FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Jeanne Mammen: The fierce artwork of a woman dubbed a ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis
08.12.2020
01:40 pm
Topics:
Tags:


“Woman with absinthe glass, Moulin Rouge” by Jeanne Mammen (early 1900s).
 

“I have always wanted to be just a pair of eyes, walking through the world unseen, only to see others.”

—a quote from artist Jeanne Mammen from the only interview she would ever do during her career, with art historian Hans Kinkel, 1975.

Described as “artistically gifted” at a very early age, Jeanne Mammen’s family would move from her birthplace of Berlin to Paris when she was five. She immersed herself in French literature—especially that of the great Romantic novelist Victor Hugo and the poet Charles Baudelaire. In 1907, at the age of seventeen, Mammen and her sister Adeline attended Académie Julian. The Académie Julian was an artistic refuge, especially for women who were allowed to enroll and where they had access to nude male models as subject matter. This is important as other art-centric schools had been slow to admit women into their institutions. If they did, women were not allowed to participate in painting or life study classes with their male counterparts.

Jeanne and Adeline would move on to Brussels to continue their studies. Then to Rome, where they attended both the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma and the Scuola Libera del Nudo dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma (aka “The Scuola Libera del Nudo,” or “free school of the nude,” for the teaching of life-drawing). The sisters would return to Paris in 1912 only to be forced to flee the city with their family. Unfortunately, their successful merchant father, Gustav Oskar Mammen, was labeled a “foreign enemy” and all of the family’s possessions, including their home, were confiscated. By 1916, the Mammen family was impecunious and living in Berlin doing any kind of work they could collectively find to keep financially afloat. After some time, Jeanne and her sister were able to afford to rent a studio apartment. The small apartment would eventually become a place Jeanne seldom left and where she would bring her observations of Berlin to life. Her work was widely published in magazines, as well as her writing. She was finally, once again, financially secure. But as 1933 and WWII loomed, Mammen would once again find herself out of work, but that didn’t mean she stopped working. Here is another quote attributed to Mammen’s lone interview on how she managed to keep creating despite the Nazis’ best efforts to stop her and other artists whom they categorized as “degenerates”:

“With the advent of the Hitler era, a ban on, or ‘Gleichschaltung’ of, all the magazines I was working for. The end of my ‘realistic’ period. Transition to an aggressive painting style, of fragmenting the object (in contrast to the official art world). World War II: no oil paints, no canvas—all pictures from this period are painted with gouache on cardboard. Ration cards, unemployment registration, hard labor, bombing, forced training as a fireman.”

Influenced by artists such as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Edgar Degas, Mammen seemed to embrace Figuratism as early as 1908, painting in this style for approximately six years before her work became more aligned with Symbolism. A wildly prolific artist who worked in various mediums, including watercolor, Mammen’s muses included members of Berlin’s queer community, a plethora of women, and vivid interjections of religious imagery and symbolism. Following the conclusion of WWII, Mammen would allegedly tell her longtime friend, Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist Max Delbrück, that “the ruins of Jeanne can be found in the ruins of Berlin.” After seven decades of creating artwork that still refuses to be defined by a singular artistic description, Mammen would pass away in Berlin at the age of 86. Mammen’s long career and artwork have been the subject of a couple of books including Jeanne Mammen: Paris – Bruxelles – Berlin (2017), Jeanne Mammen The Observer: Retrospective, 1910–1975 (2018). Her work is also featured in Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic: From Otto Dix to Jeanne Mammen (2018).

Images spanning Mammen’s impressive career follow.
 

 

“She Represents” (1928).
 

“Two Women Dancing” (1928).
 
More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
|
08.12.2020
01:40 pm
|
The grotesque and the beautiful: Meet Valeska Gert, the woman who pioneered performance art
07.18.2019
08:38 am
Topics:
Tags:

00valeska1
 
One evening at a local fleapit in Germany, sometime in the 1920s, a young woman stood on stage while the projectionist changed reels between movies and performed her latest dance called Pause. The woman was Valeska Gert who was well-known for her wild, unpredictable, highly controversial, beautiful yet often grotesque performances. The audience waited expectantly, a few coughs, a few giggles, but Gert did not move. She stood motionless in a slightly contrived awkward position and stared off into the distance. The audience grew restless. What the fuck was going on? The lights dimmed, the performance ended, and the movie came on. This wasn’t just dance, this was anti-dance. This was performance art. And nobody knew what to make of it.

