Schloss Schönhausen: Du riechst so gut!

The mother-in-law and nephew are visiting us for a few days, but where to go when the weather is as cold as a witch's proverbial? We decided on visiting the newly renovated Schloss Schönhausen, in nearby Pankow, which was opened to the public (for the first time since before the Second World War) on December 19th 2009.

This small castle - well, country house really - has a fascinating history. It was originally built in 1644 in the Dutch style for the Gräfin (Duchess) Sophie Theodore zu Dohna-Schlobitten, who was born into the house Holland-Brederode, when she acquired lands in Niederschönhausen and when Pankow was a long way outside the Berlin city walls. But you don't need to know that, as the most famous royal resident of the castle was Queen Elisabeth Christine.

Elisabeth Christine's husband, in what is generally considered as a marriage of political convenience, was Frederick the Great of Prussia aka König Friedrich II of House Hohenzollern. Reading between the lines, the story seems to be that the eighteen year old Freddy had attempted to flee the clutches of his tyrannical father (another Friedrich, Friedrich Wilhelm I, the so-called 'soldier king'), together with his confidant Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte and a young page-boy named Peter Karl Christoph Keith that Freddy had become rather ah-hem fond of. They were heading for England and got as far as Mannheim when Peter's brother Robert had a panic-attack about what was happening and spilled the beans to King Fred I. The young prince's father went ballistic, imprisoned the mutineers in Küstrin (now the split Polish border town of Kostrzyn) and charged Freddy and Katte with treason, which carried an automatic death penalty. The King eventually gave Freddy a pardon, but not before making him watch Katte's be-heading 'leaving the crown prince to faint away and suffer hallucinations for the following two days.' As well it might. Anyway, the king made young Freddy stay at Küstrin and 'learn the details of rural and city administration from the officials of the town' whilst meanwhile orchestrating his marriage to Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Bevern.

The crown prince wasn't at all happy about the arranged marriage and contemplated suicide. "There can be neither love nor friendship between us," he wrote to his sister, but never-the-less the wedding took place on 12th June 1733. As soon as his father died in 1740 and he became King, he prevented his wife Elizabeth Christine from ever visiting him at his sumptuous Court in the newly built Palace Sanssouci at Potsdam, and gave her Schloss Schönhausen as her Summer Palace (otherwise she had apartments at the Stadtschloss in Berlin). From then onwards the two only met at family get-togethers, and King Freddy never visited Schloss Schönhausen. Needless to say, they never had any children. Strangely, it is recorded that EC remained devoted to her husband all her life.



Nowadays King Frederick, or Alte Fritz as he became known, is mostly remembered for introducing potatoes into Brandenburg, though he did much more than that and built Prussia into a formidable fighting, cultural, and economic force. Poor Elizabeth Christine is hardly remembered at all, so it is fitting that the displays in the Schloss are now devoted to her life and achievements and helping to redress the balance.

Elizabeth Christine seems to have been the soul of the Schloss; and so with her death in 1797 the palace fell into disuse and seems to have been used by the Hohenzollerns somewhat as we might use the loft for storage of old carpets and unloved paintings.

When the German monarchy was abolished after World War I, the Schloss and its landscaped, English-style, gardens became property of the Free State of Prussia, and were opened to the public with a tea-room and art exhibition area. When the National Socialists in turn abolished the Free State of Prussia, the building was radically modernised and the Reich's Art department moved in. It became the storage and burial place for works that the Nazi's considered 'degenerate art' or 'entartete Kunst': this was a term that covered just about all modern art, including that done by such immoral sociopaths as Picasso, Emil Nolde, Henri Matisse, van Gogh, Otto Dix, Marc Chagall, Max Beckmann, Max Liebermann, and so on and so on.

