Travel | Berlim, a fascinating city

Berlin is a fascinating city. 

The Reichstag. I took this picture from the river Spree

 

I presented a poster about one of my research projects at an European conference there, earlier this month. I was fortunate that I could stay a few more days after the conference, to explore the city and oh... What a city it is... I have been a bit starved for the pulse of a proper city since I moved here. Oxford is tiny in comparison to São Paulo, and it revolves too much around the University for my particular taste. Because of that, being in a proper city again, even for a few days felt amazing. 

I had never been to Berlim before and in many ways, this is not exactly how I envisioned my first visit to the German city. For reasons that are not too difficult to understand, it was a profoundly lonely journey, and I suffered a bit from not speaking the language - more because I felt bad about it than because I actually needed to speak any German to be understood. All things considered, however, I had a great time. Berlim was every bit as vibrant and free as I expected it would be. It was also a very intriguing place, full of contradictions, difficult to understand. On one hand the city is like a graveyard, littered with war memorials, ever present reminders of how soaked with blood the ground beneath our feet is in that part of the world. On the other hand, not one of the museums in Museum Island displayed a Nazi flags, or uniforms or any artifacts from the war. The history of the city is everywhere, and nowhere at the same time, and of all the European cities I visited in my life (admittedly not a very long list), it is the one that felt most like a modern XXIst century capital. 

The sky was grey when I got out of the airport, and I was greeted by this big poster of the Eurocup. Over the next few days I noticed that the city was very much under construction, in preparation for the football final.

  

Generalities

I stayed a good hotel in the Mitte district, and I have no complains about the place. The room was comfortable, clean and private, the breakfast was good and and the staff was friendly and helpful. It was awesome to get a break from my college room for a few days. Most of the time I used public transport (subway, usually), and I got a 7-day public transport ticket for a little more than €40, which was great value for money. I also recommend getting the Berlim museum pass, which grants access to over 30 museums for free, for a period of 3 days. 

Breakfast was alright. I had hotdogs and scrambled eggs on a proper bread roll (pãozinho francês, as we would say back home. Orange juice, hot chocolate, pain au chocolat and a piece of fruit. I usually also kept an apple as a snack for the middle of the day.  I was taking pictures of these things for a couple of days, until it dawned on me that I didn't really have anyone to send them...

Below is a summary of what I did in Berlin (minus everything about the conference). There are highlights posts earlier in the blog about specific locations (they are linked here)

Day One

On the very first day, I took a tour of the city centre. Berlim is vast, and the tours are long. In the past, whenever I visited a European Capital, there are always walking tours that are an hour long at most, but in Berlim most of the options seem to be between 2-3 hours long. I chose the Third Reich and Cold War walking tour, that stretched longer than three hours, though it was only supposed to last for two. We started at the Brandenburg gate, where we heard about the many times the Quadriga was stolen and the guide spend some time showing us photographs of what the place looked like during the cold war, when the gate was actually deserted, and inside both layers of the Berlim wall. 

The site of the Brandenburg gate is surrounded by embassies now, including the American, but, more importantly, the French embassy. Back in 1806, after the defeat of Prussia, Napoleon took the Quadriga to Paris. It was later brought back, but today, the windows of the French embassy face the defiant stare of the goddess of Victory, all the while the French are supposedly longing for the time when it will return to Paris. 

 

 

From there, we moved to the Reichstag, the seat of the German government, which sadly, I only got to see from the outside (it is possible to visit the building, but that requires previous registration, it being a government building and all).  

 

German flag flying above the Reichstag

Now I am not generally fond of tourist tours, but one of the good things about a tour is that I am surrounded by people, so I get to go to places I wouldn't ordinarily visit on my own, such as the Tiergarten, a park that used to be the hunting grounds for the Electors of Brandenburg. It was quite a nice park. We were there to see the soviet memorial, a monument built by the soviets in 1945, to commemorate the 80,000 Soviet soldiers who died during the Battle of Berlim. This was the first taste I got of the contradictions that make up Berlim. Because I know how barbaric the Soviets were to the people of Berlim (the book "A Woman in Berlim" has been on my TBR for a long time now), and in fact, I came to learn that women from the wartime generation call this place a "tomb of the unknown rapist". But the monument stand, on the burial site of 2000 Soviet soldiers.

