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The Berlin Wall may have fallen 20 years ago come Monday, yet in many ways Berliners are still wrestling with the old divide. And understandably so: there are reminders around many corners. Even the city’s newly resurrected Neues Museum (pictured), a showplace for antiquities like sarcophagi and Neanderthal bones, exhibits a length of barbed wire from the Berlin Wall.
Part of the UNESCO-protected Museum Island, the Neues Museum just reopened after a six-year, $300-million restoration by British architect David Chipperfield. As a reminder of World War II, which ravaged the neoclassic structure, Chipperfield left some of the scorched columns and bullet-pocked bricks. Arguably the most famous of the 2,500 objects on display here is the bust of Egyptian queen Nefertiti. She’s 3,500 years old, and still an object of desire: after nearly 100 years in Germany, Egypt wants the bust back.
But not all the art in Berlin has been so prized: a collection of propagandist paintings commissioned by the Communist regime from the 1930s through the ‘80s was banished to basements and forcefully “forgotten” following Gorbachev’s push for artistic freedom. But now, for the first time ever, 300 Soviet Socialist Realism paintings, including “Lenin in October” (pictured), are on display through the end of November. You can visit the exhibit, “Behind the Iron Curtain,” at the Jeschke-Van Vliet art gallery — a gallery that’s located exactly where Berlin’s own iron curtain once stood.
Communist propaganda is certainly not what Berlin’s festival organizers have in mind for celebrating Mauerfall — they’ve actually tracked down and commissioned artists who painted freedom murals on the wall’s eastern side. Still, there’s no denying the ostalgie that’s gripped the city (ost means east, by the way). GDR brands from Zeha sneakers to Rondo coffee are once again in demand. The most popular East German sparkling wine, Rotkaeppchen, is now the biggest selling bubbly in the nation. You can claim your own bottle at the Ritz-Carlton Berlin, where it comes with their solemnly titled package “Remember the Wall.” Not that anyone’s really forgotten.
read more: 10. Culture | architecture | art
