Berlin

Collegium Hungaricum, Dorotheenstrasse, Mitte.

Last time I was in Europe at all was more than 25 years ago, as the amazing events that changed the structure of the continent were just getting under way in Poland and Hungary in particular, and not paying a lot of attention to them yet—on a last junket for the magazine I'd just quit working for; I went to a fashion show in Milan, a perfume launch in Antibes, a jewelry thing in Paris, and a watch thing in Geneva, and in between showed the young helpmeet around selected bits of a couple of other places to the best of my ability, which was not in fact very great, because my superior skill in languages and my cultural preparation were not matched by my knowledge of what to do with luggage or taxi drivers, or ability to dress in a way appropriate to the wine I might know how to order, or an appropriate amount of money for that matter, because although a junket it was not that generous a junket, but we had a great time.

In those days I was pretty good at fake travel writing, where you go someplace on assignment, eat, drink, and walk around under some kind of commercial supervision, and then paint a varnish of sophistication over the report of a couple of selected experiences—a chuckle at the Bouguereaus in the Musée d'Orsay, huh? Assuming they have some. And paying attention to the actual and potential advertisers who might like to see their names mentioned. But I never learned how to do good travel writing, and I don't feel well prepared.

It's my first time in Berlin, and I can't imagine what it was like back in 1989, or rather I can, but only because everybody really wants me to, from the long-winded VIP introducing the European Youth Orchestra (playing an all-Russian program, oddly enough, and playing it extremely well, with a knockout Shostakovich fifth symphony), a mumbler and badly miked, so that I couldn't understand much at all of what he said, except for the obligatory reference to the Wall, to the packaging in the souvenir shop, where the city's attractions are listed including a struckout MAUER, meaning that the absence of the Wall is one of the things to see.

Souvenir shop.

Which is actually true. A large part of your visit is spent looking at the remaining fragments of the thing, or at sites organized around it, like the essential Topography of Terror, a harrowing tour through the history of the Third Reich, built on the site of the main offices of the Gestapo and SS, which happens to be just up from a 200-meter Wall section on Niederkirchenerstrasse.

Niederkirchenerstrasse Wall fragment, with the old Reichsfinanzministerium looming in the background and in front an outdoor exhibit of the Topography. Photo by Maciej Godniak via Panoramio.

What I really wanted to do here was just one of those pithy observations, on something very German but sort of endearing, the character of these education exhibitions as being mostly about themselves, constructed in a frame story explaining why the museum or show or whatever exists. The Wall is all about the suffering eastern Germans endured under Communist rule as a consequence of the Nazi crimes, and the Topography of Terror is all about the harsh truth of how Germans made the terror happen in the first place, beginning with the leveling of the site under Allied bombardment; at the entrance is an enormous architectural model of the whole district, showing all the government buildings as they stood in the late 1930s, nearly all gone now, while new Berlin rises on the streets.

The Museum at Checkpoint Charlie, the spot on Friedrichstrasse in Mitte where foreigners and dignitaries and spooks in countless thrillers traversed between East and West Berlin, is an anti-Communist propaganda display from the early 1960s, designed under the patronage of the right-wing publisher Axel Springer, the Henry Luce of Germany as it were—notwithstanding which I guess everything it says about the oppression of the East German Communist regime and the brave local resistance is true—and the narrative of the permanent exhibition there is that of Springer buying the building and finding the activist Rainer Hildebrandt who developed the concept and ran it, filling it with writings by himself and his family members.

Similarly at the International Festival of Beer, on Karl-Marx-Allee, a mile of beer, literally, organized as a taxonomy of the world's beers and ales; for three days in August, you can buy a two-deciliter mug, and sample your way around the globe (glad to say Brooklyn and Singapore were both represented, but we mainly stuck with the Czech Republic and focused more on food and music than drink, I'm relieved to be able to say), but it lends itself to a particularly scholarly approach.

The same kind of thing happens at the high-culture level as well, as in the Neues Museum on the Island of Museums in the Mitte district, devoted to 19th-century archaeological discoveries in Egypt, Cyprus, and Asia Minor, especially the Troy part, where everything is framed in the narrative of Heinrich Schliemann's famous digs.

But the most extraordinary, and intellectually appealing example was at the Bode-Museum, also on the island, where an ongoing exhibit, The Lost Museum, details the fate of the museum's collection of Renaissance art during the Soviet invasion in 1945, when many pieces were lost, probably to theft, and many more destroyed in fires at the flak tower in Friedrichshain where they had been stored since the beginning of the war.

Restored and unrestored sculptures by Tullio Lombardo at the Bode-Museum exhibit, via Focus Magazin.

Botticelli in monochrome. Via www.berlin,de.

The permanent exhibition as it might have looked in the 1930s is sort of restored with black-and-white reproductions of the paintings and plaster copies of the statues, from photographs, with some pieces rescued from the fire, partly or not at all restored. It's very beautiful, even beautiful in a way the original might not have been, and moving.

But funny, too, and so German, to want to make not an exhibition, but a theory of an exhibition with an exhibition inside.

Neues Museum.