Germany- a place I have been to

By the end of my week in Norway I was literally flying solo around Europe without any valid I.D, any credit /debit cards and access to money, and had been awake for two days straight, so I felt very ready to begin my time in Germany with a clear head and clean slate, but fate could not pass up one more opportunity to fuck me over. In order to get from Amsterdam to Dresden I had to transfer in Frankfurt. As it was a particularly windy day both flights were delayed, which it seems was also the case for the flight that my suitcase was on, as when I arrived in Dresden it did not, and I was told to expect them to be delivered to my hotel at 9am the next morning. This wasn’t particularly helpful, firstly because- as I hadn’t a working credit card- I had not booked a hotel, so I had to make up an address to give them (69 Wagnerplatz, Dresden) and then phone the airline when I had actually found a place to stay. Secondly, I had packed all of my dance gear in my suitcase, and had an audition the next day at 10.30 am. This might have worked out fine had my suitcase been delivered at 9, as it was supposed to have been, but of course it wasn’t delivered until midday. Considering that organisation and efficiency are the only aspect of the German people that are universally considered to be a good I can’t say I was altogether impressed with the sainted Lufthansa. In compensation for the lack of luggage I was given an overnight bag, compliments of the airline, which contained among other things a container of ‘skin whitening moisturiser’. I couldn’t possibly make a cheap joke about that… it would be too obvious. All I’ll say on the matter is that I’m glad to see that 7 decades on they’ve found a much more subtle way to go about that business.

Until I got to Germany I didn’t realise how much I know of it is due only to the second, and, to a lesser extent, the first, world war, any knowledge or impression I have of this country is polluted by the facts of this relatively minute period of its history. Whether or not I want to (and I don’t) I find that it’s almost impossible to see this place outside of that context. Every new piece of information about its history, every city tour and museum visit serves as evidence, a piece in the puzzle of how Germany came to its present state from the early 20^th century, as well as to the 20^th century from the depths of its earlier history. This condition is especially true in Dresden, a city that everybody knows at least one thing- and usually only one thing, about. The actual facts of Dresden’s decimation in world war II are almost unimportant when it comes to that event forming a preconception of the place, all you need to hear is the tone of voice that people talk about it in. ‘Ah, Dresden…’, they say in piteous tones. It is a symbol of the war as much as Auschwitz or the Nuremburg rallies are, but unlike just about any other of these symbols Dresden forces the rest of us, the countries of the allied forces, to accept our share of the responsibility and shame of the atrocities of the war, which we are otherwise not at all used to doing. Of course I know that feeling guilty for crimes against human decency which I had absolutely no part in is ridiculous, but then so often one hears Australians talk about the war being the fault of the Germans, not some Germans, in the same way that the holocaust was tolerated by the Catholic church thanks to the collective charge of deicide on the Jews. The sword has to cut both ways, and I feel this silly, inexplicable sense of guilt that’s been programmed into me in the same way that my blame of the Germans has.

It does sort of look like a bomb went off in the town, right in the centre of the city. Only the force of this bomb was not destructive, rather it was to cause everything in its range to be plunged into the renaissance. It was a time bomb. The outer city is pretty and very charming in a simple, quiet way, but is very unremarkable, and as you come into the central tram stop and pass the building to the right of it you’re all of a sudden confronted head on by the remarkable Zwinger, which stands there in front of you like a symbol of resistance to the modern culture of mass production, concrete slabs, and the colour teal. It is so intricately and thoughtfully designed, with all the extravagant joy and enthusiasm of the baroque. The restraint and timeless style of the Bauhaus movement definitely has its place but sometimes you just need to stand in front of a big, gratuitously decorated German palace that just stands there and says ‘get the fuck out of my way.’ In one of the wings there was an exhibition about Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony, for whom the palace was built. To put it mildly, he seems like he would have been a dangerously eccentric and megalomaniacal mad man plagued by the gnawing inability to accept his own mortality and therefore obsessed with immortalising himself through art and comparing his life to the myth of Hercules, which is what the exhibition was based around. It was relatively small but very interesting, as it explained a lot about the connections between classical and renaissance culture, especially the European nobility’s obsession for oranges which I had previously been puzzled by. It also helped me to realise what a huge lot of marvellous history and artistic legacy to thank the nutty Germans for.

