Berliners love cafes with overly long cutesy names and here’s my documentation. They drive me nuts, triggering a visceral loathing like few things other than the Microsoft paper clip do. They’re cloying, gimmicky, and precious (“affectedly dainty or overrefined”, to quote the dictionary). Somehow they aim for cute yet land on pompous, which is quite a feat.
Continue reading “What is the deal with the “never ever ending” cafe names in Berlin?”
This is the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery in Berlin, the second-largest in Europe with 115,000 graves on 100 acres. There aren’t any graves of people who are at all well-known in the U.S. but quite a few names are well-known in Germany such as founders of major department stores and publishing companies, writers, artists and musicians. It is still in use. Weissensee is the name of the neighborhood in Berlin and means White Lake. I uploaded a short video here.
Some parts of the miniseries “Unorthodox” about the woman who escaped from a Hassidic sect in Brookyln were filmed a block away from me, namely, the apartment building where her fictional mother lives. Incidentally it was designed by a maddening architect – occasionally good, often aggressively lousy – named Hinrich Baller who was one of Berlin’s most popular from the 1980s to 2000s. He tried to bring some human-ness, life, and insipiration from nature to the unyielding, cold and ruthlessly functional watered-down Bauhaus that has steamrolled over Germany since 1950. Emphasis on tried.
Occasionally he hit the mark but very often got derailed into awkward geometric shapes forced into screeching juxtapositions, an obsession with unnecessarily sharp pointy angles verging on the pathological, zero sense of proportion and oh my goodness the railings. So. Many. Railings. Explosions of thin metal rods bent into ugly forms with lots of gaps and protrusions for entangling limbs, shoulder bags, and children’s heads.
Next to the apartment building is a school he designed which a Berlin newspaper called a “chronicle of scandals”: construction took eight years, leaving a trail of bankrupt companies and water leaks and a bill almost twice what was budgeted. However this is normal for Berlin so it wouldn’t be fair to blame him alone. But alll that was years before they had any idea a wing would have to be completely shut down and barricaded in 2017 after less than 20 years of use, due to deterioration, holes in the walkways big enough for a child to fall into, lack of fire exits, and still more leaks, forcing the students to eat lunch in their classrooms and the cancellation of German-language classes for immigrants. The school is in one of the city’s most desirable and prosperous neighborhoods, by the way, but still the area has so much violence the school has to have armed guards. So you can imagine what things are like in the city’s underserved communities.
Anyway… that all has nothing to do with the Unorthodox show. Here are photos showing the parts that were filmed just down the street from me. Click on the photos to enlarge. In each pair, the one on the left is a screenshot from the show and the one on the right is a photo I took myself. These are all scenes from when the woman goes to visit her mother.
Continue reading ““Unorthodox” miniseries, also, bad architecture”
A few interesting and little-known works from the Symbolist and Surrealist movements.
Below is my translation – with footnotes to explain important points that non-Germans won’t know about – of a hilariously and brutally dismissive article from May 2019 about a luxury condo building in Berlin by the star architect Daniel Libeskind, from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s leading liberal-center-left newspaper (out of Munich; the only national newspaper based in Berlin is conservative, which is a good example of how Berlin’s progressive reputation is nowadays mostly a myth, which is one of the main points of the article, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves). The back story is that Berlin is undergoing gentrification at a hyperspeed the likes of which has never happened in the U.S., not even in San Francisco or New York, and that German people, and architects everywhere, generally agree Berlin has the worst modern architecture of any major European city. I added footnotes for clarification.
Translucence – and raw pork for breakfast: A Libeskind penthouse in Mitte is for sale. A visit explains a lot about the current state of affairs in the capital
What was that Klaus Wowereit said about Berlin? Poor but sexy?(1) Now, centuries later, when you stand on the roof terrace of the Sapphire – which naturally is pronounced in English, like everything in Berlin that’s meant to not sound like Berlin and ends up sounding more like pickled eggs(2) than a precious stone – it fully sinks in how the expression belongs to a truly bygone era. Continue reading “Berlin – “The ugliest, most desolate building in world history””
When the editor of Berlin’s leading newspaper describes the city’s core defining ethos as “premeditated incompetence”, and surveys rank it as the Germans’ least-liked German city, and pregnant women are discouraged from visiting it altogether due to its deficient health care, and the pre-eminent LGBT world travel guide puts Berlin on its “Avoid” list due to its homophobia, it’s time to ask, are the auras of Cabaret and David Bowie alone really enough to constitute a great world-class, or even baseline functional, city? Because Berlin is still, in 2017, to a large extent living off the residue of this aura rather than moving forward and evolving, or even just tangibly maintaining it. For 30 years now since the fall of the wall, the city has been drawing down its figurative capital, running on fumes.
Continue reading ““Berlin: In Love with Failure” – Die Zeit magazine”