. And really, it must be. Since it was raining we weren't keen on staying out in the cold for too long so we jumped on a bus and soon found ourselves outside of the front gate to the House of the Wannsee Conference. On January 20th, 1942, fourteen select German civil servants and SS-officers met here to discuss the implementation of "The Final Solution," the extermination of European Jews. It's basically considered to be the site of the turning point from the regime murdering Jews en masse to the regime planning their extermination in a cohered way. All in all, a pretty eerie place.

After WW2 it was used by the American occupation force for a few years, and then strangely enough, it was used as a Youth Hostel until the early 1990's when it was converted to this memorial and opened for the 50th Anniversary of the Conference. Wannsee remains a really affluent area to this day, and as we left I couldn't be sure whether it the memories of the exhibit or the oh so obscene wealth around me that was creeping me out more.

speak the password primeval at the HAMBURGER BAHNHOF

Hamburger Bahnhof is a very large modern art gallery here in Berlin. Standing firmly in the tradition of what I like to call Berlins "lets make sure everything here is always really giant" theme, the visitor today can follow a passage from the main venue (which is pretty massive itself) to the "Rieckhallen", which is a huge elongated warehouse once used by the eponymous haulage contractors. It's actually a pretty sinister place, and was of course a fantastic venue for the show that pretty much satisfied all my basest urges (and hey, I've got a few) called There is Never a Stop and Never a Finish.

Right near the top of the list was the room just full of creepy creepy Paul McCarthy fun. The show featured a lot of his videotaped performances, often spreading ketchup or saliva all over his naked body, having sex with his bed, or just beating the crap out of himself. In Tubbing he just seems to jams sausages into his mouth and arse. He might have done some other things but it got a little boring after awhile and I had to move on. I was particularly excited to final see 'Santa Chocolate Shop' which I thought seemed about the coolest thing when I was a teenager pouring over the 'Transgressive Art' section in Matthew Colling's This is Modern Art. It seems that I haven't come so far since then because somehow a large, tipped-over cottage with video projections of a red-nosed reindeer humping an elf and a demented Santa shitting chocolate into the mouth of a female helper still did it for me. All in all almost certainly misogynist, fairly funny, dull in parts, but overall strangely hypnotic. Great way to start of the Christmas season anyway. http://mccarthy.smak.be/

BUT THE THING I GOT REALLY EXCITED ABOUT was smack in the middle of the end of a ridiculously long hall which I later found out was an installation by Jason Rhoades called “A Few Free Years”. I didn't know that at the time because I was already too busy playing the REAL 80s and 90s arcade games that faced each other to make a kind of corridor in the gallery. Terminator 2, Tetris, Joust, that car game I can't remember the name of, they were all here with an unlimited amount of credits on them. I have since read that it was meant to be some sort of tribute to Beethoven's 9 Symphony, and I don't really know about that. What I do know is that it was a damn good afternoon in the artwork, and I know I must have been there for awhile because my ears are still ringing with the tinny sounds that made up a fairly large chunk of my childhood spent in front of an atari, a super nintendo, the arcades at Balcatta Rollerdrome and Hillary's Boat Harbour. If only they had Bubble Bobble, it would have been like a time warp in there. Perhaps not the most challenging work I've ever seen, but still.

Das Leben Wird Von Tag Zu Tag Besser?

Now if I can only find some Garfield cartoon strips in German...