 

Next we went to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (also, the Holocaust Memorial), adjacent to the Tiergarten. Like I said, as a rule I am not fond of guided tours, preferring to explore the city by myself, and it was at this point in the tour that I started to get somewhat annoyed with our guide... For starters, we were supposed to go by the Victory column, which he decided to skip, and we inexplicably spent a long time at the Holocaust memorial, not exploring the piece, but rather sitting on some of the stones and listening as the guide prompted some questions about the significance of the place as if we were a first grade art class... Putting that aside however, I was actually looking forward to visiting this memorial - having seen it in a number of places, including of course one of my favourite TV shows, Sense 8 - and I enjoyed the experience more than I thought I would. I found the piece interesting, which surprised me because it has a certain lazyness to it's concept, as a lot of modern art does. But actually walking among the large blocks of concrete, watching as they get taller and taller, getting lost amidst the stones, listening to the sounds of the labyrinth, all of that made for a fascinating experience and having been there, I cannot say that the piece is meaningless by any means. 

Berlim Welt Balloon above the stones of the Holocaust memorial.

 

From the Holocaust Memorial, we went to the parking lot that sits above Hitler's bunker (Fuhrerbunker). I had heard there was nothing there to mark the place lest it become a pilgrimage destination for present day neonazis, but there was a plaque in a corner, with a blueprint of the bunker and some tourists taking pictures there. Apparently, there were attempts to destroy the bunker after the war, but the walls were too thick for any to be successful, and when the plaque was unveiled one of the men who actually lived there at the time of Hitler's suicide, attended the ceremony, which is a bit crazy. Regardless, the place is sealed, and the bunker itself cannot be visited. 

 

The parking lot directly above what used to be an entrance to the bunker. The building in the back is built in the Plattembau style - socialist luxury appartments, built with prefabricated concrete slabs.

Next we went to the Airforce Ministry (Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus), another testimony to the controversies of Berlim. The city worked so hard to get rid of the landmarks of Nazi Germany, but this building - which at the time of construction was the largest office building in Europe - was constructed in a style that is still described as "Nazi architecture", and buildings in this style survive all over the city (among those, I would have liked to visit the Olympic Stadium, but the place was closed to visitors because of the preparations for the Eurocup in a few weeks). 

 We spent quite some time in front of this building, and my eyes immediately caught the large Mural behind the pillars at  Leipziger Straße. After the II World War, the Ministry became the headquarters of the GDR Council of Ministers and during those years they added a mural that was supposed to depict the utopic idea of a socialist State. There's teenage girls in blue uniforms (school attire, perhaps?), children playing instruments and workers carrying the banners of Socialism. Everybody is happy, people seem to be helping each other. It is a striking contrast to the photographic display on the other side of the columns: pictures of the uprising of 1953, a protest that started at this very place, with photographs depicting the faces of real workers living under Socialism. No absent-minded smiles there.

I got away from the group for a bit while the guide blabbed to snap some pictures of this mural

There was also an interesting story here, about a man who worked in the Ministry and who used his position to escape from East Berlin, by throwing a hammer attached to a thin rope from the roof of the building and creating a zip line through which himself, his wife and his son escaped to the west (he had previously hidden them in a bathroom cubicle, with an "out of service" sign at the door). The story made me curious to find a book about the Berlim wall, and the stories of the people who managed to cross. 

From here on the tour was almost over. We walked by the Niederkirchnerstraße (a stretch of the Berlim Wall) and finished at Checkpoint Charlie. This was one of the crossing points between East and West Berlim. Truth be told, there isn't much there, it's mostly a busy street crossing in a busy modern capital, but like much of Berlim, it's not so much about seeing a monument as it is about simply being there, at the very site where so much of History took place.

At the back you can see the checkpoint charlie museum, which I  didn't get to see this time around.