Nijinsky had tried something similar a few years earlier, when he sat on the stage to a small audience and said something like: “And now I dance for you the meaning of the War.” He ended up in the booby-hatch. Gert thankfully didn’t. She just antagonized the bourgeoisie and inspired a whole new way of performance.

Valeska Gert was born Gertrud Valesca Samosch in Berlin, on January 11th, 1892. Her father was a highly successful businessman and a respected member of the Jewish community. According to her autobiographies (she wrote four of them), Gert was rebellious from the get-go. She showed little interest in school preferring to express herself through art and dance. At the age of nine, Gert was signed-up for ballet school where she exhibited considerable proficiency but a wilful subversiveness. She hated bourgeois conventions and considered traditional dance limiting and oppressive. But she was smart enough and talented enough to learn the moves and impress her teachers.

On the recommendation of one teacher, Gert was given an introduction to the renowned and highly respected dancer and choreographer Rita Sacchetto. Good ole Sacchetto thought she had a future prima ballerina on her hands and gave Gert the opportunity to perform her own dance in one of her shows. Instead of something traditional, Gert burst on stage “like a bomb” in an outrageous orange silk costume. Then rather than perform the dance as rehearsed and as expected Gert proceeded to jump, swing, stomp, grimace, and dance like “a spark in a powder keg.” Sacchetto was not pleased but the audience went wild. This became Gert’s first major performance Tanz in Orange (Dance in Orange) in 1916.

As the First World War had a dramatic and negative effect on her father’s business, Gert, buoyed by her success with Tanz in Orange, sought out her own career as a dancer, performer, and actor. She worked with various theater groups and cabarets, winning garlands for her performances in Oskar Kokoschka’s Hiob (1918), Ernst Toller’s Transformation (1919), and a revival of Frank Wedekind’s Franziska (1920).

But Gert became more interested in merging acting with dance and performance with politics. She created a series of lowlife characters who she brought to life through exaggerated performance. Or as Gert put it:

I danced all of the people that the upright citizen despised: whores, pimps, depraved souls—the ones who slipped through the cracks.

Long before Madonna caused outrage by flicking-off on stage, Gert was simulating masturbation, coition, and orgasm. It brought her a visit for the cops on grounds of obscenity. Her most notorious performance was the prostitute Canaille. As the academic Alexandra Kolb wrote in her thesis ‘There was never anythin’ like this!!!’ Valeska Gert’s Performances in the Context of Weimar Culture:

Gert’s portrayal of this figure is significant at a time when German state regulation of prostitution, which involved the supervision of sex-workers by the Sittenpolizei (moral police) and severe limitations on their freedom, became increasingly attacked as incompatible with the new democratic system and moves towards greater legal and civil rights for women. The regulation policy was in fact abolished in 1927.

Gert’s unvarnished and ruthless depiction of the prostitute renounced any idealisation. Everyday life—and misery—were reinstated over and above the aestheticised life previously represented in much dance, in particular classical ballet with its fairy-tale plots and noble, dignified representation of humanity.

~ Snip! ~

...Gert did not simply interpret this role as a critique of capitalist society and its treatment of woman as a will-less and submissive commodity. Rather, she strove to depict the female experience in a somewhat autonomous light, with the prostitute enjoying considerable control over her sexuality.

Forget The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, this was a nice Jewish girl ripping-up the text book and changing society. Gert was making a one-woman stand for “those marginalised or excluded from bourgeois society.”

Nothing was taboo for Gert. Her performances covered a wide range of subjects, themes, and characters—from sport to news, sex to death, and to the invidious nature of capitalist society. When Gert asked Bertolt Brecht what he meant by “epic theater,” the playwright replied. “It’s what you do.”

Her reputation grew in the 1920s. She appeared in cabaret, in movies, and in theater productions. Gert would have been a superstar had not the rise of the anti-semitic Nazis brought her career to a premature hiatus. She quit Germany, moved to England, and got married. She then moved to New York, ran a cabaret where both Julian Beck and Jackson Pollock worked for her, and became friends with Tennessee Williams.

After the Second World War, Gert returned to Europe. She tried her hand at cabaret again and found herself cast in movies by Fellini, Fassbinder, and Wim Wenders. But it really wasn’t until the 1970s and the explosion of punk that Gert was fully rediscovered and embraced by a younger generation. Gert was hailed as a progenitor of punk, the woman who “laid the foundations and paved the way for the punk movement.”

