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EXBERLINER MAGAZINE

CULTURE

The Best of Berlin in January

This month Exberliner, Berlin's leading English-language magazine, hits the catwalk for Fashion Week, uncovers the art of being tacky and helps you brush up your German skills.

Published: 21 January 2010 11:26 CET
The Best of Berlin in January
Photo: DPA

Back in fashion

It’s that time of year again, style lovers, so start polishing your Louboutins and plumping your pelts for Fashion Week (January 20-23). Mercedes Benz will be holding court in Bebelplatz again, where a veritable smorgasbord of burgeoning local talent (Marcel Ostertag, Mongrels in Common), big names (Hugo Boss, JOOP) and some international visitors (CUSTO Barcelona) will be on display. Invitations are strictly for people in the biz, but chat up the right folks and you might be able to squeeze your way into a show, or at least one of the crazy after-parties. This season’s top ticket is newcomers No Ifs, but the show most likely to shock and amaze is Patrick Mohr’s. Last year he sent homeless people down the runway for his debut; this time around, he is planning a transgender-themed extravaganza to show off his unisex jeans. In Berlin, Fashion Week also triggers tradeshow mania. Bread and Butter is still the big boy in town: for the second season in a row, it will exhibit the largest collection of urban streetwear brands in its new Tempelhof home. Premium is also back; among the new tradeshows, Spirit of Fashion and Jam will be worth a visit. Jam, which just made the all-important move from Cologne to Berlin, focuses on denim, so jeans lovers should elbow their way onto the shuttle service to the Rathenauhallen to check it out./JS

Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, Jan 20-23 | Bebelplatz 1, Unter den Linden, Mitte, U-Bhf Französische Str., www.mercedes-benzfashionweek.com

Jam, Jan 20-22 | Rathenauhallen, Wilhelminenhofstr. 83- 85, Oberschöneweide, S-Bhf Berlin-Schöneweide, www.jamberlin.com

Premium, Jan 20-23 | Luckenwalder Str. 4-6 , Kreuzberg, U-Bhf Gleisdreieck, www.premiumexhibitions.com

Spirit of Fashion, Jan 20-22 | Karl-Marx-Allee 131A, Friedrichshain, U-Bhf Frankfurter Tor, www.spirit-offashion.com

Bread & Butter, Jan 20-22 | Flughafen Tempelhof, Platz der Luftbrücke 5, U-Bhf Platz der Luftbrücke, www.breadandbutter.com

There’s no accounting for taste

At the beginning of the 1900s, the Czech art historian Gustav E. Pazaurek devised a complex classification system that sorted the most tasteless daily objects into categories of “design crime”. This led to the opening, at the Landesmuseum in Stuttgart, of the first “Cabinet of Bad Taste”. One hundred years later, the Werkbundarchive (an institution that, in the Bauhaus tradition, studies the design and functionality of everyday objects) has picked up where Pazaurek left off by creating a “design torture chamber” for our times. This horror show takes 50 of the 900 original “crimes” and builds on them. There are sneakers with Obama’s face on them, a swan-shaped porcelain vase, pink Dior crocodile-skin loafers made out of china… Is it art or a total aberration? Kitsch or trendy? Nowadays anything goes, so each artifact comes helpfully labelled as Violated Materials, Functional Lies, Cheap Originality, Manic Ornamentation/Wasteful Decoration or Art Atonement. Following Christmastime, all this might feel a little too familiar – for who among us has not been the victim of a tacky gift? You could, of course, donate yours to the collection. If it’s awful enough, you might even be written into (bad) design history in the soon-to-be-published 21st century edition of the Encyclopedia of Bad Taste!/SF

Böse Dinge: Eine Enzyklopädie des Ungeschmacks | Museum der Dinge, Oranienstr. 25, Kreuzberg, U-Bhf Kottbuser Tor, Fri-Mon 12-19, www.museumderdinge.de. Through Jan 11

Deutsch for beginners…and Berliners

You’ve tried it all. The Rosetta Stone iPhone app, the German course promising breakthrough language acquisition methodology, the personal tutor – hell, you’ve even tried sitting in a café and eavesdropping, in the desperate hope that German can be passed on through osmosis. And the language textbooks haven’t helped: phrases describing the asinine qualities of the everyday lives of Günther and Greta stick in the recesses of your memory like incantations from a lost time, occasionally inspiring the panic of the unprepared before a modal verb quiz. Luckily, if you’re looking for a brush-up or just a good satirical laugh (or both), there is a Deutsch als Fremdsprache book like no other to add to the pile: Florian Lamp and Heldrich Johannes’ Deutsch für den Ausländer. Hold on to your Lederhosen, though, because this book is not for the faint of heart (but then again, is German ever?) Günther and Greta have been replaced by the Familie Schmidt – close relations to that down-and-out couple with the scary dog on the U8 who sport accoutrements à la Pimkie and nurse a Frühstück of Berliner Kindl. For inspiration, author Lamp and illustrator Johannes spent their evenings scouting out Eckkneipen in Kreuzberg and Neukölln. They credit Berlin, “the center of arty-ugliness”, as the only setting in all of Germany that could lend itself to the creation of such a volume; Johannes’ work on the illustrations was “a long process to give each (character) its special type of sadness”. The creators want their book to be fun, but provocative at the same time. Its crass humor, which makes fun of everybody and anybody, is part of a greater therapy – to help Germans learn to laugh at themselves. And as Ausländer, we should have no qualms about laughing right along./EP

Deutsch für den Ausländer | Florian Lamp and Heldrich Johannes, Der Grosskonzern, 2009, 254 pages, €19.89 For more information, visit www.der-grosskonzern.de

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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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