Alan Magee – My Berlin

There is, without doubt, a mysterious aspect to our individual destinies. The irrational but persistent sense that the design of our lives is somehow cosmically guided becomes more intriguing, and slightly plausible, in old age. Before that, we are too busy to bother with it, and too sensible to give it any credence. But life is built from a sequence of connected improbabilities. We work with diligence and intention, we strategize and imagine that we are steering our own cars, but chance, it seems to me, is the driver.

I might not have visited Berlin if not for an invitation to show my monotypes there in 2000. Nevertheless, looking back at the art and ideas that have captured my attention over the past seventy years, my relationship to that city seems almost predestined, as if Berlin had been sending me discreet notifications of its existence since I was ten years old.

In 1957, my life as an artist was set on its course when James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein was broadcast, along with other Universal Studios horror films, on Shock Theater, a late-night television show from WCAU in Philadelphia. The films featured on Shock Theater were made in Hollywood, but their sensibility and art-direction came from German films made in the 1920s. The prime reason for this is that the enterprising German émigré Carl Laemmle came to California in 1915 and founded Universal Studios on a 230-acre lot, formerly a farm, in a then-primitive Hollywood. Laemmle offered German film artists like Paul Leni, and cinematographer Karl Freund employment. After 1933, the Hollywood studios became a sanctuary for European directors, cinematographers, and actors fleeing the Nazis.

Most of the ten-year-old boys enthralled with these films in 1957 must have gotten over them. I haven’t let them go; they opened a window to the pivotal expressionist masterpieces from Weimar-era Germany: W. H. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu and Fritz Lang’s Destiny, to Siegfried Kracauer’s book From Caligari to Hitler, Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen, and Anthony Heilbut’s 1983 book, Exiled in Paradise.

In a tenth-grade English class in 1962, I was assigned a seat beside Monika Siekmann, a recent arrival at our school who had immigrated to Philadelphia from Germany with her family in 1955. I sent Monika a folded note complimenting her freckled knees, and asking if I could drive her home. Despite coming from different cultures we discovered a world in common—of art, books, nature, the beginnings of the 1960s folk-music revival, and the political engagement sparked by the escalating Vietnam War. Our bond was formed in earnest when we were both sent to “detention hall” for the same offense—refusing to “stand up and holler” at a pre-game pep rally.

At Monika’s family home, German and English were spoken—often within the same sentence. Reproductions of a portrait by Rembrandt and Albrecht Dürer’s 1502 drawing of a rabbit hung on the walls. Her mother, Ilse, served the family Sauerbraten, Rotkohl (red cabbage), and Kartoffelklösse (potato dumplings), and on other occasions, Rolladen and Spargel (white asparagus). Monika made sandwiches on thin Vohlkornbrot with camembert, or a single slice of salami. (For me, a sandwich was any variant of the Philadelphia Hoagie.) Monika drew beautifully, played the cello, and spoke what sounded to me like flawless German. We drew and painted together on Saturday adventures along the Delaware River, and in the art room at Council Rock High School, where our teacher, Isabel Westberg, kept a self portrait by Käthe Kollwitz pinned to the wall, between two windows looking out to a farm with a fieldstone barn.

I received another of those dispatches from Berlin in 1980, when the art historian and critic John Canaday wrote a review of my first New York exhibition for the magazine Saturday Review. His essay ran in the same issue as an article about Hollywood writer/director Billy Wilder’s art collection. Wilder read Canaday’s review of my show and invited Monika and me to come see him in Los Angeles. That first visit to Wilder was the beginning of a friendship that lasted until his death in 2002.

Wilder liked to talk about painters and painting. I wanted to know about the world he came from—Berlin between the wars, and his friends Carl Mayer (the co-writer of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari), and Kurt Tucholsky, a celebrated Weimar-era, journalist, songwriter, author of cabaret skits, short stories, and a novel. He was a fierce critic of the Nazis, and so diverse in his literary output that he called himself “five fingers of a single hand.” About Carl Mayer, Wilder said, “we had breakfast together every morning”, and Tucholsky, to Wilder, was “Tuho”.