Gert died sometime in March 1978. The official date is March 18th. But Gert’s body had lain undiscovered for a few days—something she predicted in her 1968 autobiography Ich bin eine Hexe (I am a Witch):

Only the kitty will be with me. When I’m dead, I can’t feed him anymore. He’s hungry. In desperation he nibbles at me. I stink. Kitty’s a gourmet, he doesn’t like me anymore. He meows loudly with hunger until the neighbours notice and break down the door.

 
01valeska.jpg
 
08valeska.jpg
 
More pix of Gert and a video, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
07.18.2019
08:38 am
|
Meet Anita Berber: The ‘Priestess of Debauchery’ who scandalized Weimar Berlin

02rebreb.jpg
 
The woman with the shock of dyed red hair, her body wrapped in a fur coat, and a pet monkey grinning and holding tight to her neck was Anita Berber. She danced across the foyer of the Adlon Hotel opened her sable coat and revealed her lustrous naked body underneath. Men leered, goggle-eyed. Women giggled or turned their heads in shock and embarrassment.

Anita Berber didn’t care. She liked to shock. She liked the attention. If she didn’t get it, she would shout and throw empty bottles or glasses on the floor. Smash! Berber was a dancer, an actor, a writer, and a model. She was called the “Goddess of the Night,” the “Priestess of Debauchery,” the very symbol of Weimar decadence, and a drug-addled degenerate. She was all these things and more. And during her brief life, Berber utterly scandalized Berlin during the 1920s. Not an easy task!

The daughter of two musicians, Anita Berber was born in Dresden in 1899. Her parents divorced when she was young, Berber was then raised by her grandmother. By sixteen, she quit the family home for the unpredictable life as a dancer in cabaret shows. The First World War was at its bloodiest height. The daily reports of casualties and death meant people were reckless with their passions. It was then that Berber started a series of relationships and dangerous habits that became her life.

After the War, Berber began her career as a movie actor—starring opposite Conrad Veidt in The Story of Dida Ibsen in 1918 and then in Prostitution and Around the World in Eighty Days the following year. While Veidt went onto become a major movie star with a career in Hollywood, Berber’s career stalled and she became best known for her performances as a dancer, a sultry temptress or a drug-addled prostitute. With her dark bobbed hair and androgynous good looks, Berber created a style that was copied by Marlene Dietrich (who basically stole her act), Leni Riefenstahl who idolized Berber, was her understudy and had a brief intense relationship with her, and Louise Brooks, whose seductive image in Pandora’s Box was a copy of Berber’s. She had relationships with both men and women, seeing no difference in taking pleasures from either sex. Berber married in 1919, then left her husband—a man called Nathusius—for a woman called Susi Wanowski. The couple became a fixture of Berlin’s growing lesbian scene.

Berber enjoyed opium, hashish, heroin, and cocaine—which she kept secreted in a silver locket around her neck. She also had a strong predilection for ether and chloroform mixed together in a small china bowl, into which she scattered white rose petals. Once these were sufficiently marinated in this heady concoction, she ate the petals one by one until she fell into a delicious sleep.

Berber’s louche lifestyle coupled with her fame as a movie star and dancer meant she was the subject of gossip and cafe tittle-tattle. It was said over black sweet coffee she was once kept as a sex slave by a married woman and her fifteen-year-old daughter. It was claimed between mouthfuls of chocolate cake that she wandered through casinos and hotels flashing her naked body. While in the bars, it was overheard that she exhausted her lovers with her insatiable demands for sex. 

Some of these tales were false. Most were true. But all of them kept Anita Berber fixed in the public’s imagination.

In 1921, she met and fell in love with the Sebastian Droste, a bisexual dancer who was known as a performer in Berlin’s gay bars and clubs. They became lovers and married in 1922. They formed a scandalous dance partnership choreographing and performing together in Expressionist “fantasias” like Suicide, Morphium, and Mad House. They also collaborated on a book of poetry and photographs called Die Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase (Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy). A typical routine went something like this:

In the dance, “Menschen,” or, “People,” we find,

Only two people

Two naked people

Man

Woman

And both in a cage

Hard stiff horrible cages

The two king’s children sang songs

But with tears

The man smashes his cage

Tradition

Society

Convention he spits out.

Which is the kind of nonsense we nowadays associate with the overly pretentious rather than the naturally gifted…but at the time… You can imagine: shock, horror, and spilled sherry.

Berber’s and Groste’s relationship was intense, passionate, and drug-fueled. Because of her considerable use of cocaine, Berber often hurled champagne bottles at the audience if they failed to appreciate her genius. It was inevitable their marriage would not last long and they separated in 1923.

