In the Year 1702, Berlin

It was difficult, but in a nice way, to carry out my historical experimentation today. T. came over to the apartment to have breakfast with us, and what with the leftover food from yesterday, her plans to cook lasagne again, and the potatoes and tinned fish she also bought, it seemed wiser not to cook food from the early 1700s on top of that.

So I walked to the zero waste shop in the neighbourhood, for penne pasta, red lentils, aniseed, a candle and a dish scrubbing brush, following it up with a trip to the bank. (Where all the machines were working except the ones where I tried printing an up-to-date statement.)

And it was abundantly clear that there is another challenge in researching the Baroque period on a Saturday: it is so much noisier, so filled with vehicles, so modern in every way, than I imagine even the epicentre of London around 1702 would have been more easygoing. Besides I felt the leftover muscle ache from one of the ways I've tried to cheer myself up this past week: working through Jane Fonda's first, 1982 workout video. Which is also not very 1702.

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Nearer Home

Either way, I still went to an outdoor market. Someone was singing the Beatles' "Lady Madonna" to the accompaniment of a guitar, and it was packed. Fruit juice stands with piles of oranges and pomegranates ready to be freshly pressed were all the rage in Berlin today. And of course there were hundreds of other things to see, eat, buy and drink. But I bought big, red Boskoop apples because my mother likes them, socks, licorice allsorts that my siblings adored, and a bag of dark purple Muscat grapes.

On the way back home, I dropped by a little shop in the middle of 1960s-esque social housing. Amidst the pretty Mediterranean rugs and throws, I selected two Aleppo soaps. One was an unpackaged brown laurel soap, and the other was wrapped in a shiny white paper package with Arabic [Well, this is embarrassing. I just looked at the package today and it was just very small writing in German.] writing that I couldn't read. The shopkeeper seemed pleased, explained that the laurel soap was a body soap while the other was for the face (evidently guessing that I hadn't been able to read the package), and directed me with stern friendliness not to leave the soaps lying in water. I was fairly sure that he was from Syria himself; and the shop feels nostalgic about a lost world to me, also in the detail of the torn Persian rug that served as a makeshift screen between the back and front of the premises.

It was one of the places I visited today, which I've been passing by and been longing to explore for a long time.

***

Last week I was more successful in researching 1701, sticking to walking around quiet parklands and isolated cobbled streets that are less attractive to cars, and beginning to figure out how to dial back 21st-century hygiene without risking illness. For example, I fill a large pottery bowl with water, then use a large wooden spoon as a dipper, to avoid always using the modern indoor tap.

Reading is possible with a candle, after dark. And depending on the sunniness of the weather, the homemade sundial on my windowsill has enough hour markings on it now that I can more or less use it reliably until nightfall.

***

To Berlin's City Centre

The Arsenal, Berlin, Germany
(Zeughaus, at Unter den Linden)
via Wikimedia Commons

Today I wanted to explore more of medieval and Baroque-era Berlin, this time in the shape of the Zeughaus building on Unter den Linden (now home of the German Historical Museum), and the Marienkirche at Alexanderplatz.

So I began walking, much to my surprise coming across first the Mayor of Berlin, who stood on the sidewalk with two security officials and a cameraman who was still emerging from the buildings where she'd just had an engagement.

Then amongst the skyscrapers at Potsdamer Platz, two buses from the soccer team FC Bayern München pulled out of a side street I was trying to cross. In the end, the Bavarians beat our home team 3-2.

Near Brandenburg Gate I was fascinated by another passerby. Maybe in her fifties, hair cropped, tucked in the shapeless tan trench coat of a 1980s journalist, but with a grey leather tote bag in her hand and an expensive-sounding clop-clop of pump shoes that I couldn't see beneath the coat. I was impressed by her air of having places to go, as other tourists flocked aimlessly around us. And when she took a phone call with a pleasant, warm voice — she must have been talking to a dear friend — her accent was Berliner. I think she was headed to an office near Pariser Platz.

At the Gate itself, a throng of protesters was holding Iranian flags with gold crests in the centres, and a man was chanting something that was hard to hear from a distance but must have been 'Freiheit.' On the other side of the gate, groups of three policemen each were guarding the American embassy, and black cars were thronging to ferry around the elite guests of the Hotel Adlon.

On Unter den Linden, I eventually reached another protest: the island of candles, flowers, and Ukrainian flags in front of the Russian Embassy. It was quite moving.

At the Prussian State Library building, I briefly popped into the courtyard. It used to be one of my favourite places to go in Berlin when my family first moved back here. What I hadn't noticed before is that there seem to be bullet-pocks on the pillars in the courtyard, facing away from Unter den Linden, presumably left over from a shoot-out during World War II.

The New Museum

At last I reached Museum Island, and read the information sign with the helpful sketch of what the Lustgarten in front of the Berliner Dom would have looked like in the 17th century. The Pomeranzenhaus looked lighter and nicer than the bulky Stadtschloss, and while I'm not a big fan of sprawling formal French gardens the general layout really was quite fancy; but apparently the premises weren't open to the public then.

