Berliner Graffiti

Berliner Mauer

After WWII Germany was divided between the Americans, Soviets, British and later French. Berlin was divided similarly, with the Soviets getting the eastern half, and at first this division only existed on paper. When people began leaving the city, the Soviets tried to prevent this by building a wall around the western border. In other words, they build a wall around the back half of the Allies' territory, but the Allied powers allowed it because then they had something to use in their rhetoric against Communism: "look what they do! They wall people in!" Then the Americans did something very sneaky. They made it known that any East Berliner who approached a U.S. soldier and looked him in the eyes with one hand over their heart and said "I hate Communism" would be given an immediate and free ticket to U.S.-occupied southern Germany. The population drain on East Berlin was sudden and severe. To try to stem the tide of emigrants, a wall was built in 1961 separating east and West Berlin.
At first the wall was only a knee-high roll of barbed wire. Many folks simply found a quiet section of the wall and hopped right over. A year later the wire fence was improved. In 1965 it was replaced by a much taller concrete structure, followed by a bed of nails that would either stop tanks or shred human feet right through their boots. Behind the bed of nails was a death strip, or stretch of open sand that made it easy for the guards perched at one of the 116 watchtowers to spot and pick off runners.

Not wanting to rule with an iron fist, Gorbachev came to power giving a bit of leeway to the eastern European states, and the first thing that happened was that Hungary and Czechoslovakia opened their borders allowing East Berliners to pass around and back into West Berlin by way of Prague. Something had to be done before East Berlin was completely empty, so the government decided to announce the wall would be opened to passport holders. This would give people something to hope for and less of a reason to flee, meanwhile the government could take its sweet time actually issuing the passports -- if ever. It was the perfect solution.

Enter Günter Schabowski. Spokesman for the SED Politburo and party boss in East Berlin, he stepped out to give a public address on live television on 9 November 1989. As he was taking to the podium, someone handed him a note announced the new government plan concerning passports. Günter Schabowski stood before the world and went on for some time about unimportant bureaucratic pablum, but then just as he was about to leave the podium, he withdrew the note from his back pocket and gave it a read. Doing a double-take, he announced that the wall was to be opened. Reporters fell out of their seats. Who would qualify? What documents would be required? "In my opinion," he said as he looked over the sheet of paper and found no further details, "none." The room exploded in confusion. When would this come into effect?! "In my opinion," he said, looking again at the unhelpful piece of paper, "this will come into effect...immediately." Just like that, the Berlin Wall came down.

Folks swarmed the wall by the hundreds of thousands and the guards, not knowing what had happened and faced with the cries of so many insisting a government announcement had been made granting full and immediate access, laid down their guns and let them through. When they got on to the other side, they took hammers and rocks and hands and feet and brought every blocks of the western wall down that they possibly could. The rumors are not true: it wasn't a Hasselhoff song playing over the wall that inspired the whole of East Berlin to tear down the wall. This didn't stop David from complaining when he came to Berlin later though: "I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Checkpoint Charlie." I'd refer him to the pages of history but hey, no one hassles the Hoff.

One of the most beautiful spots in Berlin is right here, around the corner from the eerie stelae of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. It doesn't look like much, but take a closer look. The pale gravel. The splotches of grass. The oddly spaced linden trees. Underneath this plot of land lies the Führerbunker, where Hitler spent his last days on earth. As the war was ending he realized Germans weren't all he'd thought they were and so he decided that if he was going down he was going to take the German people, disappointment that they were, down with him.

He made it mandatory for all men of age to defend the cities. When they were all shot to death or hung from trees for failing to fight, he did the only other thing he could: he sacrificed the children too. Too young to wear helmet or drive tanks or even carry guns, the first regiment of children stood on this ground while Hitler handed them grenades and sent them off on their bicycles to battle the Soviet tanks.

Stories of the war often paint it black and white. Good and evil. But it wasn't so clear cut. When the Soviets entered the city they wasn't a fight to be had. Hundreds of thousands of men were hanging from trees and the women had gone into their closets for their weddings dresses or bed sheets or anything at all that was white and hung it from their balconies to indicate surrender and just like that, Berlin fell. During Soviet occupation around 80% of the women left in Berlin were raped by Soviet soldiers an average of 10-20 times each.

Today tourists can go to Checkpoint Charlie, one of the crossing points in the Berlin wall, to have their picture taken with people dressed as Soviet soldiers. How is this different than having your picture taken with some dude in Nazi gear? What's more, the idiots who dress up like this and dance around at Checkpoint Charlie are actually German porn stars. They do the Checkpoint Charlie thing by day cause they can charge tourists 5 euro to stamp their passports with a Berlin wall crossing point stamp. This stamp officially invalidates one's passport. So tourists are unknowingly paying porn stars 5 euro to render their passports useless, all while funding the grossly inappropriate behavior of these Arschlöcher.

