1.
Berlin’s Bode Museum occupies the northern corner of a four or five acre island in the Spree River at Mitte, or the center of the city. A number of famous cultural institutions are packed together on the island to the extent that the place is called “Museum Island”. The Pergamon Museum is here, closed for renovations until 2026, as well as the Altes Museum, with its intimidating facade of colossal Doric columns supporting a pediment long as a train and adorned with an inscription in gold letters each about a yard tall – I don’t know what the inscription says: it is written in Latin, apparently celebrating the generosity of a Prussian King. The famous bust of Nefertiti, presently a cause celebre between Germany and the Egyptians, sits in a small rotunda in the middle of the Altes Museum. Also nearby is the Neues Museum, a picture gallery, designed as well to mimic a classical temple, albeit rather pinched in comparison to the jumbo-sized Altes Museum – its colonnade perches atop a tall pedestal with steps steep as a Maya temple leading up to its portico and walled interior. By contrast with these imitation Parthenons, the Bode Museum sits like a luxury liner at the prow of the island, a huge building with an Italianate renaissance facade curved gracefully around the river’s bend where the channel divides to enclose this spit of land with the Spree’s turgid, if rippling, and perceptible, currents. The array of large windows within sandstone gables in two stacked registers rising over the pointed tip of the island epitomize grace and lucidity. A brown dome surmounts the semi-circular curve of building looming over the split Spree canal – the rotunda neither soars nor is flattened to squat atop the building, but rather, expresses a reticent solemnity, justly proportioned and elevated over walls pierced by planet-shaped round windows at the base of the dome. The place looks like a cross between a palace and some sort of austere, ennobled fortification.
Like all great cities, Berlin is a combination of the majestic and squalid. From the Haeckescher Markt S-Bahn station, an arcade under the tracks opens on some narrow lanes crooked here as they follow the twisting contour of the river. We walk along an alleyway that is filthy with debris, the wreckage left by squatters including slabs of cardboard flattened to make mattress-like platforms on which to rest, tangles of rags and discarded clothing, windrows of bottles and paper sacks, this whole doleful spectacle of desolation smelling strongly of urine and excrement. Some alcoves in the built-up brick embankment where the trains course back and forth overhead open into shallow recesses, also heaped with garbage. The whole length of the alley is swarmed with foraging pigeons and seems to whisper things in your ear that your would rather not hear. At the end of this passageway, the structures part on both sides of this cold groove in the city and the sky appears overhead stretched taut as a drum and, then, the canal intervenes, the Spree below tamed by concrete ledges and eerie-looking flights of dank stone steps leading down to the black waters that surround the island. In the mist, another huge dome rises over the back side of the island and some street vendors are shoving pushcarts into place in the plazas between the museums and a couple of white swans with black domino masks over their eyes glide next to their reflections mirrored in the channel.
The Bode Museum’s interior, on the other side of the bridge across the river, is majestic. Immense stairs lined with red carpet descend from high marble galleries lined with polished columns that look like agates. An enormous equestrian statue sits at the bottom of the carpeted steps. The dome of the building is a marble blossom overhead radiating white and yellow pillars around its circumference. The building’s guts seem to consist of two large blocks of rooms wrapped around pale interior courtyards. Beyond the grandiose entrance, there is yet another atrium where larger-than-life princes, also sculpted from icy-looking stone, scowl down at the visitor dwarfed by the cascades of white steps and the pillars thrust up to support the roof with its glass skylights and imperial colonnades. It looks like the pompous lobby to an opera house. At this hour, about 10:30 in the morning, the place is still and empty. The long perspectives across galleries are vacant and motionless; congregations of carved figures stand at intervals, populating the halls with ornate images that always seem to be either on the verge of moving or that, perhaps, were gesticulating at you just before your eye focused on them. The energy is all potential, like springs in repose, wrought in the coiled twists and sinewy contrapposto of the statuary.
I had never been inside the Bode Museum. Visitors, I think, tend toward the other more famous institutions on the island with their iconic collections – art by Menzel and Friedrich in the picture gallery and the Egyptian antiquities in the Altes Museum and, of course, the mighty Ishtar Gate and the Ionic Greek altar in the Pergamon Museum. But, I would like to recommend the Bode – it’s too big and encyclopedic for close scrutiny and, if you want to see everything in the place, it will take you a week and, so, you will have to resolve to simply walk past many extraordinary things on display. The quality of the sculptures, however, is remarkable and in every one of the museum’s 150 rooms there is something to delight and confound the eye. The collection is figurative and religious statuary from the Roman era to the 19th century – the things on exhibit are three dimensional, poised on waist-high platforms and, in most cases, you have to stroll around the sculptures to fully appreciate them. The textures of the polished stone and hewn wood; the inlaid amber eyes and the cool marble, like ice cream, veined with colors of iron like blood and amethyst and emerald – all of these things plead with you to touch them, to run your fingers over this simulation of flesh and muscle, although, of course, this temptation, overwhelming as it might be, must be resisted. God is crucified in just about every corner of the hundred or more rooms; small cases glitter with coins and medallions and there are heaps of bright porcelain, mosaics that glint like broken glass, every sort of thing menacing or seductive to the eye and the eye’s touch – you worry the edges of stone images in your mind like you might tongue a broken tooth in your jaw.
