Travelogue: Berlin
My first 48 hours
I have the good fortune to be in Berlin this week for work-related reasons — I’ll be meeting some of my European colleagues for the first time and giving a shot talk about writing good design documents. This is my first time in Berlin, so I built some extra time into my plans and spent this past weekend sightseeing — which is, of course, hardly any time at all. Here are some of the things that made an impression.
My own ineptness
I started the trip on a blundering note. Minutes before boarding my plane, I realized that, while I’d remembered my passport and Green Card, I’d forgotten my actual wallet at home, with my credit and ATM cards inside. Fortunately, I had tap-to-pay enabled on my phone, which is accepted pretty much everywhere. I sent myself some cash via Western Union as a backstop.
Six or so years ago I made a semi-serious effort to learn to speak German, but all that remains is a few scraps — a number of words that, without their grammatical connective tissue, are relatively useless. I’m someone who tends towards shyness, I hate to make blunders of etiquette, I feel like an asshole expecting to be spoken to in English, and I’m very conscious of how generally uncool tourists are and how easy it is for one to ruin the vibe of a place. Whenever I’m in a country where I don’t speak the language, all this makes it emotionally a bit difficult to navigate restaurants. I frequently end up standing outside the door to some likely-looking place, wondering if they’ll hate me for going inside. This will probably ease as the week goes on, but there have been more than a few hungry hours.
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
This was my first stop after the nearby Brandenburg Gate. I walked through the corridors of the sculpture for a while, and then visited the museum underground.
No matter how many times I read about the Holocaust, it always feels like new information — a confrontation to the mind, to any and every belief about humanity. There were still new, horrible details for me to learn. I had never heard, for example, about the retrofitted “delousing” bus that made a special run every Sunday, with a switch that the driver could flip to direct the exhaust fumes into the sealed cabin where the passengers sat, and whose destination was a mass grave.
I remembered a passage from one of Sebald’s books, which I’d quote directly if I had it handy but must paraphrase here. One of the characters, living through the rise of the Nazis, realizes some terrible threshold has been passed when the speechifying voices on the radio started using the “magic word” thousand — a thousand years, a thousand times, a thousand voices. Thousand (tausend in German) suggests grandeur, eternity; it has a pleasant lilting sound in the ear, it extinguishes nuance.
How dangerous people are when in the grip of a belief in magic — specifically, the belief that violence and bloodshed works like a magic spell, that killing the right people will lift an enchantment, that some Eden waits on the other side of mass purification.
Beginning the day this way made it difficult not to be cynical about everything else I saw. Perhaps this explains a lot about Germany.
Fidelio
I spent two consecutive evenings at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the first at a performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio.
Fidelio takes place in a prison where a man, Florestan, is being held unjustly after having uncovered some kind of scandal (it’s never quite specified what) that embarrassed a local politician. His loyal wife, Leonore, gets a job as a prison guard (disguised as a man and using the assumed name Fidelio) in hopes that she’ll be able to find and rescue him. It’s an explicitly political opera, illustrating how intermingled are ideas of justice and oppression (a prison might represent one or the other, depending on one’s view). The production didn’t shy away from depicting brutality — as it opens, two characters are washing a corpse. Later, the corpse is rolled into an open pit. Around the pit sit the prisoners, wearing large plaster masks on which faces are carved, concealing their true faces.
During Beethoven’s beautiful prisoner’s chorus, when the imprisoned men sing of their joy at being allowed to walk outside for the first time perhaps in weeks, they all remove their masks. The effect was very moving.
Proust, Le Bal des têtes
I am currently reading the final volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (I’ve been reading one book in the series each year since 2017, and will be concluding this year). This is the Penguin Classics translation, and they’ve translated the title somewhat unappealingly as Finding Time Again, which makes it sound like an inspirational self-help volume. Anyone with literary aspirations may actually find it quite helpful — and I’ll have a lot more to say about it in a future newsletter.
But I would like to quote a passage from the devastating Le Bal des têtes sequence, which sent me into a depression this morning. The narrator, having been “out of society” for a while, attends a party where he sees many of his old friends, and is shocked to discover how old and unlike their old selves they look — and is forced to acknowledge how much he himself is altered.
I could see myself, as though in the first truthful glass I had ever encountered, reflected in the eyes of old men, who in their opinion were still young, just as I was in mine, and who when I described myself as an old man, hoping to hear a denial showed in the way they looked at me, seeing me not as they saw themselves but as I saw them, no glimmer of protestation. Because we did not see our own true appearance, or age, and each of us, as though in a facing mirror, saw those of the others. And I am sure that many people confront the discovery that they have grown old with less sadness than I did. But old age, to begin with, has something in common with death. Some face it with indifference, not because they have more courage than others, but because they have less imagination. And then, a man who since his childhood has had one single idea in his mind, but who has been forced by idleness and his state of health continuously to put off its realization, each evening to write off the day that has been lost, so that the illness which hastens the aging of the body retards that of his mind, is more surprised and overwhelmed to see that he has never ceased living in Time than somebody who has little interior life, organizes his life by the calendar, and does not all at once discover the total of the years whose increasing tally he has followed daily.