It took me a while to figure out where the Neues Museum was. Its entrance abutted on a courtyard, and the wooden doors looked more like service entrances.

I was worried throughout that with the kangaroo pouch in my hoodie I'd be suspected of being yet another environmental protester ferrying around a liquid to wreak my political convictions on an innocent artwork. We were definitely directed to leave all outdoor jackets and bags in the cloak room.

While buying the ticket in the modern James Simon Gallery building, I'd also asked at the information desk how to get to the collections of the former Museum for Vor- und Frühgeschichte at the Schloss Charlottenburg. It turned out that they're on the top floor, and I was glad I'd spared myself the time of searching.

As a moderate loathing of Heinrich Schliemann has been a family tradition ever since a friend of the family read us an enthusiastic biography of him and his wonderful polyglot feats, and inadvertently converted some of us into his fiery foes, I skipped past the Indiana Jones attractions of the exhibition dedicated to him with little regret. (Amongst archaeologists, I think he's experiencing a partial rehabilitation, so none of the professors whose courses I attended spoke of him with scorn.) Instead, I went straight up the staircase surrounded by the bare restored classicist brickwork that won Chipperfield so many accolades when the building was renovated.

In this museum, provided one isn't climbing a staircase, about to fall into a vitrine, or in someone's way, it's generally also worthwhile to look up. You find strange brickwork that look like the bottoms of wine bottles in a dome, scraps of lovely old frescos, and quirky 19th-century-esque fretwork beams.

The room I first landed in from the Vor- und Frühgeschichte collections had a wooden floor that scrunched underfoot. It was also a hodgepodge, as each row of vitrines reflected the heteroclite tastes of 19th- and early 20th-century antiquarians and collectors, like the famous Rudolf Virchow.

And I became aware that I've become a little too politically correct for museums. Looking at ancient artifacts from 6th century Iran or Mesopotamia or the Black Sea that had just landed in Berlin for ... reasons, really just felt like legalized robbery to me. That said, the beautifully intact, partly massive pottery, the intricate Bronze Age spearheads, and really huge old flints made me thrill with the sense of human achievement and the feeling of happiness that the archaeologists must have had when they found these. The difference between picking up the millionth shapeless pottery shard — and unearthing that rare find that requires little imagination, effort, or truth-stretching to perceive as it was thousands of years ago, and that also communicates across the gap of time the tastes and refined skills of an old craftsman — is huge.

There were also little quantities of horse riding stirrups, clothing clasps, and swords from the Middle Ages in Germany, which were exactly what I was looking for.

But the best part was the room dedicated to the archaeology of Berlin. It had a lead coffin of a nobleman of the Johanniter order, discovered underneath the foundations of our City Palace, smushed in at the top, but decorated with a beautiful lion's head and ring handle at one end. Besides a perfectly intact blue glass bottle, pot-bellied and formerly filled with gin imported from London; 19th century building sculpture; stained glass fragments from the church of St. Petri; sauceboats from the luxury restaurant Lutter & Wegner that had been deformed in the Allied bombing of Berlin; a threatening-looking machine gun and ammunition belt from a soldier, recovered from the former concentration camp at Berlin-Lichterfelde, to remind museumgoers of the brutality of the Nazis; and other things I've forgotten.

It included finds from amongst the foundations of the medieval church of St. Petri; and since I often cycle past there, I was determined to see the site in person.

After that, I not exactly power-walked, but let's say 'skimmed,' through the other exhibitions.

I say so not out of Schliemann-enmity but out of genuine conviction, that there are a few remarkably kitschy oil paintings in his special exhibition. But a peacock-coloured blue faience vase from ancient Egypt was truly beautiful.

The Roman artifacts in other rooms were worth a second look (which I didn't give them), and so were the ancient Greek vases (reminiscent of T.'s favourite room when we saw the British Museum together). I was amazed to see gold measuring scales as a representative of Viking archaeology, and liked the very Giacometti-looking 9th century cult idol. The human skulls and bones scattered around several rooms (also the rings, eyeglasses, false teeth and a kidney stone in the Berlin Archaeology exhibit) felt like grave-robbing to me. And I walked quickly around a mysterious conical bronze hat that as far as I recall came from ancient Mesopotamia, and passed through the room with the bust of Nefertiti.

Medieval Berlin and Cölln

Back outside, I walked toward Alexanderplatz. There I visited the Marienkirche. Its field stone walls are dark at the bottom, lighten beigely toward the top, and then peak into a tarnished greenish spire that was not around yet in the early Middle Ages. The white and red painted patterns within the tops of the tall windows were a surprise. That said, Alexanderplatz is really not a place of quiet and meditation, and the 1960s opulence of the TV Tower really does overwhelm the church.