2.
The ten-thousand masterpieces of figurative statuary in the Bode Museum convinces me of one thing: from the dawn of time, one of human kind’s most obsessive pursuits, has been the making of images representing gods and saints, objects of erotic delectation, figures of hideous pain and torment. Since I am a writer, I think of human enterprise primarily in terms of literature, poetry, the written word. But, there is a more primordial urge, it seems, to sculpt and carve and turn blocks of stone or hunks of wood into life-like figures. In the New World, in most places where I have lived, this impulse is concealed – there aren’t forests of sculpture competing for your eye in shopping malls or the plazas of American cities. But in Europe, and, I suppose, most everywhere else on the planet, an imponderable amount of energy, skill, and craft has been devoted to making mostly life-size devotional images. (This seems to be the occult economy of the world, an enormous web of transactions all devoted to making artistic images of things that already exist in the transient substance of bone, flesh, and blood.) The primary occupation of mankind, thus, seems to be the creation of images, that is the production of objects resembling human faces and bodies. The cells of the Bode Museum, one interlocked chamber after another, are like honey combs in a beehive, brimming over with a sweet surfeit of images of angels, demons, gods and saints, every manner of animal and human being. In Herman Hesse’s Narziss und Goldmund, a novel I read while I was in Germany, one of book’s protagonists, Goldmund, spends three years carving an ardent figure of the disciple Johannes (“John”) from a fat column of linden-wood. If it takes three years to make a thing of this kind, how many millennia of craftsmanship are represented by the thousands of statues in the Bode Museum’s collection?
3.
Here you will meet five-hundred portrait busts, either ardent or soldierly or distinguished, determined and proud or bland as an accountant or estates and trusts lawyer, some anguished with unspeakable martyrdom or equally inexpressible pleasure – all variations on the expressions to which humans are heir presented here encyclopedically... A rotund St. Denis carries his head like a basketball cradled in hands cupped under his breastbone and a hermaphrodite carved in greyish marble swoons in the center of a little room decorated like a garden pavilion – try not to look at his genitals in a patch of moss and fallen leaf under his navel! Against the wall, a fat man with merry countenance grins at you while, in the corridor, St. George, righteous and erect, leans on his devil-killing lance while a swine-sized demon writhes underfoot, tail arched to reveal the slot of a vulva on its belly. A hundred demure virgins in garments elaborately chased into sinuous folds and drapes look down on the galleries where one or two or three visitors pause among the mob of figures or stumble to the repose of a bench; one virgin is resplendent in an orange dress and she shines like a neon light above a kebab place in the Reeperbahn; a Greek philosopher knocked from some cathedral perch is the color of smoke whirling off a fire, lean and haggard with a shaggy beard and a narrow, elongated head, all stretched like some sort of silly putty or charcoal haze congealed into this slim sprig of stone; wild men with hairy shoulders peer through trellises of carved vine and the fall of the rebel angels, interlocked in a puzzle of finely worked ivory, baffles the eye with its insect-sized, entwined forms, all shaped into a white lattice; Christ,as large as you or I, sits astride a humble, dog-like donkey, set on wheels to be dragged in a procession, and Mary Magdalene claws her way out of the stone tablet of her tomb, the sepulcher shattered, as if by an earthquake and some sort of foetus sprouting from her thigh like a plague boil (discomfited angels flee from this calamity) and, against the wall, two martial figures, almost twice life-sized graciously beckon – their beards are savage like inverted flames and they wear vast plumes on their helmets, twisting, rearing serpent-shaped forms that make them look like gorgons; each carries an unfurled, fragile-seeming banner and their faces and hands are painted peach pink. In recesses clad in stone the color of freshly slaughtered pork (veined with fat), more pale saints twist their heads on piles of marble garments, faces like white roses opening to your eyes and, at last, there are Gothic sculptures by Tilman Riemenschneider, the four evangelists with their beasts beside their scriptorium benches and their heads all turned and tilted so that they seem to chime like great bells and, nearby, a street scene in three-dimensions, a matron among the city-fathers who wear hats that look like the belfries of 13th century cathedrals, lime wood cut in smooth shapely grooves and curves and eloquent hands alive with gestures that I can’t quite read, expressive long fingers and palms as smooth as rocks turned and polished by the tides of the sea and great staring eyes that seem to strain to meet your gaze... and, so, it continues, an exhausting tactile spectacle room after room, with laminated guides in wooden slots by the figures, admonitory texts about the role of women and homosexuals in the Roman empire and Byzantium and medieval times as well, a lectionary reminding us, perhaps, not to be too proud of the progress that we think we have achieved because there is always more to do in the fight for equality and liberation, and, although not all handsome young men portrayed suffering and dying or in raptures of ecstasy or praying or brandishing arms, although not all of these are meant to be homosexual, these figures are designed (so it is maintained) to inspire desire, even, lust with respect to the male body, just as the images of women are frequently entangled with misogynism and repulsion – at least, so it is maintained in a hundred and fifty rigid cards coated in cold plastic and written in both English and German – an arsenal of politically correct interpretation, take it or leave it as you wish.
