SOME GENERAL THOUGHTS ON GERMANY

Karin tells a great story about overhearing some well-dressed, polite man dealing with a rude clerk.

“Were you born to be this rude,” he asked, “or did they send you to school to learn how?”

In previous trips to Germany, we'd run into lots of rude, unsmiling, and unhelpful people, but not so much this time. It did help to have our native tongue talker with us, but as she said, Berliners are known to be more open and funny than people in other parts of the country.

The little town of Marburg and the inn we stayed at there could not have been more pleasant, and the same was generally true of Berlin. The latter is bursting with energy, young people, and money. Yes, some of the older buildings need cleaning and repair (unlike St. Petersburg, where Putin spent a billion euros a few years ago polishing them ahead of a G8 meeting), but almost all of the City is new. The buses and subways all run pretty much on time except when they're closed for a marathon, and there's so much to do. We wish we were fifty years younger.

A recent op ed piece in the New York Times suggested that Germans resent having to bail out their southern neighbors such as Greece in part out of envy. They'd like to enjoy life too, but have to work too hard to earn the free time to do it. At least in Berlin, some of them seem to have stuck a good balance.

In St. Petersburg, we saw a begger sitting on the street with a cup in front of him. His face was deeply wrinkled with a lifetime of care and grief, and he had a long beard, making him look like late pictures of Tolstoy. In Berlin, we saw a similar beggar, but this one was young, and he was busily rolling a joint.

FAREWELL TO BERLIN

On our last (partial) day in Berlin, we strolled along the Kurfustendam (or “Ku'damm” to the locals), which is Berlin's version of Fifth Avenue. We window shopped at Cartier's and Tiffany's and bought a cap (on sale) at a department store. We also looked at the collection of bears (Berlin's mascot) along the sidewalk—one for every country. Steward insisted that he shoot one photo of Bob to match his earlier one of Steward.

Bob & Berlin Bears

The USA Bear...Lady Liberty

FINAL FULL DAY IN BERLIN

Ich bin ein Berliner. Nicht! 

But only when it rains as hard as it did this morning. By the time that Karin left to visit her sister for a few days in Hanover, it began to let up, so we walked a couple of miles from our hotel to Charlottenburg Palace.

Charlottenburg Palace

Our route there took us through what seemed like an up and coming part of the City; the one on our route back seemed down and going. Our goal had been to get a sense of this part of town, and we did.

Everyone told us to skip the palace but stroll through the gardens. The former is in need of repair, and the latter in need of weeding. Sad.

We did stop at two museums near the palace. The Brohan had some art deco rooms and crafts on display, while the Scharf-Gersternberg Collection had around 250 works of Surrealists. The former we found mildly interesting, while the latter were dark and depressing. The Berggruen Museum with lots of paintings by Picasso and Matisse was closed for repair.

Tomorrow we fly to Frankfurt to stay overnight before our flight home on Thursday. And so begins...or ends...our current travels.

STAY WITH US - TODAY WAS A BUSY ONE!

Victory Column

Hopped off the #100 bus in the center of Berlin's major park, the Tiergarten, to photograph the Victory Column that Hitler had moved there from in front of the Reichtag. This probably saved it from being destroyed in the Second World War. Originally, it was designed as a monument to various German victories, but Hitler wanted it to be part of a triumphal route through the Berlin Gate and up the grand avenue, Unter den Linden. He probably envisioned his own triumphal processional there after he'd conquered the world.

The Reichtag

Memorial Slate Slabs

The old #100 bus then took us to the Reichtag (Germany's parliament), beside which is a memorial of slate slabs, one for each of the 96 politicians who resisted Hitler's rise to power and were subsequently murdered by him. Each includes the victim's name, dates, and place of murder—usually a concentration camp. On the other side of the building along the Spree River is another memorial of simple white crosses on a fence for people who died trying to escape from East Germany during the Cold War.

The Brandenburg Gate

Memorial

The Brandenburg Gate, which is beside the Reichtag, looks sadly dwarfed by modern buildings built near it. It was also roped off when we were there, so workers could prepare for some German holiday in October—not a bike race. And a short walk from there took us to the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” erected in 2005. Unlike holocaust museums in Germany or Washington, DC, which document human stories and graphic details of the systematic extermination, this one consists of 2,711 gravestone-like concrete forms of different heights that you can wander through, contemplating in silence that monstrous atrocity.

We walked up Unter den Linden to Museum Island pausing along the way for a couple of photo opts. The first was of Steward being captured by a Berlin bear. The other was in Bebelplatz Square where a glass window in the pavement looks down to a room of empty book shelves. This is where staff and students of Humboldt University burned 20,000 books banned by Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels. Nearby is a plaque with a quotation from German poet Heinrich Heine: “Where they burn books, at the end, they also burn people.”

