French masterpieces from the Met

June 1st-October 7th 2007

Berlin’s hottest ticket this summer is this one-off blockbuster at the Neue Nationalgalerie. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is lending some 150 19th-century French works to Berlin (and nowhere else) while its galleries undergo renovation. Expect the queues to be as impressive as the paintings and sculptures, which include iconic works by Ingres, Manet, Degas, Pissarro, Monet, Cézanne, Gaugin, Matisse and Rodin.

“Earlybird” tickets grant admission Tuesdays to Fridays between 8am and 8.30am, or book a VIP ticket in advance (€30, including audio guide).

The Wallenstein Trilogy

Peter Stein has a taste for theatrical marathons: in 2000, he staged a 21-hour production of Goethe’s “Faust”. Now, working with the Berliner Ensemble (a company founded by Bertolt Brecht), the German director is offering a trilogy of dramas by Friedrich Schiller, Goethe’s contemporary. The three plays (“Wallenstein’s Camp”, “The Piccolomini” and “Wallenstein’s Death”) stretch over ten hours at the Kindl-Halle, a former brewery.

The action stems from the betrayal and murder of Albrecht von Wallenstein, a Bohemian general, during the Thirty Years War. Mr Stein is clearly mindful of the ways these themes of war and confusion resonate today. Those with the stamina to last through this epic (there are four intervals) will be richly rewarded.

The lives of Germans

TIMOTHY GARTON ASH has an enviable review of “The Lives of Others” in the New York Review of Books—ranging beyond the film to consider the place of the Stasi in the pantheon of wickedness and in the history of Germanism.

Why is it, he asks

that the word “Stasi”—not “KGB”, “Red Guards”, or “Khmer Rouge”—is rapidly becoming a global synonym for communist terror?

The answer, he thinks, lies in the readiness of the Germans to confront their history:

No nation has been more persistent, and more innovative, in the investigation, communication and representation—the re-presentation, the re-representation—of its own past evils.

Garton Ash believes that Germany has remade itself as

one of the most free and civilized countries on earth

and he credits this achievement to the efforts of historians, journalists, parliamentarians, moralists, writers and film-makers who joined forces to deNazify the German consciousness after Hitler’s war, and performed a similar task after communism.

The result has been somewhat perverse: the purgative processes needed to make Germany a better country have served also to cement its associations, in the memory of the world, with evil.

It is a pity, if not yet a tragedy, that Russia has gone in a different direction. The KGB has been rehabilitated at home, and forgotten or forgiven abroad. Having refused to learn fom its history, Russia seems positively keen to repeat it.

Picture credit here