Gates

So many kinds of gates, entrances, openings, pathways. Some unexpected and some repurposed. A visit to three museums in Berlin brings us through many gates: the Neues Museum (built mid 19th century) and Pergamon Museum (built end of 19th century) both featuring ancient art and the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum (converted from train station built mid 19th century featuring contemporary German art.

For some reason the "Gates of Paradise" copy from the Florence Baptistry showed up in the Neues Museum of Ancient Art in the section on Troy. I chose that section to focus on since we just finished learning about Aegean art. More about that in another post.

The Ishtar Gate for those of you who remember a couple of weeks ago from Mesopotamia. These gates were found in shards of glazed mud brick and where transported to Berlin in the early 20th century. Date of the original gate is 575 BCE. The sections around the animals and rosettes are put together from the pieces, complete bricks are reconstructions.

Detail of one of the lions so you can see the shards of brick put back in place and also you can see how the lion has actual dimension making this relief sculpture.

An aurochs, a desert kind of wild cattle, now extinct.

From the Pergamon Museum lab where they reassembled the bricks.

This crate shows you how the pieces were assembled and shipped from Iraq to Berlin

Surprise to see the "Code of Hammurabi" here and it turns out this is a copy, the original being in Paris. Code of Hammurabi is Sumerian and includes the law "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth".

The Pergamon Museum itself has been closed for three years and there are seven more years of renovation planned but I was glad to see the lions on display. We talked briefly about the use of lions in art starting at this time, 7th century BCE from Sam'al Turkey

Recreation of the processional to the Ishtar Gate so imagine yourself coming to the great city of Babylon, this is what you would walk through. Beyond that archway is the Ishtar Gate and beyond that is the Gate of Miletus.

The Pergamon Museum (home of the Pergamon Altar) has been closed for three years and will be closed another seven for major renovation. We could not visit the Pergamon Altar and the Market Gate of Mellitus is squeezed into a gallery that does not do its scale justice. It was built in the second century in the Roman town of Miletus and destroyed by an earthquake in the 10th century. The pieces were reassembled in the museum in the early 20th century. The reconstruction used quite a bit of "new" material which drew quite a bit of criticism though it's great from a viewers perspective to see what it likely looked like in its full glory. Restorations continued after WWII and even at the start of the 21st century, and probably more once the new museum opens.

If this looks like a train platform, it once was. It was the main train station traveling north to Hamburg in the late 19th century. It is the only train station building left from that time, when there were many like it.

Its neoclassical style became the standard for train stations up to the 20th century. It is now a contemporary art museum for German art and is undergoing serious renovation as well.

Not actually a gate, the Holocaust Memorial near the Brandenburg Gate is a series of corridors through which one passes up and down with different heights of simple concrete blocks of different sizes. It's powerful in many ways, not the least of which is that the city of Berlin gave over a full city block to this monument right smack in the middle of Berlin where locals and tourists pass every day. It was the site of Hitler's administration center and the Berlin Wall, also called the "Death Strip".

Very understated, and unfortunately not well marked I wonder how many people understand what this is or why it's here. When tourists stand on top of the blocks for a selfie or photo op it makes me wonder. There are guards who make them get down and children are not permitted to jump from block to block although I once saw a child try to jump and eventually they couldn't do it. That made some sense. It was designed by Peter Eisenmann in 2003 and consists of 2700 blocks (stele) designed to make you feel uneasy as the blocks are random in size and many off kilter. The contrast between the blue sky and the gray of the stele are an acknowledgement of a very gray time in German history.

A little more about that "Death Strip", pieces of the Berlin Wall are still scattered around the city and a display including photographs from that awful time can be found at Potsdamer Platz a bit like Times Square in New York City.

The texture is pieces of gum, added more recently than my last trip in 2006.

Wall was not as high as I imagined it to be. Like it much better this way, as a work of art than as the barrier it once was. Gives one a little hope for the future.