Finally, after walking past a small park filled with young people enjoying the sun and each other, we reached our destination, the Pergamon Museum. We knew it contained examples of ancient architecture, but nothing prepared us for the monumental scale of the exhibits. It was like visiting the Acropolis or the Pantheon inside a museum!

Pergamon Altar

The Pergamon Alter is part of a complex from the City of Pergamon (now in Turkey), a renowned center of culture and learning during the Hellenistic Period. Its library housed some 200,000 volumes! In another room, is the facade of a temple that the Roman Emperor Hadrian finished, and in another is the Market Gate of Miletus, an ancient city south of Ephesus, in Turkey. The gate looks almost exactly like the ruins we saw last year in Ephesus—except that it was inside a museum.

Gate of Miletus

Then we went through the Gate of Miletus which backed onto the Ishtar Gate and a long processional passage lined with lions leading to it from the opposite direction. These all came from Babylon, about 55 miles south of current-day Baghdad. They date back to Nebuchadnezzar II (6^th Century BCE) and retain most of the color baked into the bricks that they're made of. (Note the close-up of one of the lions.)

Istar Gate

Somewhere along the way to this museum, someone on a sidewalk was playing, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” on a horn. When we left the museum, we all felt we'd just visited that place where we'd dared to go.

AN EASY DAY - FOR US!

Looking toward Potsdamer Platz

Today, the marathon started at 8:30 am, and by late morning, when we started off, it was in full swing. It used to be that our travels caused volcanoes in Iceland to erupt and the euro to rise against the dollar, but in Germany, we seem to attract major events. In Hamburg, it was a heavy metal concert and the Schlepperballet (Google it!). Here in Berlin, it was the marathon and the Pope.

Gemaldegalerie

  

So, we gave up trying to make it all the way in town to Museum Island; instead, we went only to the Gemaldegalerie, billed as the country's “premier art museum.” It's in a modern building with a splendid central hall that's devoid of pictures—a quiet, serene place off which you can choose your poison: art galleries featuring German, Dutch, French, English, Italian and other “schools,” all arranged chronologically.

The museum boasts of some fifteen Rembrandts, though many were not up to snuff. One that caught our eye was a self-portrait when he was a young, cocky artist just setting out on his illustrious career—a vast change from the care-worn self-portraits he painted toward the end of his life.

There were also Vermeer's The Glass of Wine and Woman with a Pearl Necklace, some Raphaels and Titians, and lots of Gainsboroughs, but the one painting that caught our eye was Caraveggio's famous Cupid Victorious, which shows his lusty street-urchin model trampling out the armaments of war while holding a handful of love-arrows ready to shoot at the viewer.

Bob, of course, turned up lots of St. Sebastians. It's a standing joke that he seems to attract them in every major museum we go to. (“Not another human pin-cushion!”) The Gemaldegalerie is certainly a major museum, but not in the same tier as the Hermitage, National Gallery, Prado, Uffizi, or Metropolitian. On the other hand, the fact that so many of the country's treasurers survived the war is nothing short of miraculous.

On the way to the museum, we shared a train ride with a Norwegian runner. We asked if she was getting a headstart.

“No,” she replied, “I got lost.”

By now, Bob and our native tongue talker are old hands at the Berlin transportation system, so we were never lost, but we did make a short day of it. We were all in need of more down time.

FIRST FULL DAY IN BERLIN

Yesterday, both Bob and I slept most of the 2:20 plane ride from St. Petersburg to Berlin, so when we woke, it was as if the former were a dream and we'd landed on a new planet. Niko was gone, and instead we had Karin, whom her husband called our “native tongue talker.” On the cab ride to our hotel, she and the driver jabbered away in German with gusto and hilarity, which set a positive introduction to the last leg of our trip.

Altes Museum

Neues Museum

For our first day in Berlin, the #100 bus took us to Museum Island, a collection of five museums in the Spree River. We visited only two of them, the Altes (old) and the Neues (new). Since Berlin was mostly reduced to rubble by 1945, the Germans, like the Russians, had a choice: rebuild or restore. The Russians rebuilt their famous buildings to look the way they had before the war; the Germans restored what was left of theirs. The Neues Museum, which the Nazis closed in 1939, reopened seventy years later, in 2009!

The building retained its footprint, but most of its rooms were made of new materials into which, like random pieces of mosaic, the builders inserted broken segments of the old walls or ceilings. The result was effective, but totally different from the rebuilt buildings of St. Petersburg.

