Berlin

An extra-large dose of exhibitions in Berlin is a good choice when the parks are not yet green and one seeks refuge inside buildings from the risk of wet feet.

The great exhibitions make me wish that Berlin were located somewhere beyond Daugavpils or Liepaja, only about 250 kilometres from Riga. I recommend three worthwhile destinations: exhibitions that are on until March and April.

An American Woman at Stalin’s Feet

The legendary American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) said she had an “unquenchable desire to be present when history is being made,” and her name is linked to many “firsts.” The first foreign photographer (not just the first female photographer) allowed to photograph Soviet industrial plants. The only western female journalist in Russia during the Second World War. On 19 July 1941, Bourke-White photographed the bombing of the Kremlin from the roof of the US embassy. She was the first photographer to shoot cover photos for Life magazine and the first woman permitted to photograph in the war zone. In her own words she immortalized “tragedy, mass calamities, human triumphs and suffering” in the 20th century. Today, we would certainly call Bourke-White a hotspot photojournalist. It’s not surprising that she is counted among the ten most significant women in America.

The comprehensive retrospective shown at the Martin-Gropius-Bau presents a talented photojournalist who was not only there when “history was being made,” but even a brief moment before it was made, whereby she was even a major part of the making of history. Her series of photographs from 1945 when Bourke-White crossed the Rhine along with the third US Army under General George Patton and witnessed Patton’s troops entering the Buchenwald concentration camp is world famous. Emaciated people looking with crazed eyes through the fence, piles of corpses in the courtyard and civilians turning away their eyes. “I saw and photographed the piles of naked, lifeless bodies, the human skeletons in furnaces, the living skeletons who would die the next day... Using the camera was almost a relief. It interposed a slight barrier between myself and the horror in front of me,” Bourke-White remembers.


Magazine editors sent the photographer on months-long travels because she had a feel for stories and brought back interesting reports. Bourke-White published her reports in Fortune, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times, but she is best known for her creative collaboration with Life magazine. The report in the magazine about Czechoslovakia (1939) shows a market-woman with her arm raised in a Nazi salute. In the next shot, a sausage hangs from the hand raised at the same angle.

Unique historic photos can be seen in the exhibition: children murdered by their own mother, the wife of a Nazi, portraits of Stalin’s mother and aunt taken in the village of Didi Lilo, the Hungarian count Lajos Szechenyi with his family in the guestroom in 1938; students at Eton in 1940, pale, thin intellectuals in white shirts with rifles pressed awkwardly at their hips, Sergej Eisenstein shaving on the roof terrace of the photographer’s New York apartment during shooting of the film Que Viva Mexico. In 1948 M. Bourke-White photographed Gandhi a few hours before the fatal shots hit him, and more and more.

From the age of 17, when M. Bourke-White, a student of natural sciences, became interested in photography, her passions were industrial photography and architectural. The exhibition offers a detailed insight into this part of her work as well.

“He was standing very stiff and straight in the center of the rug. His face was gray, his figure flat-chested. He stood so still he might have been carved out of granite. I asked him to sit down, hoping that would make him more relaxed. Stalin showed no inclination to oblige me,” Margaret Bourke-White remembers of her session with Stalin. A coincidence brought the stony figure to life. Something dropped out of the photographer’s bag and rolled across the floor. In the moment that Margaret scrambled across the floor with Stalin’s interpreter, a smile lit up Stalin’s face. “I guess Stalin had never seen an American girl on her knees to him before,” was the ironic remark of the photographer who managed to capture the unexpected trace of a “smile” of Stalin in the portrait.

Where and when: Martin-Gropius-Bau. Margaret Bourke-White. Photographs 1930 – 1945. Until 14 April. U-Bahn stop Potsdamer Platz. www.berlinerfestspiele.de

Trophies of Childhood and an Alarm Button

An old Berlin railway station that has been converted into an exhibition space for contemporary art is the ideal destination for families with children eager for knowledge. You can leave them at the Natural History Museum for a few hours: those who yearn for art can enter the exhibition halls; the others can stay in the Natural History Museum and enjoy the huge floating Brachiosaurus, Dicraceosaurus, Allosaurus and Dysalotosaurus.

The theme of the exhibition Kinderkreuzzug by the German artist Martin Honert (born in 1953) is childhood and more specifically childhood memories reconstructed in the form of three-dimensional objects; installations. The artist’s childhood memories are an infinite source from which he draws. The installations by Honert are fascinating for one does not find the traditional tones here. He manages without any nostalgic sentiments and the pressure of childhood traumas are also not perceptible. Honert’s highlights of childhood are “hung” quasi in thin air, with no context, associations or judgments. It is as though the artist is studying the nature of memory itself and he is surprised to find that the memories of a man born in 1953 of first childhood impressions continue to live on so clearly and unfading.


Tree, bird, campfire, transformer substation, swimming badge, priest, the bed of his father lit up by the television, the history lesson during which the chalkboard is opened and historic images come to life. All of the objects are hyperbolically big. The portrayal of the maths teacher is especially perceptive: a man in a suit, sad and ugly. Perhaps not really ugly, but merely entirely grown up without any trace of youthful polish and dynamism – children see this with unpitying x-ray-like indifference. He may be 29, he may be 69 years old. Do you remember the time when even eleventh graders seemed old to you?

When you view the giants – two adults that Honert made taller than two metres – you ask yourself to what extent our childhood memories are true. Perhaps it is time to overwrite the “hard disc”? One of the first works one notices when entering the space is an empty chair and a table upon which now and then an alarm signal jumps and screeches like an upside-down bowl. Who said that childhood is easy to overcome?

It should be noted that there is a wonderful book table at the Hamburger Bahnhof containing the latest literature on contemporary culture. I encountered a sociological study of hipsters there. In the chapter The Death of the Hipster I learned that the hipsters are already dead, although I thought they had just been born. Long live the post-hipsters!

Where and when: Hamburger Bahnhof. Martin Honert. Kinderkreuzzug.Until 7 April. U-Bahn stop Naturkundemuseum. www.hamburgerbahnhof.de

Sexuality, Faith and Obesity

Parallel to the premier of the final, closing part of the Paradise trilogy Hope by the Austrian director Ulrich Seidel at the Berlin cinema festival, one of the accompanying events at the gallery C/O Berlin is the exhibition Love Faith Hope. Photo for photo, the close-ups of the trilogy Paradise are shown, and testify that the director has an outstanding talent for producing rather radical uneasiness. He explains this talent and his conviction by saying, “The physical is very important in my films. I love to take pictures very close. To show people in their unadorned, natural form. For me, something like beauty can be found in particular where someone has not been prettified.” In an interview that can be read at the exhibition, the director tells that he is also interested in perversity and the yoke of society.

Although C/O Berlin will soon be moving – the old post office will soon be sold – the gallery is worth a visit, even in its new, yet unknown home, particularly for connoisseurs of photographic art. C/O Berlin has found its fixed place and its own identity in the Berlin scene of contemporary art.

Where and when: Galerie C/O Berlin. Until 17 March. S-Bahn stop Oranienburger Straße.