The inside of the Zwinger

Beautiful and interesting as it was to just roam the streets of Dresden I feel like I would have gotten a lot more out of it had I stuck to some more organized plan, but one thing I’ve found particularly difficult whilst in Europe is walking in a straight line… I’m far too easily distracted, so planning my days has turned out be a rather boring waste of time. Unless I know exactly what it is I want to see I usually just end up going into any building that I find interesting and that is open. One such building I was very lucky to stumble upon, as the entrance I came to it by opened onto a rather narrow and uninteresting road which was being partially blocked by scaffolding, contained the Kunstkammer collection, one of the most stunning, extravagant and extensive collections of art treasures in Europe. It felt like I had walked into Scheherazade’s cave of wonders; the walls glittered and danced with light reflected from the dazzling gold, silver and gem encrusted artefacts, so superbly made that they seemed to emit a light of their own. Cases and cabinets displaying dramatic scenes from classical and biblical mythology, cutlery crafted from ivory with gnarled handles of coral, and the eggs, tusks, horns and shells of bizarre and exotic creatures, a panoply of colours glistening from the gems which studded and coated these objects like lichen growing over a granite boulder. Each object more absurd and decadent than the last and not a single one ever put to practical use. I know plenty of mad, sensible people who would condemn this as a terrible waste of money and resources, who suppose that such costly items should have a real point, but to me they are the point. To steal some words from Oscar Wilde; the man who calls a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for. Art treasures are really pretty, really really pretty, and it’s such a shame that the humanitarians of the more recent centuries have realised how terribly exploitative of both labourers and the natural world these undertakings are, before this modern age of consideration and restriction every possibility was open to designers and the aristocracy, and every opportunity seized- particularly in Germany, it seems.

The world's largest green diamond
belongs to the Kunstkammer

One of the real treasures of Dresden seems almost to be hidden, but craftily so, in the most obvious of all places. The Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister is located in the most recently built wing of the Zwinger. Built after the death of the elector Augustus it was designed by Gottfried Semper, and opens onto the stunning opera house that was also his design. The gallery is secreted underneath the archway which leads out to the street, off to the side and behind a pair of large wooden doors. Given the grand, open design of the rest of the building those dimly lit double doors are the last place one would look to find a gallery filled with the marvels of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens, Cranach the Younger and Elder, Metsu and Titian, just to skim over the cream of the crop. The gallery is also very proudly the home of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, which is mounted on the wall at the very end of the long corridor of open arch ways, so that as you edge your way gradually towards it through the preceding rooms you are initially able to catch only a small glimpse of it. As you come closer and closer it begins to loom up above you, like the imposing figure of God Himself, its towering presence eventually becoming impossible to ignore. And like the image of God that so many people have tried to describe to me it seems the personification of all that is wholly and unequivocally good. There is no pain, no comment on the hardships and emotional torture of reality, no tricky subtext to weave through. It’s just an image of vulnerable, beautiful, youthful potential and maternal comfort- warm, pure and perfect. Other works that I saw there and which have not left my mind since are Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (a poster of which I bought at the gift shop, but ended up not being able to get a tube large enough to contain it in and eventually abandoning it at the central train station to be found by some other art lover on their lucky day), Poussin’s L’Empire de Flore, and Pinturicchio’s Portrait of a Boy.

Giorgione- Sleeping Venus

I almost feel like I shouldn’t have bothered to leave Dresden. There was still much of it that I hadn’t seen, and so much of the next few towns that was just not worth the train fares. Hannover looked like it was designed by the colour blind, Magdeburg by committee, and Dortmund by Microsoft. To be honest when I was in those towns I rarely felt like leaving the hotel. I was becoming terribly fed up with being alone, and found that actually I was just so much happier chatting to my friends online for hours and hours than leaving them to explore the cold and bland outside world in the hope of finding something new that would please me. I could have done this in Dresden, too, and in fact I did spend literally a whole day there speaking to Eleanor, Toma and Paddy on skype, watching them yawn and struggle to stay active and coherent until the early morning hours. That day was among my happiest in Germany. But in Dresden I really did have the will to pull myself together by midday most days because I knew there was something to look forward to out there, this was not the case in Hannover, Dortmund or Magdeburg. I don’t know what it is about Germany that got to me, but everything bad just seemed worse in that country.

