I can't believe I've already spent roughly one fourth of my time in Germany. Time seems incredibly hard to wrap my head around properly, and has been since I got here. The trip here was roughly twenty-four hours itself. I stayed awake the entire time, and when I landed I still felt like I was still running through the same endless day. Once I slept, I was asleep right until 12:30pm, and the sun set about three and a half hours later. So the trip started out feeling like one big, endless day, and now every day goes by almost immediately. I keep finding myself thinking that I may never get to do this again. I'm going to graduate university in less than a year, and have no solid plans for work or extra education. I'll have to be working a day job soon, and that's going to take up a good chunk of my time. So I wonder if I'll ever be able to do something like this again, with this much independence and so little responsibility. With that, I want to enjoy myself, almost feverishly. I want to wring Germany's artistic potential dry before I leave it. If I go to a museum or memorial, I'm not content to just "see" the sculptures or statues, I want to take every photo and every sketch and also just have time to sit and stare at the thing. I don't want to leave Germany and think "I wish I'd gone here" or "I wish I'd thought of this to do or think" once I'm home. I guess I put too much pressure on myself. I want to get a lot out of this trip, especially since I've romanticized it in my head for years. I took a look at the art I'm making and I feel like I don't like much of it, honestly. I don't know what to think of the trip so far.
I guess all I can do is show what I've made and talk about it.
So for the last few days or week or so, I haven't been going to museums or touristy points of interest unless they happen to intersect with what I want to sketch/photograph for historical content. For example, a little while ago I went by Alexanderplatz to see the Rotes Rathaus, a building I'm sure I've seen on my previous trips to Berlin but never took much notice of, besides "hey, look how European that building looks!"
I guess all I can do is show what I've made and talk about it.
So for the last few days or week or so, I haven't been going to museums or touristy points of interest unless they happen to intersect with what I want to sketch/photograph for historical content. For example, a little while ago I went by Alexanderplatz to see the Rotes Rathaus, a building I'm sure I've seen on my previous trips to Berlin but never took much notice of, besides "hey, look how European that building looks!"
The Rothes Rathaus has had a pretty decent political history. It was built in the 1860s, but it wasn't until after WWII that it became interesting to me. It was the place that housed the short-lived provisional joint government run by the American, French, British and Russian governments. The Russians eventually strong-armed the other allies out of the building, and those allies actually tried bursting through windows and doors to reclaim control over the building and the government apparatus. There was a lot of protesting and counter-protesting, but eventually the Russians got permanent control and made this the town hall of their East Berlin. In my opinion one of the buildings from which originated the post-war segregation of Germany (the other main one being the Schloss Cecilienhof, where the Potsdam Conference to split up Germany happened). I'm going to try to re-draw the Rotes Rathaus on larger paper in a way to suggest the division of the country. I think I did a decent job sketching it.
This is the Boesebruecke at Bornholmer Strasse. It was basically the site of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was the first border checkpoint that was opened to the huge swell of protesters on November 9, 1989. There are pictures from when this checkpoint opened that are just incredible, with people cramped shoulder-to-shoulder over the entire length of the bridge. It's a wonder nobody was trampled to death. Not super happy with the sketch or larger drawing from this one, though the larger drawing has potential to turn into something decent after I get back to Canada. Maybe it's the scale of the work or something, but I don't feel exactly exstatic about the works I'm doing here. I feel they're all try-hard and pretentious, tacky and trite. I get fleeting moments where I feel like I'm not making crap. I dunno, I'm okay with this one, but I want to be more than just 'okay' with what I'm doing. Again, I think I must be putting way too much pressure on myself to church out a Sistine Chapel every day. Whatever. I can reference this later as I think there's still some merit to be brought out of it. It's probably not finished, but I could say that about all the other stuff I'm working on.
The area around the bridge was pretty interesting--the day was pretty bleak weather-wise (it would rain about an hour after I was there). Under the bridge and beside the train tracks was a large low-income sort of neighborhood. It was totally different from what I'm used to seeing in Canada. There were no "roads" between houses, and so nowhere for cars to go. There were walking lanes between them, and their yards were full of brown dead plants and broken toys. Some of the houses had those corrugated tin roofs, some had big flagpoles with German flags flapping from them. Actually, someone had a big confederate flag flying from their pole, which I can only hope is meant to be ironic.
