thomas m wilson

In the 1700s Berlin was the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia, which was the nucleus of what eventually became Germany. In the mid to the late 1700s it was ruled by Frederick the Great, a great legal reformer, instigator of religious tolerance, military strategist, musician and friend of Voltaire.

The other morning I walked from the Brandenburg Gate to Museum Island.  I passed the Berlin State Library – a beautiful classical courtyard with tall pilasters rising around its entrance half covered in climbing ivy.  A statue of a scholar reading in a niche.  This is one of the best libraries in the world with over 11 million volumes distributed across its sites.  The old royal library is on the other side of the Unter de Linden boulevard I had walked along to get here and in front of that library the Nazi youth had burnt books they disapproved of such as the novels of Thomas Mann in 1933.  Barbarians at the gates were here. 

In front of the library in the middle of the boulevard is a giant equestrian statue in bronze of Frederick the Great, the philosopher King in eighteenth century Prussia (Germany did not exist yet).  On the pedestal of the statue, you can see reliefs telling the story of his life, and one of them shows him playing the flute.  He was such a good flautist that only accomplished players can play the works he wrote for flute today.  He expressed a full gamut of emotions in his music and his concerts – of course this was on top of being a successful military strategist and directing the realm. 

Then I stood in front of Humbolt University and looked up at the statue of Alexander von Humbolt.  He sit on a globe of the world, and this is appropriate for a man who travelled so much, up South American mountains for example, and who said that ‘”The most dangerous worldview is the view of those who have never looked at the world”. 

Walking on I stepped over the bridge to Museum Island, called the Schlossbrücke.  The statues on the balustrades of the bridge made me think of Charles Bridge in Prague of the Ponte Sant’ Angelo in Rome – a triumphant and majestic mode of arrival as you step to the island.  Of course they are much older in Rome, and the carrara marble here in Berlin was carved in the mid nineteenth century (much of the sculpture on the Ponte Sant’Angelo went up in the 1500s).    

Then I got myself an annual pass to the state museums of Berlin and proceeded to walk around the Pergamon Museum.  This contains one of the great marvels of the entire Middle East, the Ishtar Gate.  It was excavated by Germans in the first decade of the twentieth century what is now Iraq from ancient Babylon and moved here, brick by brick in barrels pretending to contain coal.  It was shipped to Berlin and carefully reconstructed.  It is a long processional way, walled on both sides with moulded tiles in blue depicting lions walking forward.  Then it culminates in a grand entrance to the city of Babylon.  Amazing to imagine this civilisation, so exotic and far from the present (it was put up in 575 BC).  Imagine finding this gate, deep under the sands.  Bringing it to light again after thousands of years.  The Bedouin people of the area would have found it just as exotic as us, so long had it been buried by the desert. 

The Lustgarten, the lawn area in the centre of Museum Island, is one of the great public spaces in Europe, surely.  The Berliner Dom, their cathedral, is so vast it is a little sibling to St. Peters in Rome. What glory old Prussia brought forth in this ensemble of spaces and buildings in this area of Berlin.

Arrived in Berlin last weekend. The other morning I walked alone to the Jewish cemetery near where I’m staying.  The place is full of illustrious marble graves, and stone columned mausoleums, sinking in green ivy and sprouting ferns.  The descendants of this nineteenth century Sachs or Lieberman or whoever else I was looking at were mostly killed during the second world war by the Nazis, and thus so many of these graves and tombs are untended and unkempt.  Walking in under grey sky and cloudy light this place was peaceful, with hardly a visitor, and also melancholy.  A rain shower made me run for shelter under a mausoleum, and sit, contemplating the slick stone and lush greenery around me.  Cold rain falling on cold grey stone. No one left to mourn the family tomb. 

To leaven proceedings, I went to Liquidrom the next day with a friend.  It’s a spa under a concrete dome with an oculus at its centre.  One floats in low light in warm water, head and legs buoyed by flotation devices, eyes closed, electronic music dimly heard through the water as your ears are also submerged.  It is deeply soporific.  It feels good to be held like this, floating, weightless, warm, quiet.  $34 Australian dollars for two hours entry.  Beautiful warm showers afterwards, and a locker where one can leave one’s worldly belongings and forget about them. 

The following day I went on a walking tour of the centre of the city. We started at the Brandenburg Gate, symbol of the city. It is a beautiful gate with classical architrave, triglyphs and elaborate metopes – and it gave it added depth knowing that the bronze statue of horses and chariot and rider had to be recast years after the city had been bombed to smithereens in WW2.  The gate stood triumphant throughout the war incredibly, as it does today. 

The car park where the Fuhrer’s bunker once stood underneath the ground was a place to reflect on what a crazed megolomanaic lead ‘Germania’ in those days.  As the last bit of Nazi architecture is the tax department building today – it does indeed look forboding and grim, square and grey slabs of stone, looming above.

The Berlin wall and Checkpoint Charlie brought to mind how long ago the 1960s and 70s feel these days – casting one’s mind and imagination into the gulf of all those years brings up a drab and constrained East Berlin and a sad shadow of Soviet style communism.  There is a flicker of glamour from having watched spy films in this setting but generally I think it must have been more depressing than anything else. 

