Nightswimming

fussgaenger:

Last night, as the snow shifters and grit layers motored up and down the pavements, my flatmate and I followed in their wake to explore Berlin’s ‘Lange Nacht der Museen’ (Long Night of the Museums). It’s a special event, held every two years, where a whole host of Berlin’s museums open their doors until 2am, with theatricals and concerts at various locations throughout the night.

For 10Euros (with a student card, 15 without) you get unlimited transport anywhere in the city and entry into all of the museums. It’s kind of thrilling traipsing around places it feels like you shouldn’t be in the wee small hours, such as Friedrich the Great’s bedroom at the Schloss Charlottenburg. We pursued route number three, out of Potsdamer Platz into west Berlin - each route had special shuttle bus services ferrying you along a certain string of museums right across the city. 

First stop was the mirrored galleries of the Film and TV Museum at Potsdamer Platz. It features a fantastic permanent exhibition which is particularly good on early cinema - the glass studios built on rooftops in NYC to provide enough light to film in, then the move of the film studios to california because of its 350 guaranteed days of sunlight in a year… German Expressionism, whole rooms devoted to Marlena Dietrich (with a handwritten note from her regarding Josef von Sternberg in the photo above). Then we wandered through the Kulturforum on the edge of the Tiergarten before making our way out to the 17th Century Prussian Palace in Charlottenburg.

Wandering through the huge baroque ballrooms, we arrived just in time for a chamber concert, in full costume. So nice to be in a city where you can be bopping to minimal electro in Berghain or slamming some seventeenth century house in the early hours of a Sunday morning.