After a few days of doing barely anything I decided that I really couldn’t stand to spend the rest of my time in Germany stagnating in either Magdeburg or Dessau, so I booked a ticket to Berlin where I was sure I would feel better. This strategy meant that, as well as being in a much more inspiring and exciting city than Magdeburg, I would only have to spend a few hours of my Sunday in Dessau, which I had been warned is regarded as one of the most ugly, boring and stupid cities in the country.

I have mixed feelings about Berlin; it was quite the opposite of Bergen. Bergen was all surface and no substance, Berlin’s buildings were generally very unattractive, and though I’m sure the Tiergarten is very lovely in summer, at this time of year it is nothing like the idyllic sanctuary from the industrialism and commercialism of the city that has been described to me… plus I spent quite a bit of time trying to shake a man in a big black trench who seemed to be following me. It’s not until you get inside the buildings that you realise how much there is to see. There are a couple of notable exceptions though, on my first day in Berlin I headed to the Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin’s largest palace. Sophie Charlotte really knew how to decorate the shit out of a palace, not that the whole interior was particularly to my taste.  So many of the wall decorations in particular were gaudy and way overdone, and the room where she kept her enormous porcelain collection, while very impressive, was equally absurd. On the other hand the oval rooms that overlooked her French baroque inspired garden, covered on one side by huge arched windows and on the other by mirrors, thereby bringing the splendour of the gardens indoors by means of their reflection, were really wonderful to be in. It has to be said that whether or not it’s your taste her devotion to the fine arts and her idea of beauty is rather inspirational, not to mention the legacy she left with the help of Gottfried Leibniz in the form of Berlin’s Academy of Sciences

Sometimes it's okay to go a little over the top

Across the road from the palace were a number of galleries and museums, two of which I was able to visit before closing time, one containing a collection of art nouveau and art deco artefacts and the other containing a number of paintings and sculptures from the early 20st century. Around this point I was starting to come down with a cold, which I think it’s fair to say is largely the fault of the museums. I often find myself staggering round the floors of various galleries, reading and re-reading captions that go completely over my head thanks to the several areas of my brain that have fallen asleep. When I realise this is happening I look at my watch and almost invariably find that it is approaching closing time, and I realise that I have been wandering around the same or adjoining museums since the opening time, having missed breakfast to get there in time, and so not having eaten all day. I’m sure that, had I read this of somebody else, I would have thought it a quite stylish devotion to the arts, but in actual fact it’s more like a slavish devotion to the distracting and the mildly interesting. This is proven by the fact that one of my days wandering round Dresden included a trip to the National Museum of Hygiene, which was surprisingly completely uninteresting, and I say it was surprising in all sincerity… given that my expectations were so low I expected to be fascinated by something, anything, but there was nothing. It was completely dull.

Thankfully I didn’t find any such museums in Berlin, I was very impressed by all that I visited, particularly the gallery of early 20^th century art opposite Schloss Charlottenburg, which contained a room of works by Matisse and a large collection of Picasso’s. Picasso is always interesting, but I’m pretty sure that this was the first time I’ve seen the works of Matisse in real life. Seeing them for the first time I have to say I didn’t really get it, they didn’t do anything special for me… I listened to the audio commentary and failed to recognise anything other than the technical descriptions. But I’ve found that a few of them have been constantly on my mind since leaving the gallery, my memories of them growing fonder and fonder. As Eleanor’s facebook status once read- ‘It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to change the world’, his works have not only changed the world but also my artistic sentiments… unfortunately I didn’t see it until they weren’t there.