Die Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand

Yesterday we visited the German Resistance Memorial Center (Die Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand) a permanent exhibition documenting a spectrum of German resistance to National Socialism. This exhibition exists in the historic rooms of the attempted coup of July 20, 1944, on a street that has since been named "Stauffenbergstrasse" after the colonel that tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944. The courtyard is in the center of the Bendlerblock, the former headquarters of the German Army High Command; the bronze figure of a young man with bound hands pays tribute to Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators of the Valkyrie plot, who were executed immediately after the blast that failed to kill Hitler.But thats not the only emphasis of the museum. More than 5,000 photographs and documents present examples of the motives, actions, and goals of individuals, groups, and organizations involved in resistance to National Socialism. The resistors in the Labor Movement, the Communist Party and from Christian organisations are also represented here, and this for me made the visit much more worthwhile. The tales of people like Liselotte Herrmann or Walter Uhlmann who, like Luxemburg and Liebknecht before them, stood up for the working class and against Nazism long before 1944 are here, and for me are the real heroes of the Nazi era, not a few Colonels who decided to turn on their leader when their imperialist war was clearly lost- like drowned rats at the 11th hour. This is a link to a few of the biographies of resisters from the labor movement before 1939. http://www.gdw-berlin.de/b04/b04-bio-e.php# Another really touching part of the exhibition was the documentation of the White Rose group, a group of a few students in their early twenties (including Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, Alex Schmorell, Willi Graf and Christoph Probst, and a professer at their University called Kurt Huber) who prepared and distributed six different leaflets calling for the active opposition of the German people to Nazi oppression and tyranny between June 1942 and February 1943. They were caught during the distribution of the of the seventh leaflet and sentenced to death. Today they really typify the officially recognised opposition to the war, and the White Rose groups stylistically sophisticated leaflets and diary entries are still quoted in length by anti-war activists today who look to passive resistance.Here’s a particularly moving quotation from Sophie, written soon before her death in 1943:
“The real damage is done by those millions who want to ’survive.’ The honest men who just want to be left in peace. Those who don’t want their little lives disturbed by anything bigger than themselves. Those with no sides and no causes. Those who won’t take measure of their own strength, for fear of antagonizing their own weakness. Those who don’t like to make waves or enemies. Those for whom freedom, honour, truth, and principles are only literature. Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”
The quote has some problems, but from a group of young people isolated from the tiny underground workers organisations fighting the Nazi's, very inspiring nonetheless.

Spielwiese Ludotek

Fun had at Spielwiese, the coffee bar across the road where you can spend an evening playing one or three of the 999 games available for 1€. The bright interior with its retro design fits in well here in Friedrichshain, and walking past the shop every day for a month and a half gave me enough time to build up some serious anticipation for a night of boardgaming.

I wanted to play Risk. Pretty bad. Here in Germany it is called "Riskito" and that made me want to play it even more. They even had 6 versions, and that put me into into a place of major Risk need. Despite some serious attempts to convince, cajole and then sulk into getting my way at the Spielwiese this evening I lost the vote, and instead we spent the night listening to the panicky buzz of Operation, or "Doktor Bibber" as it is known here. Here is me sulking some more over a hot game of Bibber.














Here is steph getting out a charlie horse.

















And here is just some fun lovin guys at the Spielwiese.
http://www.spielwiese-berlin.de/

Pergamon Museum

Last night we went to the Pergamon Museum at the museum Island in Mitte, which we'd pretty much been meaning to do since we stepped off the plane. Thursday nights are a good time for museum going here in Berlin, as all of the museums of antiquity are free four hours before closing time; the "Donnerstag Angebot". The Pergamon is extremely big, and even though I still feel a bit uneasy about eyeballing things that have been dug out of the ground by foreign Imperialists and suspended in time half way across the planet, I have to say that it was a pretty impressive viewing experience. And not just because everything was giant. We made into two of the three permanent collections there; the Museum of the Near East and the Museum of Islamic Art. Its main attraction is the Pergamon Altar (2nd century BC) which I posted above. The frieze depicting the battle between the Gods and Giants is regarded as a masterpiece of Hellenistic , and certainly impressed us. The next room to the south contains the market Gate of Miletus, which is famed for being an outstanding example of Roman architecture. Unfortunately it was all under wraps because it is threatening to fall apart, so I guess I'll never know.
I did get to see this amazing piece of architecture though, The Ishtar Gate (605-562 BC) , which is a reconstruction of a gate in a city of Ancient Mesopotamia. Millions of coloured glazed brick fragments found in Babylon were put back together again to build up in their original architectural structure the walls of the Ishtar Gate and the Processional Street lying before it. Friezes of sacred animals - the Lion of Ishtar, the Bull of Adad, the Dragon of Marduk - cover the walls, and were a bit of a favourite of mine.

