This was our last day in Berlin. At breakfast, we sat with Victor and Lisa, our friends from Chichester. They told us about visiting her niece who lives here in Berlin. We told them about our adventures riding bicycles and going to the symphony. We did not bond with many people on the Viking cruise although they all seemed rather nice. Perhaps we should have tried harder. Or maybe we did not have much in common with most of them after all. I am not sure.
I had made arrangements before we left for a guided tour of the Pergamon and Neue Museums. The Pergamon was one of the few places in Berlin that I absolutely had to see. John and I hopped on our bikes and headed towards the center. My success with the Garmin bike GPS has been a bit uneven. Sometimes I have managed to get it to guide to me exactly where I want us to go. At other times, such as this morning, it seemed to do the opposite. After a few minutes of the little thing trying to send me in what I absolutely knew was the wrong direction I gave us and just used my phone. It is a wonder I did not kill myself or at least destroy the phone riding with only one hand on the streets of downtown Berlin.
We somehow made it, and I had little difficulty identifying our guide and our group standing under the colonnade by the Neue Museum. Our guide was a British guy named Nick. He was by profession an archeologist though the current situation in Syria had made doing work there a little difficult at the moment. He had been living in Berlin for over 20 years and was married to a German woman. He was clearly very smart and I liked him right away, although, as John pointed out, "arrogant does not even begin to describe him." The group was manageably small, about ten people in all, I think. The rest of our group came from Australia, the United Kingdom, and there was an Indian doctor from somewhere in New Jersey. Nick talked pretty much nonstop, so we did not get to know much about any of them.
I booked this through Viatour, and they bill many of their many of their tours as "skip-the-line." Tickets are prepurchased and there is usually some arrangement with the museum or attraction for priority entrance. When I saw the long line waiting for admission to the Pergamon, I was quite happy we had splurged on this! Nick seemed to relish all of this. "Use your elbows. Just push past them!" Not very British, but certainly effective.
We stopped in front of a large map of the Middle East to get some background. Nick through out an lot of information including dates really quickly.
If I did not already have a reasonably good idea of who the Akkadians, the Assyrians, the Hittites, and the Babylonians already were, I am not sure any of it would have made sense. Standing in place is hard for John, so he wandered around a bit during this lengthy background briefing. But it was soon time to look at the crown jewel of this collection, the Ishtar Gate from Babylon. Nick explained that most of the city of Babylon was made of mud brick and was probably a rather dull brown color. So when Nubuchadnezzar decided to build a grand ceremonial entrance to the city, using glazed tiles was an tremendous innovation. It is impressive today; it must have been unbelievably impressive in its time.
When the Germans arrived to do archeological work in Babylon in the late nineteenth century, the British, the Americans, and the French had all been there for a while. They were apparently mostly interested in finding things that were mentioned in the Old Testament, so they had not bothered to excavate a largish tell that did not seem to be located anywhere near the Biblical sites. It was the good fortune of the Germans that this proved to be the site of the Ishtar gate.
As we currently see it, the gate is extensively reconstructed. There were tens of thousand of fragments of tiles and it they were not all located in situ. But there were enough to get an idea of what the gate must have originally looked like, and the Germans, reconstructing the gate inside this museum, made new tiles to supplement what was missing. Today curators would not do this; they would, instead, simply add an artist's depiction of what the site probably looked like to the interpretive material. But that would not even begin to have the impact that the "restored" gate has, and I am grateful that modern standards did not prevail back then.
We went on to see the other massive gate that the museum holds, the gate to the city of Miletus. Located south of Ephesus, Miletus was a Greek colony that had been rebuilt by the Romans. As part of the rebuilding, the Romans create an elaborate gate for the principal entrance to the city. Once again, thanks to the fact that the Ottoman Empire was desperate for European cash, the Germans bought it, disassembled it, and put it back together in Berlin. It's impressive, but not as impressive as the Ishtar Gate.
He pointed out the figure of Orpheus on the floor tile.
He went on and on about how all these stories of Greek gods dying and rising again were obviously the inspiration for the New Testament. I thought this line of reasoning with its obvious post hoc, propter hoc fallacies had disappeared after The Golden Bough had been so thoroughly discredited a century ago, but apparently it must still be a staple in British schools. Nick also talked about how all these Roman structure had once been brightly painted. I thought about mentioning the Getty Villa but decided against it as the art and archeology people seem to have strong feelings about the Getty Museum. I suspected that Nick's politics was probably to the left of the Labour party, so he probably would much care for the the richest museum on earth.
We saw a few other things in the Pergamon and then Nick took us over to the Neue Museum. This is the museum that displays all the antiquities that are not in the Pergamon, and also art and ethnographic artifacts related to German origins. We saw a lot of stuff here and in no particular order. We spent some time looking at this wonderful Hellenistic statue.
We appreciated it more than the school group did. The bust of Nefertiti is probably the most prized item in the collection here, so much so that they are incredibly vigilante in pouncing on any tourist who dares to pull out a phone or a camera. We did get to take pictures of this Middle Kingdom monument.
Probably the item that interested me the most was this ancient cone-shaped item. Archeologists think it may have been worn as a hat, but this is not certain. What they can determine is that it displays the 19 year cycle of the sun and the moon. This item, which dates perhaps to the second millennium before Christ, shows that people at that time had keenly observed the solar and lunar cycles and were even able to use these to predict possible dates for eclipses.
