Professor's tour: Arts in Berlin

Arts in Berlin: My two days with
Matthias Grunewald, Max Planck & Co.

PATRICK D. HAZARD

Who would have thunk that a bus strike could so concentrate my mind that I’ve never spent two days so constructively since I first started Hoovering the art scene in Berlin in 1970? But there I was at the Zoo Bahnhof, looking for the M29 bus to take me to the Bauhaus Archive to participate in a conference on how best to celebrate in 2009 the 90th anniversary of its founding by Walter Gropius in 1919. No buses! And the ominous message from Ver.di, the bus drivers’ union, that today and tomorrow (May Day, the workers’ holiday throughout the industrialized world, excluding America!) there would be no bus service. Later I found out there was a bus every half hour instead of every ten minutes! And the ride was free. Funny union.

And to add to the hassle, it was the last day of the month and I was down to ten euros cash—until my pension arrived the next day in all the ATMs of the world! Hmm. For the first time in my public transportation life in Berlin, I hailed a cab.

Now here’s my first hot tip: Stay at the International Youth Hostel on Kluckstrasse, 750 meters from the Bauhaus along the Landwehr Canal. (Telephone from USA: (001) 49 30 2649529. E-mail: [email protected].) If you’re heavily laden, you can even pick up the M29 bus in front of the five-star Esplanade Hotel, starting at 99 euros a night but Internet negotiable. Two other five-stars, the brand new Maritim, stand opposite the Stauffenberg memorial (he was executed in 1944 for unsuccessfully trying to kill Hitler). Stauffenbergstrasse is the extension of Kluckstrasse, on the other side of the Landwehr Canal. A third expensive hotel option is the Berlin, a few steps back from where you get off the M29 bus from the Zoo train station.

But by all means try the Youth Hostel. For 22 euros a year you can become a member, with a handy free paperback guide to all the hostels in Europe. It cost me 32.50 euros this stop for a single room with private shower and klo, and a hearty breakfast to boot. Internet access as well. And a safe place in the basement to store your gear as you gad about unladen.

But apart from its cheapness, it’s the college kids from all over the world who give this 81-year-old geezer joy. And Kluckstrasse is a mere 100 meters from the New National Gallery (by Mies van der Rohe), which is the Northern edge of the greatest Kultural Forum on earth.

A tip from a kindly guard

Let’s begin with Matthias Grunewald. When I was squinting painfully at two images that a silk garment designer from Halle (Saale) had cut out of an original Grunewald to adorn his own Bible, a kindly guard quietly advised me I could get a loupe free at the ticket desk for a ten-euro deposit, which I did! (My first loop de loupe!) Grunewald’s drawn extremities are marvelously sinuous, with an almost feel-able tension. Toes on a man praying recumbent writhe, whether from pain or ardor.

This show on Grunewald is formidably pedagogical. Your eyes are tutored to see the subtlest shades of meaning in his drawings. My only other Grunewald experience was missing a train in Colmar, thereby giving me the chance to relish slowly the Isenheim altarpiece. I’m not going to burden you with ”ooh aah” superlatives. But they’re there for the careful eye to see.

Nearby I came down from my Matthias high, relishing a permanent display of the greatest design duo, Otto+Stein, including their classy classic posters for the Bauhaus. And this greatest collection of graphics in the world has a spritzy leading-edge group that collects today. I will mention only one long ball swung at by the late Sol Lewitt: a quartet of idiosyncratic squiggles, which made me forget for ten minutes my impatience with most abstrusely abstract art.

A tarte served by a tart

I needed a comedown. So I had me a strawberry tarte served to me by a beguiling half-Sicilian, half-German tart. Followed by a very slow glass of very ordinary Merlot. Served by a very extraordinarily ordinary young lady. (Yes, I mean that same Mischling!)

I was ready for supper (six euros), a ravishingly tasty turkey goulash spread out on a giant field of rice, as if there were no international shortage thereof. Yes, the young cook was Hungarian. The table babble was instructive: a medical prep school from Freiburg in the Breisgau. Three sturdy young men and a zillion girlies in this classy class of nearly nearby Switzerland. The boys seemed surviving their gross sexual challenges of gender imbalance! I tried hard, but unsuccessfully, not to be too lewd in my allusions. Oh the glory of once being young! Never again, alas! A lass? Make that a passel of lasses. And alack as well! Merely transient tablemates!

