From Berlin to Babylon
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Next door in the Museum, Roman architecture from the early 2nd century A.D. was showcased in the reassembled “Market Gate of Miletus,” brought here from that town which is just south of Bergama.
I was impressed by the sheer size of such artifacts from foreign lands that Berlin held in Pergamon Museum. The Museum was literally custom made to fit them. These artifacts, beginning with the collection of “Ancient Near East,” founded in 1899, had been brought here mostly around in the early part of the next century following German archeological expeditions in the ancient cities of Babylon, Assur, Uruk, Habuba Kabira in Mesopotamia, and Miletus and Bergama in today’s Turkey. So much is due to the last site that the Museum is named after it.
The man whose presence above all dominated the lobby was an alumnus of the University’s law school (1836-40): Karl Marx. On the wall over the landing in the staircase facing the entry were these words by Marx inscribed in golden letters: “Die Philosophen haben die welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verandern.”
The Prussian king followed the trend that had become fashionable among European royalties in the late 18th century by making his private art collection available to viewing by the public. His museum put Berlin on par with Paris, London, and Madrid which contemporaneously established their Louvre, British Museum, and Prado. It has since grown into a collection of five museums in Berlin, all clustered together on the tip of the small island in the River Spree next door to Humboldt.
To mark the 200th anniversary of Humboldt there was a competition to find an installation that would redesign the lobby. The British artist Ceal Floyer won. Her installation is called Vorsicht Stufe (Mind the Step). Fifty six identical brass signs inscribed with these words have been mounted on the steps of the main staircase of the lobby and the two upper flights branching out to the left and right.
Even today, the opera’s orchestra comes out into this Plaza to play “for the people” twice a year. Nearby, the statute of Frederick, re-installed on his horse in 1980 by the Communist East German government, looks on approvingly.
This place with its “empty library,” was once the intellectual epicenter of Berlin, Opernplatz (renamed Bebelplaz). It was the parlor of the National Opera House, the favorite of the music loving Prussian king Frederick the Great (1740-86) who erected the many buildings of Berlin’s cultural center called Forum around it.
The statue that I saw standing at its entrance, however, was not of a Prussian royalty. It was that of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the school’s founder, after whom the Communists again renamed the university in 1949.
In the square before the faculty of law of Humboldt University, empty shelves in a basement visible through a glass pane commemorated some of the 20,000 “un-German” books from the University library burned here by the assembled Nazis on May 10, 1933.
Where Hitler killed himself was devoid of a reminding marker; his famous bunker of World War II had been turned into an ordinary parking lot.
The commemorative plaque quoted a Jewish writer, Heinrich Heine, who, in 1820 had reflected on that age-old original Inquisition: "That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they ultimately burn people".
The same architectural guideline has kept at bay the encroachment of Frank Gehry’s now ubiquitous curved titanium structures. They were allowed only inside the building of DZ Bank at one side of the Plaza. Michael Jackson’s antics, however, could not be kept out.
“That day, a noisy crowd cheered Michael Jackson on,” our tour guide recalled. In contrast, the nearby Holocaust Memorial we were visiting now invited somber silence. We meandered through its 2711 sarcophagi-like columns that rose up a few meters above the uneven ground.
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