By the time Otto Dix painted his famous portrait of Berber in 1925, the years of drug abuse, frenetic lifestyle, and lack of nutrition was plain to see. The painting looks more like a woman in her fifties than a twenty-five-year-old. The woman who once scandalized Berlin with her androgynous looks, her erotic and seductive dances and her sultry on-screen appearance was no longer so appealing. Berber was out of favor as a younger generation of ingenues took over. She began touring her dance shows. During one such tour in Damascus, Berber became fatally ill with tuberculosis. She returned home to Berlin where she died “surrounded by empty morphine syringes” on November 10th, 1928. Anita Berber was twenty-nine. She was buried in a pauper’s grave and may have been long forgotten had it not been for Dix’s portrait that kept her legend alive.
 
014rebreb17.jpeg
 
05rebreb18.jpg
 
017rebreb.jpg
 
More photos of the ‘Priestess of Debauchery,’ after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
08.14.2017
09:52 am
|
Thirty minutes of amazing color footage of Berlin after the war
05.06.2015
12:48 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
This post will be brief, as in spite of my surname, my German language faculties are scheiße, and an over-reliance on Google translate has a way of biting one on the ass. The long-lived and respected German magazine Stern has this week reported on the existence of an incredible high-def video comprised of 30 minutes of full color footage shot in Berlin in July of 1945, two months after the city fell at the end of World War II.

The devastation is incredible. We see the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, Alexanderplatz, all in ruins as the citizenry carries on with everyday life. The aerial footage, too, is stunning and sobering. It was uploaded by Chronos Media founder Konstantin von zur Mühlen on Monday, on the heels of similar footage of Hamburg released last week. Here it is in its entirety.
 

 
Much gratitude is due to Ben Merlis for alerting us to this footage.

Posted by Ron Kretsch
|
05.06.2015
12:48 pm
|
Berlin slated to lose two graffiti masterpieces
10.14.2014
11:33 am
Topics:
Tags:


 

Anyone who works in the medium of graffiti can’t be too enamored of the possibility of permanence for his or her work. The destruction or evanescence of the works is kind of built in, whether the antagonist is the cops, the weather, or rapacious developers. But as graffiti becomes a more accepted part of the art world, the hopes for longer durations rises. A year ago, in October 2013, the incredible exterior of the legendary 5 Pointz space in Long Island City in Queens, New York, was painted over in stark white, a sobering reminder that the exigencies of commerce will generally trump a technically illegal grassroots art movement.

It looks like something of the sort will happen to the remarkable murals of the Italian street artist Blu in Berlin—murals that Artnet earlier this year named one of the five most important murals in the city. The Blu murals are located on Curvystraße, in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, and were painted in 2007 and 2008. One mural shows the torso of a man straightening his tie and wearing gold watches on both wrists which are connected by a chain. The second one shows two figures trying to unmask each other, with the one holding his fingers into a W (for West) and the other into an E (East).

Graffiti art has a special status in Berlin. Since 1989 the city has been defined by squatter culture, after the unused living spaces of the then-squalid Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg neighborhoods in East Berlin were occupied by young people—that tone has come to define the famously “poor but sexy” world capital. I visited the city in the summer of 2013, and the preponderance of graffiti was a little bit mind-blowing, it’s clearly semi-legal there and a source of scruffy, anti-establishment local pride. I was strolling in Kreuzberg when I happened upon a tour group that was on the theme of urban art and local left-wing activism—you’d be hard-pressed to find such a tour in New York City, let me tell you. I followed the group for the second half of the tour, and in fact the guide showed us the number three entry on Artnet’s list, the “Cosmonaut Mural” by Victor Ash on Mariannenstrasse.

It was reported last week that real estate investor Artur Süsskind and the architectural firm Langhof plan to tear down the buildings and replace them with 250 apartments, a kindergarten, a supermarket, and an open air terrace facing the Spree River. Not to be deterred, Berliner Jascha Herr has launched an online petition calling for the artworks to be protected under Germany’s monument protection statute. As Herr writes, “The city of Berlin loves to promote its alternative scene—and more precisely the cultural value of its artists—but it simultaneously discards them. It is simply about selling to investors who only see personal profit in the alternative landmarks of the city. But the cultural identity of the city belongs to all of us.” Unfortunately, it would be unprecedented for the landmark protections to be extended to artworks as young as seven years old.
 

 

 
Two nifty time-lapse videos documenting the creation of the two murals after the jump…..

