Goodbye to Berlin
In German, the phrase for “to say farewell” translates literally to “to take farewell.” I find this somehow more poetic than the English phrase because it signifies a palpable loss or taking away from the thing or person at hand.Today is my last day in Berlin. More than six months ago, in anticipation of my time in the same city, I’d read Christopher Isherwood’s memoirs, “Goodbye to Berlin.” These loosely connected narratives incisively and empathetically capture portraits of the characters he met while working as an English teacher in 1930s Berlin. His sketches convey the chaos and confusion of the bustling, volatile Weimar Republic, parting decadently as it was poised on the brink of a fascist takeover. One of the most famous lines from this work is as follows: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” The influence of the booming film industry and fascination with a new visual culture is manifested in these words. For Isherwood, Berlin was a heady confluence of the rush of people, cabarets and cabs. He simply allowed the onrush of images to seep into his mind and eagerly recorded these fleeting impressions with words, mixing in snatches of his own subconscious.
I recently visited the Bauhaus Archive and saw a small display of pioneer photographer and artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s photogramms, a form of sans-camera photography that consisted of light-sensitive paper being exposed to objects, culminating in dynamic and interesting light patterns. Not knowing that photographs could be created without cameras before, I immediately became fascinated with the intense subjectivity of these photographs. When Moholy-Nagy did use a camera, he would allow Berlin street scenes to turn out unfocussed and blurry, as if providing a companion illustration to Isherwood’s contemporaneous observations of the exciting and bewildering city.
I have certainly taken a fair amount of pictures with my camera while living here for the past six months, but my most precious images of Berlin have been pressed into my mind, like an invisible photogram. The past week has been a rush of “Goodbye to Berlin” activities and at first I tried to snap pictures at every turn, but quickly realized the futility of the activity.
I will remember walking from the TV Tower at three in the morning along Alte Jakobstrasse, the street I took every morning on my bike to go to the Berlinische Galerie, and noticing for the first time that further up the street ran the diagonal seam of bricks demarcating the former location of the Berlin Wall. I’ll remember the train running over Hallesches Ufer with two swans drifting under the bridge at the exact same moment, then turning the corner and seeing the sun come up over my street at five in the morning.
Isherwood and Moholy-Nagy both knew that the only constant in the clash of urbanity and art is fleeting instability. No images or words can pin down the essence of a heavy glance, a brief flash, a silent moment in conversation. Years from now, my pictures of Berlin will evoke fond memories for me, but they are only shadows of the pictures and sights captured in my imagination and memory.
posted by joyce @ 3:22 PM
1 Comments:
so sad! i'm sure new york will be happy to see you.
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