Because the "village" was just underneath the bridge and so below the street level (you could only access the area by climbing down some graffiti-covered stairs) the village gave the impression of being sunk into a pit. Part of the old Berlin Wall ran along the ridge above the neighborhood, meant as a memorial, but looking at the Wall from the low vantage point made it seem as if it were still serving the use of keeping people away, or out.
The area around the bridge was pretty interesting--the day was pretty bleak weather-wise (it would rain about an hour after I was there). Under the bridge and beside the train tracks was a large low-income sort of neighborhood. It was totally different from what I'm used to seeing in Canada. There were no "roads" between houses, and so nowhere for cars to go. There were walking lanes between them, and their yards were full of brown dead plants and broken toys. Some of the houses had those corrugated tin roofs, some had big flagpoles with German flags flapping from them. Actually, someone had a big confederate flag flying from their pole, which I can only hope is meant to be ironic.
Because the "village" was just underneath the bridge and so below the street level (you could only access the area by climbing down some graffiti-covered stairs) the village gave the impression of being sunk into a pit. Part of the old Berlin Wall ran along the ridge above the neighborhood, meant as a memorial, but looking at the Wall from the low vantage point made it seem as if it were still serving the use of keeping people away, or out.
This series is a bit different--I actually feel like I got some good stuff out of this, and there's still a lot more to explore. It's taken from the Memorial to Deported Jews, located in the old Jewish quarter of Berlin, near Oranienburger Tor and the Neues Synagogue. It helped that I'd been to the Kathe Kollwitz museum earlier that day and had been inspired by her tragic artwork. The museum claimed that Kollwitz' art is more about sadness and pain and darkness, and urged visitors to consider her laughing self-portraits and tenderhearted works of children and motherhood to show the variety of her depicted emotions, but I felt that those slightly happier works only served to emphasize the depressing ones. After all, it's hard not to look at her happy children artworks without thinking of her son who died in WWI and her grandson who died in WWII. Anyway, the subject of deportation in light of what's going on with Syria and Europe sorta caught my attention, so I thought the memorial would make for some nice references to pop up in some of my drawings. I knew this from the time I was sketching them, so I tried to draw as many of the figures as I could. My hands nearly froze doing that, and the last one I sketched in my journal is really nondescript and jittery-looking because my hand could barely grip the pen. Anyway, I'm not sure the alien-looking figure really works with the final large drawing, since it starts to lean into the realm of caricature or something, so I'll think about that a bit. I feel like I could produce a whole body of work on these guys, though.
Buuut speaking of depressing memorials, another one related to "liquidated" Jewish people of the holocaust, I also visited the Gleis 17 (platform 17) in Grunewald, which is sorta southwest of Berlin. It's one of the main places around Berlin from which Jewish people were sent to concentration or death camps. The track itself is out of use, blocked at both ends by growing trees, so I can actually walk the small section of exposed track. Along the platform is written every date that involved deportations, with the number of people on the trains listed on each date. The numbers of deportees ranged a lot, with some days only having 20 or so people deported, and other days having close to 2,000. The destinations varied too--I saw signs for Sachsenhausen, Treblinka, Auschwitz, Lodz, Dachau, Buchenwald... most of the concentration/death camps that were in operation were listed. Anyway, I'm definitely not done the above artwork. The perspective on the track itself is wonky as fuck so I'm gonna go in there and see if I can't fix it. I also hate the current texture of the brick wall to the right so I gotta figure out how to work that better. This kinda thing makes me think I should try switching to charcoal because I feel I'm a lot better at depicting texture using it. At least I got some good atmospheric perspective going. Might go back to Grunewald at one point, because there's a really creepy neighborhood nearby where all the houses look literally the exact same. Might be a good thing to get down in sketching.