Wilder was among the fortunate European film artists who found safety and work in Hollywood. His mother, his stepfather, and remaining relatives were all murdered in the camps.

I think it was during our first visit with Wilder that he showed us photos taken of him while he was in Germany working on the 1945 film Death Mills—a twenty-two minute documentary about the Nazi death camps. The film was produced by the United States Department of War to show German citizens what the Nazis had done. Many Germans refused to watch it; Wilder suggested making receipt of food-ration cards contingent on attending the film.

Billy Wilder was as mischievous and funny in person as he was in his screenplays. His wit was inseparable from his Berlin past. His cynical, streetwise comments were a perfect example of the Berliner Schnauze (the Berlin snout). You can hear it in the dialogue of Some Like it Hot, or in the sardonic voice of the fictional screenwriter Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard.

All of this was an extended primer for my first trip to Berlin in 2000. That was twenty-five years ago, when Frank Dodge, a Berlin cellist and artistic director of the chamber-music group Spectrum Concerts Berlin, introduced me to his home city. His invitation came about because of artwork that I made a decade earlier.

In the summer of 1990, in anticipation of the imminent Gulf War which would begin in January 1991, I made a series of monotypes—black and white faces which were a private response to my anticipatory grief about the war to come.

Years later, Frank Dodge was brought to my studio by our friend Robert Stanton. Monika and I had met Frank for the first time just the night before, when he captivated us with cello improvisations on the deck of Robert’s cottage overlooking Seven-Tree Pond. In the studio, Frank responded strongly and emotionally to my monotypes. He told me that these works needed to be seen in Berlin, and hinted that he would make that happen. I appreciated the gesture of support, though I did not expect a show in Germany. But, indeed. Frank organized and secured funding for an exhibition to open in November, 2000 at the Berliner Kammermusiksaal as part of American Music Week Berlin. A gallery space within the Berliner Philharmonie was built to display the monotypes, where they remained on view through January of the next year.

On the day of our arrival, Monika, Frank, and I oversaw the installation of the show. We stayed on in the Kammermusiksaal until early evening, when a custodian arrived to clean up the space. The monotypes on the walls caught his attention. He looked at each one with apparent interest, then turned to us and said, “These faces are reminiscent of the late work of Samuel Beckett. Near the end of Beckett’s life,” the man told us, “Beckett created several short plays filmed for television, where isolated faces loom out of blackness.” I had never seen nor known about Beckett’s ten-minute television play What Where or his other short pieces from the late 1980s. I had been in this city for only a few hours and I had already learned something relevant to my own work from an unlikely teacher. At that moment I felt as if I were being welcomed by Berlin, and I feel welcomed still.

Our conversation with the custodian was not an anomaly. Art, music, literature, and culture here are not thought of as the property of an elite. Parents carry small children on their shoulders through the Gemäldegalerie (the old-master gallery) in the Kulturforum. Monika and I have overheard, with a measure of awe and a trace of envy, a parent and child discussing a work of art. Our childhoods were not like this.

If, in Berlin, you decide to exchange a few words with a person at an adjacent cafe table, you invite the possibility of a life-long friendship—along with its blessings and responsibilities. This has happened to us on many occasions in this city.

If you’ve spent time in Berlin it is likely that recent social and political developments in the US will instill a heightened sense of dread. Berlin is the essential city in which to study (while remaining, for now, reasonably safe) what humans have done to each other, and what they will certainly continue to do. Berlin is a place to consider how the freedoms of a fragile democracy can be shrewdly, ruthlessly co-opted, dismantled, and replaced by a dictatorship.

