A Short Visit to Potsdam

When you are in Berlin, it is easy to visit Potsdam, the Hauptstadt of Brandenburg. Now it is a beautiful little town (184.154 inhabitants) - I write "now" because I have seen it before the turnaround/Wende - the beautiful old buildings were derelict and decayed, grey, and very depressing. 

Now they almost overdid the renovation - so very colourful and sweetly pretty that you might think you are in a charming scenery of a theatre.

 

For me the most outstanding parts are the Castle Sanssouci of Frederic the Great, and his oh so wonderful park Sanssouci. I would go from Berlin on foot if it were the only chance to see it - but no: you can comfortably use the S-Bahn and be at the main station after a cheap, nice ride of 29 minutes. 

Other views: 

Red brick houses in the Dutch quarter - King Frederic welcomed many Huguenots. Another time I will show photos of the castle, park and town - this time we were there for the beautiful museum Barberini: 

We wanted to visit the exhibition "Surrealism und Magie. Verzauberte Moderne" (Surrealism and Magic. Betwitched Modern Era").  

I have to confess that we were neither bewitched nor enchanted nor spellbound. I quarrelled with myself, scolded me that maybe an impostor  of dear Emmeline Lucas (Queen Lucia by E.F.Benson) had crept into myself...

"... while she herself, oblivious of the passage of time, was spending her last half-hour in contemplation of the Italian masterpieces at the National Gallery, or the Greek bronzes at the British Museum. Certainly she would not be at the Royal Academy, for the culture of Riseholme, led by herself, rejected as valueless all artistic efforts later than the death of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a great deal of what went before."

No, I do love modern art and know that art doesn't have to be beautiful -  but these pictures were mostly really bad, second or even third rate, often Kitsch. 

Only some Yves Tanguys were accepted.   

  

But we were very happy that there was the other exhibition in the same museum: 

"Impressionism. Masterpieces of the collection Hasso Plattner" 

                              Beautiful pictures of winter.

The following one is from Alfred Sisley, "Snow Effect in Louveciennes" 1874 , from his participation in the First Impressionist Exhibition in Paris, which I loved so much: 

 

Mr. Moonlight

 

I have the feeling that at the moment my moods go up and down a bit - as a cabin in this Ferris wheel. May depend on still interrupted sleep, or the flu vaccination a few days ago, or the change of the season (and return to standard time) - I don't know. 

The standard time feels more "normal" to me. I muse about the efficiency  of the EU: as far as I see everybody of that parliament is convinced that it would be good to stop the nonsense of shifting time in summer and winter - they talk about that often, but do they DO anything about it? At least not this year, or the last year or the years before that. Grrr. 

Maybe I should move to Tilling or Riseholm - where Queen Lucia and Miss Mapp and all the others Tillingites/Riseholites simply ignore the change (to take a train to London - but who wants that? - forces them for a very short time.  "How tarsome", George would say.) All my Lucia-books are in Berlin - I hope I wrote the quote right.

Oh, I adore E.F.Benson!!!  

We still have beautiful sunny weather - though it gets a little underlying chilly note. 

This evening the whole village does a lantern procession - the triplets are looking out for that. For me it is a very fine childhood memory - I still see my huge lantern with the face of Mr. Moon in front of me. 

    

Studio l'italiano!

Dear You,
I did it - for the fourth week now each Monday evening you find me sitting on one of the dwarf-chairs of an Italian-German primary school in Berlin, trying to "parlare - parlo, parlai, parla" in that beautiful language, Italian.
I have to confess that I always looked with a sort of prejudice at women who started to learn Italian when advancing in life and years - those that I know were always at the shady side of forty
(hopefully reading books like "The Tao of Turning Fifty" or "Younger by the Day" - the latter an excellent book by the way, written by Victoria Moran). They were always members of a posh tennis or golf club, flirting somehow desperately with their coaches (insegnante for tennis or Italian - it was the same to them - only young he had to be, and beautiful).
Of course now, when I signed in at the Italian cultural institute, one of my acquaintances thought it illuminating and helpful to remind me of my beautiful Italian massage therapist.
'Innocent until proven guilty' will hopefully apply to me, too (and by the way: he speaks German, so why bother?)
Why bother indeed? 
(It is not that I have a trauma as the photo above might indicate, taken at one of my youthful stays in Italy, entitled : "All dressed up and nowhere to go" - in German we say "booked and unclaimed", which doesn't sound better). 

My reasons: 
- I love the language
- I want to train my brain, yep
- maybe we will at one stage of our life live in Munich, and then Italy is oh so near
- I want to read Fruttero & Lucentini in Italian

Those of you who know my deep passion for E.F.Benson might fear of having a "déjà-vu", entering my salotto:

'Georgie found Britta Lucia very full of talk that day at luncheon, and was markedly more Italian than usual. Indeed she put down an Italian grammar when he entered the drawing room, and covered it up with the essays of Antonio Caporelli. (...) 
"Ben arrivato, Georgio," she said. "Ho finito il libro di Antonio Caporelli quanto momento. E magnifico!" 
Georgi thought that she had finished it long ago, but perhaps he was mistaken. The sentence flew off Lucia's tongue as if it was perched there all quite ready. 
"Sono un poco fatigata dopo il - dear me how rusty I am getting in Italian, for I can't remember the word," she went on. 
(from: Make Way For Lucia)  

If you think, as many of my friends do, that it must be EASY- PEASY for me to learn Italian, because I'm quite fit in French, and less fit in Latin, and know those beautiful English words that have Latin roots, you are wrong. It isn't.
Take the word: "to repeat". In French: répéter. In Italian: ripetere.
See it at one glance? "ripetere" - but the French é instead of the Italian i is not easily erased from my mind.
But though I have to cram hard, it is fun - our (female!) teacher is an Italian who writes her dissertation on Kierkegaard here at Berlin's university, and she and my classmates are very interesting and funny.

The Weeding Cultivator - Quote from E.F.Benson's "Queen Lucia"

"A yew hedge, bought entire from a neighboring farm, and transplanted with solid lumps of earth and indignant snails around its roots, separated the small oblong of garden from the road, and cast monstrous shadows of the shapes into which it was cut, across the little lawn inside. Here, as was only right and proper, there was not a flower to be found save such as were mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare; indeed it was called Shakespeare's garden, and the bed that ran below the windows of the dining room was Ophelia's border, for it consisted solely of those flowers which that distraught maiden distributed to her friends when she should have been in a lunatic asylum. Mrs. Lucas often reflected how lucky it was that such institutions were unknown in Elizabeth's day, or that if known, Shakespeare artistically ignored their existence. Pansies, naturally, formed the chief decoration - though there were some very flourishing plants of rue. Mrs Lucas always wore a little bunch of them when in flower, to inspire her thoughts, and found them wonderfully efficacious. Round the sundial, which was set in the middle of one of the squares of grass between which a path of broken paving stone led to the front door, was a circular border, now, in July, sadly vacant, for it harbored only the spring flowers enumerated by Perdita. But the first day every year when Perdita's border put forth its earliest blossom was a delicious anniversary, and the news of it spread like wildfire through Mrs. Lucas' kingdom, and her subjects were very joyful, and came to salute the violet or daffodil, or whatever it was."