More pictures of Berlin today, taken in late November, 2011. This follows on my earlier post, “Berlin #1”.

Despite the WW II bombing, there’s still a lot of nice old buildings around. And of course the industrious Germans have rebuilt many of those buildings as well. I like this type of nineteenth century look. Serious attics and garrets up there.

I wandered into an art gallery featuring a show by an Italian woman whose current motif was round watermelons. They even had a melon/globe on the desk.

The big Wheel at the Christmas market near our hotel. Der grossen Rad. The Berliner Dom in the background.

We went to another Christmas market, this in the Gendarmenplatz, one of the more elegant squares in Berlin with, I think, three separate cathedrals on it, also a concert hall. The Christmas markets are mostly about food, as opposed to being about classy, crafty decorations for your tree. This one restaurant had set up an enclosed dining room, heated, and with a transparent roof. A real treat.

Looking up into the dome the awesome Berlin cathedral, that Berliner Dom…it’s a Lutheran cathedral, meant to be a match for the Catholic ones. I love how the great dome’s circles work together in this kind of image. Mathematics on parade.

The round church of St. Hedwig has lovely curves. In the future, we’ll grow our buildings and everything will be like this.

Berlin has many museums. As Berlin was, for a time, two separate cities—East and West—many standard cultural institutions, like museums, concert halls, and opera houses, are duplicated, one for each half.

This one museum is in the old “Hamburg train station,” and it has contemporary art, including this great eight-foot-tall mask by Keith Haring. I think it’s the best of his works that I’ve ever seen. Wonderful cafe in this museum as well.

I like these guys moving around a statue of some high-level guy. Kind of a metaphor for…something.

In the Pergamon museum we looked at some Greek antiquities, including this tiling of a floor. I like how the square forms in the inner ring do a visual reversal like a Necker cube. And the wavy yin-yang nested scrolls on the other ring.

We went to a residential neighborhood where lots of young parents live. I always like these food-people statues, particularly when they get this battered street-person look. And he’s eating frags of his own brain. Fry-brain.

The Hamburger train station museum had a special installation of big inflated plastic domes by an artist. This one had two levels, and I went inside to look up at the people on the next level. Very spacy.

We saw a piano soloist in the concert hall off the Gendarmenplatz square. The inside of the hall was insanely elegant, like Viennese pastry.

One day we rode an urban-rail train a few miles out of the center of Berlin, going deep into the old East zone. The buildings in the East zone have this very solid, utilitarian look.

A cool old statue of a devil seen in a museum. As seen in artworks, devils always seem to be having more interesting lives than angels. I think an angel is in fact standing on this guy, but he’s making some plans anyway, sleazy city slicker that he is.

The basement of the Berliner Dom is this, like, living-room or non-living-room filled with giant, ornate nineteenth-century caskets for members of the then-ruling families. Kind of a horrible place, deeply creepy.

A statue of Death perches at the foot of one casket. “Oh, here’s your name. Got your spot all set for you here.”

A seriously classical-looking museum on the Museum Island. I love this kind of extravagent stuff. To hell with that 1950s-1960s “less is more” crap. More is more.

We wandered into this cafe of the Bode museum on the Museum island. Monumental European luxury, a marble-columned cafe with a hundred-foot-high ceiling. And marzipan cake. And hardly anyone else there.

Looking down at the Spree River from our hotel we could see an occasional barge chuffing by.

The East Berliners had their own icons for the traffic lights, including this “Ampelman” or “Traffic Light Man.” He’s kind of a mascot of the city now.

Wandering around town we passed a weathered old Amerika Haus or “America House.” These are libraries with American books and magazines, in English, set up in the 1950s to promote a sense of unity with the US. They all looked exactly like this one. When I was a boy visiting my grandmother in Hannover, Germany, I liked to go to the local Amerika Haus to get science-fiction books.

I still remember finding a story anthology with a tale about a guy who goes to a lecture on the fourth dimension and dozes off during the lecture to find himself surrounded by sentient higher-dimensional spheres. I don’t remember how that story ends. Maybe the guy gets a Ph.D. in mathematics and becomes an SF writer!

After I gave my TEDx talk in Brussels, my wife and I went to Berlin for a week. I didn’t take any journal notes, so I’m just going to paste in my best photos in a fairly random order, with whatever comments come to mind.