Antinous

Praying Boy

The Altes Museum had a stunning collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman sculptures and artifacts including several busts and even one larger-than-life statue of Antinous, the young lover of Hadrian, who drowned in the Nile at 21 and was then made a god. It also had a striking bronze statue from the Island of Rhodes, The Praying Boy, dating back 2300 years.

The Newes Museum, although it had some Roman pieces, focused mainly on Egyptian art. In a room of her own was perhaps the world's most famous bust, Queen Nerertiti, who is every bit as beautiful and amazing as we had hoped she would be. Not only was she a supermodel for the ages (beginning 3340 years ago), she was also a recognizable human being.

Ephraim Palais

We then went off the island in search of the Ephraim Palais, an 18^th Century house built on a curve in the street by Frederich the Great's banker. The architect solved the challenge of building on the site by making the central room an oval to correspond with the street, and two wings running straight on either side. Unfortunately, although the building's shell was elegant, it had no period furnishings and is now used to display totally unrelated exhibits. This was disappointing, but right next to it was a delightful square where we could sit outside for our well-earned Kaffee und Kuchen.

The trip back to the hotel was an adventure, since all the roads around the museums were closed for a bike race. No buses, no taxis, no way home. So we limped down Unter den Linden until Bob and our native tongue talker discovered a subway station and guided us back via the City's major train station, Hauptbahnhof.  

BEFORE BERLIN - OUR LAST DAY IN SAINT PETERSBURG

After a brief stop at the Kazan Cathedral to watch part of a Russian sung mass and to pay our respects to Field Marshal Kutuzov, the one who defeated Napoleon in 1812, we took the Metro to Peter and Paul Cathedral. The Metro is every bit as deep as the tube in London, so we thought that when we emerged, people might be speaking Chinese.

The Cathedral is inside a fortress on an island in the Neva. Both were built by Peter the Great, although the Cathedral was completed in 1733, eight years after his death. The fortress never saw action except during the Nazi siege, and like most other historic sites, the Russians began to restore the damaged buildings immediately after the war.

Inside Peter and Paul Cathedral

Surprisingly, the tombs of the tsars are almost all identical, even those of Peter I and Catherine II. The family of Nicholas II, however, got a whole room to themselves. The building is relatively simple by Russian standards, and it was interesting to see artists at work restoring some of the gold leaf.

Russian Royal Coat of Arms

Spire of Peter and Paul's

Looking at the city from the Island

We did not visit the fortress prisons where various notables stayed when they were out of fashion including Dostoyevsky, Gorky, and Trotsky. We did pause, though, to examine the royal coat of arms over the front gate of the fortress, admire the view of the shoreline across the Neva with the Hermitage and the golden dome of St. Isaac's Cathedral, and, on our walk back over the bridge, to take a last look at the needle-like spire of Peter and Paul's.

A stroll down Nevsky Prospect brought us back to our hotel, where Niko picked us up for a drive to the airport. We were sad to say goodbye to him, but we were relieved to survive the airport, which was almost as primitive and disorganized as the one in Guardalahara. About all that was missing was the chickens.

Some General Thoughts on St. Petersburg

All three of us were somewhat apprehensive about traveling to this terra incognita. Not only did we have a major hassle getting visas to travel here, but also people who had been there or written about it made it sound like East Berlin before the wall came down—KGB stalking us, having to carry our own toilet paper, putting up with sullen and drably dressed natives, and being lucky to find anything edible. We also envisioned a relatively small city that didn't have much going on except for its rich array of royal palaces and fabulous museums.

Well! Things have changed and are continuing to change fast. Yes, we have only glimpsed it from a tourist's perspective—like a Russian judging America from visits to the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick, and a stroll down Fifth Avenue. But first of all, the City itself is huge—about 4,850,000 people doing all sorts of things that people do in large cities.

Yes, traffic is as hair-raising as any in Boston or New York, but there is nowhere near as much noise. Older residents, such as those sitting in museums as room guards, may look like fierce versions of Mother Russia, but on the streets, people are smartly dressed and mostly young. Vibrant would be a good way to describe the the place.

Language is definitely a barrier, because none of us took the time to learn the Cyrillic alphabet, but most restaurants—and there are lots and lots of them representing all kinds of cuisines—have English translations. So we got along just fine, especially after discovering an excellent Italian place next to the hotel.

Toilets? They were easy to find and they all had toilet paper! KGB? Who knows? There were lots of sailors in dress uniforms, all of them looking about fourteen years old, but the building next to the Hermitage is the Admiralty, so what would you expect?

