The Berlinische Galerie
Sunday 17 November 2013
The rich and varied collections of modern paintings, drawings, prints, photography, and architecture on display at the Berlinische Galerie in the city’s Kreuzberg district provide proof of how the artistic community managed to thrive and produce an astonishing array of works in a range of styles despite the wars, persecutions and political turmoil of the late 19th and 20th centuries.
The need for such a gallery, housing art made in Berlin from 1870 onwards, was envisaged in the 1920s, but it took until 1975 before it became reality and until 2004 before it opened in in its present building only 150 yards from Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum (to be discussed in Part 20).
The collection includes works of all sorts – figurative and abstract, sculptures, photographs, and architectural drawings.
Even to the non-German art lover, there will be some names that are familiar among the Berlinische Galeries collections: Georg Baselitz, Max Beckmann, David Chipperfield, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, Max Liebermann, Ludwig Meidner, Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, and Kurt Schwitters, for example. An important work by Schwiiters is on permanent display at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University, and has been discussed in Part 13.
“If you want to know what Berlin is, what spirit sustains it,” writes Jörn Merkert, the gallery’s second director, in the Museum Guide, “just visit the Berlinische Galerie. “Here you can follow the revolutionary path of modern art over the last 120 years through its phases of Secession, Expressionism, Dada, Neue Sachlichkeit {New Objectivity], the Novembergruppe and the Eastern European Avant-garde, tracing the subsequent decline of each style and the ever-present courage to start anew.”
The Culture Forum
The same afternoon as visiting the Berlinische Galerie, completing a day devoted to visual arts, Alec’s group from the Goethe Institute moved on to the Old Masters Gallery, which forms part of Berlin’s principal post-war artistic complex, the Culture Forum. The Forum was developed near Potsdamer Platz by the West Berlin authorities in the 1950s in response to the fact that most of the city’s leading cultural facilities were located on Museums Island and other sites which had fallen under Soviet control when the city was partitioned at the end of the Second World War.
The Old Masters Gallery itself contains many European masterpieces of the past 700 years, including by the English painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88). Today the group was focusing on works by the Italian Caravaggio (1571-1610) and the Dutch master Rembrandt (1606-69).
The wider Culture Forum encompasses the separate Prints and Drawings Museum, the Art Library, the Museum of Decorative Arts, the Musical Instrument Museum and the Film and Television Museum. Also nearby stands the New National Gallery (Part 5). Finally, it should be noted that the Culture Forum is a focus not only for the visual arts but, equally famously, for the Philharmonie building, home to the celebrated Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (Part 7).
All aboard
Monday 18 November 2013
Just like Londoners with the Tube and Tyne-and-Wear-siders with the Metro, Berliners are simultaneously proud of and frustrated by their urban transit system. It’s very handy for getting around most parts of the city most of the time – the main exception, Alec found, being the Moabit district north of the Tiergarten park – but old and prone to breakdowns. Aware how many people are fascinated by trains, the Goethe InstituteI organised a trip out on the system, even though most students had been using it for weeks.
Plans for a (mostly) underground railway (U-Bahn) in Berlin date back to 1880 and have an extremely complex history, marked by multiple phased openings, wartime destructions followed by reconstructions and a long period of disruption caused by the partition of the city between east and west. The first line to open in 1902 ran east-west in between Stralauer Tor and Potsdamer Platz and the most recent runs beneath Unter Den Linden connecting the prime tourist spots of the Brandenburg Gate and Alexander Platz. The U-Bahn comprises 175 stations over 155 km.
The S-Bahn (suburban city train) dates from 1924, though it incorporates some previous steam train lines going as far back as 1838. It encompasses 168 stations over 332 km. It connects central Berlin to suburbs as far away at Potsdam, the Brandenburg regional capital, about 25 miles away. Because of its age it has been subject to particularly severe breakdowns and service disruption throughout this century.
Many stations serve both the U-Bahn and S-Bahn networks, and some are also stopping points for inter-city expresses.
The London Underground (the Tube) by comparison dates from 1863 and comprises 272 stations over 400km and there is also of course a very extensive suburban rail network.
The Berlin public transport network includes not only the U-Bahn (mainly underground), S-Bahn (mainly overground and overhead), but also trams (serving old East Berlin) and buses. Ferries are included too, though Alec has never had occasion to use one.
The city is divided east-west not only on old geopolitical lines but by the 210-hectare Tiergarten park, and Alec found the S-Bahn the best way of travelling through it between the historic and cultural sights of old East Berlin around Alexanderplatz, Hackeschermarkt, Friedrichstraße and Hauptbahnhof stations and the up-market shopping, hotels, and restaurants of the West around Zoo, Savignyplatz and Charlottenburg.
A walk through the Tiergarten is well worth the time and effort at least once for those who can manage it. Where its east-west and north-south road axes meet stands the Victory Column, inaugurated in 1873 and commemorating Germany’s wars of unification against Denmark, Austria, and France. Not far from the Column, eastwards toward the Brandenburg Gate, stands one of Berlin’s three Soviet World War Two memorials, incorporating two T34 tanks. Also in the park are Bellevue Palace, official residence of the German president since 1994, the House of World Cultures and the Hansa Quarter, modernist apartment buildings erected in the 1950s to symbolise West Berlin’s regeneration after the war and in response to East Berlin’s showpiece flats in Karl Marx Allee (Part 20).
The public transport network is divided into three fare zones, with AB sufficient for most visitors’ purposes, covering the whole area up to the city limits, though not the new Berlin-Brandenburg Airport and outer locations such as Potsdam and Sachsenhausen. At the time of writing an AB single ticket costs 3 euros, a day ticket 8.80 euros and a weekly ticket 36 euros. There are various concessions.
Visitors should not forget to validate (stamp) their tickets at the machines provided. Inspections are fairly frequent and are carried out by inspectors in plain clothes; These are often young people wearing jeans or other casual attire. There is a 60-euro penalty for travelling without a ticket or with an unvalidated ticket, and exceptions are not made for tourists.
Join Alec next time when he tours the Reichstag building, the vast Holocaust Memorial and bustling Potsdamerplatz.
Meanwhile, don’t forget to sign Parliamentary petition calling on the Government to make it easier for schools to organise European trips.