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
|
10.14.2014
11:33 am
|
Evocative photos from 1980s Berlin
02.12.2014
08:42 am
Topics:
Tags:

Berlin
Slesische Strasse October 1982. Near the corner with Cuvrystrasse.
 
A photographer named Chris John Dewitt has set up a fantastic Tumblr consisting almost entirely of pictures of various places. During the 1980s he took many, many photographs of East Berlin and West Berlin, and they are utterly fascinating. Sometimes he has photos of the same place both pre- and post-1989. We’ve got a generous selection of them here, but really, there are tons more over at his Tumblr.

As for context-setting, I’ll leave that to Dewitt himself:
 

A trip to the East was another step into the time-machine. The politics of the 1940s and 50s shaped everything around. Most crossing points were much like something out of an old movie, even up to the end in 1989. Checkpoint Charlie was the most famous of course, as it was the only street crossing point for foreigners, and it was built up into a full-scale border control shed in the final years, with jolly ‘Welcome to the DDR’ signs on it. The other, less well-known crossing points remained mostly the dreary forbidding places they were from the beginning. Each border-crossing was intended for particular people. Chausseestrasse, Invalidenstrasse, and Oberbaumbrücke were for West Berliners only.

-snip-

When I got there I began taking pictures, but was very quickly stopped by two young policemen. It took some while to work out what it was I shouldn’t have been photographing. It wasn’t the site of the Reich Chancellery, they replied to my questions, or even the wall. It was because in the distance, poking up from the other side of the wall, the Reichstag building could be seen. One mustn’t photograph buildings on the other side of the wall they said. The fact that I could go there on the Western side and take as many pictures of it as I liked made no difference. That was the rule which I must obey whilst on DDR soil.

 
Here are some of the pics, in roughly chronological order, with Dewitt’s captions:
 
Berlin
The Berlin Wall at Wilhelmstraße 1980
 
Berlin
The view from the platform at the end of Bernauer Straße in 1980.
 
Berlin
Another Sunday, another protest. March 1981.
 
Berlin
Protest march on the Ku’damm 1982.
 
Berlin
The Berlin Wall. A viewing platform built by the West to allow West Berliners and tourists to look over into East Berlin.
 
Berlin
Looking over the Berlin Wall from the viewing stand on Harzer Straße Treptow. 1982.
 
Berlin
The East Berlin authorities were taking no chances with this building being so close to the wall. All the windows are barred, and a guard tower sits a few meters away, to prevent any escapes to the West. 1982.
 
More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
|
02.12.2014
08:42 am
|
Gorgeous color film footage of turn of the century Berlin
01.24.2014
04:11 pm
Topics:
Tags:

Berlin
 
Absolutely stunning. The footage below is primarily of Berlin around 1900, though it contains a bit of Munich and some shots from 1914, as well. Around the turn of the century, Berlin was experiencing a population boom, mainly due to migration. Massive, rapid industrialization created the beehive of activity you see below, which inspired Mark Twain to call Berlin, “the Chicago of Europe.”

There’s an amazing array of life seen in such a short clip, from political and military pomp and circumstance to children playing to men drinking beer. Beyond the hustle and bustle and beautiful architecture, it’s the fascination of the subjects with the camera that really drew me in. Their curiosity gives the film a very intimate view of life at the time.
 

 
Via The Wall Breakers

Posted by Amber Frost
|
01.24.2014
04:11 pm
|
Oops! Google Maps brings back ‘Adolf Hitler Square’ in Berlin for a few hours
01.10.2014
12:25 pm
Topics:
Tags:

Adolf-Hitler-Platz, Google
 
For a few hours on Thursday, the address “Theodor-Heuss-Platz” in western Berlin reverted to its name during the Third Reich—“Adolf-Hitler-Platz”—at least on Google, anyway.

As is often the case in Europe—think of Leningrad/St. Petersburg—the names of places are themselves a kind of condensed history of the twentieth century. Such is the case with Theodor-Heuss-Platz. From its construction in the early 1900s to 1933, the square was called “Reichskanzlerplatz,” or “Imperial Chancellor Square.” From 1933 until 1945 (BZ, the paper that uncovered Google’s goof, says 1947) it was named after Der Führer. After the war (whether 1945 or 1947) it reverted to Reichskanzlerplatz. Then in 1963 the square was named after Theodor Heuss, who was the first President of the Federal Republic of Germany after World War II, from 1949 to 1959. (The position of President is largely a ceremonial one in Germany; the current President is not Angela Merkel—she’s the Chancellor—but rather Joachim Gauck.)
 