But back to the bunker. After the war they were worried it would become some sort of shrine to Hitler so they tried blowing it up, till they remembered it was designed not to be blown up. What then could they do with it? They didn't want to build a museum, but they couldn't destroy it, so what then? Make it a car park.

It's brilliant really, and such a twist of history that the exact site of the end of World War II, the place where they entered Hitler's chambers and found him with a bullet in his forehead and a cyanide capsule in his mouth and knew the war was finally won, that this place, possibly the most important historical site in contemporary Western history, is nothing but a car park.

Brandenburg Gate has the goddess of peace riding a chariot on top and is one of the only statues of a clothed goddess in all of Europe because the king was worried people arriving from Brandenburg would be greeted by her divine ass. It was later decided to change her identity to Nike, goddess of victory, shortly before Germany lost both world wars. Oh, history how I love you.

Gendarmenmarkt

This is one of the most beautiful things in Berlin, the Französische Dom or French Cathedral, sitting on the Gendarmenmarkt which bears a French name in honor of the Huguenots who fled to Berlin to escape persecution. Berlin had a reputation for religious tolerance. The atheist King Frederick II built a Catholic church right in front of his home, now Humboldt University, just to show people were welcome to worship as they pleased. Jews from all over Europe came to Berlin to live in peace, and when the Huguenots came there were so many of them (they made up about a quarter of Berlin's population) that King Frederick said they ought to build a church to welcome their new guests. So, imagine this, all the Catholics of Berlin got together and built their Protestant guests this building. Then as if that isn't touching enough, the Huguenots returned the favor and directly across from the Catholic-built Protestant church stands a Protestant-built Catholic church, the Deutscher Dom. King Frederick the atheist then slapped a concert hall between them just to keep things balanced.

Humboldt-Universität

This is the Royal Library of Humboldt University. Founded in 1810 the main building was originally meant to be King Frederick II's home but he decided Potsdam, Berlin's Versailles, was much lovelier so he gave this to his kid brother as a wedding present. Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Einstein, Planck, Marx, Engels, de Saussure, Bismarck, WEB Du Bois -- all went here. Goebbels burned 20,000 books here in 1933. There's a library full of empty shelves fit to hold the books that were lost and a plaque bearing a quote by Heinrich Heine, also a Humboldt alumnus, with these prophetic words:

"Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen".

"That was only a prelude, where they burn books, they eventually burn people".

Berliner Dom

Mauer Flea Market

I spent the day at Mauer Park. Sundays have fantastic flea markets there. You could walk around for hours getting lost in the crowd. I sat atop the hill on a giant swing and watched some live karaoke -- there were actually loads of people there for it and more than a few of the singers were carrying a damn fine pair of lungs. In the evening there was Creole bluegrass band playing near the street and a Bohemian Reggae group jamming under some oaks. People were just crowded around stomping feet and clapping hands. Great vibe.

Berlin is amazing but sad when you're alone. The kids at the hostel have all been quite young, the guys mostly prowling for sex and the ladies keeping a bit to themselves. Heaps of Brazilians, everyone's plenty friendly, but meeting deeply cool people hasn't been possible. But of course such people are rare wherever you go, though can be harder to bump into when you're on the road.

Beautiful Berlin

Belgian fries

French fries are actually not French at all, they're Belgian. Belgians do speak French, so maybe that explains the confusion, but in the land where they're from folks call them frites and the best fritkot is meant to be Maison Antoine. I had mine with Andalouse mayo cause I'd read that was the local favorite. Actually, I prefer the frites I had in Amsterdam. They were Belgian style though. Not at all like regular French fries. The secret to the perfect frite is frying it fast enough to create a crisp shell that not only adds texture but traps just the right amount of moisture inside. Too much moisture and you get soggy fries. Too little and you get less flavor. It's an art, and the Belgians have perfected it. But far better than the frites are the wafels. I'd never had anything like this in my life. Crisp, chewy, feather-light. A delight to eat.
I spent the afternoon visiting cheese and chocolate shops. Belgian chocolate is amazing but actually not so impressive since it's available around the world. It wasn't anything I'd never had before, unlike the wafel or frites. Brussels is also famous for its mussels, so I went to Chez Léon for the city's best. Good, I must say. Not mind-blowing though. I saw next to two older gentlemen, a Pole and Spanish-German, both family men in their forties. We had drinks at Delerium Tremens after and I fell in love with the Rodenbach, a Flanders Red Ale, which beerhunter Michael Jackson (not the singer) called the world's most refreshing beer. But...
Then I went to Beer Circus, probably the best beer shop on the planet, housing hundreds and hundreds of Belgian beer, and had this little honey. What a gorgeous piece of work.