Also went to Wannsee a couple of days ago:
This building is the place where the "Wannsee Conference" took place in January 1941, a little more than 75 years ago. This was where the "Final Solution" was made official and started. By this point a ton of people had died in concentration camps and all those notorious Nazi execution methods, but generally executions were saved for those too weak to work or "insubordinate" (there were of course a ton of wanton murders by this point as well), but after the FInal Solution came into effect, the goal switched from working people to death to simply killing as many as possible in as short a time as possible. "Ghettos" were "liquidated," death camps were put into construction, and I think maybe a third or a quarter of Holocaust victims died in the year 1942 (with the Holocaust taking place from 1938-45 by most people's definitions), so basically this conference led to a huge spike in genocidal deaths carried out by the Nazis. And it's odd that it should take place in such a secluded, "pretty" place, an image of luxury and comfort. Though I suppose it's fitting in a lot of ways too. I sketched for about three and a half hours, though I'm not sure I did a great job. Maybe I'll go back towards the end of my time here. Anyway, cool thing was that I was able to have a full interaction in German that I wasn't even expecting to have. A woman who worked in the current building saw me drawing and asked if I wanted a chair, and I said I was okay, and she said I was free to come in and warm up any time I needed. But she said it all in German, and I replied only in German, so that was pretty cool. I just talked really slowly! Although later on, when I was going back, a couple of women asked me how to get to the S-Bahn station and I bungled that pretty badly. They said they wanted to go to the "Hauptbahnhof" which I assumed meant the one in Berlin, but since I technically wasn't in Berlin I didn't realize they were talking about the station only a minute walk away. They were trying to get to "Potsdam bahnhof" and again I thought they meant the place in Berlin, "Potsdamer Platz." I kept telling them that the S-Bahn station was just nearby, but only realized later that they were asking me how to enter it. Kinda embarrassing. My mind seems to slow right down whenever I'm confronted with German.
Some sketchbook pages:
Some sketchbook pages:
Here's some random sketchbook pages for various days here. And yeah, I put some graffiti stickers in here--the ones that are both interesting and easy to peel off of posts. It's almost impossible to get stickers if it's below zero, but anyway. That one page that's nothing but stickers and a bus pass was because of me going to a small area of Kreuzberg for a walk. That place is hipster central, with a ton of really big awesome graffiti pieces (it's right by the "East Side Gallery" portion of the wall, so that's probably part of the reason).
It's admittedly getting more and more difficult to express what it's like in Germany via blogs. Each entry takes like two hours for me to get together which is obnoxious when I wanna use the time for drawing or actually going into the city, and I'm never able to write about what I've seen or done entirely. I still haven't told the story of the fucking obnoxious BVG and their fucking obnoxious fine that they slapped me with for having the wrong ticket (as if I'm supposed to know that a "Student" ticket only refers to children and not university students despite having an international student identity card)!
Anyway, the weather's supposed to stay around 5-10 degrees for the rest of the month, and I only hope that's accurate. I'll be going to Potsdam fairly soon to see the Tempel Cecilienhof and get some sketches. The work I've been doing now has been pretty much centered around this idea of division and isolation brought on by the way totalitarian regimes bureaucratize and surveil the bejesus out of their populations, turning people against each other based on their political, ethnic, religious or other inclinations. I haven't been reading as much as I'd like about the history while here (though I did recently finish The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall), but hopefully the ideas I'm burning through will give me a lot to work with once I get home. In less than a month now I'll be going to Leipzig for two weeks, where I'll be mostly interested in seeing the church where the Monday Peace Revolution started, as well as some other old GDR-related buildings. I know pollution was a huge problem in Leipzig during the GDR era, so maybe I'll do something with that too. I'm gonna try going to a few more museums before I leave as well, especially art museums. I've only been to the Kathe Kollwitz one so far. It was pretty cool, but also quite small. Still recommendable. I'll be talking to my teacher soon, which is a relief because I feel like I need some directional prodding more than anything. Aaaaand I'm not really sure how to end these things yet, so have some pictures of U-Bahn stations.
Anyway, the weather's supposed to stay around 5-10 degrees for the rest of the month, and I only hope that's accurate. I'll be going to Potsdam fairly soon to see the Tempel Cecilienhof and get some sketches. The work I've been doing now has been pretty much centered around this idea of division and isolation brought on by the way totalitarian regimes bureaucratize and surveil the bejesus out of their populations, turning people against each other based on their political, ethnic, religious or other inclinations. I haven't been reading as much as I'd like about the history while here (though I did recently finish The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall), but hopefully the ideas I'm burning through will give me a lot to work with once I get home. In less than a month now I'll be going to Leipzig for two weeks, where I'll be mostly interested in seeing the church where the Monday Peace Revolution started, as well as some other old GDR-related buildings. I know pollution was a huge problem in Leipzig during the GDR era, so maybe I'll do something with that too. I'm gonna try going to a few more museums before I leave as well, especially art museums. I've only been to the Kathe Kollwitz one so far. It was pretty cool, but also quite small. Still recommendable. I'll be talking to my teacher soon, which is a relief because I feel like I need some directional prodding more than anything. Aaaaand I'm not really sure how to end these things yet, so have some pictures of U-Bahn stations.