4.
Tilman Riemenschneider’s four evangelists gracing the Bode Museum (Berlin Staatliche Museum) are figures from the predella of an altarpiece at Muennerstadt, carved in lindenwood (or lime-tree wood). The figures were made when Riemenschneider was 30 or 32, around 1490. (Linden trees were cultivated expressly as a source for woodcutting material – lime wood from genus Tilla is less dense than other hardwoods, shows less susceptibility to warping, and is readily worked with the knife and chisel.) Riemenschneider was born in the heart of Germany and spent his life in various villages and cities around the Frankfurt area. He seems to have been influenced by the great late-Gothic engraver Martin Schongauer and many of his figures have the faintly elongated, expressionistic contours of the saints and martyrs in Schongauer’s wood cuts and copper plates. Riemenschneider is famous for his Madonnas whose faces are said to be “inward-looking” –what this means is unclear to me since a countenance is always exterior even when brooding about some inner anguish. (Most art criticism is eloquent gibberish).
Riemenschneider is claimed to be the model for the master woodcarver Nikolai in Hesse’s Narziss und Goldmund, the 1933 novel that read while in Hamburg. (Goldmund is bewitched by a Virgin carved by Nikolai and tries to become an apprentice to the master woodcarver; Nikolai recognizes that Goldmund is a free-spirit whose ecstasies and privations have elevated him far beyond other apprentices and determines that he will teach the young man but not formally engage the unruly youth as his student. Later, Goldmund carves a brilliantly expressive Johannes figure, the evangelist John, and Nikolai asks the young man to join him in his workshop, marry his comely daughter, and, even, urges his acceptance to the local woodcarvers’ trade guild; Goldmund feels that these privileges will be an imposition on his freedom and, so, he departs the city where he has sought refuge for three years, returns to wandering the forests and meadows, and, later, almost perishes in the plague) After his death in 1531, Riemenschneider was forgotten and, during his life time, not a famous figure such as Albrecht Duerer, his contemporary. His gravestone was accidentally discovered in 1822 and, gradually, his corpus of work was defined and his fame as an exemplar of German piety grew in a manner parallel to the expansion of German nationalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hesse’s oblique reference to him in his novel is part of this subsequent history of rediscovery and has, of course, unfortunate connections to the cult of the Deutsch artist during the Nazi period.
Riemenschneider’s piety, both ecstatic and curiously reticent and refined, is thought to embody the intellectual currents that fueled the Protestant Reformation. In 1525, during the Peasant’s Rebellion, a savage popular manifestation of the Reformation (although denounced by Luther), Tilman Riemenschneider was on the wrong side of the conflict. During this period, master craftsmen had considerable prestige, and Riemenschneider was on the Wuerzburg City Council. The Council was ordered to arrest and fight rebelling peasants who had taken refuge in the city. Riemenschneider and his colleagues refused and, later, in a pitched battle outside the city gates, eight-thousand peasant rebels were slaughtered. The Crown Prince of Wuerzburg detained the City Fathers, including Riemenschneider, and had them tortured. It was alleged that Riemenschneider’s hands were crushed and that this brought an end to his wood carving. The story is seductive but, almost certainly, untrue.
5.