They laughed at my Philadelphia press pass

Now let’s turn to the biggest event that has taken over the top floor of the Mies Mess House— namely, the Fifth Biennial for Contemporary Art (through June 15, but with an ever-changing Punorama.) Much defective humor loose here. And I do mean loose. I was off put by their doorman laughing away my Philadelphia press pass! Eight euros, mister, or no entrance! Professional skinflint that I am, I’d rather spend a fruitless hour tracking down a potential freebie than coughing up eight euros to review their (often marginal) work!

So in the obscure depths of this Mies Monstrous Museum, I sought a contact. Alas, the next day, I had forgotten, was May Day, and no savvy Art Boorocrat is going to be cooped up on a holiday. So I was reduced to relishing Hans Hollein’s glorious Austrian Embassy across Stauffenbergstrasse from where the Berlin Museum factota hang out, on working days.

My mark: The man in the well-tailored suit

Except for one isolated car, the huge parking lot was almost empty. Slowly and silently, a man in a well-tailored suit emerges from the sole car. I ask him if he’s part of the Boreacracy, and he, giggling, allows as how he is. I explain my ticketless plight. We palaver a mite, as he begins to scribble something on the back of his business card. He hands the card to me and wishes me luck. I say I really need Kluck, staying as I am at the Youth Hostel. I wrest a sly smile from him for the pun, as I turn over the card to see who he is.

My God! It reads “Prof. Dr. Peter-Klaus Schuster”— the top man for all the museums in Berlin! Yikes. You shudda seen the doormen jump when they saw that name! Serendipitous, eh?

I, chastised, chickened out and popped five euros for the two (night and day) little bilingual vade mecums, “When Things Cast No Shadow” (you would hardly call such Haute Blabbery “criticism”) that they sell in the downstairs bookstore as well as out on the concrete foreplay area, where non-freeloaders must buy their eight-euro entrance tickets. The show extends all over Berlin, so I can only expatiate on what’s showing at the Mies Trap. Blah! Blah! Higher Goofy by the truckload. An occasionally lively piece, like the multiple, brightly-colored Chasubles. On the other hand, 4 x 28 writhing faces of the photographer hisself. “Writhing Faces,” more likely “Writhing Faeces, aka 112 Pieces of Shit!” I writhed right past it in far fewer than 112 seconds. God, I hate the Higher Goofy!!!

The Applied Art Museum is only a beerstein’s throwup away from the Grunewald show. I like to gawk at the Jugendstil and Art Deco sections in this roundabout survey of design that takes you slowly but surely from caves to Japanese comic books. Enjoy a stein at their outdoor bar.

An honest-to-God DC-3 on top

Now we reboard the M29 bus to see a 150th birthday tribute to Max Planck at the German Technical Museum. After a ten-minute hike and a jumble of bridges, I’m there. It’s a great Techno structure adorned with an honest-to-God DC-3 on top. That old propeller workhorse. I still relish the recollection of its 50th birthday party inside a D.C. hangar (was it 1983?). They don’t make ’em like that no mo!

Such fairly useless if nonetheless lucid speculations bring me inside the museum. Holidaying three-generation families everywhere, OPA and OMA flaunting their second generation of fertility.

We approach the honoree (born in Kiel 1858, Ph. D. at 21, full professor at 26!) through cogitations about the ambiguous discoveries of the likes of his predecessors, Ptolemy and Copernicus, Columbus and Darwin. Meaty stuff, as befits the discoverer of quantum mechanics. What most intrigued me was the intellectual interactions between abstract science and the world at large, similar in scope to the new permanent show at the Deutsche Historische Museum on Unter den Linden, entitled “Gründerzeit: 1848-1871.”

You couldn’t do better than to take the 100/200 bus to the DHM for closure. Happy Daze. May all your Berlin visits begin with a liberating bus strike.