Tag: Berlin

Berliner Straßenszenen / Berlin Street Scenes

Kris Best1 Comment

Some of the best moments as an amateur art-lover are the ones when you first see a new piece, a new artist, or a new movement, and think: ‘Yes, this.’

EL Kirchner, Berliner Straßenszene (Berlin Street Scene; 1913)

That was me back in 2012, when I first saw an exhibition on the German expressionist group Die Brücke (1905-13) at – of all places – the Musée de Grenoble. It was about eight months after I’d first come to Europe, and I had yet to realise that I liked art. Although I went straight for the art museums in every city I visited, I hadn’t made the connection yet that this was something I could like. Being ‘into modern art’ felt like something that was for rich, cultured people… not for someone like me.

Still, the expressionist style left a deep impression on me back then. At the time, I was just starting to come out of a long episode of depression. The anxious contours and otherworldly colour schemes of the Brücke artists, but especially of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, really spoke to my mental state at the time. I felt like I had finally found a branch of modern art that I could emotionally relate to.

Die Brücke mostly fell off my radar for the next few years, until my interest was piqued again in 2016 by a solo exhibition of Kirchner’s work at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. This exhibition was where I first encountered – or recall encountering – Kirchner’s Berliner Straßenszenen (Berlin Street Scenes), starting with Potsdamer Platz (1913), pictured below.

EL Kirchner, Potsdamer Platz (1913)

The Straßenszenen are a set of sketches and paintings produced by Kirchner between 1913 and 1915, i.e. during the period right after the Brücke collective officially dissolved itself in May 1913 due to infighting among its members (chiefly between Kirchner and the others – but that, again, is another story).

The Brücke collective was founded in Dresden but relocated to Berlin in 1911, a move that highlighted and exacerbated significant creative differences within the group. At the time, Berlin was developing at an incredible pace. It was experiencing all the typical problems of a metropolis that was growing too quickly for its own good: urban poverty, prostitution, and an infrastructure straining to accommodate all the newcomers.

As a result, the move to Berlin had a highly polarising effect on the Brücke artists; the group had been heavily inspired early on by primitivist and ethnographic art, after all. Some, such as Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, felt out of their element in the racing pulse of the capital and preferred to retreat to the countryside.

EL Kirchner, Fünf Frauen auf der Straße (Five Women on the Street; 1913)

Kirchner, on the other hand, felt both energised and alienated by the relentlessly urban environment of the Großstadt. In channeling those feelings into his art, into the Straßenszenen, he produced not only some of the most notable works of his career but also some of the most famous modern representations of urban anxiety.

Kirchner’s Straßenszenen, beginning with Fünf Frauen auf der Straße (Five Women on the Street; 1913), portray scenes of urban street life at the turn of the century. The visual style is highly distinctive. Short, nervous brush strokes and an occasionally ‘sickly’ colour scheme convey a uniquely modern sense of anxiety.

The figures that populate the world of the Straßenszenen, largely prostitutes and their clients, are front and centre, sometimes shoved uncomfortably close to the viewer. Their shapes are angular and elongated, skin discoloured, and faces often abstracted to just eyes and cheekbones, making the figures of the Straßenszenen appear as otherworldly creatures of the night. Although they are the subjects of the piece, there is no emotional connection between them and the viewer. The figures appear to either ignore you completely or stare uncomfortably in your direction.

  • EL Kirchner, Straßenszene Berlin (Street Scene Berlin; 1913)
  • EL Kirchner, Zwei Frauen auf der Straße (Two Women on the Street; 1914)

Even though they were created more than a hundred years ago, the Straßenszenen manage to tap into a very particular feeling of urban alienation that is still recognisable today: the feeling of being hopelessly alone in a fast-moving city packed with strangers. A feeling that perhaps anyone who has moved to a new city can understand.

Kirchner himself wrote that the Straßenszenen emerged during ‘one of the loneliest times of my life, when an agonising restlessness drove me out day and night, again and again, into long streets full of people and carriages’. It’s a restlessness that I know well from the loneliest times in my life, too, when I felt compelled to go nowhere in particular to do nothing other than be somewhere else. When you’re lonely, it can feel comforting to just be out among other people – even the otherworldly strangers of the Berlin streets.

It’s oddly soothing to see your own internal struggles reflected in paintings from a hundred years ago. It’s a nice reminder that you’re not alone, that your struggles are normal human struggles, that others have felt how you feel now. In my opinion, it’s one of the best reasons to engage with art and literature.

Berlin ist kein Sehnsuchtsort / Berlin is no Sehnsuchtsort

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Berlin is an ugly city.

The most passionate bloggers in this city wouldn’t claim otherwise. Except, perhaps, the Berlin Typography guy. But even so, the strangely pleasing aesthetics of Berlin typography are not ‘beautiful’ in the same way that Parisian storefronts are beautiful, or Tuscan villages are beautiful. Berlin just doesn’t have that charm.