So I am back on the Museum going after talking myself out of it for weeks. I just have to keep reminding myself that the museums here are just not like the ones in Western Australia that comprise chiefly of three taxidermized emus, one ancient asteroid and a long spiel about how great James Stirling and all the other murderous settlers were. I guess every Thursday is going to be a Angebot Thursday from now on.

The Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial

Today we visited the site of the main remand prison for people detained by the former East German Ministry of State Security, (or the 'Stasi') that operated between 1945 and 1989.
It was amazing, particularly because the majority of the buildings, equipment and furniture and fittings have survived intact, and unlike other museums I've been to that document life under Stalinism (the Budapest "House of Terror" comes to mind) , the exhibition didn't try and shove liberal ideology down your throat in the crudest way. Tours of the prison are often led by former inmates, but we managed to tag along to a tour organized for a group of British teens led by a man who grew up in West Berlin but worked in the East at a university before the wall came down. He was an interesting character, and really gave you a sense of the bureaucracy and brutal arbitrariness which characterized the regime.

The site has been the subject of a whole swag of books written to document the lives of those who had to suffer through the life of the prison. I felt so frustrated in the bookshop afterwards because all the books were extremely interesting- from Poland's Solidarnosc movement to the novel of the experiences inside of a now famous German children's writer Klaus Kordon called Krokodil im Nacken (A Crocodile Breathing Down My Neck'), to an account of the life of Punks in the DDR- and of course, all in German. More motivation to keep at it I guess.

One historic day

One historic day.
John Howard finally got kicked out of office after 11 and a half years too long in power. I didn't realize I would get so choked up about seeing the back of him. And Hockey, and Abbott, and Brough, and Ruddock, and Costello and Nelson. But here we are stuck to the online video footage of Howard's concession speech on the ABC and getting carried away. Have since enjoyed reading a whole lot of material on the racist bastard losing his seat in Bennelong, and a good write of the election result and the fight ahead against Rudd here... http://leninology.blogspot.com/2007/11/aussie-election-shock.html

Bye, Howard.

Anti-Fascist demonstration

There was an anti-fascist demonstration today to mark the murder of SILVIO MEIER at the hands of neo-nazi's in Freidrichshain 15 years ago. The Police presence was astounding, and on numerous occasions we saw the cops going through the crowd in small numbers to try and start the crowd resisting to provoke a pretext for mass arrests. All in all, this wasn't a demonstration built for ordinary people to see or come along too; amongst the thousands of people that turned out for it only a handful were dressed in any colour other than black, and as the demo weaved its way through the heart of counter culture towards the party street Revaler Stasse, it remained far away from the eyes of the working population. Noticeably absent was any discussion about the anti-Muslim and anti-Turkish racism which is most certainly the biggest problem in the area, and the presence of Israeli flags in light of this was a worrying sign. In the end, the leaflet was more promising than its outcome; this couldn't really be called an anti-racist demo.

Berlin Top 5

Everyone loves a good favourites list. Don't they?
5. German Comics







This is my favourite (and thus far, least productive way of learning German; reading comics in Deutsch. Going into a comic shop like the one in Kreuzberg is seriously dangerous, and so far everytime I have come out with titles in English and a little Spanish, and absolutely no Deutsch. So I have resolved to stop spending my money and read them online. A recurrent theme in my life.







4. Franziskaner Some beer in Germany is made out of wheat. Wheat beer. Instead of hops. Anyway this gives the beer a much stronger flavour -- which has been described by me when I was feeling a bit whimsical as 'cloves, banana and bubble-gum' flavoured -- as well as more fizz. It is generally not actually100% wheat, but somewhere around 66% wheat and 33% barley. This is my current favourite, owning largely to the fact that it is readily available from any Getränke-Fachmärkte for about €0.80 for a favourably large bottle, has a happy monk on the front and comes in three varieties. And how I love variety.






