[Museums and more from Germany to Austria]

In my last post, I mentioned how my group had planned trip to Vienna — that was 6 days ago now, and it was incredible. From a historic standpoint, it had to be one of the more impressive cities I’ve visited, especially with its reputation as the “City of Music” and the global capital of waltz. Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Mozart, Schönberg, Schubert, Schumann, Strauss; start listing Vienna’s composers alphabetically and soon enough you’ll have an encyclopedia. Every corner we turned brought yet more memorials, and for as many composers as had lived there, it seemed there were twice as many orchestral concerts every night. We went to one, actually, a string quartet playing in St. Peter’s Church. I suddenly understood why my conductor at Pitt (shout-out Roger Zahab) is so insistent about the direction and articulation of classical melodic line. It’s as if the misplacement of accents is akin to speaking every word in a poem backwards; it might still sound interesting, beautiful even, but it would be a completely different piece of art. I’ve never heard a live quartet play Mozart with such precision; they played a few pieces I was familiar with, but they sounded almost as if I was hearing them for the first time. 

It was not just in music that the city took my breath away. We visited museums, churches, cathedrals, and coffee houses, each awe-inspiring in their own way. Of the Christian spaces, St. Charles Church had my favorite interior [pictured above]. Even still, the most memorable to me was St. Stephen’s Cathedral. With its live service, hundreds of candles, gothic architecture, and midday church bells, it had a more haunting presence, which I appreciated. My favorite museum visit was the Leopold, whose collection of art stretched from the mid-19th century to the contemporary period, which meant a lot of impressionist, post-impressionist, and early surrealist pieces. I’ve always been a fan of Gustav Klimt, but Egon Schiele — a student of Klimt’s whose art made up a large portion of the collection — had never really been on my radar. I love when an artist I’m unfamiliar with becomes a favorite after seeing their work in person. His figure-drawing style, especially with hands and eyes, spoke to me for reasons I am unable to articulate, but on some level relate to my identity as a gender-queer individual. Schiele was not queer, to my knowledge, but like queer folks, his self-expression was criminalized multiple times. He was disregarded, rejected, and at one point jailed due to his depictions of nude bodies and sexual content, which were highly controversial, and like many others of his time (b.1890 – d.1918), his art was condemned as “degenerate” by the Nazi Regime. That being said, the potential absence of queer intention does not dictate the experience of the viewer, nor prevent interpretation through a queer lens. I look forward to revisiting his art in the future.

Back in Berlin, I visited the Bode Museum, which may not have had my favorite collection, but I’d give it the award for most interesting exhibition presentation. It was a classic museum with modern twist: a program they called Der Zweite Blick [The Second Glance]. This was almost the perfect example of the contemporary curatorial methodology I’ve been learning about in my classes at Pitt. Der Zweite Blick laid out two pathways, Frauen [Women] and Spielarten der Liebe [All Forms of Love], which provided visitors with the necessary contexts in order to view the art from both historical and modern perspectives. For instance, I found a bronze statuette of Zeus holding the polished baby Dionysus which, at first glance, doesn’t stand out from other sculptures of Greek myth. However, the museum’s program prompted the viewer to consider the ways in which it subverted gender roles [see below].

I love that visitors unfamiliar with art history and mythology are given this knowledge and the challenge to consider something in a new way. I especially love that the program is available without a tour guide. Anyone who walks in has the opportunity to engage with art history if they wish, but it is also not treated as the singular goal of all visitors. One could easily go through the entire museum without having Der Zweite Blick forced upon them, as one has to seek out the text-cards rather than finding the information on wall labels right next to the art. It’s a much more open-ended museum structure, which was great to see.

A lot of my experiences in these museums have been tied to queer readings of art, specifically surrounding gender identity and societal gender roles. I would say this relates to what has been most difficult about my assimilation into the workplace and life here in Berlin. I say “most difficult” because, honestly, my workplace has been great, and nothing has been too hard so far. That said, if I had to focus on something that has proven somewhat of a struggle, it would probably be the fact that German is a heavily gendered language which doesn’t naturally leave much room for people outside of gender binaries. This is changing, slowly but surely, and even in the school I’m working at, I’ve had discussions with people about how nonbinary and trans people in Germany have been trying to introduce more inclusive pronouns. In English, the singular “they” has a long history; German is not so lucky. However, the dean of Ernst Busch, Dr. Anna Luise Kiss, is conscious of LGBTQ+ issues, and has been telling me about how many young people have started speaking a form of Denglish in which “they” is inserted as a new pronoun in German, sometimes pronounced as “tay” with the German th sound. Ultimately, although its been somewhat of a difficult transition [pun intended], the people I’ve met here have been more than welcoming.