Schloss Schönhausen suffered some damage during the Battle of Berlin but was quickly patched up by an artists' initiative from Pankow. It was then soon confiscated by the Red Army and used as first an officer's mess and then as a boarding school for Soviet students. Pankow and the Schloss were in the Soviet sector of Berlin of course, and when the GDR (DDR) was founded on 7 October 1949 Schloss Schönhausen became the official residence of the President, Wilhelm Pieck. When Pieck died in 1960 and the seat of government moved to central Berlin, the Schloss was renamed Schloss Niederschönhausen and became a guest house for visiting dignitaries to the GDR. It was a strange feeling going into a bedroom on the first floor and finding out that here slept such people as Fidel Castro, Indira Gandhi, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Yasser Arafat, Nicolae Ceauşescu, and its last residents Mikhail Gorbachev and Mrs Gorbachev. I didn't reckon much to their en-suite bathroom though; a retina-tearing lilac-purple tiled monstrosity that was perhaps the height of fashion in Sixties DDR, but clashed somewhat with the elegant gold and white mouldings of the sitting room. truly a 'Bad - bathroom' as the German/English sign said.

During the time of the DDR, the Schloss and its gardens were separated from the hoi polloi by a high wall and security gates, so it is excellent that finally (exactly twenty years after German re-unification) the house and its grounds are open to us proles again. It was also good to find shelter from the stinging snow blizzard, though as a sign on the entrance said, the Schloss isn't heated. Never mind, at least the floor isn't compacted ice like outside!

(I haven't any photos of the Schloss - too cold! - but you can get a feel for the place by visiting the official spsg website. Includes a photo of the lovely bathroom!_

The ground floor is given over to exhibitions about the life of Elisabeth Christine. There is little by way of contemporary furnishings - most of it being successively plundered over the centuries - but the restoration has recreated enough of the baroque plaster decorations, paintings, fireplace surrounds, gilded mirrors, wallpaper, and floor parquetry to give enough of an impression of what it might have looked like.

The crystal chandeliers and the amazing sweep of the staircase between neo-classical columns in the high-windowed entrance hall set a tone which is carried on to the first floor. Here is the magnificent ballroom, with views out onto the gardens and gold-framed mirrors bouncing the pale Winter light around the crystal lights. The first floor though is mostly given over to the Schloss' history as a GDR guest house, and hence the unfortunate purple bathroom, the worst but not the only preserved Sixties innovation.

The staircase continues wonderfully up to the top floor, but there is little reason to go up there unless you are really really interested in the building materials and techniques of rennovating an old property. I sort of get the impression that the purpose of the exhibition was more to prove to the tax-payers of Pankow that they were getting their money's worth by the restoration. Also, here the information boards are all in German whereas for the rest of the house they were in English too. They did however promise the addition of a cafe in the future, which would have been most welcome today. But in the absence of suitable warmth-giving refreshment, we braved the snowstorm outside once more and made our way to Pankow shopping centre for hot coffee and Apfelstrudel.

So, why have I sub-titled this post 'du riechst so gut'? Well, back in April 1998 the Schloss was opened up to let a certain group by the name of Rammstein make a video here. The result was one of my favoritest R+ videos for the track 'Du riechst so gut', which gives me an excuse to post it here! Watch out for the indoor dance-floor scenes which were filmed at the Schloss, and that amazing staircase again.



The outside scenes, by the way, were photographed at Schloss Babelsburg, which ironically is just across the Havel from Freddy's Sanssouci in Potsdam!



Postscript: the House of Hohenzollern and Prussian/German royalty didn't just vanish at the foundation of a German republic after WWI. The descendants of Alte Fritz's family (though not Freddy himself) are still around. The current head of House Hohenzollern is Georg Friedrich Ferdinand, 'seine kaiserliche und königliche Hoheit, der Prinz von Preußen'. He is also, because of the way all the monarchs of Europe were inter-related and I wouldn't be surprised if Queen Victoria has something to do with it, 152nd in line to the throne of England. As if anyone except readers of OK Magazine care nowadays.

