Elegant Elbe: Berlin 3c (6/2/2018)

Saturday, June 2, 2018 (continued)
From the Haus am Checkpoint Charlie Museum, we kept walking southward.

GSW Headquarters (1992-1999, by Matthias Sauerbruch
and Lisa Hutton, incorporating a 1950s office tower) in
the first skyscraper built after the fall of the Berlin Wall 

The GSW building has automatic colored screen blinds that react to sunlight, but can be manually overridden, and a natural ventilation system that reduces the need for artificial climate control.

Publishers' House/Haus der Presse (1999-2000,
by Joachim Franzke) (KSS)

Jewish Museum Old Building (1735, by Philip Gerlach,
as the Supreme Court/Collegienhaus, rebuilt 1963-1969, by
Günter Hönow, as the Berlin History Museum)

The Old Building of the Jewish Museum/Jüdisches Museum serves as the visitor center with a museum shop and café, and event venues. The only access to the new Libeskind Building (1989-2001, by Daniel Libeskind in his "Between the Lines" design) is through an underground passage from the Old Building.

In the Libeskind Building, the Axis of Exile leads to
this garden of 49 slanted pillars (for the
foundation of Israel in 1948 and one for Berlin)

The slant of the pillars

The Axis of the Holocaust is lined with artifacts of imprisoned Jews,
with a photo of the items in their daily use

A brush from the Otto Weidt's Workshop for the Blind (est 1936);
Weidt hired blind and deaf Jews to make brooms and brushes,
and because the workshop was considered "important for the war effort,"
Weidt managed to protect many workers from deportation

The actual yellow stars worn by Jews; this type was
introduced by Reinhard Heydrich in 1941, to be worn by all Jews
in Germany and its annexed territories

The Axis of Holocaust led to a tower with only a
triangular cut high on one wall

The Axis of Continuity, which leads to the bulk of the museum that was closed for remodeling (already?), had a detour to the "Memory Void."

The "Memory Void" was filled with "fallen leaves," heavy metal
face disks that make noises as you walk upon them

Tamiko heads into the "Memory Void" (KSS)

Art installation Under/Unten (2010, by Micha Ullman)
are fragments of a table, chair, and cup

Back through the underground passage to the Old Building.

The Glass Courtyard (2007, by Daniel Libeskind) of the Old Building,
inspired by the sukkahs/huts of the harvest holiday of Sukkot

The Glass Courtyard exterior as seen from the
the museum gardens (KSS)

The gardens provided our best view of the Libeskind Building,
with its zig-zag shape and crisscrossed slashes; its meaning open
to interpretation: to some it is a bolt of lightning,
and to others it is a deconstructed Star of David

Daniel Libeskind apparently came up with the design by finding the home addresses of prominent Jewish and non-Jewish Berliners such as Paul Celan, Max Liebermann, Heinrich von Kleist, Rahel Varnhagen, and Friedrich Hegel, who were part of connections between Jewish tradition and German culture. He plotted the addresses on a map and connected the dots, so to speak, for the design. It is apparently the first time one of his designs was actually built. (Since then, a number of his designs have been realized.)

Apartment complex/Wohnpark am Museum (1984-1987, masterplan
by Hans Kollhoff and Arthur Ovaska) with "urban villas"

These apartments (1982-1986, by Hans Kollhoff and Arthur Ovaska)
are part of a thin perimeter building constructed along the blank
southern wall of the historic Victoria Insurance Building (1893-1913)

These residential buildings were the result of Interbau 1984-1987, or International Building Exhibition/Internationale Bauausstellung, which worked under the principle of cautious urban renewal in the historic inner city neighborhoods of Berlin.

On the other side of Alte Jakobstrasse was a container village,
emergency housing for refugees

The Seventies (2018, by Albrecht Klink)

Next stop was the Berlin Gallery/Berlinische Galerie (founded 1975, after many moves it ended up in a former glass warehouse built in 1965), a museum of modern art.

Central atrium of the Berlin Gallery, where we headed upstairs
to the historic collection of paintings

After the Ceremony, Gravediggers Drink White Beer/
Nach der Feier, Totengräber beim Weißbier
(1902, by Philipp Franck, Impressionist)

On the benches were several of these relief or
three-dimensional representations of paintings,
for people with a visual impairment

Roma (1925, by Hannah Höch, a German Dada artist whose
work was deemed degenerate by the Nazi government)

Tactile paving path for the visually impaired

Model (circa 1950 of 1922 design by Otto Bartning in
Expressionist style) of the Star Church/Sternkirche

Synthetic Musician (1921, by Iwan Puni, Russian)

The Poet Iwar von Lücken (1926, by Otto Dix,
in New Objectivity style)

Blind Power (1932-1937, by Rudolph
Schlichter) changed his reference from
the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich (KSS)

Door (circa 1946, by Werner Heidt,
another Berlin Dadaist); it is really a door

Letter Field/Buchstabenfeld (2003-2004, by
Kühn Malvezzi) and Trinity/Dreiheit (1993, by
Martin Matschinsky und Brigitte Matschinsky-Denninghoff

We stayed until the museum closed, then headed towards the nearest S-Bahn station.

Oh, my! Friede sei mit Dir/Peace be with you;
the message seems to be anything but that!

Friede sei bei Dir (2009, a relief sculpture by Peter Lenk) is seen on the side of the building of the German Daily Newspaper/Die Tageszeitung known as taz, founded in 1978 to counter the more traditional and conservative papers, and it is owned by its employees. The sculpture depicts real persons who were involuntarily used in headlines in the sensationalist German tabloid, Bild/Picture. (Although they have toned it down, they used to always have a naked woman on the first page.) First, Friede also refers to the publisher, Friede Springer, of Bild. Then the main character portrayed is the former editor-in-chief of Bild, Kai Diekmann, and his caricature stretches over five floors. An article published in taz discussed the rumor that Kai Diekmann had a failed penis extension operation. Diekmann sued for defamation, and was told that for someone who earns his living through the defamation of others, the standards he applies to others should be applied to him as well.

Next: Wannsee.