First Impressions of Berlin

The journey down from Copenhagen: I’ve never before been on a train that then got onto a ferry, although I’ve heard of such things. They used to have one in Northern Michigan, connecting the two peninsulas, before a) they built the Mackinaw Bridge and b) trains became so monstrously declassé in the midwest. I mean, honestly, who takes a train these days? Gas is so much cheaper! Anyways, in this picture you can see how the train was loaded onto the car deck of the ferry:



I didn’t understand, when I bought the train ticket, that this would be the case; but I was overjoyed to get to ride a boat as well as a train. We sailed from Rodby Havn, Denmark, to Puttgarden, Germany, across the strait that separates the Kieler Bay (which, in the west, washes the shores of Schleswig-Holstein, the disputed German/Denmark land border) from the Mecklenburger Bay (which gives onto the Baltic Sea). Both bays are vast, and you can’t see to the other end. The boat was vast, too (only a member of the Runions family could tell me the specific dimensions):



From Puttgarden the train went on to Hamburg and then I transferred to the ICE, the inter-city express, which whisked me off to Berlin at some alarming speed and was a remarkably smooth and pleasant ride. Now, this is my first ever trip to Berlin. I find it a little strange that I’ve waited until I’m this old to get here; I started studying the language on my own back in 1990, first came to Germany in 1996, and have been working closely with German operas all this time—but for whatever reason I haven’t spent a whole lot of time travelling here. There is a reason; it’s hard to put into words, but I’ll try. I noticed yesterday, when I got here, I was a little nervous. I’m guessing I’ll grow more comfortable being in Germany over the course of the next week; but at first, it was tough for me to relax and be at ease. An unusual experience, not one I’ve often had travelling (except when visiting certain parts of the Midwest!) Richard Wagner, who spent most of his life on the run, certainly had this kind of experience all the time. You can hear it in his music, here was a man who was never comfortable in his own skin. And there’s something about his country—this vast, dense, incredibly complicated place—which confuses me as well.

The following picture may help give you a little sense of what’s confusing about Berlin:




That’s the steeple of Mary’s Church flush with the Television Tower, not far from Alexanderplatz. And that’s the first thing you notice about Berlin, as a visitor: you’re conscious of the past, all the rich history of this part of the world; and all the energy of the people is currently directed toward the future; and where, pray tell, is the present? There’s an elephant on the table, it can be tough to see in the city but everyone at all times must be conscious of it—the gap between past and future, that immediate past in which the city was obliterated. It’s weird, this is the first time I’ve ever been to a big European city which reminds me of an American city—big wide streets, lots of cars everywhere, everything spread out, parking lots. The reason is not because the Germans like cars so much; it’s because most of this city, like most American cities, dates from after 1945. (To be fair, much of the City of London was also obliterated during the war, and it’s tough to get a sense of the history from simply wandering about there as well.)

The other reason I’m nervous, I’m sure, is because my ability to speak what Mark Twain once called "the awful German language" has grown quite weak—the last time I wrote a translation of a German opera was a couple of years ago (Ariadne or Lohengrin, I don’t remember which I wrote first) and this is a city and a country with the deepest respect for the German language, as this sculpture outside Humboldt Universität attests:



So yeah, we’ll see how we do with that! Two more examples of this Germany past/future kind of thing from last night’s brisk tour of the city: I stopped for some food in the Noodle Cafe, a Wagamama-style restaurant with tasty Asian-fusion cuisine. The flirty waiter mistook me for a food critic, with my notepad and nosy questions about the place, an error I was keen to exploit since it meant I got to try more of the really interesting menu.



This Noodle Café is situated in the Radisson SAS hotel on Unter den Linden, near the Deutsche Staatsoper, and upstairs there’s another pan-fusion restaurant, hEAT, which looked plenty interesting as well—world cuisine, each region’s food prepared as would be traditional in that region instead of the jumble we sometimes get in our multicultural fast-food restaurants. The Radisson itself is absurd, with a central atrium built around an enormous fish tank. The lighting wasn’t great but this picture gives you an idea: that’s a vast aquarium above the check-in desks, and from each of the rooms on each of the levels you can gaze across to see what the fish are up to:



Outside the Radisson you cross the river Spree, and, on the other side, step into the past: the Berlin Dom, the main cathedral, which houses lots of random musical and cultural events, and obviously belongs architecturally to the pre-war Germany, instead of the Radisson’s futurism.



So I’m off now to the new Deutsches Historik Museum to try even harder to wrap my brain around the weirdness which is this great country.