Das KaDeWe: the famous Kaufhaus des Westens

Das Kaufhaus des Westens. The KaDeWe.
When the Wall fell in 1989 the East Germans flocked first and foremost into this Capitalistic Phenomenon, no doubt gasping at the immense amount of things you could buy in this pestilential capitalistic system.
A must go to for droves of Dutch too. The KaDeWe is famous in this part of Europe: an immense department store, good for hours and hours on end of great and amazing shopping.

So famous that after visiting the likes of Fortnum and Mason, Liberty and Harrods in London, le Printemps and Lafayette in Paris you just have to visit KaDeWe as well, if only to tick it off.

It was Sunday. Normally they weren't open but this Sunday they were.
OMG.
Personally I'm not that much into shopping for clothes, but I was very much looking forward to the Delikatessen floor.
Die Feinschmeckeretage.
The sixth. See my pics.
If you ever come to visit us in Holland we'll take you there. Paradise (Ed: a Laduree shop-in-shop. Need I say more?)

For one day: we're tourists in Berlin

Our first encounter with Berlin - see my earlier blog - was rather mixed but on the whole positive: the Alexanderplatz might have been a bit of a disaster, the barge-cum-cafe and the surrounding area (Treptow) was great.

Now that we were in the city I remembered some other must see's. We decided to go to the Brandenburger Tor by way of the well known boulevard Unter den Linden - that happened to be broken up as if they were working on a new underground line. The Brandenburger Tor is now a tourist trap, but a great one. Lots of people strolling around, lots of street artists.

On we went, to the KaDeWe, Das Kaufhaus des Westens, the biggest and most famous department store in - then - West Berlin, and the biggest department store in Europe, for that matter. See my next blog, dedicated to our fav. floor: the delicatessen!

After our visit to the KaDeWe the traffic was getting a bit hectic and we wanted a nice and quiet place to spend our last holiday evening.
So we left Berlin late afternoon and headed West, to a little town where there would be famous sulphur springs.
But that's for another blog.
Here are our first glimpses of Berlin for you!

Berlin. Alexanderplatz.

I started reading German books when I found out I was seriously outdone bij the casus. Never properly learned them. Did reading German books help? Yes. In no time I knew more ways of talking around the casus thing and could thus communicate better (and more!).
Plus I finally read Alfred Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz.

And now we were in Eastern Germany and saw Berlin - never been there before - on the road signs.
I told Pieter I very much wanted to see this Alexanderplatz IRL. We decided to visit Berlin, before heading back to Holland.

Entering an unknown but famous city is, IMHO, one of the major pleasures in life so I was enthralled while Pieter followed the directions on our GPS.
We drove into an old, industrial part of the city and crossed a little river.
I looked sideways and saw Indonesia. Barges turned into cafe's in a redeveloped industrial area.

A very IT sort of place. Lot's of young, modern urbanites speaking English to their international friends with a strong German accents. The cafe's served excellent coffee.

But it was the Alexanderplatz we wanted to go to.
So we went on, drove on into the city centre, parked our car next to the Alexanderplatz and - may I warn you?
If you know about Alexanderplatz because you read Döblins book - don't go there.
The place is turned into an example of post war, Soviet influenced concrete blocks.

The whole Platz has been bombed to bits in WWII, of course. And when they rebuilt it, it was very modern at the time. Not any more. So be prepared.

I include one pic of todays Alexanderplatz (the last one). Check out Google for some gorgeous pics of the pre-war square.

Of course that wasn't all we saw of Berlin. So read my next blog, and see if you like the city as much as we did!

Symphonie der Tausend: Mahler performed in the Lausitz Arena

Most of you will know by now that I'm an avid Mahler fan. Actually, we both are.
So when we read the Mahler 8 was sceduled in Cottbus (see the two blogs before this one) we decided on the spot we had to be there.

The Mahler 8 is of course a bit of a maverick in the Mahler symphonies: 'only' two parts and voices and orchestra are equally important. And then the massive amount of participants it requires: an almost doubled orchestra, two full choirs, a children's (or boys) choir, eight soloists.
No wonder they nicknamed it the Symphonie der Tausend - 600 singers and musicians is about the minimum required.

So not your common or garden symfony. We happen to have quite a history with it.

The first time we heard it IRL was in the New York Carnegie Hall: the Staatskapelle Berlin under Pierre Boulez. We managed to get the last tickets, in a corner high above in the upper tiers.

So we heard, and hardly saw performed, somewhat weird music. The massive choirs we heard, yes, their sound multiplied by the shape of the hall before it reached us. But the orchestra was definitely reduced to a small chamber orchestra - hardly audible.
A strange experience and not for the faint hearted: getting up to applaud you had the definite feeling you were keeling over into the abyss, a couple of floors below.