Fröhliche Weihnachten zum Schloss Rammstein!

Click for bigger!

Ragdoll Fantasy Adventures!

I've just finished a website for a friend in Trieste for her to sell her book 'Avventure Gattartiche' (in Italian) or 'The Catartic Adventures' (in English).

I think I can safely say it is the only trilogy of stories about the fantastical adventures of a family of ragdoll cats on the Internet!

The website gives a taster from each of the three books, and if you like them you can pay through PayPal and download the books as PDF files to read on your PC. There are also lots of photos of the authoress' own ragdoll cats, and other true short stories starring, yes you've guessed it, cats!

Please check it out, and if you do decide to buy it, note that all the money from the sales goes towards looking after, and finding homes for, stray cats in Trieste. So, all for a good cause.

'Le Avventure Gattartiche' di Francesca Doria. 

'The Catartic Adventures' by Francesca Doria. Ragdoll cat fantasy stories to download.

Laibach & Think of Berlin

"You shall see the Lord of Life and Death/ You shall see Heaven in Hell/ You shall be blinded by light/ You shall see darkness." - God Is God, Laibach, 1996

The Heaven and Hell Tour: Laibach at The Postbahnhof, Berlin.

In a renovated former Eastern Sector railway warehouse, a dark and brooding figure dressed in black and a distinctive leather mining hat can just be seen in the stage fog. He stands, head bowed, in the gloomy shadow whilst a pair of synthesisers fight each other across the stage with discordant noise and deafening exploding cymbal crashes. Meanwhile a severe looking woman with slicked back short hair, dressed in a short skirt matched with black tie and military shirt, strides around the smoking battlefield in six-inch-heeled boots barking guttural German into a loudspeaker.

It could only be the beginning of a Laibach concert, couldn't it? From the opening number of 'Sredi Bojev' out of the early 1980's, Laibach force-marched us through a set list which took in most of their milestones. But it wasn't just a journey down a bombed-out memory lane; the standards were apocalypticly re-arranged and re-interpreted, sometimes almost beyond recognition.

It was an older, warier, wearier Milan Fras who put melancholy and yearning into his vocals tonight; the kind of feeling that can only be imparted after a life which has seen totalitarianism and war, and drug-addiction, and death. And liberation and life. Though Fras performed a lot of the tracks from their early days, Laibach were past the gimmicky trapping of militarism and pseduo-fascism of their youth. Instead they gave us their virtuosity at creating a wall of richly-layered drums and synth, thundering with energy and violence, and without a single miscued sample loop or mis-hit snare.

The imposing and sexually dangerous Mina Špiler (who sang with Fras on the Mina Harker remix of 'Ohne Dich' , Rammstein fans take note) held her own centre-stage at the keyboard against a back-drop of blinding explosions of light and screen-projected marching skeletons. Meanwhile Fras kept to front-right of the stage, alternately imploring the fans with outstretched muscular arms or retreating into the shadows with a fixed glower.

The audience seemed almost transfixed with awe, like the congregation at a Satanic ceremony. Only when 'Tanz mit Laibach' stomped across the back-screens did they show any enthusiasm for movement.

All too soon Laibach had given us a single encore of 'Life is Life' and were gone. The house lights came up and the spell was broken.

Laibach were joint-headers on this 'Heaven and Hell' tour with Juno Reactor. Which one Juno Reactor were meant to be was unclear, but they were certainly at the opposite pole to Laibach. The South African drumming and dancing was energising for a while, but soon got tiring. We left before the set ended and drifted away into the cold, grey, misty night of Berlin. Leave Juno Reactor's world music for bright Summer days - Here and now, Laibach was more fitting to the Ortgeist.