Here’s a medieval painting of a wizard. I like this guy.

My mother grew up in Berlin, but I’d never been there before. It was an interesting city, really big, and with the palpable divide between the east and west halves. We stayed in a hotel in the Mitte area in the former east zone, right by an island in the river. On the island was this enormous museum complex, like four or five Met museums in one spot. It’s the Museum island.

We were there at the end of November, with the Christmas thing ramping up. Dig these ornaments on a mirror-topped table in a fancy hotel with columns. Hard to tell where you are. I went into this hotel twice to use their luxurious bathroom.

I get a little tired of photographing the places in the Bay Area where I always go, and it’s fun on a trip to have this big feast of new things to shoot. In this image, I’m into the old stone, the arches, and especially the wobbly reflection in the windows on the left.

One of the big landmarks in the former east zone is this giant TV tower. In principle you can ride an elevator to the top, but there’s a wait, and I generally prefer being down in the streets. I liked getting this triangular roof corner in the foreground.

A certain stretch of the famous street Under Den Linden has the Humboldt University and bunch of amazing old buildings. The one here on the right is a memorial to the WW II dead, both the soldiers and the victims of the Holocaust.

This thing that looks like a temple is actually the pointed tip of one of the Bode museum on the Museum Island.

Like I said, our hotel, the Radisson Blu, was right across the Spree river from the Museum island, and on the island was a 19th century Protestant cathedral, the Berliner Dom. Great flocks of crows gathered on it every night, wheeling and cawing. Sylvia liked this statue of an angel on the Dom roof, blowing that long horn.

As the sun went down behind the Berliner Dom we’d get wild silhouettes.

We went inside the Dom of course. Amazing stained glass window, with ferny fractal designs and maybe the Kaiser’s hat.

We went and saw a stretch of the Berlin Wall in this funky part of the east side called Friederichshain. Lots of younger people there, a very hip spot called the Michaelsberger hotel. A bunch of artists drew semi-permanent graffiti on the Berlin wall—each of them got about twenty meters worth to paint on—this was about twenty years ago, and the murals are still intact. Uncle Scrooge confronts a videogame warrior from a black hole.

Meanwhile back at the Humboldt University on Unter Den Linden we’ve got a marble scholar.

My cousin Christian von Bitter met us in Berlin—his father Conrad was the brother of my mother Marianne von Bitter. Christian drove us out and we saw the house where our parents lived with they were teenagers.

Christian steered me to our great-great-great-grandfather Georg Hegel’s grave as well. We found it around dusk—it got dark there about 4:30, as Berlin is a far north as Toronto. We were a little worried about getting locked into the graveyard. I was glad to find Hegel’s spot.

While we were at it, Christian led me to a portrait of my great-grandfather Carl Julius Rudolf von Bitter (1846-1914) as well. He was a judge for the Verwaltungsgericht, a court for administrative workers, and when he was older he lived on the top floor of a giant Verwaltungsgericht courthouse built in the early 1900s near the Berlin zoo. His son, also named Rudolf von Bitter, was my mother’s father.

Christian said a lot of the 19th century Bitters had worked in the Prussian government, which wasn’t really how I’d thought of my family background! I thought of them as philosphers and artists. The Bitters were ennobled and given the “von” in front of their name in 1880, in recognition of my great-great-grandfather Hans Rudolf von Bitter (1811-1880), who’d been appointed at the President of the Prussian State Bank.

The Bitter family tree also includes some Jewish people, which was a problem in the 1930s, although my grandfather managed to squeak through. This tree that I have online was made by my mother’s younger brother, yet another Rudolf von Bitter (1918-1941), and it’s drawn so that it converges on my uncle Rudolf at the top. He died on the Russian front in WW II.

Back to one’s roots…too much information! We walk on a forest floor of humus from our uncountable ancestors’ lives.

In the Bode museum on the Museum island we wandered through some Islamic art galleries, with very cool rugs. Note the perennial and ubiquitous Zhabotinsky scrolls.

All around the city were Christmas markets, some with giant Ferris wheels. Sylvia and I actually rode on this one. We sat in little gondola cars. We were in there with a cheerful six year old girl and her parents. She said she wasn’t scared, but we were, a little bit.

More pix in my “Berlin #2” entry.