Inside, I'd say none of its medieval character remains except for the architectural bones. When I started reading the epitaphs on the walls, I could surmise why: the heyday of the church had apparently been in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, because that is when most of the epitaphs were put up. I think that the sculptured staircase to the pastor's perch was also Baroque or Classical, and carvings at the altar had the same over-the-top aesthetic. But the church itself is pretty simple: a few slender columns, no complex aisles, fine-boned ribbed vaulting at the very top of the walls but no other ornamentation. Berlin was not very rich or large in the 13th century, I imagine, and I think the church was built well before the frills and furbelows of Perpendicular style.

A few people were sitting singly in the wooden pews, absorbed in apparently gloomy thoughts. A few of us were also ambling around in front of the altar or around the side aisles. On a white table near the roped-off area and the basin of holy water, there was a book where one could write wishes for peace in Ukraine, and I was rather moved to see a recent entry in Cyrillic writing; and blue and yellow tea lights were burning in two racks beside it.

What I hadn't known until I read it in German Wikipedia just now, is that Martin Luther King, Jr., preached in this church in the 1960s and said that 'no border can divide God's children.'

After leaving the church again, I set off in the direction of the twin spires of the equally medieval Nikolaikirche, passing the Rotes Rathaus as I went.

It was only after I reached the church that the question came to mind what someone in the 18th century, or the 13th, would have seen as they walked between the spires (if there was foot traffic between the two, and it wasn't a Montague and Capulet type situation). Fields? town houses?

I didn't see an entry point to the church, and was too lazy to circle back to at least read the grey epitaphs. But it was in a quiet zone, cobbled, with a few tourists eating at the small restaurants and cafés. The front of the church, with its fountain outside and the two towers rising from it, reminded me strongly of the onion-dome church in Munich. Reconstructed in the 80s during the commemoration of the 750th anniversary of Berlin, one of the buildings had projecting stories that jutted toward the church, and a huge sign that here Gotthold Ephraim Lessing had finished writing his play Minna von Barnhelm in 1767.

At the church, signs had also pointed to the fact that for example the German theologian and hymn writer Paul Gerhardt had been a deacon at the Nikolaikirche. It didn't say much to me until I returned home and found out that he wrote some of the touchingly simple Baroque Christmas songs that I know: "Wie soll ich dich empfangen?" and "Ich steh an deiner Krippen hier."

After that I began travelling back home, and on the way I found the wooden boards encircling the medieval city square of St. Petri. The enclosure has two windows cut into it so that passersby can see the archaeological site. The wire fence across one window had been laid open at the side, judging by a beer bottle that lay inside apparently for the purposes of carousing. But beyond the excavated construction rubble and sand, the grass and herbs, and the bottle, I saw dusty pale pillar stubs that used to hold up the medieval church. Beyond that, at the distant wall, a much deeper excavation.

On the fence itself there was also a poster that (in my view, unfortunately) showed an artist's rendering of the multi denominational religious building that's intended to be built over the site. Not that I object to the good intentions, but the architect's aesthetic is a little ... bare to me.

Winding Down the Adventure

Winding my way back to the main street, I was tempted into another warren of post-war buildings, which partly looked like 1960s low income housing. But there was a low building with white-painted metalwork chairs outside, chalkboards advertising traditional German cooking including desserts like plum cake, Kaiserschmarrn and rice pudding, and flowers. I made my way in through the hallway, surprised to see that the fitted kitchen behind the counter was straight out of a 1980s or 90s American home or diner, and asked for a slice of plum cake — then also saw slices of delectable-looking Stollen with squidgy marzipan centres, and asked for one of those too. It turned out that the restaurant had just closed, so the man at the counter wrapped it up for me to go. (He and his partner also seemed to be listening to the Hertha BSC - FC Bayern München game.) He reduced the price a bit for me, and I asked him if he accepted tips (since he hadn't done the full restaurant service deal due to closing time, I thought it was better to ask in case he was touchy about it), and he looked really happy about the admittedly meagre 50 cents I handed him.

What was sad was that an elderly lady with a walker and (presumably) her granddaughter had just come in and wanted to eat. They had to leave again, hungry, the walker carefully manoeuvered over the high step at the entrance.

*

Illustration by Ernest Howard Shepard
from Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), by A A Milne
via Wikimedia Commons

Wolfing down the Stollen as I walked, I stopped to lean on bridges on the way home. Below one, a thick pale greenish frothing of decidedly agitated water lay underneath an artificial waterfall of a river lock. I decided to play a game of Pooh-sticks, in honour of the A.A. Milne book, and tried to spot a linden leaf again after it shot over the edge. But the leaves didn't fully rise to the surface again all the time — a few lurked inches underneath the surface — so I only spotted the second or third one I tried this with.

That isn't everything that happened today — I could talk about my writing with a goose quill and finally figuring out that I need to dip it far into the ink pot if I want to write more than one sentence at a time. Or many other things. But even if it isn't an authentically 18th century thing, I figure that Pooh sticks are a nice note to end on. Except that I'll add: as I walked home from my long outing, the sun set and I was reminded of Thomas Gray's 1740s verse:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day;
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea;
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.