Korenveld met kraaien, Wheatfield with Crows

One of my favorite paintings in the Rijks is Thomas de Keyser's Group Portrait of an Unindentified Body. Rembrandt's best paintings were his self-portraits, but it's impossible for me to take any one of them alone. They all fit into one idea, the idea of a man trying to understand himself, and in the process he gives us something more than a series of paintings. He gives us a record of his soul as he gradually accepts that his life will never be what he wanted it to be. I know how that feels, and I find his vulnerability all so beautiful. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

De Keyser was one of the painters Rembrandt admired. You see the same darkness, but de Keyser's brushstrokes are cleaner and this gives such a power of expression to these men's faces. The texture of their skin. The exactness of their expressions. Above all, their profound eyes. What Rembrandt gave is more valuable to me, but I find this paintings more beautiful than any single Rembrandt. Another painting that touches me is Verner van den Valckett's Portrait of a Man with Ring. He's a ringmaker, proud of his trade, finely dressed. I like the white collar that frames his face, the blackness around that, the grey concrete windowsill.
It's simple, but not so simple. This was the 17th century. The British Empire would have an area greater than the surface of the Moon and London would rule it all, but before that the Dutch were the greatest colonial power and Amsterdam was the financial center of the world. All these paintings of merchants and guild masters by the great Dutch artists are essentially a celebration of colonialism. You can't divorce colonialism from its horrors, and Dutch colonialism was particularly horrible. All of Amsterdam's buildings too, also so beautiful and yet also products of the same wealth generated by colonialism. These are all the things that ran through my head while I walked through Vondelpark. I happened across an outdoor concert and sat for a while. A guy was playing his cello like it was a banjo while another fella sang in Swahili.
It was an amazing day. After the park, I went to the van Gogh museum and standing in front of Wheatfield with Crows is probably my favorite thing I've done in Europe so far. But again I thought about colonialism and how van Gogh was all about vividness. That was his thing. He was always trying to get the most powerful colors. He even moved to Arles because he thought the colors there would be as vivid as the ones from his beloved Japanese prints. Matisse once said that a bucketful of red is redder than a thimbleful of red. That's why he slammed on curtains of color and later gave up his paintbrush for a pair of ultra-long scissors, cutting shapes out of swaths of colored paper. It reminds me of van Gogh, but all his colors and color inspiration was again come from afar and wouldn't have happened if the Dutch weren't colonialists.

About van Gogh's wheatfield: I don't find it sad at all. It was painting near the very end of his life, yes, but when I look at it I see such striking color. Vivid blue, yellow, black, those gold wheat edges and pale blue patches -- and those breaking v-lines that cut the composition. It's like an attack. But then look: the clay path shines and there's a touch of blue there too. It's a puddle. The storm has already passed. Light is breaking through the clouds.

Barney's Farm

My favorite thing to do in Amsterdam is walk. Beyond the busier paths are quiet canal streets lined with elms and the faces of old buildings.

Amsterdam

Stuttgart Beauties in Copenhagen

家庭画報

Courtesy of sekaibunkapublishing

家庭画報 'kateigaho' is my favorite periodical for Japanese culture.

One week, 50 people, free advice...

"There was something larger going on, something I had only a small part in. I’m talking about the energy that occurs when two or more people move forward together in a shared attempt to become more conscious. It was quite an amazing experience." -Simon Høgsberg.

Copenhagen: Men's Uniform

Courtesy of Gunnar
Courtesy of The Sartorialist

These shots capture male Copenhagener fashion: dark colors, skinny fit, rolled legs (whether pants or shorts), leather shoes and the ubiquitous haircut: shaved sides, long on top.

Side note: the jacket/sweater with shorts thing is everywhere. Danes love it as much as Germans love their socks with sandals, and since 55% of Copenhageners commute by bicycle they have the legs to pull it off.

"Vintage Danish Design" [MONOCLE]

A report by Monocle's Gillian Dobias on how classic Danish furniture influences modern designs.

dorodango.com

Photos courtesy of Bruce Gardner

光る泥だんご, hikaru dorodango ("shining mud dumplings"), are spheres made from polished mud (here).

The city center is blessed by three placid lakes: Sankt Jørgen Sø, Peblinge Sø (Little Priests' Lake, in reference to the students, back when education was a product of the church) and Sortedams Sø (Black Pond) -- three meters deep and 6.4 km all around.