More photos of Laibach at the Fritzclub, Postbahnhof, here

Stasiland

Stasiland

Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall

by Anna Funder

London: Granta 2003

Now that the events marking the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall are dying down, I thought I would remind myself just what it is we have been celebrating. Funder's first person narrative about seeking out the victims and perpetrators of total state control in the former GDR (DDR) is an antidote to the indifference that sets in from seeing black and white footage of the wall going up for the umpteenth time. It also explains the ecstasy in the faces of those filmed pouring into West Berlin when the regime finally came crashing down.

Her story begins with her visit to the volunteer-run Stasi museum in the Runde Ecke building in Leipzig. The exhibits, neatly labelled in glass cases, are strange, unfathomable - comical even; the fake wigs and moustaches for disguising Stasi spies, the empty jars that once contained smell samples taken from suspects, the microphones hidden in handbags. The woman who runs the museum perhaps notices Funder's confusion and knows how to make sense of these artefacts from a lost land. She tells Funder about Miriam, who's husband died during Stasi interrogation, supposedly by hanging himself, though the suspicion is that he died at their hands and that the funeral was a charade, perhaps even involving an empty coffin. Funder decides she must speak with this Miriam, and the book is primarily Miriam's story.

Along the way she uncovers many other personal tragedies; it is almost as if everyone has a dreadful tale, including her landlady, if you could just get them to speak. Ay, and there's the rub, because there seems to her to be a collective amnesia, a deep level of denial, in everyone from former East and West. Though at the time of starting to write (1996) these events happened only a few years before, already it was becoming like ancient history. Not relevant any more. Best forgotten. But as one victim explains why he just lives from day to day, nobody foresaw The Wall going up in 1961, and no-one expected it just as suddenly coming down in '89. Things might change again tomorrow, so make the most of your freedom whilst you have it.

Miriam's tale spans the book and is truly heart-rendering. A soul scarred for life by the brutality and callousness of a totalitarian regime is laid bare before us. A beautiful, innocent butterfly who has had a wing ripped off by an anonymous gloved hand. And as the book unfolds, similar tales are bravely revealed by ordinary folks who have been subjected to extra-ordinary torture.

Funder interviews people from the other side of the divide; the watchers and manipulators as well as those whose lives they crippled or destroyed. This is not, cannot be, an objective assessment. Funder is writing first-person all along, sharing her thoughts and emotions with us, becoming our proxy within the narrative. She is not giving a scientifically methodical historical analysis, she is engaging us with the emotions of someone whose eyes are being opened to a past she barely imagined. So, the ex-Stasi men (all men) come over as unrepentant, bitter, wishing The Wall had never come down. Either that or finding that they are well suited post Wende to a job selling insurance or telemarketing. However, her book is also lacking in the stories of the innocents who just got on with their lives without snooping on their neghbours. And hey (don't shout it too loud) but maybe they actually agreed with the principles of Socialism, and looked at the West and really did believe that Capitalism wasn't the perfect system it's cracked up to be.

The title of this book is 'Stasiland', and the allusion is to the ridiculous illogicality of Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'. But the work of fiction more fitting here is surely Kafka's 'The Trial', because there is a warped logic to the oppression; it's just no-one tells you the rules by which to behave, or what you are accused of, or when you may be imprisoned, or how you can prove your innocence. The GDR was a country with more people spying on each other - either directly employed to do so, or paid informers who might be your boss or co-worker or a member of your family - than any other regime in history. By the end of the GDR, it was becoming farcical: so many members of some dissident organisations were Stasi infiltrators that it looked like the organisations were much more powerful in numbers than they actually were. And the brutality of what the State could get away with doing to personal lives is stomach-churning. The chapter on the Stasi prison of Hohenschönhausen is almost unreadable.