The city abounds with memorials, museums, and monuments to inhumanity—and to those who have resisted it. Berlin is unique among European cities in that the memorials to war are not triumphal or celebratory, they are somber, and cautionary. They do not honor the Second World War’s soldiers or generals, but they often pay tribute to the Nazi’s victims: Jews, Roma, homosexuals, artists, writers, the disabled, outsiders of every variety and those who tried to protect them. Reminders of this kind are ubiquitous in Berlin. Even on the Kurfürstendamm, the city’s mecca for luxury-brands, the dominant architectural feature is the bombed remnant of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (known as the Memorial Church, or, colloquially, as “The Hollow Tooth”). Its ruin, a standing testament to war’s destruction, was preserved at the insistence of Berlin citizens for whom it is “the Heart of Berlin.”

It is taken for granted here that part of art’s role is to serve as witness, to confront corrupt or illegitimate authority with truth and defiance. Along with masterpieces by Caspar David Friederich, Adolph Menzel, and Max Libermann, it is always possible to see powerful, original works by Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, and their contemporaries. The Käthe Kollwitz Museum recently moved to the Theatre Building at the Charlottenburg Palace, leaving its home of thirty-seven years on the elegant Fasanenstrasse.

Another small museum, das Kleine Grosz Museum, dedicated to the work of George Grosz, closed for good in November of last year. During the three years of its existence it offered a comprehensive education in Grosz’s work. On my last visit there, an entire room was filled with drawings that I had not known before—unflinching depictions of Nazi brutalities against hapless prisoners. Perhaps I’d not seen them because they were deemed too caustic for wide publication. Though the museum is gone, the street murals along Bülowstrasse, where the museum stood, constitute a museum of comparable engagement and power. A six-story-high mural by the artist Nils Westergard, for example, honors Walter Degan, a young man who was registered as a homosexual by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. The mural includes a view of the infamous gate at Birkenau. Nearby, on the outside wall of the Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn station, a pink triangle (recalling the badge affixed to homosexual concentration-camp prisoners) commemorates the gay and lesbian victims of the Nazis.

Bülowstrasse is in the exuberant district of Schöneberg, the city’s center of gay life since the 1920s. It’s the setting for Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, and home to some of our Berlin friends. The vitality and prosperity of Schöneberg are inseparable from its diversity and spirit of tolerance. Creative people coming to Berlin often choose to live in Schöneberg. David Bowie lived here in the 1970s; actors Marlene Dietrich, and Klaus Kinski, lived in Schöneberg for extended periods. Billy Wilder lived there in the 1920s.

Walk down any street in Berlin, and you may see several Stolpersteine (stumbling stones)—contoured brass plaques set among the sidewalk paving stones identifying Nazi victims. They record the names and fates of each family member who lived in the building in front of you. You notice these stones on your way to the grocery store, an art museum or a concert. They are part of life here in the same way that every meaningful conversation in this city will be colored, even if in the most oblique of ways, by the Nazi years, or by memories of the divided city during the Cold War.

Two sites along Unter-den-Linden, Berlin’s grand boulevard between the Brandenburg Gate and the Museumsinsel (Museum Island), are poignantly relevant today. The Neue Wache, once a Prussian guard house, is now a memorial to the victims of totalitarianism and war. It is empty except for an enlarged copy of Käthe Kollwitz’s Pietà, a sculpture of a mother holding her dead son, sitting alone on a floor of dark-gray tiles. Rain and snow fall on the figures through an oculus directly above them.

Diagonally across the street, on Bebelplatz, is the site of the 10 May 1933 book burning. In remembrance of that event, the artist Micha Ullman designed The Empty Library, an underground installation of white, empty bookshelves visible through a window in the cobblestone pavement. Near the window a quotation from Heinrich Heine, written more than a hundred years before the book burning, is etched into a plaque: “This is but a prelude. Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people.”

