On the wall at Frankfurt am Main’s Neuer Börneplatz Memorial Site are nearly 12-thousand small steel blocks for every Frankfurt Jewish person deported and murdered between 1933 and 1945. The names include Edith Frank and her two daughters Margot and Annelies (Anne), who died in concentration camps. The sole remaining family member, patriarch Otto, survived the Holocaust, eventually settling in Basel, Switzerland, where he is buried.
I made the image above on 15 Jun 2023 with a Fujifilm X70 fixed-lens prime. This post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-uso.
“Can something truly awful be depicted in a meaningful way?”
Art4All Thursday means the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery, NNG) is entirely free to the public from 4pm to 8pm. Residents and visitors in the masses stream into the gallery, because regular admission is between 16 and 20€.
Gerhard Richter is one of the featured artists on display at the NNG. Since the 1970s, the German artist has explored the limits of the painting process and physicality, but he like many of their generation has also challenged the ideas of producing meaning in German art in a post-Holocaust world. I saw some of his work this past winter at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, but here on display in Berlin, his 2014-2019 work called “Birkenau” is abstract, challenging, poignant, and provocative.
“Abstract images are fictional models because they visualise a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can infer.” (Gerhard Richter)
That’s another mirror at the end.
A forbidden image taken by a prisoner, attributed to Alberto Errera: Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944.
“Grauer Spiegel” / Grey mirror, by G. Richter, 2019, 4 parts.
“Birkenau”, by G. Richter, 2014, 4 parts.
The physical reflection invites the impossible, a (self-) examination asked by the artist of the viewer to consider the moral depths into which we will sink; whether survival welcomes or allows creative expression, and whether we still have it in ourselves to truly engage with the history of very difficult questions.
1 of the 4 parts. The abstraction is what keeps things “level”; see why below.
Neue Nationalgalerie.
I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 22 May 2025. I received neither request nor compensation for this content. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.
Today was a bad day. The trees around, they do rain with fluff. And lo, come forth the raging swells of sneezy and runny. Despite the nightly ritual of Loratadine in a tiny 10-milligram pill.
Yet, into Berlin Mitte I must go, into the warm springtime sun for an afternoon of fresh air and new tissues. 🤧
“Hey WeRoad: thanks, but I’m good. I’ve been here many times since 2002, and I’m content with meeting up with friends whom I haven’t seen in years and who’ve been here awhile.”
Der Himmel über Berlin / the sky over Berlin.
Große Hamburger Straße 29: eighty-plus years on, the holes and scars still look fresh.
Rossmann drugstore chain.
Gipsstraße 19.
Gipsstraße 27.
“Milk and honey taken far far away” / “Milch und Honig weit weit weggebracht” This piece of 1990s word-art at Sophie-Gips-Höfe is by American conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner.
That tower again, from Tucholskystraße & Oranienburger Straße.
I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 21 May 2025. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.
Many architects, engineers, medical doctors, and scientists made their homes and careers here in Berlin. Not only is evidence plain to see in buildings, memorial plaques, and sculptures, but by the final resting places of the renowned throughout the capital city.
In Schöneberg’s Alter St. Matthäus cemetery, I say “hello” to Kirchhoff, Kronecker, and Rubens; as well as Mitscherlich and the Brothers Grimm.
Leopold & Fanni Kronecker. In my training, I learned about the Kronecker delta function whose utility became more apparent in learning about mathematical physics: e.g., “how to write the identity matrix or tensor in a couple of terms.”
Gustav Robert Kirchhoff. I learned the Kirchhoff laws (or rules) of electrical circuits, and later, the Kirchhoff law of thermal radiation. He and Robert Bunsen created the spectroscope, and with the new spectroscopic examination of sunlight, discovered in 1861 the elements caesium and rubidium.
Heinrich & Marie Rubens. Thanks to Rubens’ measurements of infrared radiation, Max Planck was able to derive and write a new law of radiation, based on the discreteness (quantization) of energy. Ruben’s’ work extended the range to larger wavelengths (smaller frequencies) and helped set the new 20th-century “quantum mechanics” on solid experimental ground.
Eilhard Mitscherlich. I didn’t know about this until I searched his name. In 1819, the chemist studied various compounds with phosphorus and arsenic in the laboratory, and realized they crystallized similarly: thus began the study of crystallographic isomorphism.
Members of the Grimm family, including Brothers Grimm Jacob & Wilhelm. They collected fables and fairy tales of their time in the German language, many of which have been sanitized for popular consumption today.
The cemetery is free to enter, but opening times vary during the year; summer hours (May to August) are 8am to 8pm. The cemetery’s main entrance (shown here) is directly opposite the south entrance to S1 S-Bahn station Yorckstrasse.
I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 20 May 2025. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.
Here are a few sights of mine, after an afternoon in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district.
One Wall Mehringplatz (2014), by Shepard Fairey 🇺🇸.
Jewish Museum Berlin: In 1935, Regina Jonas became the first woman in the world to be ordained as rabbi in Germany.
Jewish Museum Berlin: In 2010, Alina Treiger became the first woman to be ordained as rabbi in Germany after the Holocaust.
DPA (Deutsche Presse-Agentur): the German Press Agency’s central editorial office. In front are statues of 3 politicians who saw and navigated big changes in 1989 and 1990.
George Bush 🇺🇸, Helmut Kohl 🇩🇪, and Mikhail Gorbachev 🇷🇺 : the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; and German reunification in 1990.
Checkpoint C: Friedrichstraße at Zimmerstrasse, facing south. Note the line of bricks across the street and the horizontal metal “plate” at lower right.
Checkpoint C: Friedrichstraße at Zimmerstrasse, facing north. Note the line of bricks across the street and the horizontal metal “plate” at lower left.
The line of bricks traces the former Berlin Wall (1961-1989).
Memorial to Peter Fechter who died at the Berlin Wall on 17 Aug 1962. Trying to escape into West Berlin, the 18 year old was shot by border guards, and bled to death alone in the border strip. The stele and paving with red-basalt circular-disk stone marks the spot where he died, on the East Berlin side, next to the Wall.
“Peter Fechter, 1944-1962: All he wanted was freedom.”
This street ran along the Berlin Wall from 1961 to 1990. Construction worker Peter Fechter was shot here trying to escape from East to West on 17 August 1962.
The “mobile & me” needed a boost. Phone got some charge, as I sat inside a bakery from one of the national chains, Kamps, with a Milchkaffee (latté) and Zitronenkuchen (lemon cake). Nothing “heavy”!
Stadtmitte U-Bahn station entrance “J”, in the middle of Friedrichstraße.
I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 19 May 2025. This post composed within Jetpack for iOS appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com.
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