Matisse- Blue Nude Skipping

 The next experience in my art tour of Europe was the Helmut Newton Gallery of Photography. If you don’t already know it, Helmut Newton is the shit. His photographs seem even more lifelike than reality does at times, it was difficult to walk past a single one of his photographs without staring like a Peeping Tom… which is what it felt like sometimes,  given how lively and provocative his nudes are. Upstairs was a collection of photos by his wife June, who worked under the pseudonym Alice Springs, a few of which rated highly out of the gallery’s entire collection, but whose work as a whole was not as impressive, as a few photos betrayed the fact that she was capable of error and mediocrity, which Helmut’s did not. It was impressive enough just to see the letters written between the couple and their friends and to read the captions beside the pictures, given the huge number and quality of celebrities, artists and everything in between that they socialised and worked with.  It was like intruding on a frozen conversation between a group of people so influential on modern culture that they were practically (and, in the case of Grace of Monaco, actually) royalty.

 I always had a feeling that one of the major problems I would have with Germany was the language. English speaking people generally agree that it’s not the prettiest language of all, but it wasn’t the sound of it that I disliked so much as the fact that everybody spoke it. I know that rightfully I should have been at least a little embarrassed by the fact that I was the outsider who didn’t understand what everybody else was saying… but actually, and I know how unfair it is of me, I sort of just thought of them as being quite silly and annoying for not being bilingual. This was especially problematic on my first night in Dresden. Never mind organising the delivery of my luggage, checking into a hotel in the first place and explaining that I was having luggage delivered proved impossible without the use of Pictionary. (I know it somewhat contradicts what I was saying about the language barrier being a problem, but as I was writing that sentence I just realised how much more fun life could be with an increased dependency on Pictionary). In the end I began to enjoy speaking to sales assistants and checkout chicks who didn’t understand what I was saying past my tone of voice and physical gestures, it presented a great opportunity for me to try out creative new off the cuff obscenities. A transaction would end and I would smile sweetly whilst turning to leave give the cashier a cheery ‘felch dribble’, or ‘cock frottage’. The more I did it the more confident and imaginative I became with my use of language until one time when I had just said my parting words to a cashier and a woman in the queue behind me burst out laughing.

Speaking of cock frottage; around the end of my time in Berlin I finally had a reasonably proper conversation with a brothel madam. I was on my way to dinner and had just passed by a woman standing in front of a red door when she called to me, telling me to come inside if I wanted to. Seeing a sheet of paper next to the door with a list printed on it I assumed it was a restaurant and told her that I had already decided where I was eating that night. Not quite sure whether I was joking or not she handed me her business card, which I laughed at, having finally realised that she wasn’t trying to sell me dinner. Not unnaturally she took offense to this and proceeded to insult me as I continued on my way, calling me immature and insolent, and any number of other German insults. Brothels… you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

On my last day in Berlin I looked at the list of things to do that I had compiled on my last night in Magdeburg and realised that I had achieved less than half of them, but in the end had seen about as many things that had not been on the list. This list included, among other things, the Bauhaus archives, which I would recommend to anybody with even the slightest interest in design. The Bauhaus movement was the mother of all of modern design, and it’s fascinating to observe the objects and read about the people who radically, permanently and entirely changed our everyday landscape. Its legacy is seen in some areas of Berlin, not all the buildings are drab… but all too often the marriage of form and function tipped way too far in favour of function, and completely miss the point.

This isn’t the last I’ve seen of Germany, after some time in London and France I will be staying in and around Geissen, in the South West of the country.  I hope this branch of my trip has just been very clouded by a huge come down from my Nordic drama, and that in actual fact I don’t dislike this country. I know that it has a magnificent and important history, and that the grandeur of old Germany is still well and truly alive in its culture to this day. But I know these things second hand; I’m yet to experience them myself. I flew out of Berlin in the early afternoon when it was still light, and from above what I saw were block after huge block of buildings encircling huge courtyards. It looked like a microscopic view of a plant, showing all of the cells, with water features or centrepieces usually inside, reflecting a nucleus. It was a fantastic and unique view of the city, one you would not have imagined from ground level. It’s a fairly neat summation of my feelings towards Germany- a country whose beauty has to be seen from a distance.