Berlin

The first stop on my accidental happiness tour has been Berlin. One of the more special elements of the trip has been the Kunsthaus Tacheles, an ex shopping mall that has assumed many guises throughout Nazi and Communist occupation, but has now come to become a home to an art community. This unkempt building has now become home to galleries, studios, a cinema, four bars, and a projector that screens art onto an adjacent wall every evening.
Its history is a pretty special one with artists finding the disused building shortly after the Berlin Wall came down and took it over, creating an autonomous community of artists.
I guess for me it highlights everything that I really found unique about Berlin. It is a city that has been stained pretty heavily in the face of both World War II and with communism and all of the assorted issues that that brought in, and then again when the two cities reunited.
Berlin is paradoxical in the sense that it is a very much a breathing, exciting and alive city, made even more real by places such as the Kunsthaus Tacheles and the myriad number of public art projects dotted around the city. At the same time it is also a very bloody city, all of the damage and tragedy that has occured didn’t happen in my grandparents generation (as with WWII) like the rest of western Europe, but on top of that, there have been serious shifts and unrest even within in my own life span.
The curious thing about all of this is that on many corners there are boards explaining what went on here during the war and during the communist divide, with all of this being presented with great gravitas. However what was odd was that in the background of Checkpoint Charlie was a real estate ad with a tag line ‘Check in Charlie’. I don’t know if this is a good thing (that people are moving on and attempting just to create something new) or horribly insensitive.