Amidst all of these reminders of the past and the chilling forebodings they engender, I find enormous joy in this city. I appreciate my walk to the bakery every morning, and the Brötchen (crisp rolls) that I am on my way to buy.. Every Brötchen will have been baked that morning, and waiting in line for them in the morning is a shared, unspoken ritual. Brötchen, called Schrippen in Berlin, are the essential breakfast rolls, and the handles for every bratwurst sandwich in Germany—not simply a staple, but a cultural emblem like the Parisian baguette.

Shopping for groceries is one of our supreme pleasures in this city. There are two celebrated farmers’ markets on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, one on Goethestrasse at Karl Augustplatz in Charlottenburg, and another on Winterfeldtplatz in Schöneberg; they are both treasures, featuring beautiful, often exotic, fruit and vegetables, a bounty of flowers, freshly-baked breads of every density and shade of brown, licorice of every flavor, and dazzling assortments of cheeses, salamis, and specialty Leberwurst from every region in Germany. I will take note of any display of farm-made liverwurst, as I squeeze along the crowded aisles between the food carts and flower stalls.

The results of the 2016 US presidential election seemed inexplicable to Berliners. Many people asked us to explain it to them. By 12 November, the post-election issue of Der Spiegel appeared on the newsstands. The cover, by the Cuban/American artist Edel Rodriguez, depicted Donald Trump’s head as a meteor hurtling toward the earth, The caption read, DAS ENDE DER WELT (Wie wir sie Kennen)—The End of The World (As We Know It).

We occasionally stay at an apartment on Stresemannstrasse, across the street from the ruin of the Anhalter Bahnhof—the city’s largest train station before it was badly damaged in World War II. From the apartment window we look down on the station’s monumental brown brick entrance gate; nothing else of the station remains. Nearly seven thousand Jews were sent to Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, from this spot between 1941 and 1945. Though the station is gone, you can still walk along the rusted tracks heading south, past the Museum of Technology. The area surrounding the old rail lines is now an expansive public park, Park am Gleisdreieck. The park is full of children and families on a weekend afternoon, while the tracks silently testify to their legacy. This is the essence of Berlin in a single image.

Visitors to Berlin often want to see the renowned Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe—nearly five acres of unadorned grey, concrete slabs, “stelae,” located at the back of the American Embassy and to the left of the Brandenburg Gate. Walking deeply into this maze can be a powerful experience.

Monika and I were more deeply affected by a less-visited holocaust memorial in Grunewald—the now abandoned Gleis 17 (Track 17). On one overcast day in November, our friend Dieter Pallul took us on a walking tour of Berlin sites that are not part of the tourist itinerary. He led us to Track 17 through a field of high grass bordered by trees. Dieter gave us no hint about where we were going. The effect of walking onto this platform, empty of other people, wet from the intermittent rain and covered with fallen yellow leaves, was overwhelming. The sight of it and its emotional impact are burned into my memory. Ten-thousand Berlin Jews and other targets of the Nazis were loaded from this platform onto boxcars destined for the death camps.

Steel plaques, butted together and lining the edge of the concrete platform, give a detailed account of the number of people taken, and to which camp they were taken, on a given day between 1941 and 1945. This memorial was conceived and established by Deutsche Bahn AG, (formerly Deutsche Reichsbahn) in acknowledgement of the company’s essential complicity in the deportations of German citizens under the Nazis. The tracks leading from Track 17 are overgrown with trees—left to grow as a pledge that these rails will never be used again.

Visitors can also approach the Memorial by walking a short incline leading to the Track 17 platform. Along that path, a concrete wall sculpture by Karol Broniatowski evokes ghostly figures ascending it. As you walk up this path you feel as if you are walking alongside the ones on their way to the boxcars.

It is a challenge, today, to get a sense of the formerly divided Berlin, before the beginning of reunification in 1989. Much of the old East Berlin is now revitalized and fashionable. Once neglected neighborhoods like the streets around Hackescher Markt are now architecturally stunning, and you will stop to marvel at the elegance of the façades. But you can still take the U-1 east to Warschauerstrasse, the last stop, where the longest remnant of the Berlin Wall, known as The East Side Gallery, is preserved. Here you can see the famous mural of Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker kissing, It was painted by the artist Dmitri Vrube. His caption, written in Russian, reads, “My God, Help me to survive this deadly love.”