Adolf-Hitler-Platz, Berlin
 
According to BZ, a spokesman at Google apologized and said that they would look into why this change occurred. So far, they don’t know why it happened. When I first read about this, my first thought was that they had somehow permitted data from an old-timey map to get through—which just goes to show how naive I am. BZ points out that Google Maps permits certain changes from users, to account for short-term construction or changes in traffic. It takes only one disgruntled neo-Nazi to make a change like that.

BZ also points out that Google Maps has a pretty good record in terms of dealing with historical place names. For instance, if you put “Karl-Marx-Stadt,” Google Maps instantly directs you to Chemnitz, as the East German city was known before 1953 and after 1990.

Here is how the square looked during the Third Reich and how it looks today:
 
Adolf-Hiter-Platz, Berlin
Note: “im Flaggenschmuck” means something like “In flag mode” or “Done up in flags.”
 
Theodor-Heuss-Platz, Berlin
 
via Spiegel Online

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Google map view of the spreading riots in London
Massive pentagram viewable in Kazakhstan on Google Maps

Posted by Martin Schneider
|
01.10.2014
12:25 pm
|
Is Berlin going to name a street after Edward Snowden?
11.17.2013
01:32 pm
Topics:
Tags:

Snowden Strasse
 
In early July, a citizen of Berlin named Jörg Janzer went to the trouble to “rename” Schwedter Strasse and Kastanienallee, respectively, “Snowden Street” and “Snowden Alley.” He did this simply by pasting his own printed versions of the street names over the street signs at that intersection. His intention was to protest the mistreatment of Edward Snowden, the former NSA employee who in May of this year was obliged to leave the United States after having instigated several leaks about the full extent of the NSA’s PRISM program of Internet data acquisition. In the United States, Snowden is officially a wanted criminal; many people around the world (as well as a good many people in the U.S.) don’t see it the same way.

The crazy thing is, Janzer’s action may result in an actual Berlin street getting its name changed to “Snowden Strasse.” If Berlin ends up doing this, one suspects it won’t be the last city to do this.

Janzer was identified in the Berliner Kurier as a “Spaß-Guerilla,” which translates to something like “Prank-Guerrilla”—like Abbie Hoffman or Banksy. The police removed the sign before even a day had passed.
 
Snowden Street
 
The gesture by Janzer has sparked a legislative initiative to give Berlin’s Behrenstrasse between Wilhelmstrasse and Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse, which corresponds exactly to the block where the United States Embassy is, the name Edward Snowden Strasse. Given the vagaries of high-stakes geopolitics, it’s difficult to imagine any municipality in Germany snubbing the United States to that extent, so I wouldn’t hold my breath. However, just as New York or Los Angeles isn’t under the personal control of Barack Obama, it’s possible that Berlin can do what it wants. We’ll have to wait and see.
 
Behrenstrasse
The purple line is the section of street that would be renamed “Snowden Street” if the measure passes. On the map, the U.S. Embassy is the area above it.
 
Here’s a video Janzer shot of his nighttime provocation. At the end of the video he says a few words—what he’s saying is: “This is most likely the first ‘Snowden Street’ and ‘Snowden Alley’ in the world. This should serve as an inspiration to do this anywhere in the world as an expression of protest against the fact that we are bugged so mercilessly and that Snowden is being punished because he revealed it to us.”
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Who is Edward Snowden: Whistle-blower hero, enemy of the state or covert ops shapeshifter?

Posted by Martin Schneider
|
11.17.2013
01:32 pm
|
Berlin’s Ampelmännchen, symbol of ‘Ostalgie,’ is objectively superior to the competition
08.21.2013
11:52 am
Topics:
Tags:

Ampelmännchen
 
In Berlin, the little illuminated red and green fellows who signal the all-clear for pedestrians are a beloved and fiercely protected symbol of the city. The Ampelmännchen (little traffic light man) and his iconic two-dimensional graphic pantomime is one of the few remnants of the former German Democratic Republic that has not only been tolerated since 1989 but has risen to near-universal acceptance—even love.

Perhaps the closest American analogue is “Rich Uncle Pennybags,” otherwise known as the Monopoly Man. From a political perspective, it’s difficult to argue that East Berlin’s more humble everyman, with his stocky gait and functional fedora, isn’t a preferable symbol than the moustachio’d plutocrat—who after all has been known to commit transgressions serious enough to land himself in the clink.

