Berlin day 2

---

1st Morning, Berlin.

Strolling up Friedrich Straße, essentially a high street, we soon bag a couple of Art Nouveau Jugendstil buildings. Excellent. I’ve built up a collection of snaps of A N in European cities and am becoming obsessional about seeking further shots.

Approaching Unter den Linden we’re excited to find a memory of Berlin from our visit to play music with IG BLECH in the ‘90s: a large blue pipe arising from the pavement, traversing the road at an ‘above bus height’ level and then descending into the ground. We thought then that it was about the unification of the sewerage of east and west....... now it’s because there’s a new underbahn metro tunnel being built under Unter den Linden.Because Berlin is built upon a swamp the water table is high and new building work necessitates pumping excess water away. We’ve noticed an Ouseburnesque pong pretty much everywhere around the city. That nuance of detergent mixed with scheisse, softened by muddy aromas that greets you down by the Blue Bell in Heaton (our home patch) or on a hot day in Napoli. The stereotype for German engineering, that I hold, doesn’t allow for the notion that the sewers in Berlin don’t work properly...... perhaps it’s temporary whilst the flow of dirty swamp water is disturbed by gravity’s fickle pull upon the waste matter trying to cross the road in elevated pipes.

The telecom tower of Alexanderplatz is a beacon and target for our morning meanderings, and the way is marked out by large fibreglass bears including a number of SNOW BEARS, hurrah!

Crossing the river Spree we turn right and follow its north bank reaching the Museum Island. The fabulous dome of the New Synagogue on Oranienburgestraße tempts us off piste passing a newly renovated Bauerhaus building on Tucholskystraße.

A wonder of architectural engineering in an oriental arabesque style, it opened in 1866, to seat 3200 people as the largest Jewish place of worship in Germany, the Neue Synagogue was literally a symbol of the thriving Jewish community. With 160,000 Jewish citizens in 1933, Berlin was the centre of Liberal Judaism.

Said to based upon the plan of Granada’s Alhambra, its grandeur and authority as a major building proved a threat to anti semites and catalysed, in some small part, the slow lead up to the hideous events of the WW2 holocaust. Photos of the beautiful building before and after bombing bring a lump to the throat.
The main prayer room was demolished in the 1950s. Today the dome and front facade is fully restored and what’s left of the building houses the Centrum Judaicum foundation which opened in 1995, an institution for the preservation of Jewish memory and tradition, a community congregation centre for study and teaching.

There is a short film to watch about photographer Herbert Sonnenfeld whose archive of pictures of the Enlightenment, the Jewish movement of the 30s: theatre, writing, dance and art, are a treat.

Further on we stopped for a quick deek at the Hackescher Markt and the brickwork and tiles of its station before crossing to Marienkirche, Mary’s church, where there’s a Totententanz frieze. Unfortunately the ancient Danse Macabre artwork is being renovated under wraps, but its existence adds to evidence of a large number of such murals that I knew nothing of only a few years ago. The levelling powers of ‘the dance of death’ means that rich, priests and paupers are all in the same boat ........we all end up with nothing.

Approaching Alexanderplatz from this direction gives views of a large park area with the aforementioned telecom tower to the north. The World Clock (featured in the Bourne Supremacy) is hidden behind two or three layers of buildings, station and shopping precincts..... but eventually we found it and noted that it was time for Chris and Dave to go to bed in Australia.

We late-lunched in a Tapas bar ‘El Colmado’ drinking an aged red wine, and eating a mixed platter of cheeses, iberico ham, walnuts, olives and tomato bread. To be recommended.... run by a Catalan couple who charmed our socks off.

The a walk through Museum Island and up Unter den Linden took us through the Brandenburg gate to the Reichestad, now a mixture of neo classical and modern with a glass dome on top.

A walk south through the Tiergarten brought us to the Philharmonie where we planned to meet our friends for a pre concert meal. Communications were crossed but a phone call allowed us to relocate to the Konzerthaus via underbahn metro and pick up our tickets for a concert with The Jerusalem Quartet.

After beverages in the Konzerthaus bar we made haste to Augustiner am Gendarmenmarkt, a large and well established restaurant with scrubbed oak tables, traditional fayre served up with dumplings, mash, egg noodles and other stodge. My roast pork, kartofel dumpling and caraway cabbage barely touched the sides as it sank past my rib cage. I discovered that a ‘Radner’ is a shandy and that a half litre of Hell is also a beer on tap (although I suspect the English translation of ‘beer from a wooden barrel’ might not have been true).

We finished our meals with time for Ewan and Helen to reach their 8pm appointment with Borodin at the Philharmonie and we ourselves slipped back to the kleine Halle of the Konzerthaus ready for Ludwig van Beethoven Streichquartett A-Dur op. 18 Nr. 5,
Claude Debussy Streichquartett g-Moll op. 10 Dmitri and Schostakowitsch Streichquartett Nr. 2 A-Dur op. 68.

The Jerusalem Quartet warmed up satisfactorily with the Beethoven ready for their thrilling rendition of the Debussy maintaining the majority of the possession and scoring a number of goals.

After some towelling down and half time lemons the team returned to play the Shostakovich Slav Suite which left me impressed but with a yearning for more modal melodies.

Final Score: Debussy 3 The Rest 1.

The formal C & A suits did the boys no favours ....... chill out and communicate more with the audience is my advice to them.

The engineering of the upstairs ‘Small Hall’ is intriguing. Side balconies are supported by pillars placed only 40 cm or so from the wall with L brackets at the top over the 2.5m depth of the balcony. I would expect the columns to be placed further out and close to the edge of said balcony ..... here’s not to reason why ...... certainly sight lines are not compromised for those under the balcony between the columns.

And so to bed. More fun tomorrow.

---