Schloss Charlottenburg partly in scaffolding
Mausoleum: Friedrich Wilhelm III, first king of Prussia and Wilhelm I, first Emperor of Germany, with their respective wives, lie in state in this Doric temple, designed by Schinkel.
Belvedere, the tea house, now houses the Porcelain Museum
The Baroque garden and the latter part in English lanschape style
the wrapped up statue of The Great Elector

After our walk through the Schloss park we enter the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, which possesses that part of the Schliemann treasure from Troy, which the Russians for one reason or another did not take with them to Moscow, where now the famous Agamemnon mask is stored. Today after 1 pm, might be free entrance, it’s not our lucky day, because even the jewelry of Troy is not on display until the 12th of June, being next week. Well, our day is not over, and our stay is not at an end yet. Three busses of nuns unload. They have unpacked their lunches and stabled all out on a foldable table in the shadow of the trees in front of the Kleine Orangerie.

The Sammlung Berggruen is perhaps a known name in art circles, I had not yet heard of the museum, which is located in the soft-yellow neoclassicist building across Spandauer Damm. The
Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, Braque and Giacometti

Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung
Bust of Queen Nefertiti

The Museum of Photography at the back of the Zoologischer Bahnhof unfortunately was still closed, despite the bustle of activity. The activity at least was explained, when after inquiry it turned the museum was top open tomorrow. So also for the Helmut Newton’s Heimkehr we will have to return ourselves another day.

I wake up in the middle of the night, still the vividness of the dream appearing before me. My immediate reflection leaves within me a great distress of cruelty. Life is a cynical design in which the two greatest sensual sensations, being in love and loving, are completely exclusive of each other. This, misunderstanding between being in love and loving is inreconcilable. To be in love, is to not know, to yearn and discover, to explore one bit at a time, and breath in every little air of the terrain to which one was allowed with the most sensitive willingness and feeling of forbidden excitement. Loving is to depent and knowing, believing to know, to be convinced that all is won, the victorious settlement, the comfort of the future disclosed, a harmonious knowing forged in union, and how often though falsely, to sail blindly after that light at the horizon. But achieving one, is being deprived of the other. Life does not allow to experience both, without the risk of incompletion, of splinters flying off the marble, the vain cut too deep and cracking the solid stone open like crystal shattering on the stone tiles. Life is a cruel design, for don’t we long to possess both, to be in love and be ignorant of loving, and to love and know our beloved’s heart?

started reading: Johannes Willms, Bismarck – Dämon der Deutschen, Anmerkungen zu einer Legende (München 1997)