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."

Love and Rockets: The Maggie and Hopey Stories

The biggest threat to my Deutsch lernen yet.

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

Life has become a little more structured for me since beginning language classes at the Sprachenatelier down the road from our flat. Its been a wonderfully confusing, challenging but above all exciting couple of weeks- peppered with small victories and occasional audible improvements to tide me over in the harder times. Learning German has put me into contact which a whole range of interesting people (the brochure even said this would happen) from all over the place, except of course from Britain. This is a mystery worth resolving. There are hundreds of Americans here, and almost as many Australians, and even some New Zealanders, but we are all having to hold our own as the irritatingly accented English speakers here without the support of the British. How is this possible? My Granny would no doubt say "It's the war, love, the blitz..." but I still feel that there must be more to it than that.

Anyway, here we are with or without them. Klaus (my language teacher) is a standout from the crowd, and I still am not over his attempt to teach us a whole range of verb conjugations in the present tense through the use of little wursts with feet that he'd lovingly drawn on the board. Over and over again. Incidentally Klaus doesn't look like that at all, he looks more like Ricky Gervais, minus the collared shirts and plus ear studs and a wry grin. I am coming to the conclusion that one in four men of European ancestry look uncannily like Ricky Gervais, and I'd like to cite the Easyjet flight attendant that brought us here and my Dad as evidence of this.

But I wouldn't want you to think that the only think we'd been up to was conjugating at likening those around us to celebrities. Oh no, we've been doing much more than that. Well, a bit more than that anyway. A standout evening was at the Babylon Kino in Mitte where we attended a screening of Sir! No Sir! (in Deutsch) on the closing night of a 1967-1977 Radical Film Festival.
It was great to be amongst a little of the left here, and the night was made all the more interesting by the introduction and Question and Answer session afterwards by two Vietnam Veteran's Against the War (who feature in the film) Stephen Summers and Dave Blalock. Turns out they have made Germany their home in order to help US soldiers stationed for training here in Germany prior to their deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan to desert. Summers also helped set up the STOP THE WAR BRIGADE in Germany during the Gulf war to build support for anti-war GIs, and has made a whole series of films that he distributes to soliders that document a growing resistance in the US military. There were certainly debates going on in the room between the two men and different political groups in attendence. If only my German was a little better I might have known what they were! In any case, it was amazing to hear the same kind of things that get brought up in Australia brought up here, particularly the one that goes something like "Yeah, okay its all happening in ___________ (insert mythical land where it is easy to build against the war, on this ocassion it was Italy), but its not like that here in Berlin, the people are just too apathetic here". I never thought I would here that here, but there you go.