Latest news with #BodeMuseum
NZ Herald
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Berlin's rich museum scene - strolling through 200 years of history
The Bode Museum's round Baroque facade, standing against the Spree, is probably one of the most recognised images of Berlin. Inside, the museum has everything from 3rd-century Byzantine art to 16th-century Renaissance art, with a slant towards Christian religious sculpture. There are numerous pieces in marble, wood and bronze, by sculptors like Donatello (Pazzi Madonna), Bernini (Satyr with Panther) and Pisano (Man of Sorrows), along with vibrant mosaics from medieval churches in Constantinople and Ravenna. German Spy Museum Before Ethan Hunt started globetrotting for impossible missions, Berlin was the capital of spies. The Deutsches Spionagemuseum has hundreds of artefacts from World War II and the Cold War, from lipstick cameras to wearable radio interceptors to cipher machines, and lets you play spy as well, decrypting coded messages and finding hidden bugs. A highlight is the Laser Maze, where you can live out your Ocean's 12 dreams and jump and twist your way out of a maze of laser beams. Museum of Communication Alexander Graham Bell may get all the credit for inventing the telephone, but 16 years prior, German inventor Philip Reis revealed his 'telephone', which transmitted voice via electronic signals and can still be found in the Museum for Communication alongside the Enigma cipher machine. The museum has a couple of friendly robots in the atrium, and many themed collections on communication objects, from postcards to mail coaches to televisions and even a pneumatic tube system. Naturkunde Museum With 30 million specimens covering botany, zoology, minerals and fossils, Berlin's Natural History Museum is among the most comprehensive in Europe. The Dinosaur Hall in the central atrium has a brachiosaurus, Europe's only original T-rex skeleton and the world's best preserved archaeopteryx fossil. The mineral collection includes 5000 impact crater rocks, the only collection in Europe, while the wet collection – floor to ceiling shelves of thousands of specimen jars kept for research – inspires awe. Kunstgewerbemuseum For more than 150 years, the Museum of Decorative Arts has been collecting European arts and crafts, from 12th-century tapestries to Balenciaga gowns from the 1960s. It has a particularly impressive collection of Renaissance and Baroque-era furniture and crockery, such as gilded cabinets, Delft faiences and Emile Gallé's glasswork, and its temporary exhibitions cover diverse topics from regenerative design principles to historical Parisian fashion. Jewish Museum Berlin's first Jewish Museum was founded to showcase the community's art collection, six days before the Nazis came to power. The modern museum that opened in 2001 reflects on all that happened after. Installations like Fallen Leaves, a corridor strewn with iron plates with open-mouthed faces carved into them, and Catastrophe, a roomful of banners detailing every Nazi decree against the Jewish population, stay with you long after you leave. Neue Nationalgalerie With a Modernist building that was the last work of German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Neue Nationalgalerie is dedicated to showcasing art from the 20th century onwards. Picassos, Matisses and Rothkos abound, exploring topics such as art's response to post-war societal upheavals. Temporary exhibitions feature work of modern artists like Nan Goldin and Yoko Ono. Designpanoptikum In an unassuming grey building near Museuminsel sits Berlin's museum for bizarre objects, housing artist Vlad Korneev's collection of unusual industrial objects arranged in surreal ways. Old movie cameras and film projectors sit beside odd-looking inventions like fire beaters (a steel broom to put out small fires) and an iron lung (a ventilation chamber for polio patients); among the weirder creative arrangements is a trumpet that appears to sprout from the nose of a first aid prop mannequin. There is no explanatory signage, but the owner offers tours to explain his vision behind the collection. Computerspielemuseum Stepping into the Computer Games Museum is a Back to the Future experience. Some 300 exhibits cover the history of gaming, from early East German games like Piko Dat to a paper set of Dungeons and Dragons to early consoles like Nimrod and Gameboy. The playable arcade games are a highlight, from Computer Space, the first arcade game, to classics like Donkey Kong and Space Invaders, to PainStation, a Pong-like game for adults, where missing a ball results in physical penalties like heat and mild electric shocks.