The second time we heard the Eight was even more special: the Symphony was performed at the First Night of the Proms in the London Albert Hall, a couple of years ago. My cousin Paul sang in one of the choirs - the Sydney Philharmonic Choir - and thanks to him we sat near his choir watching all these thrilled concert goers, all the time knowing that my cousin sang there - we were so proud and happy to be at this very special occasion.
This performance was very good by the way, Jiri Belolávek conducting the BBC SO.

And now came the third time.
In Cottbus.
But not in the Mastodont, the Cottbus theatre. Not enough space!
The concert was to be performed in the local Arena. The Lausitz Arena. The sports hall. Like, where boxing matches are held.

And that of course was a must go.
Just imagine, going to Eastern Germany to hear the Mahler 8 being performed in an ... Arena.

We booked tickets - cheaper than we could have imagined - booked a hotel in Cottbus and when arrived rented bicycles to check out this Arena.
Good decision, because we soon found ourselves in a huge sports complex, clueless as to where this Arena actually was. Luckily a kind German told us, and warned us there wasn't much parking space - better go in the evening on our bicycles.

Next we cycled through a lovely wood, green with tiny new leaves, we cycled on beautiful tracks, we enjoyed the spring air, visited unknown parts of the city and it's surroundings. And in the evening we cycled, in our concert outfit, to the Arena.

I am absolutely sure that never in its history the Symphonie der Tausend was performed in a place as strange as this.
A sports hall. In it 600 performers and some 1200 attenders. Parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, friends and two Dutch.

And after a very interesting performance of Philippe Manoury's Melencolia-Figuren by the orchestra and the Arditti quartet (the members of the quartet stayed in our hotel) an amazing, wonderful performance the Mahler 8.

The performance itself - this is for the afficionados - was really good and so not like the benchmark performances we're used to. The conductor - Evan Christ - went for up tempo and steered orchestra, choirs and soloists enthusiastically onto the Highway. He very (very) well kept his pace and we were soon in a whirlwind of wonderful music - kudos for this approach, a pleasant detour from the ponderous meaningful and philosophical approaches you often hear from the famous conductors & orchestras, especially the older performances.
Strange but refreshing. And the couple of soft, intimate parts hit you right between the eyes - again kudos! Evan Christ, we hadn't heard of you yet. Compliments. Great performance!

Cottbus and the Mastodont: Art Nouveau gone brutalist

Cottbus holds an unexpected gem.
The Cottbus Theatre. Das Staatstheater Cottbus.

We renamed it the Mastodont and when you see pics of it you'll know why.
The building is huge, the building is massive and the building is inside and out Jugendstil - Art nouveau. It's more than a 100 years old, one of the few remaining Jugendstil theatres in Germany.

The Germans are equally enthralled:
'Eine architektonische Skulptur. Ein Tempel der Kunst, umrahmt von Grünanlagen und Brunnen. Ist das Jugendstil? Ist das Eklektizismus? In jedem Fall ist es genial'.

Flabbergasted is the right word to describe the feeling when you see it, and not just the first time!

We fell in love with the theatre the moment we saw it. And we went back to visit it, when they performed a wonderful Don Giovanni. The best we saw yet, actually.
We kept checking their agenda, and last year we found a must go concert to be performed a couple of months later - which we immediately booked.

See here a couple of Cottbus photos and the Mastodont.
We've only got one picture of the theatre - it does give a pretty adequate idea but check out Internet for more: the building is absolutely worth it.

The must go concert very much deserves its own blog, so you have to wait a little longer for that story...

Ossie Eyes: East German roofs looking at you

East Germany has of course been a no go area for a very long time. After that it took many years before we finally ventured into that part of Germany, an eight hours drive from our home.

By then the country was united of course, but the partition still remained in the names the German people gave themselves: Ossies and Wessies. After a couple of years the Ossies became sort of homesick for their old country, hence the Ostalgie: nostalgia for pre war East Germany. This is not the place to delve further into the German history, I tell it to explain the title of this blog - apart from it being a nice wordplay for my Ozzie readers.

Anyway, a couple of years ago Pieter wanted to travel the Oder-Neisse border, the old border between Germany and Poland. During that - very interesting - trip we ended up in the Cottbus area, an open pit mining area near the Polish and Chech border.
It was there where we saw our first Ossie Eyes.

In that part of Germany the roofs have eyes.
The roofs actually LOOK at you. It's sweet, it's funny, it's charming and it's something we had never seen before. It thrilled us. Enjoy!