That time I met Benjamin meet Brecht

You know how some people wait until the absolute last day to go to an exhibition that’s been going for months, and suddenly come together to fill up a small space, that’s been sparsely filled for weeks, with damp shoe smell and garlic Döner breath? Well I’m one of those people.

Hi everyone! It’s been a while. I have to be honest and say I went through a pretty rough time since the summer, and it’s taken me a while for the process of ‘open the “write post” page and type something in’ to be easier…but if you’re reading this, the drought may finally be over.

While I’ve been neglecting WordPress and you, dear readers, I wrapped up a pretty nice Christmas season with a lot of Weihnachtsmärkte and at least 6 mugs of Glühwein. I even made it down to Nürnberg again, and longtime readers will remember how ridiculously full the Markt gets and ridiculously silly I get, but this time I was kept responsible by looking after a few cute kids.

Here are some pretty pictures of some of the markets my brother and I went to. It was his first Christmas season ever in Germany, so I made sure he got a good idea of what the markets are about (clearly: food).

 

Schloss Charlottenburg

Hi

Nürnberg

Charlottenburg again

I went home again to Florida for Christmas and fully took three weeks off school, which may or may not have been the best decision I’ve made last year. I came back early January and zoomed into the semester again, and now here we are, end January and I’ve visited a lot of lectures, done some writing, a lot of reading, and saw people do mad acrobatics/gymnastics in the Mercedes-Benz Arena again.  My brother and I also spent time being dorks in the snow, since we’re still Florida kids and just get excited by the white powdery stuff, you know?

 

Okay, quite possibly the creepiest snowman you’ve ever seen, but we only had red berries for the eyes!

Good thing the padding on this jacket is thick

And today I visited said exhibit that’s been open in the Berlin Akedemie der Künste since October: Benjamin and Brecht: Thinking in Extremes.

yes. Berlin is just a grey and dreary in winter as people always say it is.

Oh, you didn’t know that one of the 20th century’s most celebrated playwrights and poets had met and worked with the 20th century’s favorite (okay, my favorite) cultural and literary critic? Oh, good. Me neither (and if you did… can we meet and talk?, because  you sound pretty interesting).

 

It makes sense that they’ve met giving the timing and both their fates as exiled from the 3rd Reich under the National Socialists in Germany, but as the title of the exhibit demonstrates, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht were pretty different and their coming together in theory and practice was a bit explosive sometimes. Benjamin was a kind of straight-laced, tweed wearing (though I don’t know if he wore tweed), briefcase carrying rationalist and Brecht was a cigar smoking, scuffed sneaker, gesturing dreamer. Both believed in the necessity of art for social and political critique, though, and that much was clear in the exhibit.

The exhibit was part record of their conversations and conversations about B and B, but also artwork that commented on their theory or generally continued the work of the two.

I especially appreciated Zoe Beloff‘s work. She submitted two of her paintings and a movie to the exhibit and if her movie Exile (still a work in progress) is ever available to own, I will definitely procure it.

And I don’t know if I was just in a good mood today, but seeing the community aspect of criticism and art just made me happy. I like to see the working habits of writers, how they spend their days and the kinds of lives they lead. This impression was created by the hanging boards with pictures and quotes of/about the men’s lives. Very little was said in the exhibit about the women in B’s and B’s lives, but most of the quotes about their relationship came from women. And both Benjamin and Brecht had children (something one doesn’t hear a lot about), so I’m assuming some part of their lives were spent wiping poop away off something.

It was an artfully done exhibit, taking advantage of the multiple technologies we have today (including a self-playing chess board… it was magic!), and I’m glad I went, though admittedly I got a bit anxious by the end because my work was calling and the exhibit got to be too full of people by the time I left. I’m not the only one who waited until the last day and looked for a bit of literary and cultural history on a bleak Berlin day.

Looking forward, the semester in Berlin is about to end (only three more weeks!) and in the meantime, I’m slogging through trying to get a working model of my theory done. It’s harder to pin-down than it is to think about it in a fragmentary nature though.

Oh! I almost forgot to mention that in this time of not-writing-about-going-ons-in-Berlin, I also visited a lecture that was meant to provide a mid-term evaluation about Trump. It was, interesting… but writing more would be its own post.

Hope the first month of the year was good for you, and that the next one is good, if not better!

Cheers, Dorothea

p.s. sigh. You can totally tell that the quality of my bro’s camera is better than mine.