>Re-PHOTO

Rykestrasse Synagogue, Germany’s largest synagogue, was built in 1903-4. On “Kristallnacht” (Night of Broken Glass), 9 November 1938, it was trashed but not burnt down as it is a part of a residential building, and in 1944 it was bought by the borough of Prenzlauer Berg. During the war it was used as a furniture store. It came back into use in May 1945 and various repairs were made over the years but it was only finally restored to its pre-was splendour in 2007.

Painter and sculptor Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) was born in Königsberg, Prussia and first came to Berlin to study art in 1883. She returned in 1891 to live in Prenzlauer Berg after marrying Karl Kollwitz, a doctor for the Berlin poor, living in the same large apartment until she was evacuated from Berlin in 1943; a few months later the building was destroyed by bombing. Weissenburger Strasse where she and Karl lived at 56A was renamed Kollwitzstrasse in 1947 in honour of her. A health centre built in Prenzlauer Allee in 1983 is named after Karl. The statue (1956-8) in Kolwitzplatz is by Gustav Seitz.

KulturBrauerei is a huge leisure/entertainment/arts complex using the historic buildings of the the former Schultheiss brewery, begun in the 1800s, which expanded greatly and was once the largest in the world. The brewery closed in 1967, and in 1974 was declared a national monument. It now has theatre, nightclub, music perfomances, markets and more in a slightly bland gentrifiers cultutral mould.

Stadt Bad Prenzlauer-Berg in Oderberger Strasse, designed by city architect Ludwig Hoffmann and built in 1899-1902 included a small swimming pool as well as at the time much needed washing and bathing facilities for the population  in these municipal baths. Although built to look like a Renaissance palace, the interior was apparently organised on rational lines with 63 showers and bath tubs. Out of use since cracks in the ceiling were discovered in 1986s when I photographed the exterior, the building has now been restored as a hotel and the public can visit them again.

Kastanienallee, 12 with a doorway leading through to a whole series of courtyards. These were widely squatted after the unification of Germany, and the whole complex here became a well-known area full of hippies.

Kastanienallee

KAPITALISMUS (capitalism) ZERSTÖRT (destroyed) TÖTET (killing) NORMIERT (normalised)

More from my walk around Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin to follow shortly.

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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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It seems particularly appropriate to be writing about Berlin and our stay in Rosa Luxemburg Strasse today, March 5th, as it is the anniversary of her birth in  1871 in Zamość in southeast Poland.

On Sunday morning a short walk from the flat took me into Prenzlauer Berg, a once working class area which became heavily squatted and a centre of counterculture before undergoing a rapid process of gentrification.  Many of the squats were cleared by police in 1998 but some were still there in 2011.

Senefelderplatz got its name from Alois Senefelder, the inventor of lithography, the basis of modern printing processes. He used a flat stone plate, coating it to repel ink except in the areas required to print which had the text (or line image) in reverse. When the plate was inked it forms a reverse image on the plate, to which the paper was then applied and the ink transferred to give a correct reading image. His name is carved in reverse on the monument.  Later metal plates were used (and paper for low cost short runs), and printing is usually ‘offset’ with a correct reading plate being transferred onto a flexible rubber or plastic sheet in reverse and then transferred onto paper to produce a right-reading print.

Almost all large volume printing in black and white and colour still uses offset litho, with colour mainly being printed from four plates, inked with yellow, magenta, cyan and black inks

A sign shows support for Bradley Manning – now Chelsea Manning. The area had become a centre for radical communities from the 1950s under the East German State and after the wall fell they were joined by many young anarchists and socialists from West Berlin and the wider west.

Many of the walls are covered with graffiti, and this one has an unusual cluster of 42 red boxes for post.

A welcome survival from an earlier age was this vintage octagonal urinal, still in full working order.

And a rather more decorative and useful piece of street furniture.

The watertower at left, Wasserturm Prenzlauer Berg, is Berlin’s oldest and is apparently known as “Fat Hermann”. Designed by Henry Gill and built by the English Waterworks Company, it was completed in 1877 and remained in use as a water tower until 1952.

As well as a large water tank at the top of the tower, it was built with flats for the water company workers below, still lived in but no longer by workers.

Although many of the buidlings from the original development of the area which was planned in 1862 and built in the following years remain. some of the more modern buildings are rather less imaginative, but many were enlivened by various decorations. There were also quite a few small park areas, often with childrens playgrounds. Probably allied bombing created a number of gaps in the area.

I walked around on my own for a couple of hours before meeting up with Linda who had been to one of the churches in the area. Although I  had to pass a German exam to get my Chemistry degree  (a throwback to the century before the war when many of the famous chemists were German and pubished in German scientific periodicals) my spoken German is pretty non-existent, though fortunately you need little or none to buy a beer in a cafe. Though not the one above. This area in particular is one were many languages are spoken and English serves pretty well.

