Rainy Day Traveler

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Moving down the hall, a starkly lit display of 23 white architectural models of Berlin’s public buildings shows how the city’s architecture is intertwined with its history. A multimedia display of materials and video monitors depict the changes brought by the industrial revolution. Sporadically assembled artifacts represent the transition to mechanized industry.

I follow what look like railroad tracks laid in perspective through a tunnel that dead-ends at a painting of a man beating a horse. I must have missed something. I retrace my steps to see what I’m supposed to be seeing. I should have gotten the headset.

Julie read the panels. The three segments of this “portal” show the upper class, the middle class and the “urban proletarians” respectively. In the latter segment, where the man is beating the horse, a brightly colored abacus looks out of place among drab metal kitchen utensils set against a backdrop of a life-size black-and-white turn-of-the-last-century photo of a woman with her children. As an example of classism, Julie draws my attention to a painting from the time depicting lower-class townsfolk as a crowd of plump sunbathers, naked babies and groping couples at the beach.

We move through time to a room with a three-wheeled car and cutouts of women from the roaring 20’s behind giant red letters spelling out REVOLUTION. It looks very retro-modern and cool…more concept than content. There’s a little movie theater with a film playing in German. We don’t stop. I must have blinked and missed WWI, or turned the wrong corner. Maybe it was covered in the film. I’m not looking back.

We follow arrows around a corner down a long stairwell plastered with photos of politicians, intellectuals and movie stars. Empty frames indicate those who were lost under the Third Reich. As we descend the stairs, we hear the voices of democratic speeches from above transitioning to the inflammatory speeches of Nazi Germany below. The heavy steel door at the bottom of the dark stairwell forewarns us that we are now entering the darkest chapter in Berlin’s history. On the other side of the door is a hall paved with the spines of books that were burned by the Nazis in 1933. Additional volumes are heaped along the walls. I GET this one, and it GETS me. The goosebumps are starting as I move past the window with “Jude,” German for Jew, scrawled big.

In the Third Reich exhibit, I once again bump up against those high-concept metaphors that I see, but don’t immediately grasp. Aligned footprints on the floor (the masses who went along with everything), swastika turnstiles, a white room (the resistance), a bombed out hole (war and destruction).

As we move through this period of history, television screens playing historical footage start to appear. They become more prominent as we move past the war into the rebuilding of the 50’s and 60s, including news reports of the Berlin airlift. A display shows two 1950s living rooms representing life in East and West Berlin with a bomb suspended through the ceiling between them. The differences are subtle, the most obvious being the colored TV in the West and black and white in the East.

The wall is built. In an effective visual presentation, back to back TV sets show footage of what surveillance cameras recorded on the East and West sides of the wall. More TV screens show footage of news reports of changes in the Soviet Union. Four segments of the original wall stand here. We hear the voice of Ronald Reagan saying “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” as thousands cheer. We see the German and English news reports of GDR secretary general Erich Honecker declaring the borders open between East and West. Hundreds of thousands of people fill the streets and clamber on top of the wall. I’ve held up until now, but the tissue comes out as I remember watching this original footage from my apartment in Glendale, CA.

I regain my composure and look for Julie, already at the other end of the final room of the exhibit, the rebuilding. I walk past a car…I think it might have been Erich Honecker’s…a moped with a protest banner hanging overhead…a little room with a desk and books piled all around…I’m past my information absorption limit. I tread gratefully over a field of red and green East German traffic-signal men to the elevator back up to the shopping mall and on to…lunch.

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