Travelogue, Berlin: Part 2
An account of the first few days I spent in Berlin this past week can be found here. The rest of the time was mostly spent working and spending time with colleagues, so I don’t have as much to report. Still, there was room for more transcendence.
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt
In the same SMB complex as the beautiful Vermeers and Botticellis I wrote about last week was an exhibit featuring the works of Berlin artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, a name that had been previously unfamiliar to me. As a self-taught artist working under heavy surveillance in Soviet-controlled East Berlin, she made her artworks using a typewriter and sent them to others through the mail. I found the pieces, often geometric designs, entrancing — the meticulousness and vulnerability, the wit of their construction.
After the Berlin Wall fell, she stopped making her typed pieces — once the constraints that necessitated her methods were lifted, she no longer found the work relevant. As Astrid Mania writes in this ArtForum piece on Wolf-Rehfeldt, “When a political system collapses, many an artistic practice goes down with it.”
Georgian Dumplings
I rarely see Georgian restaurants in the USA (apparently Seattle has a bakery?), but there are many in Berlin. I had an excellent meal at a place called Tsomi in Prenzlauerberg. It included exceptional soup dumplings (and instructions not to eat the stems). I neglected to take pictures.
The rest of the meal featured yogurt, cheese, pomegranate seeds, wine, and very tender chicken.
Presentations
Along with some colleagues, I gave a talk at Grammarly’s Berlin office on how to write thoughtful, nuanced, career-advancing technical design documents. Even though I don’t earn income as a writer, I’ve found in every job I’ve had that the more writing I do, the better my projects tend to go. Writing is perhaps the best possible medium for the demonstration of one’s understanding of a complex circumstance, and if you’re a smart person (and of course you are), writing down your thoughts is a helpful practice. As usual with giving talks, the best part was the conversations afterward; everyone I met was friendly, interesting, and had a good perspective to share.
It also felt good to be speaking in front of an audience again, and in a room full of people. I’m worried about is that the past few pandemic years have dulled our collective interest in engagement with public social life. Professional gatherings increasingly take place remotely, and anecdotally people are throwing fewer parties. When I go to the symphony or the opera in Seattle the empty seats are abundant, movie theatres are next to empty, and the city center has a deserted feeling. Unquestionably, valid and pressing health concerns are still a factor for many, but I worry that we’ve lost the habit of being human in public and we’ll be worse off for it. So I was happy to see a healthy turnout for our event, but also to see the opera house packed for a weird Don Giovanni, and groups of friends laughing in restaurants.
Proust Proust Proust
The final volume of In Search of Lost Time will get a fuller treatment in this newsletter, but I wanted to commemorate that, almost seven years after picking up Swann’s Way, I have now completed the entirety of Proust’s magnum opus. I reached the end of Finding Time Again on an airplane sitting on the tarmac at Charles de Gaulle airport. I thought it was highly appropriate to complete the final pages in Paris — even if it was only technically in Paris.
The Berlin Philharmonic
(yes, I have seen Tár)
At first I avoided making plans for my final night in Berlin. After spending my first days chasing high culture, I thought I might be doing myself a disservice by not pursuing other notable Berlin experiences. But I’m not really one for techno music and don’t have the personality for solo clubbing. As the day drew closer, I realized that if I didn’t plan for something specific, I’d wind up pacing the sidewalks somewhere, anxious about going into restaurants. And I realized that I would never, ever regret going to hear one of the best classical orchestras in the world.
The program featured Ravel, Bartók, and the trendier Esa-Pekka Salonen. Within five minutes I knew that I hadn’t made a mistake — they really do sound that good, precise and luminous and subtle. Plus I love Ravel.
I was struck, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been, by how aggressively modern the BP’s branding is, the logo and the primary yellow, the sleek, minimalist graphic design. The hall itself is angular in a showy way, both exterior and exterior, and no doubt the acoustics were designed with scientific precision.
The small merch shop was also the site of the most extended transaction I managed to conduct entirely in German. In specifying the exact type of branded BP notizbuch I wanted, I needed to use my words for size (kleiner), color (gelb und weiss), quantity (zwei), please (bitte) and thank you (danke schön). It was an interaction straight out of an “Introduction to German” reader. When I completed the whole thing without the cashier switching to English I was glowing with absurd pride. This is cosmopolitanism!
Other Travelogue/language learning posts that might interest you:
Lovely post as ever, I would have liked to have seen your Grammarly talk.