LET THEM TAKE YOU THERE … BERLIN
The German capital’s turbulent “recent” history — the eye of the storm for both World War 2 and the Cold War — means it is heavily represented in art and culture. While you hold on for the real thing, make a virtual visit via films and books about its terrible past or spy its madcap modern life through art or the restless beats of a techno soundtrack.
CINEMA
Schindler’s List
A German businessman saves thousands of Polish-Jewish refugees during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. Starring Liam Neeson, above, as the title character, it is generally lauded as one of the top movies of all time and won multiple awards, including 1993’s Best Picture Oscar. Showmax
Unorthodox
Adapted from Deborah Feldman’s 2012 memoir, this four-part miniseries follows a Hasidic Jewish woman from Brooklyn as she flees to Berlin from an arranged marriage and is taken in by a group of musicians — until her past comes calling.
Netflix
TELEVISION
Deutschland 83
A quiet hit when it aired in 2016, Deutschland 83 travels back to 1983, when Cold War tensions were threatening to boil over. It tells the tale of an East German border patrol guard (Jonas Nay, pictured above) who becomes a reluctant spy, going undercover at a military base in West Germany as the threat of a nuclear holocaust looms.
Amazon Prime Video
Dark
This critically acclaimed sci-fi show is set in a German town in the present day, where the disappearance of two young children exposes the double lives and fractured relationships among four families. Watch it in the original German or dubbed in English.
Netflix
MUSIC
Techno
Berlin was one of the proving grounds for techno in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Indeed, this frenetic form of dance music is credited with being one of the healing factors which helped to bring the two halves of the German capital together after the fall of the wall. Dance music has since moved on but it’s not hard to dig up anthems that once shook a nation.
Search for “Berlin Techno” playlists on Spotify and other streaming services.
Reise Reise
Formed in Berlin in 1994, Rammstein, pictured above, have grown to become one of Germany’s most popular bands of the past 30 years — a titan of industrial metal whose loud, uncompromising music is not for everyone yet has sold over 10 million records worldwide. Released in 2004, Reise Reise is one of their calling cards, thanks in part to its keynote track, Keine Lust (No Desire).
Available on most streaming services.
Staatsoper Unter Den Linden
The Berlin State Opera (on the central avenue of Unter Den Linden, hence its full name in German) is offering streamed (historic) performances from the stately auditorium it has occupied since 1742.
staatsoper-berlin.de
BOOKS
Goodbye To Berlin (Christopher Isherwood)
Although not published until 1939, Isherwood’s collection of short stories is firmly rooted in the Berlin of the early ’30s. The fruit of the novelist’s time living in the city (on and off between 1929 and 1938), it keeps one eye on Hitler’s rise to prominence while focusing the other on tales of desire and decadence in a society slowly coming apart at the seams. The most famous of these is Sally Bowles, the tale of an English girl in the Weimar era eking out a living as a dancer, singer and plaything for rich men. It has since taken on a life of its own, notably in Cabaret, the 1972 musical starring Liza Minnelli.
Buy it on Google Play Books (R205); or for Kindle as The Berlin Stories at amazon.com ($9.99).
Berlin Alexanderplatz (Alfred Döblin)
Döblin was a prolific German wordsmith, producing works which veered from history to science fiction during a career that stretched across over half a century. Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered his tour de force. Published in 1929, it revolves around a convicted murderer who is released from jail into the Berlin of the Weimar Republic and struggles to stay out of its underworld in a period of increasing extremism.
Google Play Books (R151) or Amazon for Kindle ($14.99)
PAINTING
Street, Berlin
A key member of Die Brucke (The Bridge), an influential group of German Expressionists, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner was born in Bavaria but often turned his gaze to Berlin. He documented the city in the 1910s, often with an unflinching eye for its underbelly. His work would be decried as degenerate in the Nazi era and many of his paintings were destroyed, but his 1913 effort, Street, Berlin, pictured above, survived the purge. It now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It shows a conversation between two prostitutes and a lengthy queue of potential male customers — everyone in the image wearing furs and finery, a year before World War 1 would rip everything to pieces.
MUSEUM
The East Side Gallery
Berlin has an abundance of museums but its most feted paint hotspot is East Side Gallery, 105 murals along the old Berlin Wall. They vary greatly in style but many cameras focus on Mein Gott, Hilf Mir, Diese Todliche Liebe Zu Uberleben (My God, Help Me To Survive This Fatal Attraction) — a mocking take on the close relationship between East Germany and the Soviet Union. It shows Erich Honecker and Leonid Brezhnev (the powers’ leaders in the ’70s), caught in a deep kiss, below.
eastsidegalleryberlin.de © Telegraph Media
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