The Ampelmännchen was invented by Karl Peglau, a “traffic psychologist” who sought to create a visual icon that would be appealing and comprehensible to young and elderly Germans alike. For many years East Germany had its Ampelmännchen, while West Germany made do with a sleeker, more generic homunculus. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a lot of West German practices in signage and so forth, many of them endorsed by the EU, began to replace the old East German ways—and even the Ampelmännchen was threatened. The East Germans responded with a fierce public outcry to save the little dude, the force of which in 2005 even led to the adoption of the Ampelmännchen in West Berlin as well.

The widepsread impulse to save the Ampelmännchen became a primary exemplar of Ostalgie, a German portmanteau word combining the words for “nostalgia” and “East.” Another prominent example of Ostalgie is Wolfgang Becker’s engaging and internationally successful 2003 movie Good Bye Lenin!, which focused on the herculean efforts of a young man to create a kind of Potemkin GDR within the confines of the bedroom of his mother, recently awoken from a coma and therefore entirely unaware of the transformations of 1989.

As we move inexorably further from 1989, the Ampelmännchen’s political edge tends to dissipate, as his inherent distinctiveness and cuteness move to the foreground. Commenting on the “comeback” of the Ampelmännchen in 1997, its creator Peglau rather high-mindedly noted, “It is presumably their special, almost indescribable aura of human snugness and warmth, when humans are comfortably touched by this traffic symbol figure and find a piece of honest historical identification, giving the Ampelmännchen the right to represent a positive aspect of a failed social order.”

The latest news is that the Ampelmännchen offers not only cozy feelings of nostalgia—it also boasts superior design, in a purely objective sense. Psychologist Claudia Peschke and her team at Jacobs University in the German city of Bremen recently conducted tests involving both the Ampelmännchen and the traditional, more anodyne figure seen in the rest of Europe, including versions with the “wrong” color imposed. It turns out that people respond more to the shape, or function, of the symbol than they do to the color, and it also emerged that the Ampelmännchen outperformed the regular, svelte figure in terms of identifying whether it’s time to walk or stand still.

As noted, the Ampelmännchen’s status as a beloved totem of nostalgia has also (paradoxically) meant big business, as this nearly wordless video featuring some of the industrial production shows:
 

 
As with any good icon, there are few contexts in which it looks truly out of place. As proof, we offer this reworking of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” in which the Ampelmännchen and his politically correct counterpart, “Ampelfrau” (introduced in 2004), both do that galloping thing that swept the globe last year.
 
“Berlin Ampel Style”:

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Waiting for the Communist Call: Propaganda and reflection as the Berlin Wall turns 49
‘Berlin Super 80’: Films from the German underground
East German soldier helps a little boy sneak across the Berlin Wall, August 1961

Posted by Martin Schneider
|
08.21.2013
11:52 am
|
People losing their shit on New Year’s Eve in Berlin
01.02.2013
03:01 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
There are some folks who like to celebrate New Year’s Eve, and then there are some folks who really fuckin’ like to celebrate New Year’s Eve. This video captures some of those latter types in action.

Remind me to never be caught in Berlin on December 31st.
 

 
Via Nerdcore

Posted by Tara McGinley
|
01.02.2013
03:01 pm
|
Sig Waller: ‘Our capacity for cruelty and suffering is timeless, as is our ability to look away’

image
 
Parlour Games is a series of stunning pen drawings by artist Sig Waller.

‘The drawings are based on some sixteenth century engravings called Theatrum Crudelitatum (Theater of Cruelty),’ Waller tells Dangerous Minds.

‘I’ve appropriated some of the imagery and drawn directly onto antimacassars and napkins. These cloths are generally used to wipe away and protect from grease and dirt and in this sense the series is about denial (personal or societal). Our capacity for cruelty and suffering is timeless, as is our ability to look away.

Waller studied Fine Art & Art History at London’s Goldsmiths College, before moving to Berlin, where she started her career as an artist under the alias Sig Waller’s paintings explore “the dark borders of our culture of excess, drawing attention to human destructiveness, human frailty and the delicate balance of life on Earth.”

Now based in Berlin and Brighton, Sig is planning her next artistic collaboration with her dead grandmother (using some of her sewing) and writing a book The Day the Women Stopped Listening.

See more of Parlour Games and Sig Waller’s brilliant work here.
 
image
 
image
 
More of Sig’s superb ‘Parlour Games’, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
10.23.2012
04:49 pm
|
Peaches’ free ‘Free Pussy Riot’ track & video

image
 
When it comes to feminist-punk, there’s none more femme, nor punk, than the mighty Peaches.

So it’s no real surprise to learn that Peaches has been following the Pussy Riot trial closely, and has turned her hand to making both a video and a track in support of the persecuted Russian rock group.

