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 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”
We were in New Haven and rural New England just before Covid hit. Everything was gorgeous. The food was great and there was lots of agrodiversity and local produce and small producers even in the smallest towns, things that you essentially can’t get, by the way, here in Berlin where I live. Hard as it may be to believe, they somehow have only barely started getting the memo on eating local. The pictures may look a little gloomy because this was “mud season”, the time in March after the beautiful snow has melted and before spring has started. The trees are bare, mud is everywhere, and many sights, shops and restaurants are closed or have reduced hours. They even advise tourists to avoid March but we had a wonderful time.
Campbell Falls lies on the border of Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Continue reading “Connecticut! Massachusetts! Connecticut! Massachusetts!”
This is the Yiddish Book Center which lies four hours north of New York City in Amherst, Massachusetts, adjacent to Hampshire College. It’s really great and you should visit. It’s an archives, museum, and cultural center housed in a gorgeous new building recalling a rural eastern European village. A big draw for me was Shtetl in the Sun: South Beach, Miami 1977-1980, an exhibition of photographs of Jewish retirees.
Continue reading “The Yiddish Book Center – Amherst, Massachusetts”
Vienna is picture-postcard gorgeous. I still need to post my photos of pre-World War II storefronts that are still intact including their shop signs, which is one of the extraordinary things about the city. Even in Paris hardly of these have survived. Vienna even has some modern ones from the 1950s-60s , which are even rarer because they’ve never been considered historical or important. I did see lots of Klimt and Schiele art in the museums but did not take pictures because those are easy to find on line.
Museum of Applied Arts. Three different exhibits of chairs including one on the history of Thonet bentwood with around 300 examples!
A few interesting and little-known works from the Symbolist and Surrealist movements.
This was an exhibit on globe-shaped and globe-inspired buildings since 1700, some actually built and some just proposed, at a museum called Cité de l’Architecture (click to enlarge)
Continue reading “Exhibition in Paris: “Globes: Architecture and Science Explore the World””
