A Thursday in Berlin
The Jewish Museum, The Path of Visionaries, and The Music of Django Reinhardt
During our five days in Berlin, we visited a different museum nearly every day. We enjoyed seeing many intricately framed old masters and stunning landscapes, but what we noticed most was the inclusion of interactive screens and buttons. We wondered how much it had to do with a generation raised with cellphones.
Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof (the old train station whose trains went to Hamburg) was turned into a modern art museum with a new wing devoted to mostly large and noisy pieces of art. There were a few beautiful pieces, like the floor constructed of ropes and fabric, but many of the displays were shockingly ugly and required turning things on, watching screens, or listening to blaring music. I thought that messages and meaning too frequently took the place of aesthetics.
One afternoon we walked to Jewish Museum, renowned for its Daniel Liebeskind designed building that required a rigorous security check followed by navigating an underground tunnel. It took a while for us to recognize that there wasn’t a single right angle in the museum. We found much of it disorienting and depressing, because for the most part, it wasn’t designed for those of us who are Judaically educated and involved in Jewish life.
Instead, it reminded me of the museums Hitler planned, the ones that showcased the life and artifacts of a people that no longer existed. The exhibits, one after another, portrayed Jewish history and artifacts via video installations, exhibits that required interaction, and recordings of music or spoken descriptions of day-to-day Jewish life in different centuries and regions.
The museum was packed with groups of tourists and student groups engaged in pressing all those buttons, for example, hearing the voices of Jews who loved Wagner’s music but struggled with his antisemitism, and watching video clips from .
I spent a few moments re-watching the video of Raid on Entebbe, about the 1976 Israeli military operation to free hostages after a French flight was diverted to Uganda and Jewish passengers were separated from the rest of the passengers. The terrorists were two German militants and two Palestinian operatives — five people were wounded and the only one to die was Yonaton Netanyahu, older brother of current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
After nearly two hours, we were tired of all the input, the screens, the noise, and the technology. We headed to the Israeli-run Museum café where we shared an excellent spinach boureka topped with tahini and pomegranate seeds.
Then we left the museum and meandered a bit, suddenly coming upon a street filled with engraved plaques embedded in the pavement. Each plaque contained a quotation of one of the world’s great minds (I snapped a picture of Baruch Spinoza’s quotation.
There were few people about and nobody else seemed to notice that this was the , a “symbol of global unity.” The path, we learned is a city project that passes Checkpoint Charlie (formerly a dividing point between east and west Berlin), and ends at the Oranienburger Tur, near where we were staying. Exhausted by then, we hopped on a train and returned to the hotel for a nap.
Since we’ve already been back in Chicago for a week, and I just found this unsent essay, I’ll end my notes about the trip by extolling the fabulous concert we saw that evening. It was part of the Berlin Jazz Festival, a sold-out performance about the Music of , in one of the Berlin Opera’s smaller halls.
Although my German wasn’t advanced enough to understand the narrator describing the life of the great Django, I’d studied the jazz musicians during a college elective and knew his trajectory (I remembered being shocked about the fire that left him only able to use two fingers on his left hand and he still managed to play like he did).
Waiting to get into the concert hall, I struck up a conversation with a young woman who was there on her own, and we ended up sitting together for the concert, talking in between songs. We were both blown away by the virtuosity of , one of the , and it was delightful to make a new friend in Germany.
The next day, Christine, my new friend, sent a list of good places to eat, but we only had time to try Princess Cheesecake. Berlin is now officially on my list of the cities I want to return to.
