October 11th and 12th, better known as ‘the Berlin weekend’, were the days when the new students eager to explore the heart of Germany had the chance to feel the pulse of a city ‘…condemned forever to becoming and never being.’ The programme offered something for everyone: we all got the opportunity to peak into
CategoryDays in Berlin
Death of a Salesman at Berlin’s Schaubühne
In the final week of the winter term the theatre lab went to Berlin’s famous contemporary theatre, Schaubühne, to see Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Sticking reasonably closely to Miller’s original script, director Luk Perceval reconceives the tragedy of the post-war American dream in post-reunification Germany. Here in Berlin, Miller’s themes of unemployment and
Enjoying Berlin, Public Lectures by Alain Badiou
Things happen in a city like Berlin. There is almost too much to do, too many things to experience. Ground-breaking exhibitions, grand festivals and public lectures by world-famous thinkers are on constant offer. So it was that on Thursday 18 and Friday 19 January, the renowned, left-wing French philosopher Alain Badiou gave two public lectures
Berlin Jewish Museum – Metal Marvel and Misery
Getting to the Jewish Museum was not an easy task despite the apparent simplicity of the process – get on the M1, then switch to U6, and then walk for ten minutes. But what happens if it starts raining? You take out an umbrella, of course. Or you put on the raincoat you cautiously brought with
Visting Wannsee
A beautiful Sunday provided the perfect backdrop for a trip to idyllic Wannsee, a place in southwest Berlin well known for its lovely inland beach – one of the longest in Europe. Wannsee is also famous for hosting the conference of the same name on the 20th of January, 1942. Most of us have learned
‘Schmerz’ in the Hamburger Bahnhof: “Art is the Image of the Human Being”…
…said Joseph Beuys. If this statement is applied to Anselm Kiefer’s works and the Schmerz exhibition, then the image of the human being is one of pain and desperation. That is the immediate conclusion that one can draw after Wednesday’s visit to the Hamburger Bahnhof , Berlin’s Museum for Contemporary Art. But things are not
Berlin, The City of ECLA
With the end of the year at ECLA there comes a time to ponder the meaning of our academic experience here. However, there is yet another side to the ECLA experience – Berlin and its culture. Some students speak of The Island of ECLA, ECLA-Land or The City of ECLA (referring to Plato’s Republic). There
The Eye of Paris
Brassaï is the pseudonym of Hungarian artist Gyula Halász, whose exhibition we visited last week at Martin Gropius Bau as part of the Seeing Berlin programme. A notable feature of the exhibition is that the hanging arrangement of the 1950’s Moma exhibition in New York is now reproduced in Berlin. Our guide began the tour