After so much walking I was beat and I retreated to the hotel, to get some take away and a good night's rest before the conference the following day. After the conference my days went like this:

Day Two

My second day of exploration started with the thing I wanted to see the most in Berlim: the Narural History Museum (Museum für Naturkunde), home of the tallest dinosaur on display in the world,  a Brachiosaurus with over 13 metres. 

After the Naturkunde, I made my way to the Kulturforum, to explore some of the museums in that part of town. It was only my first proper day of exploring the city and already it was clear to me that there was too much of Berlim to see in one go. There was much to see there, but this time I chose the Gemäldegalerie - an art museum focusing on European paintings between the 13th and 18th century - and the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Galerie), a museum of modern art. 

This is the home of the Berlim Philarmonic. I walked around it, taking pictures from several angles. I really wanted to listen to them, but it wasn't possible this time around. This is at the very top of my priorities for the next time I visit the German Capital.

 My first real contact with world class art galleries came in 2014, when I first moved to Europe as a student, for one year. I had been to the museum of art of São Paulo once before, but the Masp paled in comparison to the National Gallery in London, or the Louvre in Paris. However, back then, I knew nothing at all about modern art. I activelly avoided modern art museums such as the Tate and the Pompadour. One month after I returned home I took the Khan Academy course on modern and pop art. I started to understand certain art movements better, and even came to appreciate artists I never would have given a second thought. I regretted not visiting some of Europe's most important modern art museums, and as a results, whenever I travel now, I try to include at least one of them in my plans. The neues nationalgalerie was not particularly impressive though. They were working on an Andy Warhol exhibit but sadly, it wasn't open for visitors yet

Newman is a painter I came to appreciate after my Khan Academy course and this is his last major work. Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV

 

Also kind of cool, one of the "art examples here" is Palacio da Alvorada, at Brasilia

 

The Kulturforum is located near Potsdamer Plaz, which became one of my favorite parts of the city. When I was making my way to the Gemäldegalerie I walked by mutiple posters of the Berlim film festival (Berlinale), which instantly brought a bittersweet smile to my face, and reminded me of the good old days when I watched 20 movies or more during the São Paulo film festival. On my way back I walked by the Deutsche Kinemathek, the film museum, and though it was already late, and the museum was closed, I decided then and there that I had to make time to visit that place - which would happen two days later. 

Although the museum was closed, I got to spend some time at the film museum bookshop and oh wow. Great spot, with a shelf full of Star Trek stuff.

 It was past 18:00h by then. It was late, I was exhausted and it looked like it might start to rain at any moment, but I decided not to go back to the hotel right away. Instead, I stopped by Dunking Donnut's for an energy boost (I know someone who would have been proud of this in the old days) and took the train to the Eastside Gallery, which ended up being one of my favourite parts of the visit. 

Day Three

Day Three was the most intense of all of my days in Berlim. It started early, at the TV tower (at Alexanderplatz) the best panoramic spot I ever visited anywhwere in the world. From there I walked to museum island, walking by St Marienkirche, and the Neptune Fountain (Neptunbrunnen). 

Beautiful flowers with the Neptune fountain in the back. The fountain has Neptune in the center with four women around him, wach of whom represent one of the four main German rivers (at the time of construction), including the Rhine, which features in the story I am currently working on.

  

View of the Rotes Rathaus, when I was on my way to museum island

 From there I walked to the Museum Island and the first order of the day was to visit the Berlin Cathedral, where I caught a little of the organ recital before climbing the 270 steps to the dome. I explored all the four main museums in the island that afternoon (Altes, Neues, Bode and Alte Nationalgalerie). The Pergamonmuseum, sadly, was closed for refurbishments that should go on until 2037! By the end of the day, I was pretty beat. I had seen amazing things in those museums, but I didn't have anybody to share them with, and my thoughts got away from me for a bit, as I sat on the steps of the Altes museum and watched the people playing in the grass ahead. Couples making out, families enjoying the sun, friends chatting and having ice cream together... I stayed there for a while, jotting some thoughts down on my pocket journal. 

I went back to the steps of the Altes museum after the boat tour the next day, and that's when I had more time to put pen to paper...

