This being one of the world’s great party cities, I am sure there were a reasonable number of Berliners who were comfortably still on their Saturday night out at 7.35am: but I will never be a person like that again. Personally, I was on the way to the airport. It’s been a good and potentially transfomative trip.
Took myself on a day out into the countryside, specifically to the little town of Lübben, which lies about an hour’s train journey south of Berlin, further up the River Spree. Here, the river breaks into a series of creeks and canals, on which, today, a substantial number of tourists were floating around in either a self-propelled manner or on Venice-style gondolas, only piloted by gruff-looking East German types. But let’s go with this person-free shot, instead. One has to be pleased with the colour contrast here.
Formally this used to be the “Research Institute for Experimental Medicine”, which I am sure is quite as sinister as it sounds, so its being more popularly known as “The Mouse Bunker” does show that Germans indeed possess a sense of irony. It’s a masterpiece of brutalism, anyway, of which no one picture can do justice but you’ll get a better impression looking it up online. It’d be nice if the white ball of the street lamp wasn’t there, but otherwise, the light will certainly do.
Amongst various (acknowledged) perks of my job I get to visit some world-renowned seats of learning, and the Humboldt University of Berlin is definitely one of the elite. Scholars who have worked here include Einstein, Schopenhauer, Marx, Weber, Hegel, Planck and von Braun, and if you haven’t heard of at least three of those, you need to do some more reading.
There is something terribly autumnal about this shot, even if it was 25ºC and extremely pleasant in Berlin today. But here we are, mid-to-late September, and I suppose it’s an inevitability.
Second photo in a row of the next person along the platform, but this was an utterly random moment that could not be resisted. Somehow this bodes well for the rest of the week. The blog’s second, and my third, trip to Berlin.
At one point during the conference I was attending at the Goethe University in Frankfurt today, there were vague references to ‘our famous building’ that drifted through my Friday consciousness but didn’t take hold. Then, on my way back into the city centre afterwards, I saw the building.
The IG-Farbenhaus has had a chequered history to say the least. HQ to the eponymous company, when built in the 1920s it was the biggest office building in Europe and remained so for thirty years. IG Farben manufactured the world’s first antibiotic — and also the gas that was used in the Nazi concentration camps. After the war the USA used it as a military base — the ‘Pentagon of Europe’; following German reunification ownership passed to the state of Hesse who renovated it and then helped the Goethe-Institut build a new campus around it from 2001 onwards. And all set in parkland (kept free of development by the Americans for security reasons) right in the city centre.
I’m sure this photo doesn’t do the architecture full justice, but what the hell, the sun looks good too.
Left Zagreb, with regret when it comes to the people and the general pleasantness of the place, but with no regret when it comes to the weather which was dreadful today. Further chewed up my CO2 allowance and hopped back to Frankfurt, which is one of the worst airports I’ve ever been to but at least you get a good view of the city on the way in. I’m here for just over 24 hours. This is about as intimate with the place as I’ll probably get.
I claim that this blog is apolitical but it is hard to avoid touching on certain subjects sometimes. Why does this kind of thing still happen in a world where there are enough resources to lift everyone — and certainly, at least, everyone in a very rich country like Germany, and a very rich part of it, like Bavaria — out of poverty? We become inured to it, it becomes normalised, until we don’t even see it any more. Maybe that’s all I can say with this photo: here it is, still.
This is one of those shots that works if one gets the symmetry right — so it’s a shame both trains were not the same. But with this station, Simbach am Inn, lying right on the German/Austrian border, the one on the left goes into the first country, the one on the right, the latter. And who doesn’t love a bit of good old-fashioned Century Gothic font.
The reason I came to Germany was to come to a conference here, at the University of Passau, right in the bottom right-hand (south-east) corner of the country. The best experience I had at it was to get plugged in for ten minutes to an amazing virtual reality rig — created by students — which replicated, and rather well, the experience of being in a zero-gravity environment, specifically an abandoned space station. Once I got over the dizziness and tried to forget that my legs were relevant in this place, it was very effective. I wish I could somehow have photographed my own immersion, but that didn’t prove possible, so here’s fellow delegate Reni playing with it, after me.
Being 42 