So for the last two weeks I've had a bad cold on-and-off, so I thought I would do a strange little post about the German version of Kleenex, called "Tempo" (but superior to its American version). Like in English, people reference the thing by the brand name (Kleenex/Tempo) maybe just as often as the generic word "tissue" or "Taschentuch".
A cultural difference (but correct me if I'm wrong): My impression is that in the US, people tend to buy boxed tissues more than the small kind. If you go to a drugstore or grocery store, there is a whole shelf with lots of options for boxed tissues: colored tissues, with lotion, with aloe, etc. But Germans have mastered the pocket tissues. But the pocket sized ones are usually flimsy and cheap in the US, and the German ones are super strong. And, in Germany almost everyone always has a pack of tissues on them, that look like the blue pack below.
It's funny if you think about the cultural meaning of this revolution: from fabric handkerchiefs to paper tissues (diapers, too...). In Germany this brand was introduced in 1929; in the US Kleenex was also being developed and marketed in the mid 1920s. At first it was being used to remove makeup, and then after the 30s it is marketed as a hygiene product, with the slogan: “Don’t Carry a Cold in Your Pocket”. Below is a similar ad/slogan from Tempo: "Higher Risk of Flu - Tempo, the hygienic tissue. " (here More ads from Spiegel) So that's the weird little post for you as I sit in bed, recovering with my Tempos. :) Germany isn't the worst place to have a cold...as they also have the best juice (Multivitaminsaft) and Ricola! (Jessica knows what I'm talking about here...)
One of the things I love about Berlin is how many little pieces of history you discover walking/biking/running through the city. It's fascinating, and the city never lets you forget that it has this multi-layered history that never goes away. Today biking home I went by this apartment complex which was built over/above/around a WWII bunker that was impossible to get rid of after the war (the amount of explosives it would have taken would have destroyed too many of the surrounding buildings). Most were destroyed by the Allies. This older post from a few summers ago also has a bunker that survived the war, in Mitte near the Deutsches Theater. There is an organization (Berliner Unterwelten) that does tours of bunkers and other "underworlds", but I have never done one. Maybe when Anna and Paul come to visit this summer we'll do it. Their website also has some good information about the various sites they go to. For example, in the Volkspark Humboldthain, the bunker was also too close to railroad lines to be destroyed, so they piled it with rubble and it created a so-called "Trümmerberg", rubble mountain. In this case, it was over 1,4 Millionen cubic meters of rubble! There are many of these "Trümmerberge" in Berlin, formed after the war when they were trying to rebuild and reorganize the city from the pile of bricks it was. The most famous is the Teufelsberg, which I have also not yet visited, in the Grünewald. Some of the U-Bahn stations also had bunkers, like Gesundbrunnen, and under Moritzplatz.
One thing I always love about being in Europe are how the street names (and U-Bahn station names) are always tied to history, culture, and geography. It's not 5th Ave and 10th Street, random numbers and coordinates like on a US city grid, but "Rosa-Luxembourg-Platz" and "Kleistpark," "Straße des 17. Juni" and "Bismarckstr.". (This has always impressed me in visiting, Paris, too.) And sometimes, with the ups and downs of history, the street names change. The Third Reich is only the most obvious example: Rosa-Luxembourg-Platz was "Horst-Wessel-Platz"; Theodor-Heuss-Platz was Adolf-Hitler-Platz 1933-1945.
Michael noticed that one of our regular stations, Platz der Luftbrücke, has a plaque that the station used to be called "Kreuzberg" (see picture above). Well, it's obvious that the name "Platz der Luftbrücke" [the Berlin Air Lift] is a relatively recent name. So I looked into it...and found this amazing website, http://www.alt-berlin.info with great old maps of the city. The history of the U-Bahn is relatively recent but they have maps of the city going back to 1738. Here is another super amazing (I know, so nerdy...) site with info about all the stations: http://www.untergrundbahn.de/, and even some historic pictures.
So you can see above the station is called "Kreuzberg", you can also see the Viktoria Park. And in the map below from 1926, the stop is marked with an open circle (incomplete?). In the last one below, it's already renamed "Flughafen" (Airport).
We just saw The Artist tonight and so I thought I'd do a little silent-film inspired post about Germans in Hollywood, with some film recommendations. Feel free to post any other suggestions.
I've seen a lot of the classic German silent films, and shown them to students...and to be honest, they can be hard to take sometimes. The intertitles are usually made for people who need more time to read on the screen, and the movies usually move more slowly in general. I can watch Caligarifor the beautiful sets, and I have really enjoyed Nosferatu at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, with live organ accompaniment around Halloween. But if you rent them at home and watch them in your living room, I can't promise you that you will love it. Or Metropolis, or Berlin: Sinfonie der Großstadt. The latter I got to see with modern music at the Babylon in Berlin, an amazing experience. And last year at the Michigan Theater I went to quite a few Charlie Chaplin films on the big screen, with a full audience, laughing with you. It totally changes the experience. Silent films were meant to engage you (the audience) loudly and viscerally, and communally, and that has totally been lost along the way, and it's hard to recapture (but can be done!). Watch Cinema Paradiso for a feel for the loud, grimy and hot atmosphere at the local theater. Some of the opening scenes of The Artist try to capture this, when they zoom out so you can see the movie palace where the film was being shown. But that was a movie premiere in Hollywood, not your local theater. But I'm getting off-track...
The Artist takes place during the late 20s, early 30s, roughly the same time frame for Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, starring Marlene Dietrich, which also flashes the dates as intertitles, and uses the stock market crash as a time reference. The Blue Angel was the first major German sound film, and also made Dietrich internationally famous. Both she and von Sternberg went to Hollywood after the film.