When I left museum island I Bebelplatz, a historic square where the Nazi book burning took place (there is an underground room covered by empty shelves, visible through a glass in this square, to remmember that moment). I hear there's a book fair here nowadays, but sadly all the booksellers were gone by the time I walked by. On the left, the pink building is the German State Opera, and in the back there is the old library of Humboldt University and St Hedwige's cathedral, which is closed for refurbishments until November, 2024.

 

At the end of the day, I went to the Konzerthaus. Although I couldn't watch the Berlim Phil this time around, I had been seeing posters about a "cello duello" at the Konzerthaus from day one, and it was too perfect an opportunity to pass on - this is my instrument after all. So I went to Gendarmenmarkt. It was hard to get there, because the square is completely blocked by construction work, and I had to walk around for quite a bit before I found a way to access the building.

 

The view from the cheap seats...

Jens Peter Maintz and Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt, the protagonists of the cello duello, at the Konzerthaus.

Day Four 

Harry Potter from all over the world at Dussmann

 

 By the fourth day I needed a break from the frenetic exploration of the previous days, so I decided to have a more relaxing day. I stated at Dussmann the big sister of the film museum bookshop I visited two days earlier. This bookshop was amazing. Easily in my top ten of favourite bookshops around the globe, and I live at Oxford, so that means a lot. It has the largest English session of any international bookshop I have ever visited, and not just that, Italian and French and Italian sessions two, and a designated space full of children's books in various languages. There were walls of comic books and manga, rooms exclusively for Vinyl and many, many DVDs. There was also some Star Trek stuff, which I always appreciate, and a whole session of books about Berlim or set in Berlin. I spent several hours there, walking around, and reading the first chapters of interesting titles that caught my eye. 

Film Museum

 From there I went to the film museum and oh, wow. What a place. Easily one of my favourite places that I visited in the city. There was a lot for me to learn, a lot about German cinema, from the origins through the war period, and the way cinema was used as a tool during the Nazi regime. But my favourite part - by far, was the Marlene Dietrich session. I spent about three hours in the film museum, and it was still not enough.

At the end of the day I took a river cruise with a tour guide. This was a tip from someone I met during one of the formals in college, but in truth, it was a bit disappointing. Wouldn't do it again.

Day Five

Museum of History of Medicine

 

On the final day of my journey, I had several hours before the plane. So I checked out from the hotel but left my luggage there and made my way to the Berlin Museum of Medical History of the Charité. I was not disappointed. The museum was small, but there was a lot of cool stuff to see, and much of which directly related to many of my personal interests. The skeletons of patients with genetic anomalies were particularly cool to see, and they actually gave me an idea for a small project to incorporate in my thesis, provided I can convince my supervisors to support the idea. 

This place really deserved a post of highlights all for itself, but I couldn't take many pictures of the coolest stuff. There were many interesting anatomic pieces, including a kidney with multiple cysts that had to be at least 40cm long. Many skeletons of conjoined twins, and one of a child with Janus malformation (craniofacial duplication, in other words, two heads) which I had never seen in person.

Then, in the afternoon, I visited the Berlim Zoo. This was an unexpected stop for me, as visiting zoo's has never been my thing but I had a great time there. I decided to visit because of some of the exhibits in the Natural history museum (in the taxidermy session), and I have been playing a lot of Ark Nova, so that added to the experience. Here's what I learned about zoos: birds are disappointing, the petting zoo is absolutely enchanting - albeit too crowded with children - and the African animals are the best. My favourites were elephants, giraffes and orangutans.  

 

I think I would like to visit Berlin during the Berlinale and take part in the festival. On my list for next time are the Berliner Philharmonie, German Historical Museum, st. Hedwig's cathedral, and, of course, the Pergamon (When it finally reopens). 

 

Book | Five things I took from "Introducing Sartre, a Graphic Guide", by Philip Thody and Howard Read

Introducing Sartre, a Graphic Guide

One of my goals for 2024 is to visit bookshops more often. 

