High Culture in Berlin

My two days in Berlin were defined by great poppyseed cakes, world-class museums and galleries, and a riveting production of Mozart's Don Giovanni opera in arguably the best opera house in the world. My Deutsche Bahn train pulled into Berlin's Ostbahnhof a few minutes before midnight. I had about 10 crazy minutes of looking around for my old friend Daniel from the University of Victoria before I saw his friendly face. I had no idea what to expect about Berlin - I really had never seen pictures and had some unexplainable preconception of an edgy big city that was slightly sinister. It turned out to be nothing of the kind - rather a sprawling, modern urban landscape with great, tree-lined Napoleonic boulevards that felt very safe and clean.

My friend Daniel has a sunny, paper-strewn flat in a Turkish neighborhood of the city. He is in the final stages of a PhD dissertation on corporate responsibility and civil society in Europe; his mother institution is Cornell University in Ithaca, New York with research periods in Berlin. Our first day exploring Berlin took us to the BundesTag and complex of German parliament buildings. A cool non-stop procession of parliamentarians in black Mercedes and BMWs threaded through our walking tour. I reveled in the wonderful combination of clean, geometric modernist buildings and old heritage monuments. We had a coffee near the Brandenburg Gate, and I marveled at the classical Greek and Roman statues adorning the Gate and other public buildings. We visited the Holocaust Memorial, an expanse of grey cement blocks of different heights covering many city blocks.

Daniel took me to the famous Pergamonmuseum, and we spent a few lovely hours exploring their Classical exhibit, the Syrian exhibit and the wonderful Museum of Islamic Art. The latter was particularly impressive and timely: after spending the last year amidst the desolation and fundamentalism of Afghanistan's current milieu, it was great to see a profile of Islamic society in a richer and more exploratory age. I particularly appreciated rich paintings from the 16th century combining Christian and Islamic icons, scripts and motifs: a celebration of the contributions of both great religions and proof that the current tendency to divisiveness is not the only viable option.

After the museum, we stopped at an Italian restaurant for some gorgonzola cream pasta (amazing!) and made our way to the Berlin Staatsoper to see Mozart's Don Giovanni opera. It was my big wish to see an opera in Berlin and we just managed to obtain two tickets from a last-minute cancellation. The opera house (see picture) itself was a work of art, and I was surprised that it was a small, intimate space and our seats afforded an exceptional view of the stage. It was three and a half splendid hours of musical bliss. I'm not sure why, but I discovered opera in Kabul by downloading it from the internet and listening to it on my ipod during many cooped-up weekends when I was unable to leave the house. And I love Italian, so listening to Italian singing was just heaven. The producer had a modernist interpretation of the set and costumes, and I'm sure the fabulous gowns that the women were wearing must have been Guccis and Pradas...they were gorgeous in various shades of white and black. The plot was sensual, dramatic and certain parts of the melody spine-tinglingly glorious. It was a cultural highlight that I will never forget!

A leisurely tour through the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin was the highlight of my second day. The gallery houses Botticelli, Rafael, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Rubens originals and paintings from other fine Dutch painters. I'm not as intrigued by 16th century Dutch productions, but prefer the Florentine artists like Botticelli. My overall impressions were that women wore great clothes back in the day, and that I'd love to revive some of the more crazy aristocratic fashions. Clearly the female ideal of beauty from the 14th to 16th centuries was pre tanning salons, as evidenced by the white-skinned, thick-thighed and small-breasted beauties of the day. Probably because I'm pregnant, I was unusually attracted to the myriad representations of the Madonna and child. I loved the Madonna faces but found most depictions of baby Jesus pretty terrible - he looks either too fat or too skinny for a normal baby and has a very old face in most pictures! The highlight was Botticelli's Venus with her beautiful golden hair and gentle face.

Through my time in Berlin, it became very clear to me the German love of the classical age. So it was pretty normal for me to love all things Italian after all! Like all my other destinations in Germany and Prague, I felt I could have stayed much longer in Berlin to see more of what the city had to offer. It was such a brief glimpse, but even with such a short visit I felt tremendously satisfied by the culture of Berlin.