3. Weird Berlin Museums: The Museum of Broken Relationships
There are a lot of amazing museums in Berlin. In fact there is a whole island of them, its Jurassic Park out there. Unfortunately I hover somewhere between occasional museum goer to outright philistine so I haven't really given the island much of a chance. But here is one that got me to sit up and listen. I quote the museums brochure at length. " When the love affair is over and the angry words of recrimination have faded into the air, what better way to dull the pain than to put on display the tokens of that lost passion? The 250 exhibits in the Museum of Broken Relationships in Berlin are ordinary items with poignant stories attached, such as a pen used to write the now bitterly regretted love letters or the bike a man left on, never to return."
Each time the travelling exhibition pitches up in a new city, people are invited to contribute the tokens of their lost love, which they insist is a more creative and cathartic way of dealing with the refuse. One of my favourites was the story of the Berlin woman who donated an axe she had used to reduce the furniture of her female lover to matchsticks after a bad breakup. “I kept it as a therapeutic tool,” the woman says. Her departed girlfriend returned two weeks later to pick up the furniture only to find it in a splintered pile on the floor.
And the story quoted in the exhibition programme seems to be a favourite. "A well-used prosthetic leg comes with the heart-rending tale of how its owner, a veteran of the Bosnian war, had met a beautiful social worker who helped him to obtain the false limb. “The prosthesis endured longer than our love,” the accompanying note says. Under an elegant wedding dress, a woman has written: “Can I have it back if I re-marry?”

For a long-winded but kinda fun description of the conceptual underpinings of the project see http://www.brokenships.com/doc/mobr_concept.pdf


2. Rosi's Klub! + Kultur! + Kiezhof!
I still don't know what Kiezhof! means.
Rosi's is like a big old house in the middle of nowhere. Actually its just down the road from the middle of Friedrichshain. Anyway it hosts a whole lot of indie nights (a marginalized genre in electro Berlin) and if and when you find it you're pretty much guaranteed a great night of big dance moves, low prices and an unpretentious crowd that just want to kick it.
They play way too much Maximo Park, Franz Ferdinand and every other British or British sounding band of that canon, but the best part is when they play a track sung in German and the crowd erupts into a serious singalong. It's worth the wait.



1. Berlin is Nummer Eins

Note to self. Take pyjama trousers with you wherever you go.

It's been two months now since I last donned a pair of pyjama trousers, which everyone knows is the cornerstone of a good nights rest and general emotional stability. I don't know why I did it, three pairs of jeans and not one pair of pants to goon away the night in was never going to be the right choice. And the deprivation is all coming to surface. Nervous tension, the eye twitch, cold feet, signs of early arthritisism and lets not forget the occasional outbursts of trouser related fear and regret.

But that's all changed now. I thought it was just going to be another routine snoop of the apartment pulling out old lover letters and English style guides for high achieving American Phd-er's. But everything was gonna change as soon as my hand brushed against some material stuck underneath our sub-lettor's bed. Which turned out to be fisherman's pants. FISHERMAN'S PANTS. The overalls in soft textile. I am now wearing these ridiculous trousers in a state of high, high relaxation. But its come at a cost. Just as a feel too silly to write in a Moleskine 'just like Hemingway did' I now feel too silly embarrassed to write a blog in these boho trousers. So until I get these off (which may be a long time coming) this is now a photo diary. I give you the last two weeks in pictures. Don't worry, the pants have not been documented. Enjoy.


Floh Markts in Boxhaganer Straße. A find.


Still love modern art jokes.


But still it is very hard to talk about culture when one cannot differentiate between who and what.


Did you know that that guy in the middle of Liars fame is an Australian?









The Döner: Fruend oder Foe? Me feeling the effects of the Wunderlampe kebap at 3am after Liars.




















"I decided that I liked the big needle."