This post documents a recent walking tour of Berlin’s Staadt Mittee area…with friend, local resident and interpreter Mailef as my guide. The plan was to see the graffiti and traces of an artists’ commune (kunsthaus). I also wanted to visit Renate comics shop and bibliothek which has been located there since the early 1990s. I thought it would be good to purchase some German kunst comicbuchs (art comics) there!

Mailef escorted me to the Kunsthaus (arthouse) Tacheles building on Oranienburger Strasse…a site that was previously part of East Berlin when the wall was up. The Tacheles (translation “let’s talk business”) building had, over a century, successively housed…an elegant shopping arcade, then Nazi offices and squatter artists. The building was damaged in World War 2 then repaired by the GDR…vacated in 1989 then occupied as an international artist squat in the 1990s. The artists were eventually displaced/evicted by representatives of the investors in 2012.

Art comics (kunst comicbuchs) by the hundreds were available at Renate Comics. Many of them were signed and marked as limited editions. These varied in size from A6 minicomics to the larger A3 format. Art postcards (kunst postkartes) have become an additional creative outlet for comics creators. I enjoy making art postcards myself…and there was a range of German stock in a rotating rack on the pavement outside the shop.

I took another walking tour of Mitte in Berlin with friend, former student, now animator, illustrator and printmaker, Michelle Park. She showed me a study of terror(see photos below). It was a busy morning for walking tours in Berlin. Starting out in Bezirk Kreuzburg…we passed the Deutsches Currywurst Museum in Schützenstraße,…Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Friedrichstraße, then walked along Niederkirchnerstraße to the old Gestapo and SS Headquarters site.

The Gestapo Headquarters building had taken a direct hit from English bombing during World War II. It was demolished after the war. It is now an open-air museum Topography Des Terrors (Topography of Terror). Some rubble remains. There is a section of the Berlin Wall(without the barbed wire) and a new building with an exhibition and information. The exhibition was titled Errfast, Verfolgt, Vernichtet (Registered, Persecuted, Annihilated). It was both grim and candid about the horror that had taken place there.

 

Next door at Martin Gropius Bau museum was the Hans Richter exhibition…Begegnungen, Von Dada Bis Heute (Encounters: From Dada to the Present Day). It was part of the Berlin Festival. Also present was the David Bowie exhibition from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s Evidence.  What a line-up! This building had also suffered from the bombing alyjough not as much as the Gestapo site. It has been restored but still displays its scarification from shrapnel and bullets.

With both of us interested in animation and printmaking I wanted to show Michelle this wonderful exhibition of the artistic career of Hans Richter. He had been born in Berlin in 1888 and was a key figure in 20th Century art and animation. Three sides of Martin Gropius Bau had been allocated so a lot of walking was required. There were his woodcuts and paintings and his contributions to Dada. These included Dada magazine and his own zine G -Material zur elementarun Gestaltung (Material for elementary design). There were also his experiments with painted scrolls. These had led him to the discovery of displaying images in motion through animation. On screen were his abstract animations and live-action films including Dreams That Money Can Buy. There were also some home movies, plus documentation of his film teaching work in New York. Added to this were works by colleagues Max Ernst, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, George Grosz, Francis Picabia, Viking Eggeling, Alexander Calder and Kurt Schwitters. Richter was a well connected man.

 

With a life’s work on display there was much inter-connected visual material in the exhibition…we found ourselves walking back and forth. We could have spent 4 or 5 hours watching the films, videos and documentaries alone. It was an exhibition that called for fresh legs and more than one visit. Excellent art, impressive show, Michael.

 

 

_{Dada-Kopf painting by Hans Richter.}

_{(All text, photos and artwork-©2014 Dr. Michael Hill a.k.a. Doctor Comics).}