Berlin 1

It has been just over a week since I arrived in Berlin, so I’ll catch up with a summary and some observations.

August 26, 2011: The flight was quite tolerable considering that I got up at 4:00 (after going to bed at midnight). Watched Thor, more entertaining than I thought it would be, and most of Hanna, which I will now have to see the end of.

The flight was an hour late, so I assumed there was a good chance I would miss my train connection, but the airport runs so smoothly, no waiting or harassment going through passport control, baggage arrives quickly and smoothly, that I still had time to get my BahnCard50 at the train station, get the local train to the Frankfurt Hbf and get on the superfast ICE express to Berlin. What a contrast to arriving in the US, where even citizens are treated with suspicion and delay. Frankfurt Hbf (train station) is great, wonderful old building, a woman walking by eating a giant pretzel for breakfast. I had a “Bismarck Herring” and onion sandwich on a very good little roll and a cappuccino. Ah, to be in Europe!

It’s high summer, warm, humid, from the train window I see people taking their kids to ride bikes in the country, walking dogs along rural lanes. This is one major thing that I have observed on previous trips.  The transition from city to rural country and then wide-open agricultural land is very quick. The cities and towns are surrounded by functional green space. Skies are clear. It’s very attractive. It’s also very hot!

August 28, 2011: Now the weather has returned to ‘normal,’ in the low 70s, a mix of sun, clouds and rain. I’m staying for this week with Lars Koch, the director of the Music Ethnology section of the Berlin State Museum, at his home, an old farmhouse in the small, very charming community of Werder, on an island in a lake southwest of Berlin near Potsdam. This area was not fashionable during the time it was part of East Germany, so it has changed very little. Now it has been discovered and is starting to go more upscale. The island has attracted small shops and businesses like architects, landscape and garden designers, and discreet antique shops.

September 1, 2011: This initial week passes both slowly and quickly. I have taken care of many essentials, such as the formalities of the grant, so that I have quite a stash of Euros for the moment, getting a monthly transit pass, an access pass to the Museum, etc. The transit system is excellent, as I have seen on past visits, and my pass will take me quite far into the surrounding areas. I continue to be impressed by the result of this society’s decision to reject the cancer of urban sprawl. My Museum ID will get me entrance to dozens of museums all over Berlin; I could probably use half the time I have available just working my way through the museums.

I am also encountering the passive entropy of a bureaucratized society that is very set in many ways. I was able to open a bank account, but not deposit any money because the bank wasn’t set up to receive it. The Museum’s database was painstakingly designed to allow for the description or cataloguing of any kind of object that might be found in any of its collections. As a result, the way that any particular object or type of object is listed is obtuse and difficult to work with. So much information about the musical instruments I hope to examine is hinted at, but the links that look like they should be there are not, or are maybe hidden and someone will find them for me later, or… Is information or actual instruments lost literally, as in destroyed during the decades, or just misplaced? I keep replaying the final scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark in my head, as the crated ark is wheeled into the giant warehouse.

I will move on Sunday into town, into the wonderful flat on loan to me from Amelia Cuni and Walter Durand while they have an artist’s residency in Vienna for two months. I’m looking forward to the chance to get to know the neighborhood. A preliminary observation about Berlin is that there is a very high proportion of elderly people and people with dogs, and elderly people with dogs - on the street, on the train, on the subway, in restaurants and businesses.