The one thing that did meet expectations was the general Russian demeanor. Almost no one smiles. Maybe it's in their genes, but maybe Americans smile too much. What we do know is that if you discount the museum guards, people are generally slim, in-shape, well-dressed, and handsome.

Karin, who has observed how East Germany became absorbed into West Germany, summed it up well. She said that Russia (at least the little we saw of it) is making a similar transition to a world that's modern, fashionable, vibrant, and forward-looking. If so, that bodes well for the future of the world.

IF IT'S FRIDAY - IT MUST BE BERLIN

Just a quick post to let you know that we have arrived safely in Berlin. Tired. So we're all heading to bed. Regular post with photos will appear tomorrow.

Trip was very eventful. Saint Petersburg may be a big city in many ways, but the airport is amazingly small. And crowded. Enough to say that the stress level was high!

Gute Nacht!

PETERHOF - GOLDEN FOUNTAINS

Peterhof has a relatively small palace, which we did not visit, and world-famous gardens. It was built by Peter the Great and largely finished by the time of his death in 1725. Much of it was destroyed during the Nazi occupation, but restoration began immediately after the war.

Modeled it on—what else?—Versailles, Peter may have outdone his master in the fountain department. Someone said there are 66 of them, but there seemed to be many more than that, all of them fed by gravity, and each unique. They range from spectacular, the largest shooting a jet of water up 20 meters, to playful. Scattered around the 300 acres are small buildings for retreating in, viewing birds, gazing at the Baltic Sea, or whatever else you might think of.

A few of the fountains were designed as jokes to soak unsuspecting viewers, and Bob was one of them! It had a bench you walked toward on cobble stones, and part way there, jets of water sprung up around the perimeter. He escaped, though, with only the back of one leg soaked.

We took a 30-minute ride on a hydrofoil to get there, and since it rained, as predicted, 40% of the time, we only stayed 2 ½ hours, but the crowds were light—a fair trade-off. This allowed Bob to photograph many of the fountains, statues, and the roofs of the palace without lots of people in the way. As in most of the City, almost everything was slathered in gold-leaf.

   

All through this post, in no particular order, are some of the pictures.

THE HERMITAGE...

Once again, click on the pics for a larger version!

The Winter Palace (only a part of the Hermitage!)

On the steps of the State Museum

Niko picked us up in his car, nicknamed “Boris,” and drove us to the Hermitage. Bob took one more exterior shot of the building that we all expected to be the highlight of the trip. Before going in, he also took a photo of Karin, Niko, and Steward in front of one of the building's many entrances.

The Hermitage, meaning a place of quiet and solitude, was named by Catherine the Great, who founded it, but that was then. Now tourists and tourist buses crowd around its main entrances. However, a quiet word from Niko to the guard whisked us past the long lines and into the building that we'd come many thousands of miles to see.

Technically, the Hermitage consists of six buildings, the central one being the Winter Palace of the tsars. Inside, it was not as jammed with tourists as we'd expected it to be, although there were points where the crush was so deep that we could barely see what was on the walls. This was particularly true of the room housing all the Rembrandt's, perhaps the largest collection in the world. We did catch a minute or two to see each of them before the next tour group flowed in like a tsunami. Other world-famous items were not quite as crowded, but often they were still obscured by tourists wanting to be photographed in front of them.

As we requested, Niko took us for the grand tour for a couple of hours before leaving us to make our own way. In particular, he showed us the state rooms, and his prediction was true. In comparison with the Winter Palace, those summer ones that we'd seen a couple of days ago seemed like mere cottages.

It's hard to describe the excesses of this building. We walked first up the grand staircase, and Bob took several shots of it along the way. 

Then we walked through room after room, each more opulent than the last. Bob took a few photos of rooms to give some idea of their size.

 

Finally, he gave up and focused on ceilings and parquet floors to give some idea of their incredible craftsmanship. One of the floors had connecting circles that seemed to run endlessly down a corridor of rooms, each circle made of exotic woods carefully shaped and connected by hand.

And that was just the state rooms. Through them and elsewhere in the museum's 1001 rooms were displayed some of the world's largest collection of paintings. We saw many “old friends” that we'd known from art books over the years, but a few stood out. For Karin, it was Fragonard's The Stolen Kiss. For all of us was Caravaggio's The Lute Player and Matisse's The Dance. When we made it finally to the last of these, the room was almost empty of tourists, and for a few minutes, we could be alone with it. The painting is over twelve feet by eight feet, so we could stare at it from across the room with no one posing in front of it.

In all, we spent six hours in the Hermitage, and Karin said that it had more than met her expectations. She found no dissenting opinions from either of us.