More from my walk around  Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin to follow shortly.

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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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Berlin at night might have been easier to photograph were it not for my phobia for tripods, and I think all these pictures were probably made without the aid of either tripod or flash – and flash would generally have been of no use.  However a decent tripod would have been helpful, but I’d left that at home, around 600 miles away, deciding to travel light.

I’d not taken the Leica out with me either in our wander after dinner on to the Museum Island, although that f1.4 35mm lens would have been useful. But the Fuji X100 was a better performer in low light. The picture of the temporary Humboldt Box (due to be demolished by 2019) was taken at 1/3s f2.8 and ISO 1600, and the Altes Museum at 1/2s. It would have been better to use a higher ISO, but for some uknown reason at that time I was reluctant to do so. The X100 isn’t a great performer at ISO 6400, but would have been sharper.

I wasn’t thinking seriously about taking night pictures, but I was there with a camera and gave it a go. In the brighter areas things were OK, but some of the darker areas were a challenge. I think I took a dozen frames of the Altes Museum, but only two were reasonably sharp – the best just very slightly crisper than the one I’ve used here.

Sometimes there was something I could brace myself against when making the picture, perhaps leaning on a rail or against a lamp post, but for other pictures I just had to stand as still as possible, make several exposures and hope. Using digital it’s possible of course to see the image on the back of the camera after you’ve made it. You can then delete those that really are blurred, but can’t tell if things are really critically sharp.

The statue above isn’t quite there, though it will have looked it on the camera back., and could probably be made to look a little sharper in Lightroom. It would have been nicer to have brought out the shadow of a fence on the plinth a little more too.

A little more light got my shutter speed up to 1/20th of a second as Linda walked away, probably fed up with waiting for me as I fiddled around with my camera.

Night brings out quite a different look in the buildings, helped by some good floodlighting, though it perhaps seemed something of a waste of electricity as the island at around 9pm was deserted. We hardly saw a single person, though doubtless there were security guards on duty in some of the buildings they remained invisible.

Der Deutschen Kunst – the Alte Nationalgalerie

The River Spree from Friedrichsbrücke

St. Marienkirche on Karl-Liebknecht-Str and the Fernsehturm at Alexanderplatz.

More from Berlin to follow shortly.

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2019 at 11:52 am and is filed 

Around 80,000 Soviet soldiers died in the Battle of Berlin in April-May 1945, so it is perhaps not surprising that three Soviet War Memorials were built in the city after the war. Treptower Park which was completed in 1949 was the central war memorial of East Germany. It commemorates all Soviet soldiers who died in the war as well as the 5,000 who are buried there.

Much of the stone used in building it came from the New Reich Chancellery, commissioned by Hitler from architect Albert Speer in 1938 as the headquarters for a Greater German Reich. A vast building completed in 1939 it became Hitler’s official residence as well as housing the various ministries of the Reich, and the bunker in which he committed suicide was in its garden.

The building was badly damaged, particularly in the final fight for Berlin, where it was the scene of the final stand by German troops. Wikipedia quotes Andrei Gromyko who visited the site shortly after as saying it “…was almost destroyed… Only the walls remained, riddled by countless shrapnel, yawning by big shot-holes from shells. Ceilings survived only partly. Windows loomed black by emptiness.”

Some of the red granite (often called red marble) was used at Treptower, and also to repair the nearby U-bahn station. Possibly too some was taken by train to Moscow and used in some of the palatial Metro stations there. The most obvious use at Treptower is in the two giant stylised red Soviet flags with statues of kneeling soldiers at their base which form an gateway from the entrance to the main area of the memorial.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, parts of the monument were vandalised with anti-Soviet graffiti. There was a huge reaction, with a quarter of a million East Germans demonstrating against the unidentified vandals.

In the central area are 16 large white stone sarcophagi, each representing one of the sixteen Soviet republics, with military scenes carved on them and text in both Russian and German by Stalin: “Now all recognise that the Soviet people with their selfless fight saved the civilisation of Europe from fascist thugs. This was a great achievement of the Soviet people to the history of mankind“.

This leads up to a mound with steps up to it and a pavilion above which is a plinth carrying a 12m tall statue of a Soviet soldier with a sword holding a German child, standing over a broken swastika. The pavillion entrance is closed by a locked gate, and I didn’t have a wide enough lens to photograph the mosaic around the rear wall in a single picture.

In the entrance to the site, before you reach the flag portal is another sculpture, smaller and in stone of Mother Russia weeping over the loss of her children, and beyond that rows of trees, weeping willows and past them, a row of tall poplars.

It remains a moving tribute to the dead, and I took many more pictures than appear here. It’s hard to appreciate the scale of the Soviet losses; around 10 million Soviet military died in World War 2, roughly 25 times as many as from the UK, and 20 times theat of the US A. For the civilian population the difference was greater still, with around 30 times as many deaths than the UK. And the Soviet population was only around 3.5 times that of the UK.