Irish Examiner
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Examiner
German Holocaust survivor Margot Friedlander dies aged 103
Margot Friedlander, a German Jew who survived the Theresienstadt concentration camp and became a high-profile witness to Nazi persecution in her final years, has died aged 103. Her death was announced by the Margot Friedlander Foundation in Berlin on its website. Details about where she died, as well as the cause of death, were not immediately made public. Holocaust survivor Margot Friedlander, centre, stands as members of the European Parliament applaud after an address in the plenary chamber at the European Parliament in Brussels in 2022 (Virginia Mayo/AP) She died in the week of the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender in the Second World War. After spending much of her life in the United States, Ms Friedlander returned to live in the German capital in her 80s. She was honoured with Germany's highest decoration and with a statue at Berlin's City Hall. 'What I do gives me my strength and probably also my energy, because I speak for those who can no longer speak,' Ms Friedlander said at an event at Berlin's Jewish Museum in 2018. 'I would like to say that I don't just speak for the six million Jews who were killed, but for all the people who were killed – innocent people,' she said. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier expressed his condolences in a statement, saying she gave Germany reconciliation despite the horrors she went through there in her life. Mr Steinmeier said the country cannot be grateful enough for her gift. A report released last month said more than 200,000 Jewish survivors are still alive but 70% of them will be gone within the next 10 years. Margot Friedlander shows the Mevlude Genc Medal after it was awarded to her at the Bode Museum in Berlin in June 2024 (Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa via AP) Ms Friedlander was born Margot Bendheim on November 5 1921. Her father, Artur Bendheim, owned a shop in Berlin. He had fought for Germany and had been decorated in the First World War. Ms Friedlander recalled that, after the Nazis took power, her father initially said that 'they don't mean us; We're Germans'. She added that 'we didn't see it until it was too late'. Ms Friedlander wanted to design clothes and started an apprenticeship as a tailor. After her parents divorced in 1937, Ms Friedlander, her mother and younger brother went to live with her grandparents. In 1941, they had to move to a so-called 'Jewish apartment', and Ms Friedlander was forced to work nights at a metal factory. Margot Friedlander accepts the applause after being awarded the Mevlude Genc Medal at the Bode Museum in Berlin in June 2024 (Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa via AP) In January 1943, just as the family was planning to flee Berlin, Ms Friedlander returned home to discover that her brother, Ralph, had been taken away by the Gestapo. A neighbour told her that her mother had decided to go to the police and 'go with Ralph, wherever that may be'. She passed on her mother's final message – 'Try to make your life,' which would later become the title of Ms Friedlander's autobiography – along with her handbag. Ms Friedlander went into hiding, taking off the yellow star that Jews were obliged to wear. She recalled getting her hair dyed red, reasoning that 'people think Jews don't have red hair'. She said that 16 people helped keep her under the radar over the next 15 months. That ended in April 1944 when she was taken in by police after being stopped for an identity check after leaving a bunker following an air raid. She said she quickly decided to tell the truth and say that she was Jewish. I had felt guilty every day; had I gone with my mother and my brother, I would at least have known what had happened to them 'The running and hiding was over,' she said. 'I felt separated from the fate of my people. I had felt guilty every day; had I gone with my mother and my brother, I would at least have known what had happened to them.' Ms Friedlander arrived in June 1944 at the packed Theresienstadt camp. In the spring of 1945, she recalled later, she saw the arrival of skeletal prisoners who had been forced on to death marches from Auschwitz ahead of that camp's liberation. 'At that moment, we heard of the death camps, and at that moment I understood that I would not see my mother and my brother again,' she said. Both were killed at the Auschwitz death camp. Her father had fled in 1939 to Belgium. He later went to France, where he was interned, before being deported in 1942 to Auschwitz, where he was also killed. Shortly after the camp's liberation, she married Adolf Friedlander, an acquaintance from Berlin whom she met again at Theresienstadt. Holocaust survivor Margot Friedlander appears for an event with US secretary of state Antony Blinken at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin in June 2021 (Andrew Harnik, Pool/AP) He had a sister in America, and – after months in a camp for displaced persons – they arrived in New York in 1946. Ms Friedlander stayed away from Germany for 57 years. She and her husband became US citizens; she worked as a tailor and later ran a travel agency. Adolf Friedlander died in 1997, aged 87. Margot returned to Germany for the first time in 2003, when she was received at Berlin's City Hall along with others who had been pushed out by the Nazis. In 2010, she moved back to the German capital, where she told her story to students and was decorated with, among other things, the country's highest honour, the Order of Merit. She was made a citizen of honour of Berlin in 2018. Noting that there were few Holocaust survivors still alive, she told an audience that year: 'I would like you to be the witnesses we can't be for much longer.'
New York Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Rarely Seen Angel With a Lesson From History
The angel is kept in a state of darkness, because it is delicate and vulnerable to light. The subject of a century of philosophical debate, and the inspiration for works of poetry, theater, music and film, the angel, called 'Angelus Novus,' is a powerfully enigmatic figure. When this artwork by Paul Klee is presented it in public, it is considered an event. Klee's 1920 watercolor print will have a rare appearance starting on May 8, as part of the exhibition, 'The Angel of History: Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee and the Berlin Angels 80 Years After World War II,' at the Bode-Museum in Berlin. On loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Klee's work — which is about the size of a standard notebook page — will be on show through July 13, a shorter-than-typical exhibition run, to protect it from too much exposure. The German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, who owned 'Angelus Novus' for nearly two decades, wrote one of his final texts about the angel, just before he died by suicide in 1940. He saw the angel as a witness to an imminent cataclysm. 'This is how one pictures the angel of history,' Benjamin wrote in notes that would later be published as 'Theses on the Philosophy of History.'
