Silent Films, Starry Night
Berliners love the summer. It’s the season when beer gardens spring up in the middle of the city, when groups travel en masse for bathing in the lakes, when grill parties dot the landscape of every public park, and when films are screened in the open air. The city-wide “Freiluftkinos” (“open-air cinemas”) show a mix of new hits and old classics and attract an equally varied crowd nearly every night of the week. Last Saturday, underneath the cool Berlin night sky, a friend and I saw two silent films from the 1920s accompanied on live piano music by renowned silent-film accompanist Carsten-Stephan Graf von Bothmer.
While freely mixing themes from classical, jazz and pop music, Graf von Bothmer perfectly improvises along to the film and matches his playing to the story. I observed him as he played: not for a single second did he take his eyes of the screen. He seemed to want to absorb himself into the film—his eyes glowed in euphoria as he trilled and clanged away, adding musical color to the black and white images on screen. As the audience laughed, he laughed along too. The whole time I couldn’t help thinking (well, other than the sound-synths from his computer and the DVD-projector), this must have been similar to how audiences in the Twenties enjoyed their silent movies.
The first short film was called “The Mysteries of a Hairsalon” from 1922, directed by Erich Engel and Bertolt Brecht and starring Karl Valentin, famed for his exaggeratedly long nose and macabre wit. In the film he plays a hairdresser who cuts off the head of a client, but then fastens it back on with a bit of tape. Foil-sword duels and pop-gun shoot offs ensue. A touch of the vaudeville comes through the hinted-at love story between an angry client and the hairdresser’s female apprentice. I was kind of unnerved by the slightly racist overtones of the film though (the aforementioned angry client is angry because he's been made to look like a Mandarin, with a two-pronged beard and has had his beard moved to the top of his bald head. What's wrong with having a topknot??), but I suppose I'm just too 21st Century PC.
I found the second film much more entertaining: “The Oyster Princess” from 1919, directed by Ernst Lubitsch (the Jewish filmmaker who later emigrated to Hollywood and made the classic anti-Hitler comedy “To Be or Not To Be”), is a riotous comedy of errors set against a visually opulent mansion ruled over by a profligate patriarch, Mister Quaker. His spoiled daughter, played by Ossi Oswalda, threatens to throw a tantrum big enough to tear the mansion down if she doesn’t get to marry a real live prince. An old matchmaker ferrets out the dingy quarters of impoverished Prince Nucki—a cocky gambler and drinker who keeps one loyal servant by his side, the incorrigibly simple Josef. Jam-packed in this gloriously low-brow slapstick are, amongst other things, a female boxing match, a phalanx of masseuses, an outbreak of the “foxtrot epidemic”, and a wedding so large and fabulous that it would make J.Lo's seem paltry. Through a series of not-too-sober misunderstandings and naughty hints of innuendo, the happy couple finally gets together and everyone goes home happy. Lubitsch’s sets and scenes were spectacularly designed, and he kept the tempo quick and the atmosphere light as in an opera buffa, with a bite of satire to boot.
Somehow the evening hearkened back to an era I had only read about in books, when Berlin was carefree and risqué and fast living was the order of the day. The Twenties were the short-lived summertime in Germany before the winter specter of Fascism set in. Now at the height of the summer almost ninety years after the films were first shown, Berliners were enjoying a valued cultural inheritance from that era. And the fact that such a large audience showed up to a silent film shows that the spirit of the Golden Age is still very much alive.
Dresneyland
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really want to go on the required excursion to Dresden arranged by our study abroad program at first —my parents were in town, I had research to do for my final papers, and on the night of the World Cup semi final we were scheduled to attend a staging of Verdi’s Macbeth at the Semper Opera House. Plus my friend who was there for a day en route to Prague had mentioned that due to postwar reconstruction, the city had a strange Disneylandish vibe about it. Short of “It’s a Small World” humming out of speakers disguised as lampposts, the center of the Old City did feel somewhat inauthentic. But much to my pleasurable surprise, it didn’t take long before the lovingly restored churches and spectacular Baroque palaces worked their magic—and I became smitten with Dresden.
As the capital of Saxony, Dresden has a long history of economic and cultural influence in Eastern Germany. Dresden’s architecture and art constituted the showpieces of the Saxon kings' might—the Semper Opera House, built in 1841 by Gottfried Semper, is a cultural icon in Germany and world-renowned for the quality of its performances. The cavernous house was decorated in breathtaking grandeur that put Berlin’s State Opera House to shame. Plus, their particular staging of Macbeth, in comparison to the one I’d already seen in Berlin, was correspondingly more impressive. The performance had me riveted to the seat, so much so that I forgot about France versus Portugal!
I was most impressed, however, by the array of quality art Dresden has in its various museums. The Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister contains the most famous pair of cherubs in art history, the two puzzled putti at the bottom of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus of 1508 was to be seen next to the work of his friend Titian. The galleries also had an impressive array of Rembrandt paintings as well as two Vermeers. The Art Academy was having an exhibition of “Rodin in Germany,” which focused on the French sculptor’s influence and relationships with notable contemporary German artists and intellectuals, such as cultural critic Georg Simmel, one of his earliest dealers Georg Treu, and poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who actually worked as Rodin’s secretary for a while. 
Dresden’s New City district, populated mostly by students from its Technical University, felt like the trendy Prenzlauer Berg district in Berlin with its array of ethnic restaurants and hip novelty boutiques. There was the Kunsthofpassage (“art courtyard passage”) that united a felt craft workshop with art, music, dance studios and a calligraphy store, along with a Vietnamese restaurant behind a decorated wall that displayed a “water show” on the hour. This is not to say, however, that my friend was entirely wrong about the kitschiness of Dresden’s Old Town. Dresden’s Frauenkirche, reduced to a pile of rubble by British airpilots in WWII, was recently reopened to much fanfare after a decade of painstaking restoration. Indeed, they organized old blackened portions of the church with new stone masonry, giving the distinctive dome and exterior an interesting hybrid façade.
After an introductory video tried to impress us with its thorough documentation of the rebuilding efforts (accompanied by appropriately sentimental horn music), we stepped inside the church…and I immediately wanted to shield my eyes from the blindingly gaudy gold leaf, blue/pink/yellow paint juxtaposed with pseudo nouveau-Baroque paintings. Kitschy doesn’t even begin to describe the tastelessness with which the interior was outfitted—though I suppose it provides an interesting case study for post-period aesthetics, by which I mean it is easier to call certain artwork beautiful merely because the ameliorating effects of age have rendered them so. What I feel they should have done with the Frauenkirche—it being an important memorial to the centrality of faith despite human folly—is to leave the interior as austerely simple as possible, or even built around it, like the Kaiser-Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. As a testament to post-war generations’ efforts to literally lift the city out of the rubble, a minimalist design would have been more appropriate, and truer, to the project of memorializing.
