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CULTURE

Berlin goes Babylon

Babylon’s strange hold on contemporary culture spurs Daniel Miller to sort myth from truth at a new exhibition at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum.

Published: 1 August 2008 17:55 CEST
Berlin goes Babylon
Photo: Pergamon Museum

What’s the first thing you think of when you hear the name Babylon?

That reggae phase you went through in high school? Steel Pulse irie! A bad science fiction series? You’ll never get those hours of your life spent in front of the TV back. Or perhaps traumatic moments as a kid during bible study?

Babylon has a strange hold on contemporary culture. In the film “Ghostbusters,” an ancient Sumerian spirit takes the form of huge marshmallow man and tries to conquer New York. In the seminal cyberpunk book “Snow Crash” – which inspired virtual reality worlds like “Second Life” – Babylonian spirits attempt to invade the internet.

Playing on the cliché of a corrupt Babylonian society, the US film industry has been labelled Hollywood Babylon and a film about rebuilding post-reunification Berlin plays off the ancient city’s supposed hubris. The uncompromising American feminist writer Camille Paglia once even suggested that “popular cultural is the new Babylon… our imperial sex theatre, supreme temple of the western eye.”

Click here to see a photo gallery of the exhibition.

The strength of our fixation on Babylon is one of the two topics addressed in the gigantic “Babylon: Myth and Truth” exhibition currently on show at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Heavily promoted across the city over the last few weeks, the exhibition is really two shows in one. Each section occupies a separate part of the building and each is put together by a different curator.

The juxtaposition is significant. Whereas the “Truth” section is an exercise in archaeology taking in ancient relics from all over the world, the “Myth” section is a diverse and eclectic art exhibition.

Among the artists represented are the Weimar expressionist George Grosz, the apocalyptic Victorian etcher John Martin, and the hyped-up contemporary art star Dash Show. A clip from D.W. Griffith’s historical epic Intolerance plays in one room, while a disturbing sound installation by Timm Ulrich jars visitors in another. It seems fair to say that there surely aren’t many art exhibitions in which a beautifully-illustrated fifteenth century edition of Saint Augustine’s “City of God” and Snow’s semen-stained copies of the New York Post are able jostle happily for the attention of visitors.

A Babylonian moment

Unconcerned that it might be some type of museum Rorschach test, I headed for the “Myth” section located on the top floor of the Pergamon first.

“Myth” begins with piece of video art entitled “Zid/Wall” by the Sarajevo-born artist Danica Dakic. The piece shows sixty-four close-up shots of lips moving feverishly, recounting different stories in different languages. The cumulative, and fitting, result was inchoate babble. “The talking wall,” the caption noted helpfully, “reflects the linguistic condition of our time.”

The two big ideas of the Babylon show are that our civilization is currently going through a Babylonian moment, and that our civilization is haunted by Babylonian themes. Dakic’s piece turned on this first idea, while the second came across strongly in a video installation entitled “Black and White (Babylon)” by Douglas Gordon, who is famous from his film about Zinedine Zidane. Gordon’s piece depicts a buxom nineteen-fifties stripper, hypnotically swaying in black and white slow-motion in the guise of the ubiquitous Babylonian whore.

While “Myth” was mainly do with ideas, “Truth” was visceral, and instilled a sheer sense of awe. Featuring as its centrepiece is the Pergamon’s reconstruction of Babylon’s stunning blue-glazed Ishtar Gate. The sheer scale of the subject matter reduced me to silence. After a while I stopped taking notes, unsure as to what I could meaningfully say about an exhibition, built on two centuries of scholarly research about an entire civilization.

Despite the provocative tone of the posters dotted around Berlin, the “Truth” show was more concerned with clarifying the extent of our Babylonian influences then with refuting them. We don’t discover that there a Tower of Babel never existed, but rather that the actual structure was sharper and more ziggurat-like then the famous painting by Brueghel. Elsewhere, we learn of the finer points of Babylonian government, law, science and economy, as well as the intriguing tale of the rise of Marduk from a small-time local deity to the king of gods.

Most of the actual exhibits on show in “Truth” are, in truth, weird lumps of rock. But the presence of huge numbers of sweating visitors bustling through the rooms, and talking in dozens of languages, cast an interesting light on them.

The last piece in the show is a fictional time capsule from the future, cast from the perspective of the fast-coming day when our own civilization turned to dust, and explaining our downfall through Babylonian terms. I suppose it’s up to us whether that becomes truth or myth.

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DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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