En Route to Brugge

Holocaust Memorial, Berlin

We're now on our way from Berlin to Brugge, Belgium, with an overnight stop in Bielefeld, Germany. Berlin was an interesting city, saturated with history from WWII and the Cold War. I think it's safe to say no other city in the world still feels the presence of the Nazi's reign or the Soviet occupation like Berlin. Everywhere you turn there is some military or holocaust memorial, a hill made of rubble from WWII bombing, or some sign of the Berlin wall and the division and struggle that went along with it. The city is is more significant to Americans than any other city I've visited; of the four most significant events in recent American history--WWII, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the War in Iraq--Berlin played a major role in half of them. We spent a few hours at the museum at Checkpoint Charlie, reading the descriptions of events and pictures centered around the Berlin Wall and its one passageway. The extreme measures people took to cross this wall are quite moving, as are the psychological struggle of the Soviet border guards, many of whom did not want to be there are and intentionally shot over fugitives' heads. It's hard to think that it has come down less than twenty years ago, within my lifetime.

We spent some time in the Pergamon Museum, where I saw many great works of art, including the Temple of Zeus at Pergamon and the Ishtar Gates of Babylon, both of which were incredible. But the most striking work I saw was a statue, sculpted in stone, of a man I later discovered to be Apollo. There was nothing terribly remarkable about it--I've seen many male nudes on this trip--except for that all that was left of the original was the the torso: from just below the neck to the upper legs, no arms. The "cropped" subject and the contrapposto of his stance was strongly reminiscent of an Edward Weston photograph of the nude torso of his son. This is one of his most famous photographs, but the fist time I saw it I didn't know quite what to think. The boy is young and slender; the photograph is certainly not a celebration of man's strength or brawniness. Yet the photograph is still beautiful--a presentaion of the human form and stance with those wonderful slender dark shapes on each side. As I stared at the statue, which was absolutely a display of the strength of the perfect male form, thinking of all this, I was able to better put Weston's effort into historical context, giving me a much greater appreciation for the image. Weston, certainly, has thoroughly studied these ancient Greek and Roman forms (and all art since), and has internalized them to the point where they are second nature. He was able to stand in front of his nude son and frame exactly what he wanted, knowing full well (even though I didn't when I saw it) the reference he was making to Greek sculpture. The difference, though--and this is the wonderful thing about photography--is that this is no glorified human or god, and no figment of his imagination. This is a real person, his own flesh, really, with real human weakness. He was taking ancient sculpture and turning it around on itself, showing us not a beautiful woman or powerful god, but a weak adolescent, a subject we all know too well, for we all have been one. Michelangelo often scultped the hands of his subjects oversized (see his David), a reference to the idea that it is not he but God who is working through his hands. Weston comes back with this sort of surrogate self portrait and says no, I am not God, I am man, and this is my flesh. It's all very interesting.

Berlin was probably my most photographically successful city yet. I tried hard to stick with point, line, shape, form, pattern, texture, and color, and I think it paid off. At my current state of evaluation, I count seven keepers from just two days of shooting, including this one of the holocaust memorial. The graphic elements are obvious, and I had the sense to include a person on a thirds line to give it some scale. These blocks are arranged in ordered rows, and by choosing to arrange them on the diagonal the image gets a great sense of dynamism and motion, which is perfect because of how this art works: it is not something you look at, but something you move through. I really enjoyed this memorial. These cement blocks spread out in their rows for probaby close to half a city block. At the edges, they are no more than a few inches high. As you walk towards the center, zig-zagging through them in an attempt to get lost, the blocks get taller and the ground gets lower. All of it has an uneasy, imperfect feel to it--the ground is not flat nor inclined but rather is a series of unordered waves, and the blocks do not have perfectly vertical sides, nor do their tops line up evenly. At their tallest, we estimated them to be around 14 to 16 feet high. Once you move through the middle part and start coming out, the blocks get shorter again, more light gets let in, and finally you are at the edge where the blocks are barely above ground level. Moving through it is clear how relevent it is for a holocaust memorial. The victims of the holocaust were taken from their normal lives and thrown into the depths of some hell, organized but chaotic, surrounded by inpenetrable stone. Some of them survived, moving through the hell back into light. I don't think I've ever seen a work of art this abstract and this clear about its message. I was evesdropping on a tour guide who was explaining that the artist, a Jewish American, said there is no significance to the number or shapes of blocks (they don't represent tombstones or number of people that died, for example), they are purely abstract elements to convey the emotion. Apparently the artist came to visit it a while ago, and was moved by seeing very diffent reactions to his work: some people were weeping, leaving flowers by the blocks, while a little further down children were running through them, playing games.

The travel portion of this trip is pretty much over. We will spend two days in Brugge, most of which will be spent studying for our final exams, before heading to Oxford on Saturday, the 23rd. We'll stay there until about the first week in August, then I fly home. Although I've enjoyed the traveling, it will be good to get some stability back in my schedule. I plan to take some trips on the weekends (we get three day weekends every week), but I also want to explore Oxford thoroughly.

I miss my girlfriend.