Then came the mid 30s and 40s, when Hollywood benefited from the talented writers, directors, composers, and actors who were either driven out or chose to leave Nazi Germany, including: Fritz Lang (in Germany: expressionist classic Metropolis, film noir M, in the US: The Big Heat), Peter Lorre (in Germany: M; in the US: Casablanca), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity, The Apartment, Sabrina, and many others).
I read that when The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius gave his acceptance speech, he said he wanted to thank three people, "Billy Wilder, Billy Wilder and Billy Wilder." Billy Wilder tops my list of the most amazing stuff you'll ever see that doesn't seem to age (also including Chaplin on the big screen, and Hitchcock). (Maybe that's also why my expectations were very, very high.) If you haven't seen Sunset Boulevard, it is also a film about a silent film star ruined by the sound age. Rent it. Amazing. And, if you want to see some of his work tied to Germany and the immediate postwar period, rent One, two, three (1961); and A Foreign Affair (1948). Hilarious!
Watch the first minute of this clip, where American GIs are hitting on German "Frolleins," and then accidentally pick up an American from Iowa. The whole film is actually available on YouTube, starting here.
This is a photo by Friedrich Seidenstücker, taken after WWII in Berlin, which I came across in my research. I actually haven't seen many other photos of the ruins in the snow, so I think it's quite unique. More common are images or descriptions of grass growing up and over the rubble, nature taking back over. But the snow has a really different effect. You get a feeling of cold and silence, which is really beautiful and quite sad, at the same time.
Friedrich der Große, the Great, "der alte Fritz": 2012 marks the 300-year anniversary of his birth. He was an advocate of "enlightened absolutism," read the French philosophes, played the flute and tried to reform and modernize Prussia.
In December, during our visit to Sanssouci in Potsdam, we noticed potatoes on his gravestone near the place. I had to look up why, and found out he helped introduce the potato to Prussia.
the gravestone in Sanssouci
Here is one account of the legend: "Frederick the Great of Prussia saw the potato's potential to help feed his nation and lower the price of bread, but faced the challenge of overcoming the people's prejudice against the plant. When he issued a 1774 order for his subjects to grow potatoes as protection against famine, the town of Kolberg replied: "The things have neither smell nor taste, not even the dogs will eat them, so what use are they to us?" Trying a less direct approach to encourage his subjects to begin planting potatoes, Frederick used a bit of reverse psychology: he planted a royal field of potato plants and stationed a heavy guard to protect this field from thieves. Nearby peasants naturally assumed that anything worth guarding was worth stealing, and so snuck into the field and snatched the plants for their home gardens. Of course, this was entirely in line with Frederick's wishes." From http://www.history-magazine.com/potato.html
statue on Unter den Linden
"Fritz" display at bookstore (Dussmann)
"In meinem Staate kann jeder nach seiner Facon selig werden."
Yesterday I went to the Friedrich Seidenstücker exhibit at the Berlinische Galerie (exhibit up until Feb. 6). His photographs are mostly of street scenes from Weimar-era Berlin, and go into the 30s. He also has photographs from after the war and from the occupation of Berlin.
I thought many of the images from the 30s echo the same themes as Ruttmann's film Sinfonie der Großstadt. He has photographs of people on their way to work and during their free time. The motifs of city life are central: train stations, traffic, buildings...but also the places of recreation: the zoo, the lakes around Berlin. Actually, he had a strange fascination for the zoo, and some of the photos were even funny, comparing the zoo visitors to the animals.
I love this picture below of the women eating ice cream. Their bikes, their skirts, the sunlight...It's so beautiful.
"Nach der Schule ein Eis" (um 1931).
In terms of postwar photography, the exhibit described his work as focusing more on life in the ruins, than on the devastation itself. I would generally agree. In the below image, two US soldiers look over what was the Tiergarten. A few statues are all that lets you recognize what kind of forest was once there. In the background, you can see a line of hollow, destroyed houses. By placing the viewer behind the soldiers, you not only have their line of sight, but this is made more complex by their presence. What do they see when they see this destruction? The tracks of tanks are also in the foreground, making the signs of war subtle, but present.
And I love this image, below. I didn't see it in the exhibition, but I know it from his other work. It's the perfect symbol for the West German "Wirtschaftswunder," the "economic miracle" of postwar recovery. And so funny :)
Just saw this article in the New York Times: Without being able to prove guilt for individual crimes, they are now able to persecute guards at death camps for being an accessory to murder. These men are in their 80s-90s today. Interesting legally.
“The Demjanjuk conviction has created the possibility to prosecute perhaps as many as several dozen Holocaust perpetrators who served in the most lethal Nazi installations and units, and basically spent as much as two years carrying out mass murder on practically a daily basis,” Mr. Zuroff said.
It's funny if you think about the cultural meaning of this revolution: from fabric handkerchiefs to paper tissues (diapers, too...). In Germany this brand was introduced in 1929; in the US Kleenex was also being developed and marketed in the mid 1920s. At first it was being used to remove makeup, and then after the 30s it is marketed as a hygiene product, with the slogan: “Don’t Carry a Cold in Your Pocket”. Below is a similar ad/slogan from Tempo: "Higher Risk of Flu - Tempo, the hygienic tissue. " (here More ads from Spiegel) So that's the weird little post for you as I sit in bed, recovering with my Tempos. :) Germany isn't the worst place to have a cold...as they also have the best juice (Multivitaminsaft) and Ricola! (Jessica knows what I'm talking about here...)
