TWO TOWERS PLUS ONE
Our tour of Berlin on 12 August 2009 started at the TV tower. evaluate on the pitch at St Mary's Church, where I float up before we with the lift, an angel with wings, swan, tramp occupy discrete banks and engage in their bags and pockets for bottles. I wave back to Hackney: the channel early in the morning, the drinkers in their places, the brisk walkers, all in black, conceived in intensive talks in German. While our artist alienated from occupied pull storage lofts to Berlin, where it is cheaper and more interesting to retaliate young German. Journalists, architects, photographers. One of them pulled me at a bus stop in the Kingsland High Street in a conversation. She sought the famous lesbian district of Hackney, the bars and cafes with the performance artists, of which she had read so much. The spike of the mosque was further south, like a faint echo of the television tower.
As we glide down to Alexanderplatz, he is not there. We are in a different offset east, East London and Essex: Barking, Dagenham, Romford. A desolate square with poorly designed architectural intervention, a railway station and a selection of little more inviting cafes. Confused tourists cut into solid cakes, gurgling coffee substitute. My wife makes a remark about missing dogs and cats. We are in the wrong place, I tell her. Here the dogs are all eaten already. At dinner with the editor, who ordered my Berlin-piece, I learned that there was in the suburbs a lot of dogs. Rather, it was a city of foxes that lived in the cellars of abandoned buildings. The marten, which is home on automobiles and chewing on cables. Even wolves would slowly get closer to the city.
A man I met in Manchester, where I need travel by a city, described to me is as unknown as Berlin, revealed to me that he had begun his own project on Alexanderplatz. He followed the railway line on foot to the Polish border. No photos, many drawings. For a possible graphic novel. "Have you read Doblin? I asked. "Never heard of. . It was just a convenient stop "
The first traces of the World Athletics Championships were displayed in the window of a department store: bloodless albino characters Cheap versions of Leni Riefenstahl's Aryan masters, dressed in matching colors of their nations. The Netherlands, Australia, Korea. Sculptures, white like lard: meatless, muscles steeled to the exercise equipment that could be seen at the gym in the basement of the TV tower. Behind the model is reflected in clouds clouds the blocks of the place. A city in flames. My local informant said that the authorities are nervous just before the elections. Because of the serious participation of Germany in the high-tech aspects of the Afghanistan mission, the people recalled the attacks in Madrid. It was to arrests come, newcomers and native German, in a house in the country.
Unter den Linden us away then, as you would expect from the street, towards the Brandenburg Gate. A refreshing rain cools us. There are to be incorporated so much that it is almost as if we did not go. We are at an airport roll band, a moving sidewalk that takes us through places of approved memory. Isherwood remembers an incident shortly before he left Berlin, as "a group of SA men inflated" chatting and laughing blocked the free passage on this avenue. Continuous were forced to detour through the gutter. The English author studies in the knowledge that a key period of his life is over, the reflections of the public buildings in the windows of elegant shops. He looks "with mournful strength" , as if to impress upon these images in his memory, take them. And build up as fiction again.
The Brandenburg Gate, which was what his view of identity cards promised - namely, that there was finally broken through the wall - is a barrier of another kind: street artists, spontaneous music groups, a horde of tourists. A person who does not know Fritz Lang's early work is probably, in my way. He is dressed as a storm trooper from Star Wars . The franchise is inevitable. A tapsender Bear takes off his head and ask a green-faced vampire soldiers for a cigarette. Looks like one of the dead returning from the battlefield of World War II. Or, as an oxidized military statue, which came down from her pedestal. The smoking bear reminds me of a card from the Film Museum , Brigitte Helm in Metropolis in their on-the-Star-Wars robot outfit shows how hands her a straw, so they can drink from the glass that she holds out a woman in a white coat. While an assistant with a hair dryer to accept their sweat.
On the north side of the avenue promoting the dignified American icon Gary Cooper, Twelve Clock directly from noon for solidarity. "Yup." triumphs The sheriff, before returning his star. Exiled Hollywood leftists such as Carl Foreman distort the Western mythology. And here are themselves distorted. Coop is upright to a limit which is no more. Pedestrians and cyclists like himself is forbidden to walk through the gate or to ride. We have to turn left, make a detour through the park. Why we feel right at home. The effects of a major project, as experienced in London, showing as closure of roads, security barriers to cross public roads, blocked railway stations.
guides want to pull in the group that seeks the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Peter Eisenman's maze of memories - from a garden sharp gray pillars. But we run into a crocodile from older, Poncho supporting cyclists to push their bikes through the obedient allowed entrance to the park. My editor told me
when you go deeper into the zoo, you meet people again and again, recalling Beckett's characters: tramps with bundles, with drinkers irrem views, humorous discontent. Because he could, I thought, even Beckett himself met his spirit - not the famous playwright struck by lightning, which has come back to oversee a sparse production, but the young, unknown wanderer, the philosophers of loneliness. At the beginning his career, 1936 was, Beckett the sails, hoped to visit relatives in Germany to question painting and close contact with artists. "How will Germany be?" he wrote in his diary. "Six months passed around." alone in his hut, he read Céline's Death on . The perfect choice for an unknown city: Elan, delirium and derangement, which he compared his rest, his stop was to put his exhaustion. The young Beckett caught in a Berlin that was not an island, walked for hours in the Zoo around. It still retains the pattern of his footsteps in the sand trails. The grinding his teeth.
The street of the 17th June, when we must again on aspects of the Mall from Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace, but also of the Phoenix Park in Dublin. Monuments shine again and again by the well maintained urban green shade. Wars in stone or bronze. Victory Column. Figures dark destiny. I'm impressed by the park workers: how clean they align their tools as they work hard, sweep paths, trees, trim, water plants. When I stop to make a lime green Caravan photographed with the logo of a sharpened cleaver and word "carnivore" to , two cyclists go past me so close that I feel the air flow. "Kinski! Klaus Kinski " cries the one.
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