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The Zeitguide to the Berlinale Film Festival

By on January 29, 2012 in Berlin & Brandenburg

The Festival

Every February, in the midst of Berlin’s icy winter doldrums, the city’s most prestigious cultural event sends another kind of shiver through its streets. The star-studded Berlinale Film Festival (www.berlinale.de, February 9-19) serves up a smorgasbord of  world premieres (10 this year) and lots of opportunities for celeb sightings. Established in 1951, shortly after Berlin was split into East and West, the festival is enmeshed in the city’s tumultuous history.

Today, industry and avant-garde types from all corners of the globe jet into Berlin for two weeks of frantic hobnobbing in and around Potsdamer Platz, and morning-to-night screenings throughout the city. (Here’s a list of the venues.) Their goal is to sell or buy the next sleeper hit at the European Film Market (closed to the general public)–or at private meetings on the sidelines.

To kick-start this wheeling and dealing, long-time Berlinale Film Festival director and local celebrity, the bespeckeled Deiter Kosslick, selects films that offer daring political themes that don’t shy away from controversial issues.  He also appeals to the more glamorous aspects of the industry by selecting films starring Hollywood A-listers like George Clooney, Kate Winslet, and Brangelina.

Unlike Berlin’s French (Cannes) and Italian (Venice) counterparts, the Berlinale doesn’t shun the average movie-goer. Though there are plenty of events and screenings that are off limits to non-industry festivel-goers, the public is free to attend most Berlinale screenings–as long as they shell out between 8-12€ for a ticket.

Will you be there? The Zeitguide to the Berlinale Film Festival tells you everything you need to know about ticket-buying, star-gazing and eating between screenings.

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Berlin’s Top Five Tourist Traps & Top Five Guilty Pleasures

By on January 5, 2012 in Berlin & Brandenburg

Berlin is Europe’s third most-visited city. So it is inevitable that there are tourist traps lurking among the its dozens upon dozens of  sights. Our list of the Berlin’s top five tourist traps helps you to avoid the biggest turkeys.  But don’t avoid all of the city’s tacky attractions. Our list of the city’s top five guilty pleasures points to sights that we love despite their heavy flirtation with tourist trap status.

Berlin’s Top Five Tourist Traps

Currywurst Museum

Sorry Wallpaper magazine. We know you named this museum one of Germany’s Fab 40. But we think that the information conveyed in the exhibits is as empty as the calories in the street food it chronicles. A visit to one of the city’s famed Currywurst slingers—Konnopke’s Imbiß or Curry36—should sufficiently quench any curiosity you have about this cult-like snack.

East Side Gallery

This 1.3-kilometer stretch of the original Berlin Wall adorned with paintings by more than 100 artists was an exciting symbol of the fall of the Wall. But the paintings, which had fallen victim to the weather and graffiti, were recently restored or re-painted.  In the process, the magic of this open-air gallery was somehow lost.

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The Zeitguide to East German Architecture

By on October 23, 2011 in Baltic Sea Coast, Berlin & Brandenburg, Dresden & Greater Saxony

One of the most enduring reminders of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a.k.a. East Germany, is its distinctive architecture. Composed of notoriously unattractive materials—from thick concrete to flimsy cardboard—these monuments to the Communist aesthetic were designed to impress (at least from a distance) and still do.

From Prestige Projects to Plattenbauten

In the 1950s, after the GDR was founded, a construction boom transformed the country’s cities into modern metropolises. Buildings and squares inspired by the Stalinist (neoclassical) architectural style emerged from World War II rubble, symbolizing the country’s ‘brand-newness’ and emphasizing its sharp contrast with ‘old’ West Germany.  During this time, the Communist Party propaganda machine used construction (and labor) as a metaphor for the emergence of a new country with a radically new economic and social system. East German films of the time, including the excellent Spur der Steine (Traces of Stone, available on Netflix), emphasized these themes. Likewise public artwork including murals and statues in the preferred Eastern bloc style—Socialist Realist—glorified the common worker with bold images of triumphant farmers, factory workers, and builders. It is easy to imagine that these images of re-building and starting afresh must have been inspiring to everyday East Germans still living among World War II destruction.

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New in Berlin: The Humboldt Box

By on August 1, 2011 in Berlin & Brandenburg

Sticking out like a sore thumb on Berlin’s regal Unter den Linden, The Humboldt Box is an ultra contemporary exhibition space devoted to Berlin’s latest building project: The Humboldt Forum.

Shortly after World War II, the East German government tore down the Berliner Schloss (Berlin Palace), the domed, baroque edifice that the Hohenzollern clan built in the 15th century as its base. In its place, the East Germans built a palace of their own: the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), a massive multipurpose government building sheathed in bronzed glass and concrete.

After Germany’s reunification, activists tried to save the historically significant but brutally ugly and asbestos-infested building from destruction. They lost their uphill battle, and Berlin started the long, drawn-out demolition of the controversial East German landmark in 2006.

In 2008, the same year that the Palast der Republik finally disappeared from the cityscape, Berlin held an international architecture competition to determine who would rebuild the Berliner Schloss in its original location.  The winner was the Italian architect Franco Stella. The choice of this non-Berliner was met with controversy and a lawsuit—but the city eventually rallied behind the new design and construction on the Humboldt Forum has begun.

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Watch your step! Germany’s Easy-to-Miss Memorials

By on February 17, 2010 in Berlin & Brandenburg, Cologne & North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Watch your step! Stolpersteine

If you didn’t know any better, you could walk all over one of Germany’s most poignant contemporary art projects without even realizing it. On sidewalks throughout the country, gleaming brass markers called Stolpersteine (“Stumbling Blocks”) memorialize the places where Holocaust victims last lived. An ongoing project by Cologne-based artist Gunter Demnig, it’s one of the most moving memorials of the Holocaust.

Since 1995, Demnig has been fashioning by hand the 10 X 10 centimeter (4 X 4 inch) blocks, each one of which represents a Holocaust victim, whether they were Jewish, homosexual, Jehovah’s Witness, Roma Gypsy, or a resistance fighter.

“Here lived,” begins the engraved text, followed by the name of the victim and brief information about their life, usually their birth year, when they were deported, and when, where, and sometimes how they died. The €95 cost of each stone is footed, for the most part, by victims’ families and private donations, and information for the markers is gleaned from a variety of archive sources.

Once each block is finished, Demnig personally hammers it into the sidewalk in front of the building that the victim once called home. In cases when the apartments or houses no longer exist, the Stolperstein is imbedded where the building once stood.

The project hasn’t been without controversy. Munich is the only major city to ban the markers, arguing that they could spark anti-Semitic action. In some cases, homeowners have tried to block the installation of Stolpersteine in front of their buildings, and some of the brass markers have been ripped out.

Still, the project continues to expand and reach new milestones. As of late 2007, there were well over 12,000 stones in 30 locations in Germany, plus some in Austria, Hungary and the Netherlands. In late 2007, the first memorial to commemorate a black Holocaust victim was unveiled in Berlin’s Mitte district. In 1941, African-born Mahjub bin Adam Mohamed was arrested by the Nazis and accused of miscegenation. He died in 1944 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which is located just outside of Berlin in Oranienburg.

For more information on Demnig, who recently released a documentary about his project, visit www.stolpersteine.com. (in German)

Article by: Hilda Hoy, a Berlin-based freelance journalist.

Photo by: Williamaveryhudson

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