More from Berlin to follow shortly.

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My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

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Inside the fortress at Spandau is this tower, presumably designed as a lookout, which give a 360 degree view around the area, though you have to climb a lot of steps. There are also some other viewpoints, and I cannot recall which the several pictures here were taken from.

As well as some pictures taken with the 35mm equivalent Fuji X100, I also used the 90mm f2.8 Elmar on the Leica M8. It gives a rather small image frame in the viewfinder, but the images are fine. The M8 has an unusual size sensor, APS-H at27x18mm, which gives a 1.33x crop factor, making the 90mm into a 120mm equivalent lens. I think the 90mm is the only Leitz lens I ever bought new, to use with my Minolta CLE, and is small and light, tapering from the body. Leica kept this lens in production for around 25 years, mainly like mine in Canada. It had a rather silly rubber lens hood combined with a UV filter, one of Leica’s few design failures (the Leica M8 was another.) Optically it remains one of the best – and much more usable with a suitable adapter on a mirrorless camera from Fuji or any Micro 4/3 camera with viewing through the lens and a magnified focus.

Eventually we made our way out of the fortress and back into the town of Spandau, which has a number of historical buildings, before making our way back into the centre of Berlin.

More from Berlin to follow shortly.

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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Spandau, at the west of Berlin, is best known for its prison, infamous for being where seven leading Nazis sentenced to imprisonment at the Nuremburg trials were held until their release or death. The last to be held there, Rudolf Hess, died in 1987, and the prison was then demolished with everthing from it, except a single set of keys, ground to dust and either dispersed in the North Sea or buried at a German air base.

We went to Spandau, a small town now a part of Berlin to visit its well-preserved Renaissance fortress, Zitadelle Spandau, built between 1559-94, and largely well-preserved, helped by the fact that in two of its major battles, beseiged by Napoleon and later by Russian forces at the end of the Second World War it surrendered without a fight.

A very sinister site in the 1930s, when from 1935 it was home to the German Army’s In 1935, the Army’s Gas Protection Laboratory, where around 300 scientist and technicians developed and tested chemical weapons including nerve gas. Now it is a tourist attraction and also venue for a number of festivals including the open-air concerts of the Citadel Music Festival.

The Citadel is a bastion fort or ‘tracé à l’italienne‘, a design that emerged after traditional castles had shown themselves vulnerable to cannon fire. At Spandau it takes the shape of a square with at each of the four corners a projection like a short triangular spearhead, the bastions, which allow protecting fire on the main walls, while the angle makes them less vulnerable to cannon fire.

The walls were generally lower and thicker than those of earlier castles and like most such fortresses it is surrounded by a deep ditch, often as here filled with water, part of which is the River Havel.

As well as walking around the grounds we also took a guided tour of much of the interior, including some of the dungeons.

The fort offers some wide views around the surrounding country, some of which I’ll put in the next post.

More from Berlin to follow shortly.

Previous Berlin post
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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

No visit to Berlin could miss the wall, and we went to walk along its best-known section, the East Side Gallery, alongside the River Spree. Here are just a few of my favourite pictures from it:

It was still raining, and seemed colder in the fairly open area around the wall. This almost certainly made taking pictures rather easier, as there were relatively few others crazy enough to be out on a day like this and get in the way.

It had been a fairly tiring day, and when we reached the end of the East Side Gallery we were ready to head back to the flat, make ourselves a meal and rest.

More from Berlin to follow shortly.

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Copyright of the paintings shown in these images belongs to their creators; the photographs are my copyright
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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

I was with family, and their priorities didn’t exactly coincide with mine, but the route that they took on their way to the next cafe, for lunch, was an interesting one, keeping to the road at Boxhagener Platz (it was too wet to play on the swings) with various graffiti and

some finely decorated shutters for a bar. They continued making their way with determination  (and  I had to do a lot of running to catch up  after stopping to take pictures) to the Knilchbar kindercafé on Krossener Str.

I can’t say I enjoyed the kindercafé.  But then I wouldn’t enjoy any kindercafé, places where the kind of behaviour that would be frowned upon in civilised company is actively encouraged; at least it keeps children and their parents away from other establishments.  The noise level was high, and the food and drink was children’s food and drink. Of course I’m not their target audience, and it’s good that such places exist for those who so obviously delight in them, but really I should have found a nearby bar to sit in grumpily while the others played.

Of course I did take a few pictures. The kind any grandad would, but nothing I’d want to share outside the family (and parts of the family wouldn’t like if I did.) And after what seemed like several hours I had to leave and walk around a bit outside as my head was aching from the screaming. Eventually the others came out and we walked on.