 Oxford is, in many ways, a make-belief town. It's a place that revolves around itself as if the wider world outside didn't really exist, and living here has been different from my previous UK experience (when I lived in Newcastle-upon-Tyne) in every possible way. Amidst the constant pressures or pursuing a PhD (or a DPhil, as we call them up here), and the unexpected longing for the comforts of home, it's surprisingly easy to forget that this is actually a pretty cool place in which to write this chapter of my life. I want to remind myself of this more often. Remind myself to enjoy the cool things that Oxford has to offer, and one of these things, are the bookshops. 

There are at ten bookshops in a radius of a fifteen minute walk from where I live, and that's discounting museum shops and the Bodleian gift stores (which also sell some books). There's a 4-storey Waterstones on my block, and three different Blackwells bookshops on the street behind my house. It's a treasure trove for book lovers, and I want to make visiting these bookshops a part of my weekly routine. 

Now, although I enjoy going to brick-and-mortar shops, one of the frustrations of doing that is that books are so expensive. When you're living as a student on scholarship, in a far away place, it's difficult to shed £20 for a book, when the same novel costs up to 50% less on Amazon, and is delivered to your door (or, in my case, to my pidge at the College lodge) in one day.  This is why I was so amazed when I discovered that "remainder bookshops" are a thing. 

Oxford has two of these shops: The Last Bookshop on Walton Street and Book Stop, at Magdalen street. These shops specialize in "remainder books", that is, excess copies of new books that are no longer selling well, and must be taken off the shelves to make space for new material. These books would have been discarded, so instead, they are sold for cheap. Most of the books at the Last Bookshop for instance, are priced at £4. 

During my last visit, one of the books I got was "Introducing Sartre, A Graphic Guide", and I decided to pick it up. I am not sure why... I didn't know much about Sartre, except that he was involved with Simone de Beauvoir (which seems to puzzle everybody), he wrote something called Being and Nothingness, and his branch of philosophy is called Existentialism.  I didn't even remember whatever is said about him in Sophia's World (or if he's even mentioned there at all). But, in my mind, Sartre has this aura of being the kind of thinker people come across and become very impressed by when they're at University. Well, I'm at University. I didn't know if I was about to become very impressed by Sartre, but I decided I wanted to know more.This book is but an introduction to his life and his thinking. It's sort of like a graphic novel, in that every page is illustrated, and there isn't much time to delve deeply into anything. Nevertheless, here are 5 things I took from this little volume:

1. Before he was a philosopher, Sartre was a novelist

 

One of the ways this book approaches Sartre's life is through his works, and the way they go about this is by summarizing the plot of some of these novels, short stories and plays. Sartre's novels are infused with his philosophical beliefs, but still, before he wrote any sort of technical treaty, he was writing novels, and writing beautifully at that. The first one introduced in the book is Nausea, which is about a man who is made sick by everything he touches, including his own body. The reason is that "there is no reason for anything to exist at all". In his words:

 "Everything which exists is born for no reason, carries on existing through weakness and dies by accident" 

I didn't have time to fully consider his words here (although my first inclination is to agree with them), but regardless of the philosophical message he is trying to convey, the thought is beautifully phrased. The brief descriptions of this book - the prose, the fantastical element - made me curious to read it, and I have added it to my library list. 

2. Sartre was a political activist

  Apparently, Sartre was very much a left-wing man, which I bet is the reason why so many people are smitten with him at Uni. He seems to have had integrity - or at least that is my take from him refusing to accept the Novel Prize, and to have been an important player during the war for Algerian independence - by, if nothing else, publishing anticolonialist material in France at the time and specifically arguing against the atempt to mantain Algeria as a French territory. Personally, however, from what was shown to me in this guide, his political writings hold less of my interest. 

 3. Man is condemned to be free. Or is he? 

Sartre's thoughts about free-will were, by far, the most interesting element of his thinking. I have long thought that, although people are fond of saying that they "didn't have a choice", no one - or rather, the majority of people - always have a choice. Even if the choice is difficult, or if it is a choice between two bad options. It's nearly always there*. I had never seen these thought expressed so eloquently as it is in Sartre's conviction that man is condemned to be free. He uses the example of a man who was tortured but did not reveal the information asked of him as proof of his concept - even in this extreme circumstance, that soldier was not out of choices.  