Last night I went to see the film Oppenheimer at the old Soviet-era cinema Kino International on Karl Marx Allee.  The cinema is rectangular concrete with a large glass counter-leavered front first floor.  The room with the bar and candy store is a stunning recreation of life at its best in 1960s East Berlin – a time warp even down to the slightly musty smell mixed with popcorn, and huge glass wall looking out over the boulevard below.  The film leaves the viewer unsettled by the dawning of the age of the nuclear bomb, and I was not feeling entirely cheerful when I set out on my cycle home…

Cycling home along Karl Marx Allee by myself that night around midnight the grand boulevard – described as the last great street built in Europe by some – built by the Communists in the 50s, was an erie but impressive experience.  90 metres wide, flanked by ten story buildings in the style of Socialist Classicism, the buildings are ‘palaces for the people’ – apartment blocks covered in cream coloured tiles with tall windows.  A Soviet Empire feeling to the place but it was hard not, despite having misgivings about the police state nature of Communism at the time, to be very impressed by what a canyon of austere pomp they had created.  The whole street, even down to the names of the cafes, is now listed and has been refurbished (soon after many of these were built they were already losing tiles).  As I cycled along, ant like in the dark, by myself, I looked up at dimly the lit facades and entrance lobbies, and felt like I was in Gotham City, or Metropolis by Fritz Lang, or some other dark and futuristic vision of glory.  Or indeed in a sequel to the film I’d just watched, Oppenheimer.  “Man is the victim of an environment which refuses to understand his soul” says Charles Bukowski, in Tales of Ordinary Madness.  Socialist architecture is in general not something which I feel designs an emotional utopia – rather it is in general, like much twentieth century modernism at least for me, overly distant and dehumanising.  But here at least the classical elements, fused to the idiom of Soviet style, were grand if they were not charming.    

And as an absolute contrast…. This morning I and a friend went to Vabali, a day spa of countless relaxation rooms, outdoor pools, countless saunas and steam rooms and plunge pools and showers, and Buddha statues and wood and stone everywhere, and sprawling green grassed gardens full of deck chairs.  People walked around with a towel around them but otherwise were nude.  I don’t know how the Germans can do this kind of thing – they did it better than most of the day spas in Bali – larger, cleaner, cooler, more well run, and probably cheaper. This is a place with a sense of luxury and relaxation and conviviality – what the ancient Roman thermae were thousands of years before.  

In the last week or so in Stockholm I’ve explored Drottingholm Palace, a royal residence west of the city. In walking around the island I found a section of wild forest near the palace and remembered the splendours of wild ecosystems in the Scandinavian northern forests – mossy green boulders, beds of pine needles, birch and oak and cool air, and silence.  It felt like some kind of spiritual and emotional renewal just to have that little time by myself in that forest.  The palace, like most palaces, felt bombastic and lacked charm.  As if it wanted to be Versailles, and was trying hard. But still a place that one does feel enlarged and at least a bit elevated compared to the muddle of modern architecture – the formal gardens with their huge fountain and water side location to the main building are at least worth seeing. 

Also visited the National Museum – the sculpture courtyard was remarkable.  A well of limpid light falling from a glass ceiling high above onto the arrayed marbles below, life size and larger than life size, created a beautiful and entrancing experience.  A huge sculpture of a shirtless, long haired Adonis with, casual, nonchalant and powerful frame, arms and hands open to the world, communicated something accepting and positive. 

Another day I went to a tour of the City Hall – loved the carved granite in the banqueting hall for the Nobel prize ceremony – and the glittering gold mosaics in the golden hall.  The mosaic representation of Stockholm shows her personification as a maiden in the centre of the world, with all the West to the left (Eiffel tower, NYC, etc), and the Orient to the right (minuets of Instanbul, camel of the Arabs, etc).  Every city in the world lives under the illusion that its at the centre doesn’t it? 

Then I went and walked around the Medelhavsmuseet, which houses Sweden’s most important archaeological collections of ancient and historical relics from the Mediterranean countries.  The place is in a gorgeous bank from 1905, full of marble and light.  If you ever want a cafe in Stockhom please think Bagdad Café – it is the best café I have been to, with views over Strömmen (the stream), the Royal Palace and the Opera, and the chance to sip coffee among real Greek and Roman antiquities. 

Yesterday I went to see the main library in Stockholm – an old building but the reading room felt poorly ventilated and uninspiring.  But outside in the adjoining park a tall bronze statue of Carl Linneaus stood.  I looked up at his figure, and thought about John Fowles’s reflection in his book The Tree that so much our modern way of seeing nature comes from this old man’s reductive, analytic gaze, parsing complexity to the binomal species name, growing, budding complexity strangely hidden and ‘owned’ by attaching a two part Latin name to it.  And yet by caring and being attentive enough to parse the green tangle of a forest into species identifications one is at least looking.  One is at least paying attention.  The scientific gaze has its drawbacks, a loss of holistic and affective understanding, and a loss of mystery, but at least it is a better fate than the total oblivion of human neglect.