Our route took us back to Boxhagener Platz  and a rather fine public toilet, though perhaps it would have been better without the graffiti. Perhaps surprisingly it seemed still to be in full working order.

Further along we came to the well graffitied Zielona Gora on Grünberger Str,

and I took a couple of closer pictures, still using the Fuji 100X.

On a street corner not far away was Paul’s Metal Eck, apparently

a well known heavy metal bar, still firmly closed and quiet. Another version of hell though for a slightly older clientele, with “relentless metal videos” apparently played at excessive volume; though one on-line customer review did hold out the promise of “Beautiful and capable waitresses” and “good bear”, certainly more welcoming than a bad bear.

More from Berlin to follow shortly.

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________

Café Sibylle is a café in the Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin , which opened in 1953 under the name Milchtrinkhalle when the Stalinallee was being redeveloped as an impressively overdone socialist boulevard, with many of the buildings on it dating from the 1950s.

It was renamed Milchbar and in the 1960s became Café Sibylle, named for the leading East German fashion magazine, whose staff often held meetings there. After the reunification of Germany the café closed for a while, reopening around 2000, with a permanent exhibition display of the history  of the area around Karl-Marx-Allee, and reverting to some of the original decor with some original wall paintings which were discovered.

Perhaps because of the weather there were few customers when we visited, although the place is often featured in tourist guides and is worth a visit – and the the cake and coffee/beer was very welcome and reasonably priced.

A part of the café was a museum area with some genuine 1950s East German objects. The business closed briefly in 2018 as it was making a loss and there were aslo apparently problems with contracts, but it was reopened with some pomp a few months later.

Back on Karl-Marx-Allee were some rather less impressive buildings of a temporary nature and some more interesting piping. I did take rather a lot of pictures of the piping, much of which was overhead and brightly coloured, though have spared you by not posting them here. It was I think a temporary feature.

We were nearing the end of the impressively wide street. and could see one of a pair of its more impressive buildings from the Soviet era, though the foreground was rather less so.

Kosmos, along with  Kino International, both built as cinemas in the 1960s, are the only significant building on Karl-Mark-Allee not built in the Soviet Classical (‘Zuckerbäckerstil’) style but as truly modern buildings, designed in 1959 by  Josef Kaiser and Herbert Aust. Used for many years for film premieres, since 2006 it has been a conference and event centre.

We left the Karl-Marx-Allee where it ends at Frankfurter Tur, where there are two towers to form a dramatic gateway to Berlin, dating from 1953-1956 and which are perhaps the most impressive of the soviet style buildings and walked through an area where the architecture was on a more modest scale.

Two rather differently decorated vehicles were parked outside Schmuck-Klinik on Boxhagener Strasse, with Darkstore’s devil promising Clothes, boots, jewelry, CDs.

More from Berlin to follow shortly.

Previous Berlin post

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

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________________________________________________________

The next day it rained. All day, though sometimes the rain was lighter and sometimes it was heavier.  It was perhaps appropriated weather to make our way down Karl-Marx-Allee, though at times the rain was a little too heavy to make photography easy, and a number of pictures were spoilt by raindrops on the filter in front of the 23mm lens of the Fuji 100x, despite wiping it before every exposure.

The street was rebuilt as a flagship monumental showcase for the East German regime in the 1950s, originally as Stalinallee, but renamed in 1961 after he fell from grace some years after his death. Moves to rename it after the wall fell have so far failed.

It is a truly massive street, roughly a hundred yards wide, and parts of it had some equally massive roadworks that we sometimes struggled around. Back in the old days it was no doubt always clear for the May Day military parade.

Both sides of the street are lined by buildings on an appropriate scale and built for a wide range of functions, including  spacious and luxurious apartments for workers, shops, restaurants, cafés, a tourist hotel, and a vast cinema, all in the rather ponderous Russian  modern classical style, not particularly to my taste.

A curious note was added by some colorful above-ground pipework.

A couple of blocks near the start of our walk on the edge of the Alexanderplatz had some interesting decoation, with a huge Mexican style mural on the Haus des Lehrers (Teacher’s House – in the second picture from the top – but I made a better picture later in the week) and on the north corner of the street a huge metallic tribute to the Russian cosmonauts.

Had the weather been better I might have lingered more, and perhaps taken the Leica out of my bag to use a wider lens, but we hurried on, keen to reach our first café of the day for morning coffee and cake, though I preferred a beer. I did take rather more pictures than appear here, a little over 50 in total , but most are either family pictures or more pictures of the various buildings.

More about the  café  in Berlin 3.

Previous Berlin Post.

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There are no adverts on this site and it receives no sponsorship, and I like to keep it that way. But it does take a considerable amount of my time and thought, and if you enjoy reading it, a small donation – perhaps the cost of a beer – would be appreciated.

My London Diary : London Photos : Hull : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

To order prints or reproduce images

________________________________________________________