Notes from Nof Yam: Berlin in Seven Parts (Day 5)

Day 5: Art and History to Blow Your Mind.

Time for some hardcore museums today (NOT boring, mind you.) Berlin has a central island that is the oldest vestige of the original city, and now it's now a series of super-fascinating museums that kind of make it its own Louvre, except spread out over a central park-like space. We began today by taking the train to Friedrichstrasse, which is about as close to the center of the city as you can get.

It was a beautiful morning, so we stopped for some coffee directly across from Museum Island. Above is the Berliner Dom across the river; an imposing figure from any angle.

From the same seat (just swiveled 180 degrees) is a bridge leading to the island.

The Old National Gallery (on right, with the twin staircases) and the New Museum (on left.) Both world-class museums that any city would kill for, both originally built in the mid-19th century. The Old National Gallery made it through WWII unscathed, but the New Museum was decimated by allied bombs and had to be rebuilt in 2003.

The best part of Museum Island is how pleasant the island itself is. With these noble buildings, wide lawns, and shady trees around, it's more like a manicured park that just happens to have a cathedral and a bunch of museums hanging around. Many people were enjoying the day on the parkland between the buildings today.

I love this picture because it has people, the S-Bahn (surface train), classic buildings on the left, and a huge hurking museum on the right that seems to be rising out of the river. Very Berlin.

That hurking museum, by the way, is the Pergamon, which was the thing I was most excited to visit in Berlin. It was the last museum to be built on the island (in 1930), and it houses original, reconstructed monumental buildings from different parts of the world. To get in, you have to cross the river on the drawbridge-like walkway.

Inside, this is a model of the Pergamon Altar (originally from an ancient Greek city Western Turkey), for which the museum is named.

And, zooming back, this is the real thing, as much as is left. It's a stunning sight to see this enormous ornate sculpture inside another building. The sunlight comes through the skylights above to give the feeling of still being outside.

Enlarge the picture above to see the detail in these sculptures. Here, Athena and Nike are fighting Alkyoneus (getting his hair pulled, on the left) while Gaia rises up from the ground and tries to intervene. There's a tremendous sense of motion in this frieze, as though this is a stone photograph of the battle. You can even see the pleading in the eyes of Gaia as she watches the struggle.

This is the Market Gate of Miletus, another ancient Greek city just down the coast from Pergamon. This gate was from 130AD. I was surprised at how grand and tall these gates were, but if they had to defend and show the grandeur of the city from afar, I can see why. There was the same skylight allowing the natural sun to fall on the gate and make it seem like it was outdoors.

A mosaic in the ground in front of the market gate. Lots of different patterns.

A statue imparts wisdom to this tourist through his electronic headset.

Now here is a gate: this is a model of the Ishtar Gate, which was one of the ways into the inner city of Babylon in 575 BCE. It was constructed out of rare blue stones with dragons embedded in contrasting golden-colored stones. This gate was once considered one of the wonders of the ancient world until it was replaced by the Lighthouse of Alexandria in 600 CE. The long corridor leading up the gate is called the Processional Way, and both were entirely reconstructed in the museum by the buried stones from the site of the originals.

Breathtaking. I loved walking down the Processional Way and approaching the gate.

This is a close-up of an ancient astronomy tool in the antiquities portion of the museum. I was amazed at the minute and precise detail on a metal object from so long ago.

There was much more to see, but one of the finest things in the Pergamon collection was this room from Aleppo, Syria in the Islamic art wing. This was the reception room in a merchant's home from the year 1600, and it was imported piece-by-piece. Check out the absolute beauty in these walls. It was a hypnotic thing to see, and I didn't want to leave.

The walls, close up.

After a wonderful two hours in the Pergamon (two hours being the "museum maximum" before we start to falter and wish we were eating or napping) we found a nearby bench on the island under some trees and took a siesta. It was so nice.

To the right of our bench, the Berliner Dom. We decided to check it out.

Man, what an awesome pipe organ! Didn't hear it played, but could only imagine.

Lunchtime at a nearby row of food shops near the north bank of the island. Na'ama poses with her new favorite drink: Berliner Weisse. This is a sour, cloudy wheat beer that comes flavored with syrup, either red or green. Red tastes like raspberries, green tastes kind of medicinal and plant-like. Both are sugary, delicious, and great for a Spring day. Usually it's served in wide glass goblets, but today it's just in the bottles. There is, however, always a straw.

Our last stop of the day was a museum called the Hamburger Bahnhof, which we affectionately called the Hamburger Bun. To get to it, we had to take the S-Bahn to the main train station in Berlin, which was an awesome glass structure like something out of a Steampunk fantasy. Trans-Euro train lines run through this structure on many separate levels, and it's a station on the scale of a mid-sized airport.

An exterior of the station.

The "Hamburger Bun" was a former railway station that linked Berlin and Hamburg. It got closed in 1884 and turned into a railway museum, then closed down with everything else during WWII. In the 1990s, it was turned into Berlin's ultra-contemporary art museum.

While it sometimes drives me nuts, I love contemporary art. I love the experiential aspect of the installations and trying to figure out what the artist is trying to do. In this way, the Bahnhof did not disappoint. I won't give any commentary on the following slides (because, largely, there wasn't any to begin with) but to walk through the vast, silent building and see the installations was a great experience in itself.