The book is not without its flaws though. It is written in the style of a piece of fiction, and sometimes you wonder if it is fiction. Funder is apt to pepper her narrative with descriptions and incidental details that distract from the main points. Do we care what colour the wallpaper was in the cell? Or should we be concentrating on the fact that the prisoner had only a small three-legged stool to sit on 24 hours? And to be frank, do we really care about Funder's description of the events of her life, when by comparison with the lives of her subjects they seem trivial concerns, petty even? As someone once advised me about writing a gig review, the readers don't want to know how you and your girlfriend got to the venue and how your moped broke down on the way, they want to know how the band looked and performed. Maybe Funder felt that Alice in Stasiland couldn't have done without its Alice.

Quibbles aside, this is a moving and insightful book. One that should be on the reading list of anyone who wonders what all the fuss is about with The Wall coming down. For someone who lives in Berlin it also makes you look twice at your fellow S-Bahn travellers, and make you wonder what kind of tales they could tell. And if the woman at the till in Netto is a bit short with you when you're not quick with finding your change, just ponder for a moment if she ever tried to scale the wall as a teenager, or lost a dying son because she couldn't travel West for medicine.

Hamburg

Today we had a day-trip to Hamburg to celebrate my dearest's birthday. Hamburg is 286km North West of Berlin, but the journey took only an hour and a half because we travelled it in a sleek, white, bullet shaped ICE (InterCityExpress) train. The ICE was really impressive, more like a jet plane inside - and I don't mean Ryanair. We had a six-seat compartment to ourselves on the way out, but even on the way back the main carriages were spacious and comfortable. A speed display showed we were cruising at 230km/h for most of the time, and the ride was smooth and slick. There wasn't much to look at out of the window; a few deer, cranes, horses etc. but mostly just fields and forests and a reminder of how very very flat the Norddeutsches Tiefebene (North German plains) really are. It's no wonder then that Hamburg, though quite some distance from the sea on the river Elbe, is prone to periodic flooding, the worse being the North Sea flood of 1962 when a fifth of the city was underwater and over three hundred people tragically lost their lives. Maybe we should have packed our life-jackets? But no, though the weather was rather grey and it tried to rain once or twice, we didn't get too wet.

Hamburg is Germany's second largest city after Berlin, but there is a marked difference between the two. Though both were virtually flattened by air-raids during WWII, Hamburg wasn't in West Germany and so didn't get rebuilt by Soviet, plattenbau-obsessed planners like East Berlin was. Instead, the townscape of Hamburg is a mixture of rebuilt neo-gothic blackened sand-stone buildings, and the kind of 1970's shopping centres that went up in England in the bombed-out city-centres of places like Exeter, Coventry, and Birmingham. In fact, I have been to Hamburg before, way back in my teens, and all I can remember of it are the pedestrianised shopping precincts, the Rathaus, and the unexpected Binnenalster lake. But mostly the shopping precincts. Hamburg also feels a lot less German than Berlin, or at least less Prussian. It has a feel of Amsterdam about it, or even a larger version of Liverpool - no wonder The Beatles felt at home here in their early days.

Unlike Liverpool though, the seaport of Hamburg (second-largest in Europe after Rotterdam, stat fans!) seems to be thriving, with many large container ships and cruise liners in the docks, or undercover in the shipyards for renovation. Another river-side area still full of life is the old warehouse district, or Speicherstadt (NB 'Speicher' is also the German word for computer disk storage and memory). Though strangely it smelt of toasted tea-cake when we were there. The rows of many tall, narrow warehouse fronts have both road and riverside entrances, and a pulley beam on the apex of the gables for hauling up goods to the various levels. The warehouses are home to many importers and exporters of goods, including more Oriental carpet companies than I have ever seen in one place. They are also home to 'The Hamburg Dungeon', 'Miniatur-Wunderland' model railway exhibition (the largest of its kind in the world!), and an Afghani museum, but just to wander down the quaysides, and especially see them lit up at night, is enough of an attraction. On a cynical note, if this was England they would have been renovated into 'authentic' loft and warehouse apartments for Yuppies like at Salford Quays. What is incredible is that all these towering red-brick warehouses are built out in the middle of the Elbe on wooden-pile foundations, somewhat like a German Venice (or Venedig). And in fact - or at least according to the Hamburg entry in Wikipedia, so maybe not - Hamburg has more bridges over its canals than Venice and Amsterdam combined.