A YouTube casting call went out last week, asking for fans to send in their own, pro-Pussy Riot footage to be included in the video. Well it is now done and dusted, and available to watch online. The track itself, called “Free Pussy Riot”, is available as a free download, and all Peaches is asking in return for her work is that everyone sign the Free Pussy Riot petition at change.org.

This is the statement Peaches and friends have made to go with the download:

Peaches, Simonne Jones, and tons of musicians, artists, activists, and free-thinkers are came together to make a video for this song in support of the russian punk feminist band PUSSY RIOT! Now that you have heard about the song and video, we want you to take action! Here is why:

In March 2012 three members of Pussy Riot, Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevitch, were taken into custody by Russian authorities for their participation as part of a protest at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow. Their punk prayer is and was an act of free speech and the charges of “hooliganism” and detainment of the three women are seen by the world as a cruel heavy handed act of oppression, are being carried out to discourage free thought and speech in Russia.

If Russia wishes to be a part of the modern globalized world it must adhere to the standards and principles of a free nation where its people have the right to have a free and open dialogue about all subjects. Discussion, debate, and action are the basic building blocks of a free society. By following through with the prosecution of these women Russian political bullies are currently making a mockery of free speech, free thought, and Russia’s own country’s constitution.

We, the citizens of the world and advocates for free speech, DEMAND the immediate release of Pussy Riot. The verdict is planned for August 17th - let’s show Pussy Riot our support!

The charges and punishments facing Maria, Nadezhda, and Ekaterina are nothing more than a political stunt by the Russian authorities and Russian Orthodox Chruch to retain control over the Russian people and instill fear into the free-thinkers, political activists, and artists of Russia.

The world is watching, and we do not like what we see.

I do, however, like what I see here:
 
Peaches “Free Pussy Riot!”
 

 
And here is the track itself:
 

   Free Pussy Riot by Peaches Rocks
 
You can sign the Free Pussy Riot petition at: www.change.org/freepussyriot

Donations are also accepted at: http://freepussyriot.org
 

 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
|
08.15.2012
12:08 pm
|
Ana Lola Roman: Even Assassins Have Lovers and Romances

image
 
A is for Ana

Ah wanna tell ya ‘bout a girl…

Ana Lola Roman is a singer, a musician, a dancer, a choreographer, a curator, a writer. She’s talented and beautiful, funny and smart. Has the looks of a silent movie star, a Louise Brooks in a Pabst film, with a hint of Audrey Hepburn, via Maria Callas and and Frida Kahlo. 

An only child born in the early 1980s into a large Spanish family, that had emigrated to America, “during the whole Iranian Revolution Post-Oil Boom Era” in the late 1970s. The first 5 years were spent in a ghetto of Del City, on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. The family worked hard, worked harder, until they settled into a middle class suburb of OKC.

Her home life was European by nature, American by inclination. A heady mix of European sophistication and American pop, which informed her musical influences.

‘I’d have to say my first influences were a heaping helping of various flamenco singers listened to while in the back of my Grandmother’s Cadillac. It was a weird mix of environments and influences. Gracia Montes and Lola Flores…well, these women had soul, heartache, moxie, and power.

‘Mixed with that and the impending sensations of early MTV. I fell in love with David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” video when I was only 5 years old, developed a keen fascination with Numan’s “Cars”, and felt delightfully inappropriate when I witnessed Billy Idol’s curved lip.

‘I was only 5 years old when these things happened to me. And I knew right then that I wasn’t going to last long where I was. I was going to be restless for the rest of my life and end up somewhere as crazy as New York or Berlin.’

‘Then of course being 10 years old and seeing Siouxsie….that’s when everything fell apart and got worse, then I felt bitten by the vampire when Joy Division came along. That was the end of the road for my Oklahoma Journey.’
 

 
More from Ana Lola Roman, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
06.18.2012
08:40 pm
|
The Dinosaur Graveyard of East Berlin
03.23.2012
07:14 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
It wasn’t an asteroid but the fall of the Berlin Wall that wiped out this amusement park and its life-size dinosaurs in 1989. The Kulturpark Plänterwald was the only theme park in the German Democratic Republic, and once the wall was gone, the park soon sadly followed, eventually closing its doors (after a brief revival) in 2002.

More dino-carnage can be seen here.
 
image
 
image
 
Via Kuriositas
 
More abandoned dinosaurs, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
|
03.23.2012
07:14 pm
|
Page 1 of 2  1 2 >