Mendelssohn in Berlin

Composer Felix Mendelssohn was a Berliner -- he grew up here in an extremely plugged-in intellectual household. Old Goethe use to drop by in the evenings for margaritas and Trivial Pursuit (well not exactly that, but it was that sort of thing). So since I'm in Berlin now, here is some more about Mendelssohn (continuing the story that was at the bottom of this blog posting, in case you missed it).

When Felix had grown up and become a famous composer, he used to travel to England all the time and hang out with a couple of other German music lovers at Buckingham Palace -- Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. All three of them spoke German at home, although Vicky and Al would never speak it in public, of course (even though this was years before Victoria's grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II started all that "Great War" trouble in Europe). They would pass evenings together making music. 

In Düsseldorf and Leipzig, statues of Mendelssohn stood for decades in front of the town concert halls. But Mendelssohn's grandfather Moses, a famous philosopher, was a Jew, and although Felix and his parents and siblings were all baptized in the early 1800s, as far as the Nazis were concerned Mendelssohn was still a Jew. His "degenerate" music was banned, and in 1936 they pulled down the statues. The Düsseldorf one was melted down for metal but the fate of the Leipzig one is unknown. Both statues have now been replaced.

When I was 17,

instead of composing glorious timeless music, I was reading Mad comics and jerking off. But when Felix was 17, inspired by Schlegel's translations of Shakespeare, he composed this overture (click here). At 3:16 in the piece, notice the "Hee-haw! Hee-haw!" (in the play, as you will doubtless recall, the character Bottom has been turned into a donkey - Ha ha!).

Friday, Saturday, & Sunday, September 30 and October 1st & 2nd

On Friday I took the fast train from Hamburg to Berlin. There were four ladies sitting at a table across from me and they played cards and drank beer and laughed and laughed and laughed all the way to Berlin. They had brought their beer along with them. Lots of it.

In Berlin I bought a 7-day local travel ticket and dragged the suitcase to Jan's airbnb place, on the 6th floor of a modern apartment complex 2 blocks from Alexanderplatz. Jan, a Berliner, is an art student at Humboldt University. His place is full of paintings and smells of oil paint. Dozens of paintings are leaning against the walls of the room he paints in. He speaks Russian, having lived there for several years. Right now he is studying Czech and Polish. The picture is what I see from my pillow - the illuminated Fernsehturm (TV tower) in Alexanderplatz.

Jan is a very nice young man. He obviously cleaned up the bathroom and his bedroom for me (he sleeps on the couch in the living room), but he's a college-student-type mess. I peeked into the living room to see if he was there once so I'd know whether or not to lock the door, and there are snack bags and bottles and clothes and underwear all over the place. I hope he's not depressed or something.

Missus Slade and I have already done the museums and major tourist sites, so I wanted just to check out the city and listen to the Germans talking. I spent Saturday looking at just about every used book at the many stalls of the flea market behind the Bodemuseum on the river, and then spent the whole afternoon at Dussmann's huge bookstore

Friedrichstraße, from the window
of the film & DVD section of
Dussmann's bookstore

on Friedrichstraße. I finally found a book I've been looking for (about the post-war expulsion of the Germans from the east of the Reich). And I had a lot of fun just seeing what was there. It's a wonderful store. I think Germans read more than Americans do.

Sunday I went down to the defunct Tempelhof Airfield, now used as a big big open space for kite-flying, cycling, jogging, skateboarding, etc. This is where planes came and went during the Berlin Airlift.

Lots of info - e.g., pictures of Gina Lollobrigida and Cary Grant arriving there in the 60s for the Berlinale film festival. Kiddies were driving little electric cars around the disused runways.

I came back north and visited the

Invalidenfriedhof, an old cemetery that Missus Slade and I had stumbled on during a previous visit. It's full of military heroes - big shots mostly who were killed in WWI but also some from WWII.  A lot of them even "fell" during the Franco-Prussian War, and even before that. A great place to take pictures.

From there I went to the New Synagogue (info here) on Oranienburger Straße with its amazing Ottoman dome. I knew it had been torched during Kristallnacht and later bombed by the Allies, and only the restored front part and dome remain, but I always wanted to see inside, so I went in. The site is surrounded by cops and video cameras, and there is airport-type x-ray security. 

The ticket counter lady heard my accent and asked where I was from, and then she switched to American English. She explained what I wouldn't see because of the torching and bombing, and I said I knew that but I wanted to check it out. I sheepishly said that I thought maybe we (the US) had bombed it, but she checked with a colleague and told me that it was the Brits who bombed it. "So you're off the hook," she said. Ha ha! Whew! There's a nice little museum with artifacts and history and architectural info.

I walked to the Deutsches Theater and bought a ticket for that night's performance of a drama version of Alfred Döblin's novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, and I asked for a seat from which I could see the projected English surtitles. The ticket guy also asked where I was from and I told him, but he didn't switch to English. I said I had come here to improve my German, and he said, "Then you mustn't look at the English surtitles!"

I remembered a little Vietnamese restaurant in the area, where Missus Slade and I had eaten, and I couldn't find that one but I found another one and had a big bowl of pho. I figured there's nothing better than watching a German play with a belly full of pho.

I would describe the play (info here) as what the Germans call "durcheinander," meaning all-over-the-place. It was technically well done, and mostly shouted, in Berlin dialect. Even when I could read the surtitles in time, it didn't make much sense, since (just like the novel) the narrative proceeds in a patchwork-collage of impressions. I had read part of it once, but I got bogged. 

The play was up-to-the-minute avant-garde. After the first 25 minutes, which included an extended bombastic soliloquy from a full-frontal nude male followed by THREE instances of energetic simulated sexual intercourse, the nicely dressed lady sitting beside me stood up and crept out of the hall. At the interval, so did I.

Random observation:

I love listening to tiny kids talking on the subway trains. A little girl boarded with her daddy, jumped into a seat and patted the seat next to her shouting, "Papa, platz dich hier! Papa, platz dich hier!" It's so cute. A 4-year-old exclaimed to his mama as they boarded the train, "Wir sind unten!" Then, pointing out the window at the tunnel wall, he asked, "Ist das die Erde?" These toddlers never make a mistake about noun gender! I assume their parents drill them on gender and grammar before they leave home in the morning. That's the only possible explanation.