Like Amsterdam, but not so much Venice (not since the Eighteenth Century anyway), Hamburg is also famous for its red-light district, centred around the Reeperbahn in the dockside St. Pauli quarter. This is of course also the area where those young scousers with the mop-tops played all those years ago, but you'll be hard-pressed to find The Star-Club (it closed in '69 and the building burnt down in 1987). We wandered along the Reeperbahn in daylight so we didn't get the full feel of the place (if you'll excuse the expression), and, well the Reeperbahn is all rather more seedy and run-down than Amsterdam; sort of like Blackpool but without the funfairs. But then it also feels like it actually caters for its originally intended customers, rather than to stag-parties and middle-aged Japanese tourists with cameras, like Amsterdam. My geography reference book 'Deutschland-Atlas für Kinder' (= children's Atlas of Germany) delicately calls the Reeperbahn 'ein Erwachsenenvergnügungsviertal' which is a wonderfully long word meaning 'pleasure district for adults'. It did have a wonderfully quirky and rather different Weihnachtsmarkt (Christmas Market) though!

Ah yes, the Christmas Markets. Wonderful the first time you visit them. Maybe also the second, third and fourth time. But after the fiftieth time of the same twee faux-Alpine cabins selling wooden soldier nutcrackers, or candles, or rock-crystal lamps, or woollen hats, or wurst wurst immer wurst, then ... sorry, getting all Scrooge there. Anyway, Hamburg would have been a lot more interesting if all the buildings and views across the river and lakes weren't all lit up like - well, like a Christmas tree. Just saying, that's all! I did get to see Santa fly up to the top of the Rathaus on his sleigh though.

Apart from the Christmas lights and stalls then, the area around the Rathaus and the Binnenalster (the 'inner Alster') were very interesting. Alster, by the way, is the name of the river that's been locked (as in a canal lock) to make this inner-city lake. And Alsterwasser (Alster water) is the name for an alcoholically weak mix of lemonade and beer invented in Hamburg (what everyone else calls a shandy, or Radler in German), just to let you know to avoid disappointment at the Hamburger Bier festival.

The Binnenalster's waterside promenade is good for strolling along, and it has an unusual name: Jungfernsteig, or Virgins' promenade. Apparently in the Nineteenth Century it was the done thing to take your unmarried daughters for a walk along here on a Sunday afternoon, to show her off to eligible bachelors. Another name for it could have been Fleischmarkt, but thankfully not. Also around this area is the picturesquely quaint 'Colonnaden', with its rebuilt colonnades (surprise!) giving it the air of a Regency-period arcade.

Hamburg is dominated by the river, and has a long nautical trading past and spirit of independence. This stretches back to at least 1241, when Hamburg founded the beginnings of the Hanseatic League in alliance with Lübeck. The closeness of Scandinavia is also felt, so much that this is almost a Viking town, though the heathen pillagers have been kept in check by the Lutheran church: there are numerous churches with names such as the 'Danish Seamen´s Church' and the 'Norwegian Church'. A traditional local dish is 'Labskaus', which takes its name from the Norwegian stew 'lapskaus', which also gave its name to the Liverpool sailor's staple food and hence to their nickname 'scousers'. So, another reason why the Fab Four felt at home in Hamburg!

We feel at home in Berlin though, so we caught a late-evening ICE and were soon back with the cats, who were wondering where we had been all day, and why if we'd been to Hamburg we'd not been to the famous Fischmarkt and brought them a fish back. (Because the Fischmarkt is only open on a Sunday, darlings!).

Deichstraße, Hamburg
or Dyke Street.
Oy! No sniggering at the back!

More photographs of Hamburg at Julie Woodhouse Photography, of course!