I think this is a similar idea to what happens in V for Vendetta, when Evie becomes stronger by realizing this very thing. At the end of V's "training" (let's call it "training", for now). Evie, when threatened, chooses to die. "You thought the only thing you had left was your life," V says, meaning that, for Evie, if her life was threatened she would have no choice but to yield. That however, wasn't true. The choice of keeping your life or dying, difficult as it is, is still a choice, and one we are all condemned to have.

Most people behave as if they are perpetually trapped by their circumstances: their parentage, upbringing, ethnicity, personality and socio-economical class. That, Sartre says, is because people are constantly afraid of their freedom, and trying to run away from the responsibility of their own choices. This idea really resonated with me, and reminded me a bit of The Next Generation's Masterpiece Society, when Captain Picard softly admonishes Aaron of this very behavior. 

 "You would have me make this choice for you, but I can't."

 I was a bit confused however when it came to the relationship between himself and Jean Genet. At some point, the book says : Genet decided, at that point, to take upon himself the nature of thief and evil doer which society had forced upon him". That seems incompatible doesn't it? Either you choose to become a thief or you are a victim of society. It seems to me you can't have it both ways... But I suppose I would neeed to read more of his writings to fully explore this question.  

4.There is a constant war within us, between our vision of ourselves and the struggle to reconcile that with the vision others have of us 

 

 "When two people are together, according to Sartre and Hegel, each is trying to force the other to look at him - or her - in the way that they would like to be seen"

These ideas are mentioned in the context of a play, Huis Clos. He goes on: "All of us have our own vision of ourselves which we want other epople to endorse, and this leads us to see them first and foremost as possible supporters of this view of ourselves. But them, in turn, are trying to do the same to us, and the result of this clasjh of egotistical self-visions is the permanent conflict which characterizes all human relationships."

These lines were very interesting to me. I am not sure I agree that we are all performing a certain role for eveyone else, trying to be believable as whatever it is that we want to be. That is... too cynical, perhaps. But I do agree that we are constantly striving to show other who we are, in a manner that thye can understand. And when these efforts are successful - when their vision of us matches our vision of ourselves - then.we feel seen. But perhaps the reason why we are not successful sometimes - the reason why we are no seen - is that seeing us would be imcompatible with the other person's endeavour to be seen as well. Seeing us as we are would be inconflict with who they are - or who they want to be.  I had never seen things through this light... Well, it might be interesting to give this play a read as well.

 5. A Novelist should study the greats that came before

"Mentes Apaixonadas" (Passionate Minds),  a book about the relationship between Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet was a very unexpected book, and one that had a great impact on me, without my ever seeing it coming. Part of why it was so impactful was because of what I learned from those two scientists, and the way they nurtured their intelligence and their passions - not only by exercising their crafts but also, in their case, by translating works of those who came before. Sartre too did something similar, it seems. He did at least two major studies of the lives of French writers who came before him: Baudelaire and Flaubert. Now, Sartre is more than a little judgemental about his predecessors - and the sensibilities of the Romantic movement seem entirely lost on him - but this is still a lesson for me, as a young writer, and thinker, or at least as someone who is learning to become the person they can be. 

I was also curious about whether Sartre could speak other languages. I was curious because almost everything about his life - at least the way it is presented in this graphic guide - revolved arround France: French politics, french society, even the authors he studied were French. There's nothing wrong with that -the French language seems to offer fertile ground for study... But it seems, somehow... Small... Too small. 

Overall, I think I made good use of this little book. Enough that I am hoping to go back to the Last Bookshop and get a second one (Perhaps Introducing Feminism). There were moments when I didn't like how the book was written - in this kind of material, I think authors should avoid elocubrating about their own personal thoughts and focus on presenting facts and, at most, some interpretations of the works of the individual under study. But regardless, I learned a few things, and the reading sparked my interest for even more books. Time well spent.

 

*The reason why I say nearly always is because my experience as a geneticist has demonstrated that some people, by virtue of their genetic make up, are excluded from this - often because they lack the awareness that is necessary to understand that choices are even available. They are an exception that should be kept in mind.