While all the objects we saw in the Neue Museum were interesting, I think we were even more fascinated by the building itself. When the museum was built in the late nineteenth century to house this collection, the walls were decorated with frescoes that depicted scenes from the ancient world. I must have been gloriously tacky. But the museum was nearly gutted during the war. For decades, only the hollow shell of the building remained. When the decision to rebuild the museum was made, they decided not to reconstruct the old building. Instead, they built a new building in and around the old one. This is not quite like leaving a burned out shell like they did at the Kaiser Wilhelm Church. Instead, the near and the old are joined together so that the new museum seems to display the fragments of the old one as if they were archeological items in their own right. It is an absolutely stunning piece of architecture. Sadly, I was so impressed I forgot to take any pictures of it.
After three hours of looking and listening our tour was over. We had seen a lot, but there was still much more we could see. Our ticket was good for all day to all the museums. John was feeling pretty exhausted by this time, however, and he wanted to go back to the hotel. He encouraged me to stay, and I decided to take a look at the Altes Museum. The "old" museum is indeed an older building than the "new museum," though probably not all that much older. All of these museum were built in the aftermath of what the Prussians called "German unification" and what other areas of Germany thought us as the Prussian conquest. The Germans wanted to show the world that not only were they just as powerful as the British but that they were just as cultured. Having big museums done in a grandly classical style was part of that.
The collection inside this wonderful building is not that great. There are a few pieces by some prominent painters, but most of it is undistinguished paintings and sculptures done by artists that you have probably never heard of unless you happened to be writing a thesis on pre-World War I German art. The better stuff — mostly NOT by German artists — is at the front after you enter. There is a lovely gallery devoted to the Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen.
And there was a statue called “The Bronze Age” by Rodin. I wondered if he thought about the fact that it would turn green with age. Right now I think it suggests Martians more than Greeks….
Mostly the Pergamon is a gallery of oil paintings. I could barely pay any attention at all to the landscapes and still lifes. Most of them looked like something that somebody brought to Antiques Roadshow. I do have a soft spot for those big nineteenth century narrative canvases. Here is Prospero and Ariel.
After our time as Sanssouci, I did appreciate a bit more all the painting about Frederick the Great. This was the best of them. Old Fritz is given a concert for his guests.
And I just loved all the German imperialist stuff like Kaiser Wilhelm
and Otto von Bismarck.
Not to mention this canvas showing Prussian soldiers billeted with a Parisian family after the French lost the war in 1870. Thank that, you effete Frenchies!
There was one small room with the slightly weird stuff in it. I am surprised I have never seen this one before. It is called like “My Sin” or some other name one might give an overpriced perfume.
After about a half hour, I was ready to go back. I had a little more luck this time programming the GPS, although I had done this ride two or three times by this time and probably could have made it on memory alone. John had taken a nap and a bath, and he was ready to get packed up. We checked the room over several times as we have a tendency to leave something behind in just about every hotel room. We settled our bill at the desk, and caught a cab to the train station.
The Berlin train station is just what you would expect from this city. It is clean, efficient, modern, and safe. It would be hard to imagine anything more different than our experience in Split. And we had high hopes that our experience of Snälltåget, the Swedish national railroad, would be opposite of our experience on the Croatian railroads. We were somewhat disappointed.
Our sleeping compartment was exactly the same as it had been on the Zagreb night train. There were six bunks in the room, three on each side. The middle bunk could be flipped up to create a seating area. The car was hot, though it was not quite as stifling as the earlier sleeping car. The Swedish one looked like it had been built in the seventies, and it needed some repair work. Still, it somewhat cleaner than the one in Croatia. And we did have bed linens provided for us. There were comforters created from some kind of petroleum byproduct, and a duvet cover for each. Pillows were slightly nicer than the Croatian ones, and the pillow cases matched the duvet covers. As John observed, the linens were exactly what you would expect from the country than invented Ikea.
I made beds for us. With the windows opened, the car cooled down quickly. Most of the lights worked. I tried to read; John napped. Periodically we would look out the window. The train was out of Berlin quickly, and we saw vast wheat fields punctuated with woodlands. I was surprised by how empty the land seemed. I always think of Europe as a crowded continent, but there are many places where the population is clearly small and probably getting smaller. The were points when I thought that nothing here looked different than it had when Napoleon had marched his troops across this land two centuries ago.
The train went about as far as Rostok, I think. I was not watching the map on my phone. At that point, the entire train, about six cars, was loaded onto an enormous ferry. Most of our train trip, I discovered, would actually be on a boat. I have taken many car ferries before in Europe, but I have never seen one before that carried an entire train.
We were both quite hungry by this point, so we left the train and went to find something to eat on the ship. The whole place looked exactly like I remembered these ferries from years ago. People were trying to sleep in uncomfortable chairs with lights bright enough to elicit a confession. Children were crying and running about. Just about everyone who was awake and old enough to drink was drinking. We found the cafe. The hot table food did not look particularly good, but we were too famished to be snobbish about this. I had a soggy pork cutlet that was supposed to be snitzel. John had the Swedish meatballs, and decided that the Ikea version was far better.
We are going to get some sleep tonight with a little assistance so that we will be awake for tomorrow’s journey. We should land in Malmo at about 7:00 and we will catch another train for Stockholm around 8:00. The last leg of our grand European trip is starting.
