March 31: Ich bin kalt Berliner!

I may never be warm again! We slept in this morning and then headed to the Bode Museum -- we both found new art to love. After quite a few hours, we headed off to the Altes Museum, where we made it through the Greek exhibit before Ian's sleepless night made him ready to go -- before the Roman and Etruscan floor, which shows you just how tired he is!

We decided to brave the cold (1 degree with hurricane force winds) and walk to the Reichstag and Tiergarten. About halfway along, it started to rain hard, and my "raincoat" decided it wasn't waterproof. Just as I said, "I'm tired of this! Make it stop, Ian!" it started to hail and it hurt! Therefore we saw the Holocaust and Roma Memorials under suitably austere conditions, but were denied entrance to the Reichstag dome, as we forgot to make an appointment. We had a nice dinner, and an evening back in our cell should put everything right.

We later discovered that we were in the middle of a storm called “Niklas”, which is the worst storm to hit Berlin and Germany in years.  Even the rail service was cancelled today after the Munchen Bahnhof (Munich Train station) had some windows blown out.


The Bode Museum was very beautiful and impressive, just as a building.  Like the rest of Museum Island, it was very close to many of the main buildings of the Third Reich, and was heavily damaged during the war.  The East Germans made a point of restoring the buildings to their former glory.  Unfortunately, some of the larger Greek marble statues were too big to move and store in mines, and marble burns.  We were met at the door by a much damaged statue of Hermes; whose obscured features and darkened colour give some hint of what was lost in the war.

The first area one enters is the Gallery, which was originally intended to be “a temple to Greek art.  This was the area where a fire bomb hit, but the gallery suits its new purpose extremely well.  Each of the niches that once held a statue now holds the alter pieces and other art from a church which was destroyed during the war.   The little person in the orange coat is Margaret, and as you can see, concerts are sometimes given here.

 I particularly liked some of the ceramic pieces.  Germany was the first area outside of China to develop very hard porcelain, and it was extremely valuable, so these alter pieces were given to the glory of God as precious works of art. 

The entrance to the upper galleries is also designed to make an impression, even if the original marble cladding is now a faux finish on plaster that would make Debbie Travis proud. 

The next exhibit was the temporary exhibit, which at the moment is about all of the treasures of German art lost during the war.  The signs are very honest about the war, “which Germany started”, and go on to explain that most of the treasures were stored in mines underground for the duration of the war.  When Germany was taken over, the works of art were appropriated by other governments, especially the Americans and the Soviets, or were stolen in the confusion of transporting and cataloguing, or were destroyed by improper storage, or given as gifts by the Nazis . . . in short, 80% of the works once owned by the Bode are now gone.

Where possible, the fragments of the works of art are shown.  This is all that remains from a very important pieta in the German style.

A saving grace was that plaster copies were taken of many of the statues, and photographs and catalogues were maintained of the museum collection, so in the first few rooms these reproductions, in their original sizes, were placed where the originals once stood. This older man was studying one of these reproductions, and I found it rather sad.

This is a plaster cast of a lost statue, without its top coat of paint to make it look like marble.  One can only imagine what this looked like in the original material.

A later exhibit showed how these reproductions were made.  One statue of a gentleman with beautiful hair was half original, and half replacement pieces made from the cast of the original.  His hair is darkened, his nose replaced, and they fixed the bullet hole in his forehead.

The next stop was the numismatic collection, which is a fancy way of saying “coins and medals”.  It was more interesting to Ian than to me, although I did like the shiny gold Canadian $1,000,000 coin.

Ian was impressed by everything, and took a very long time in this gallery.  Yes, a very long time.  He took about six pictures each of anything more than a 1000 years old, but I will include one token picture from the reign of Heinrich II.

The remaining galleries on the second floor were dedicated to German Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo art.  While these galleries were amazing, I was particularly impressed by the carved wooden sculptures, painted, or not, which seemed to be uniquely German, and very beautiful.

Of course, I was pretty sure that Ian was only there for the Byzantine art, and the mosaics, taken from Ravenna, were really beautiful.  Particularly impressive was the Fifth Century dome mosaic, even though it was purchased on the open market and “redone” to fit the space available in the museum in 1905.

What really delighted both of us, however, was the gizmo below.  We both looked at it and thought “it looks like a marble maze”, but decided it must be something more refined.  But no, it was described as a “gambling machine”, and coloured balls were dropped in the top, and people bet on the winner.  These were so popular that a law was passed forbidding them!

All of the time that we were in the Bode museum, the wind and rain were frantically beating down.  At one point I was pointing out a flag outside the window, advertising the museum, which was whipping back and forth at an alarming rate – but by the time Ian looked, the thing had blown away!

The next stop was a short walk through wind that whipped all heat away – we couldn’t hear each other over the wind!  We went to the Altes Museum, and saw the memorial to the burning of books in the Lustgarten.  Despite what it sounds like, this means Pleasure Garden, and it was originally the kitchen garden to Frederick the Great’s palace that stood opposite.  Here Hitler addressed up to a million people, but now it holds the memorial to the burning of books.

The Altes Museum is dedicated to Greek, Etruscan and Roman artifacts.  There were many things similar to things we had seen before in other places in the Greek section of this museum, but of course there were also things that really caught our attention, including two beautiful ceramics, one the “lip” for a stone sarcophagus.

The other was also a funerary monument, made at a master potters, which showed the death and funeral of a young woman who presumably died in childbirth (her son is passed from hand to hand while she lies on a bier).  This was destroyed in ancient times, and much is missing (the guide sign suggests that a rival family destroyed it), but it was still very beautiful and moving, and I had never seen red figure work except on vases.  As you may know, I really like this type of pottery, having done a paper on it 30 years ago.

The so-called “Berlin Goddess” is probably also a funerary kouri, but no less beautiful for that.  The still bears traces of pigmentation – all Greek marble was originally painted.

The praying boy is also famous – even though his arms were added in the Seventeenth Century, and were probably not raised so high in the original.

The so-called “Treasury” was also very interesting, especially this golden fish found in a field in Poland.  It was made in Greece – how did it get so far from home? 

On the other hand this Celtic helmet made it all the way to Greece from France.

I also liked the Gallery, which arranged the statues in niches on two levels, and gave a good hint at what the Pantheon in Rome might have looked like in antiquity.

Ian was super tired, and we decided to skip the Roman and Etruscan floor.  We will see plenty of this in Tuscany next week, but it gives you a good indication of just how exhausted Ian was feeling.  We are paying very close attention to his energy levels.

We walked out into sunshine, and decided to go back to the Brandenburg Gate and go up the Reichstag.  We were about halfway down the Unter der Linden Strasse when it suddenly started to blow fiercely and then hail on us.  We did visit the Holocaust Memorial and stood above the bunker, and also saw the Memorial to the Roma victims of the Third Reich, but we did not have an appointment to go up the Reichstag, and were so cold we had stopped shivering, so back to our dismal hotel room we went.