Another way to grasp what was the daily gloom of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (the DDR) under Communism is through two outstanding films: Wings of Desire by Director Wim Wenders, and Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) by the German/Austrian director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, which paints a vivid picture of life under mass-surveillance and censorship.

In the early 1930s, playwright Bertolt Brecht and his musical collaborator Hanns Eisler escaped Germany and established careers in Hollywood. They would likely have remained in California, but Brecht and Eisler, both socialists, were ordered to appear before the House un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Brecht understood from his interrogation that there was no future for him in the US and left for the DDR voluntarily. Hanns Eisler was quickly deported. Both were welcomed in East Berlin. Brecht, with his wife, the actress Helene Weigel, founded the Berliner Ensemble there in 1949. They moved productions to the historic Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, directly across the Spree from the Friedrichstrasse S-Bahn station in 1954. The theater, built in 1892, premiered Brecht’s Threepenny Opera in 1928, and after the war, the now-famous plays that Brecht wrote while in exile ( Mother Courage and Her Children, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and The Life of Galileo) were presented there. To this day, the Berliner Ensemble remains a major venue for Brecht’s work and other modern plays with social or political bite. This theater is one of Berlin’s living artifacts of the 1920s and the Cold-War years. In 1954, its revolving stage was rebuilt, and has since that time been supported by thirty-two T-35 Russian tank wheels—donated by the Soviets at the request of Helene Weigel. The Russians donated more tank wheels than needed; the extra wheels still lean against the theater’s basement wall.

If you time your visit right, you can still see a contemporary staging of The Threepenny Opera (with English subtitles) and enjoy a beer (vom Fass) and a bratwurst among the actors in the lower-level canteen before the performance begins. If you attend a play, look for the red “X” painted over a Prussian coat-of-arms near the theater’s ceiling. Brecht placed it there to proclaim a final end to the era of princes and kings.

Many Berlin streets are named after writers, artists, or activists. Just one block north of the Museumsinsel is Tucholskystrasse. There is Kollwitzstrasse, Otto-Dix-Strasse, Karl-Lieblknecht-Strasse, Walter-Benjamin-Platz, Bertolt-Brecht-Platz, a Majakowskiring, and several streets named for Goethe. Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, in Berlin Mitte, honors the Marxist sociologist and anti-war activist. Sixty of Luxemburg’s quotations are engraved into the square’s pavement, including this one: “The most revolutionary thing one can do is to proclaim loudly what is happening.”

On the second day of our first trip to Berlin in 2000, Monika and I took a short walk through Schöneberg—headed for a copy-shop to reproduce a page about my show at the Kammermusiksaal. The route took us past the Sophie-Scholl-Schule, a middle school named for Sophia Magdalena Scholl. In 1943, Scholl was a twenty-one year old student at the University of Munich, just beginning her courses in biology and philosophy. She was arrested and executed, along with her brother, Hans, and their friend Christoph Probst, for writing and distributing pamphlets critical of the Nazis. Since the early 1980s I’ve kept a book of the Scholl siblings’ diaries and letters where I can see it—and re-read it. The Scholls had become for me a supreme example of courage. Walking past a school named for Sophie Scholl so soon after arriving, I felt as if I had received another greeting from this city. The Scholls’ pamphlets asked readers to consider how an individual ought to act under a dictatorship. Sophie Scholl’s cell-mate at Stadelheim Prison, Else Gebel, remembers Sophie saying “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause?”

There were many such people then, as there are now.

 

Image at top: Käthe Kollwitz, Self-Portrait of Left Profile, Drawing, charcoal on brown laid Ingres paper, 18 3/4 x 25 in. (47.7 x 63.5 cm), 1933, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (photo: Wikimedia Commons).