In the Sailor’s Chapel in Hamburg, the St. Katherina Kirche, there is a lissome wooden sculpture of the its patron made around 1350. St. Catherine has a sweet, round face and cocks her head as if hearing some remote, almost imperceptible music. She wears a scarlet tunic and dress around which a cloak the color of brass (with an inner lining that is bright blue) is wrapped. Her cheeks are round and faintly rosy and, atop her head, she has a crown with ludicrous-looking spires of ornate, oriental crosses, fleur-de-lys of gilt tracery work. Of course, the church heavens are filled with a vast pipe organ that looks like a burnished instrument of war, but, otherwise, most of the walls are bare. Bombing stripped the altars of these churches in 1943 and calcined their interiors and this place, standing above the Nikolia Fleet, a narrow channel incised into the city, was relatively poor and could not be restored to its full pomp and magnificence. Bach performed on the predecessor of this organ and the church pastor, Phillip Nikolai was the great composer’s librettist –Nikolai wrote the text to the cantata “Wachet auf, Ruft uns die Stimme” (sometimes translated as “Sleeper’s Awake”). Today, all of these churches are engaged in vigorous advocacy on the question of Ukraine and its war with Russia and, under the altar in the empty St. Katherina’s Kirche, I found a cell-phone next to a very neatly bound sheaf of wheat – a theatrical work on the Holodomer (or Ukrainian famine induced by Stalin) is performed here nightly. An elaborate art work, white tapestries showing female figures about twice life-size walking away from the spectator, is hung along the side of the nave. The art installation, seemingly a comment on Friedrich’s famous “Rueckenfigure” of the “Wanderer above the Sea of Mist” is entitled, with Brechtian self-confidence: “By closely observing others, you may see a resemblance of your self.”
St. Catherine’s Church is the second oldest structure surviving in the Hamburg, only a stone’s throw away from the vast brick ramparts of the “Warehouse City” and the narrow, medieval tenements where the sailor’s wives once lived among brewers and small craftsmen. The somber dark waters of the canal hold the reflection of the high steeple on their bosom. Of course, it’s not clear how the age of buildings should be measured in this city – it was bombed into rubble in July of 1943 and photographs show the hulk of a enormous bell lying like some kind of perverse fallen fruit in a shambles of broken walls, smashed brick and masonry. Everything visible today had to be rebuilt.
6.
On one of our last night’s in Hamburg, Angelica and I went to La Sepia, a Portuguese restaurant in the Sternschanze district. Sternschanze station is one stop to the west on the S-bahn line from Dammtor and, therefore, close to where we were lodged. The neighborhood is a funky mix of bars, dance clubs, and restaurants, some of them so popular that lines of people are waiting on the sidewalk outside. The buildings are old and, apparently, this is a part of town that is being gentrified. The haggard-looking buildings tower over silky ribbons of neon at street-level and music simmers in alleys and at intersections.
There are several Portuguese districts in Hamburg, neighborhoods characterized by Tapas restaurants and seafood places. (The old Portuguese Viertel is near Landungsbruecke, the excursion pier on the harbor, in a tangle of old streets under the river bluff.) La Sepia, named I suppose for the ink squirted by distressed Mediterranean and Atlantic squid, is one of the older establishments in Sternenschanze, dating back to the hippy era in the early ‘70's when the place was mostly a haven for squatters.
The restaurant smells strongly, if not unpleasantly of steamed and broiled fish, and there are fat old men working as waiters, gruff fellows who are not to be trifled with. There’s a menu in inept English and, also, offerings in German neatly written in a sort of laborious long-hand on a chalkboard. A little after we enter the restaurant and are seated, a family with husband and wife and three teenage children are escorted to a table near us. The oldest son seems to have returned from some scholastic endeavors abroad and he is very effusive, speaking enthusiastically and, at length, to the apparent delight of his handsome father and mother. These are fit, athletic-looking Germans, neatly dressed and groomed, well-equipped for the perpetual rain outside with thick plush coats and fur-lined hoods. I order “limbs of Polpo” –that is, octopus – and platter arrives with fat rubbery-looking (although relatively tender) tentacles grilled until their tips are a little charred.
The two teenage daughters don’t seem much interested in their brother’s narrative and, so, they scroll through their cell-phone messages in a desultory way. The youngest daughter has a pale, perfectly round face that seems somewhat blurry to me, a milky forehead and a very slightly receding chin. She is beautiful and looks familiar to me. Where have I seen these slender shoulders and petal-like hands and this unfocused, wan face with white cheeks just slightly suffused with rose, petal-mouth with a discrete underbite? Then, it occurs to me that I am seeing the figure of the Virgin as she appears in a hundred carved effigies in the Bode Museum, cream complexion slightly tinted with the only faintest flare of cheeks. The Greek word for “virgin” means “young woman” and I imagine that the master woodcutters who carved these religious figures based them on the thirteen- and fourteen-year old girls that they saw on the streets or who might be persuaded with sweets and trinkets to pose for them. How old is the Virgin Mary in the Gospels? Isn’t she a young girl, a teenager, just like this pale apparition sitting fifteen feet from me and engrossed in texts on her cell-phone?
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