Berliners have no illusions about this. The ugliness of our streets has been elevated beyond the point of a running joke; it’s a statement of fact, mentioned in passing by Berliners in conversation in the same way that you would state any mutually-agreed fact that you wouldn’t seriously expect another person to contradict. 

Take Berliner musician Peter Fox’s popular ode to the city, Schwarz zu Blau (Black to Blue), a song and music video about stumbling home at dawn through the streets of Berlin-Kreuzberg, populated with unfriendly characters, vomit, and buses that never arrive. Without a hint of irony, the chorus goes like this:

Guten Morgen Berlin
Du kannst so hässlich sein
So dreckig und grau
Du kannst so schön schrecklich sein…

Good morning Berlin
You can be so ugly
So dirty and grey
You can be so wonderfully dreadful…  

An ode to an ugly city if there ever was one.

An interesting point about the aesthetic quality of this city is that it has been both much better, and much worse. Berlin newspapers like the Morgenpost and the Tagesspiegel delight in posting regular features on Berlin ‘damals und heute’ (then and now), ranging from the imperial glory of pre-WWII Berlin to the smouldering ruins of the city centre in 1945 and bleak scenes of war-damaged neighbourhoods divided by the Berlin Wall. In comparison to the latter two, the bland concrete we live in today is a real improvement.

Sometimes, when the concrete looks particularly grey and depressing, it’s hard not to long for a Berlin that doesn’t exist anymore. A Berlin where the area around Hallesches Tor and Belle-Alliance-Platz (now: Mehringplatz) looked like this:

  • U Hallesches Tor, pre-war Berlin
  • Belle Alliance Platz, pre-war Berlin

Instead of like this:

  • U Hallesches Tor, modern Berlin
  • Mehringplatz (before: Belle Alliance Platz), modern Berlin

But even though the older pictures hold a certain classical European charm when seen through modern eyes, Berlin was not considered particularly beautiful by contemporaries in the pre-war era either. It was rapidly and chaotically developed from a ‘swampy backwater’ to a modern industrial city largely after the unification of the German Empire in 1871 – relatively late compared to other major European capitals like London and Paris. The title of a recent book on the history of Berlin sums up the city’s eternal status as an underperformer in aesthetics: ‘An der Schönheit kann’s nicht liegen’ (‘It can’t be the beauty’).

And indeed, it has never been the beauty of Berlin that has been its primary appeal. Berlin has been many things to many people over the years. A refuge for the French Huguenots during the 16th century. The original sin city of the Weimar era. Capital of Nazi Germany. Symbol of the Iron Curtain, symbol of hope. What it has always been is profoundly interesting. Behind every grim postwar facade is a hidden story about what used to be there and why it’s not there anymore.

Few places in the world are as laden with 20th century history as Berlin, and the city’s modern ugliness is a testament to the forces of that history. Having the will and the interest to look beyond the surface is richly rewarded here. Berlin is a place where you can discover for the first time, after three years, that an unassuming S-Bahn station you pass every day used to look like this.

  • S Nordbahnhof, modern Berlin.
  • Stettiner Bahnhof (now S Nordbahnhof), 1904.

Or that a big chunk of concrete in the garden colony down the street from your apartment was built by Hitler’s architect Albert Speer as part of abandoned plans to radically reshape Berlin into ‘Welthauptstadt Germania’ (World Capital Germania).

  • Schwerbelästigungskörper, Berlin-Tempelhof
  • Model for ‘Welthauptstadt Germania’

Or that everywhere you go, even the ground beneath your feet tells the story of the people who used to be there – but aren’t there anymore.

As with everything, the Germans have a word for ‘a place you long to be’: der Sehnsuchtsort. The meaning is deeper than simply ‘a place you’d like to go’; Sehnsucht is not a mere want, but a longing or yearning for something. Italy is the traditional Sehnsuchtsort of German art and literature, popularised by Goethe before being taken up in earnest by German Romantic painters.

In this sense, Berlin is no Sehnsuchtsort. Its cityscape is not the kind that inspires classical poets. Musicians don’t sing about the beauty of Berlin in the way they have sung about the beauty of Paris or Rome, and surely they never will. In the streets of Paris, French impressionists once painted bright, airy depictions of modern life; in the streets of Berlin, German expressionists painted erratic scenes of urban anxiety.

  • Camille Pissarro, Blvd Montmartre on a Winter Morning (1897)
  • Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Nollendorfplatz (1912)

Berlin isn’t as instantly lovable as the older and less damaged capitals of Europe. Berlin is complicated. It begs you to give it a closer look. Berlin is like the compelling anti-hero in a well-written novel, inviting you to peek beneath its rough exterior, to dig deeper into its complex past, until you realise, ‘Aha, so that’s why you are the way you are.’ Each new chapter and each re-reading of the text tell you something new that you didn’t see before and bring you slightly closer to understanding the bigger picture.

The appeal of Berlin isn’t on display for the world to see. It has to be uncovered, day by day. Bits of history are all around in this city, hiding in plain sight and just waiting for you to find them. If you, like me, have an inclination towards history and an urge to go out and discover it, there’s no place more rewarding than ugly Berlin.