Perfect coat no pockets
On a lighter note (all of this is so heavy! But that’s Berlin for you): luckily for me, it is sale season here, and meany beautiful things are heavily discounted. I tried on a perfectly shaped wool overcoat that fit just right in the shoulders, and the line was exquisite. But, alas, the coat did not have pockets (it’s possible that the exquisite line was owed, in part, to this). I decided that no pockets in a coat is a dealbreaker. I bought a yellow silk blouse with some drapery at the neck instead.
Alte Nationalgalerie
My first day in Berlin, trying to figure out where to see the good paintings, I visited the Alte Nationalgalerie, which was a disappointment. The collection of mostly 19th-century works was deeply dreary, heavy on the works of Adolph Menzel, and seemingly bursting with ugly paintings (some B-tier Manet was a bright spot). One of the prize exhibitions was Johann Gottfried Schadow’s sculpture of two sister princesses of Prussia, which is indeed lovely. One of the info cards informed me that the original plan called for one of the princesses to hold a flower basket, but that the accessory was deemed inappropriate and jettisoned. The nixing of the flower basket seemed to me to be in keeping with the joylessness of the rest of the collection.
No wonder the Nazis stole so much art, I found myself thinking. They didn’t have any of the good stuff at home. Now, this is probably inaccurate and unfair to German painting as a whole… but that’s what I was thinking.
Gemäldegalerie
Now, this was what I had been looking for. After the dreary Alte and contemplating mortality with Beethoven and Proust, I nearly teared up in front of this Botticelli:
The collection also includes this Vermeer, which was breathtaking in person:
Don Giovanni
This was my second evening at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Germany is particularly well-known — some might say notorious — for the Regietheater movement in opera production, in which an opera director’s vision for a work overrides traditional performance conventions. At its most tame, it might be a period update, setting Manon in the 1920’s or whatever. But at its most aggressive, the original plot and characters of the work might be totally unrecognizable.
Of course, Regietheater has been a major force in opera for fifty years now, especially in Europe, and a number of lazy clichés have solidified around it. In particular, the stereotypical Regie production will include business suits, neon (bonus points for text), television sets and/or projected images, S&M, various simulated sex acts, sunglasses, fascists, gratuitous nudity, and/or workout wear.
I am generally pro-Regie. I like my opera to come with some intellectual as well as sensory engagement, and highly cerebral or conceptual productions give me something to chew on. What I want to see in a “director’s concept” is a sign that the director and the creative team have thought carefully about the work and what makes it interesting, and have a coherent point of view that can illuminate it in a new way.
During the first act of this Don Giovanni, I was mostly on board. The Don was accompanied in every scene by a gang of men all wearing black business attire, who imitated his gestures, laughed at his jokes, and did his dirty work. They all entered carrying golf clubs (with which they bludgeoned the Commendatore) and followed along with the Don in a workout routine that included golf swings, push-ups, and yoga poses. The Commendatore was bludgeoned with the clubs and had a golf ball placed in his mouth as a coup-de-grace; Donna Anna realizes that the Don is her assailant when he casually tosses another golf ball her way. This seemed like a reasonable concept: Don Giovanni as the patriarchy, men imitating each other in violent acts.
Then, in the party scene that closes Act I, the production went full-regie. The stage was occupied by a giant spinning metal and neon sculpture with bodies hellishly posed along it. There was a man clad only in a loincloth pedaling a stationary bike, a second man walking across the stage with an IV drip, a wooden door with the message Lasciate ogni speranza (abandon all hope) painted above, strewn black garbage bags, etc. etc. It was hard to say how all that fit in. Don Giovanni is already in hell, I suppose? Capitalism?
Then, in Act II, the ideas in Act I seemed to be mostly abandoned. The farcical sections of Act II of Don Giovanni are challenging for any director (many productions fall apart here). The hangers-on swapped their business suits for Bob Fosse bowler hats and vests with red clown noses, and mostly acted clownishly for the rest of the opera. I suppose the idea was to ironically call attention to the farce, but it really felt like someone was throwing up their hands and saying “fuck it, we’re doing clowns”. Later, they were wearing grinning skull masks with Mickey Mouse ears and doing the Charleston. It started to feel a bit like dorm room aesthetics — the director abandoning any hope of a coherent point of view and just cramming in whatever imagery he thought would be edgy or badass.
On the plus side, this is the kind of production that would absolutely never run in an American opera house, so it counts as an authentic experience of Germany. There was also some very beautiful and sensitive singing, particularly in the title role (Deh vieni alla finestra was a standout) and from Donna Elvira.