7 June: Old and new in Berlin

First job was squeezing everything into suitcases (note to self: don’t plan holidays across three climate zones!)

Our large taxi van fitted our luggage with ease. On our arrival at the Mövenpick Hotel, we enjoyed a stimulating exchange between our tough Berlin lady taxi driver and the unfortunate occupant of her taxi space in front of the hotel. With a eye for tactics fit for Frederick the Great, she jammed her van across the road, causing sn instant buildup of tooting cars and tour buses.”Uberfahrer!” (“uber driver”) she yelled. Assailed on all sides, he skulked away. She beamed a smile at us and pulled up triumphant.

Our hotel had started off as the Berlin head offices of Werner von Siemens, inventer of the dynamo and most other electrical systems in modern cities, who founded one of the greatest electrical companies in the world.

Seriously damaged by World War II bombing, and cut off by the Berlin Wall nearby, Siemens House languished until the Mövenpick Hotel chain refurbished this classified historical monument as a 243- room hotel on the late 1990’s.

It was a perfect location for us. Our main reason for coming to Berlin was to go to a live concert of the Berliner Philharmoniker. During Covid we joined their digital membership and have enjoyed it ever since.

We were pleased to find our hotel only a half-hour walk from the famous Philharmonie complex. We wanted to book a guided tour for the next day (we had tickets for a concert on Thursday.) But the office didn’t open until 3pm. Was there a good coffee bar nearby? Yes, at the Gemälde Gallery. This just happens to house one the world’s leading collections of European masterpieces from the 13th to 18th centuries. Wow!

We walked until our feet were sore. A handful of our favourites:

* Botticelli’s Profile of a Young Woman. She could model for Dior. And her hair, woven with pearls;
* Fra Fillipo Lippi’s exquisite Adoration in the Forest;
*Caravaggio’s scoffing bad boy (of course) Amor, lust not love;
* the cruel Gabriel de la Cueva, Duke of Albuquerque, the Spanish Governor of Milan;
And as always, Rembrandt:
* the old goldsmith engrossed in his private world;
* Sculpture: a bronze Hercules, the dead Nemean Lion underfoot;
* And once again Til Riemenschneider, greatest of German woodcarvers. Grace, feeling, robes that sweep and flow.

Back at the Philharmonie - no problem with our upcoming tour. On the way back to the hotel we found a perfect juxtoposition of old and new Berlin: a dignified mansion (with stone patches in the pillars damaged during the war) and behind it an immense new apartment block proudly advertising its state-of-the-art measures for water recycling.Weiterlesen