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Rockwell Matters

February 18, 2008

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The other day I was in Berlin and I was wandering along the Spree River, which is not the Seine but it’s as close as they can get. It was kind of forlorn because all the tourist boats were sort of shuttered up for the winter, but there I was. As I approached the center of the city, I discovered the DDR Museum which is much advertised. DDR stands for Deutsche Demokratische Republik which means German Democratic Republic which means East Germany. And this is a very curious museum, it’s a nostalgia museum, although it is not entirely clear whether it’s geared to tourists who want to see what it was all about, who haven’t gotten their fill of it at the Checkpoint Charlie museum, or former East Germans (since it is in East Berlin) who want to paw through the hands-on exhibit of the schoolbooks of the German democratic youth and home products and mock-ups of living rooms and kitchens and such. It’s pretty superficial, and the thing that’s most annoyingly superficial about it, as far as I was concerned, was culture in East Berlin.

I spent a lot of time in Berlin in the 60s and 70s and went to the theater a lot in East Berlin, also musical concerts. And all the museum says is “Gee, it was pretty terrible and that it suppressed individuality and that there was dissidence,” but it was a lot more complicated than that because some of the great theater directors of the 20th century worked in East Berlin and worked there happily because they were convinced Marxists. The fact that they also got subsidies from the East Germany government who wanted to showcase the talent of East Berlin and some of them like Walter Felsenstein, director of the Komische Opera, used to drive through Checkpoint Charlie every day in his Mercedes from his residence in West Berlin, nevertheless the theater in East Berlin was really great. I mean, of course [Bertolt] Brecht, but also Beno Besson, a Swiss director who was active there, and Felsenstein himself, whose realistic opera productions, were unmatched in terms of care of thinking through the productions and fidelity to the scores and to the librettos and fantastic operatic acting.

Now it just so happens that all of the recorded video / film versions that exist of Felsenstein’s work, 5 or 6 of them, have been unleashed on a waiting public in an incredibly heavy box; it weighs more, way more, than a telephone book. You can actually order it form Arthouse Music on Amazon.com, it says it won’t be available until February 26th, however, at a store in central Berlin, it’s available and it almost breaks the display table that these giant boxes are on.

I want to talk now, segueing from Felsenstein’s box, to the store in which I found them, which is called Dussmann’s Culture Department Store. This is an amazing place. It’s like the biggest Barnes & Noble you ever saw, including places to sit down and cafes and all that, also it’s like a combination of that with the biggest Tower Records you ever saw. An enormous selection of classical DVDs and CDs, plus pop, plus musical scores like Joseph Patelson’s House of Music, plus a whole section of maps and guidebooks. It’s an amazing, amazing store.

They also have for sale there something called the Bielefelder Katalog, which I used to collect as a boy, which was the German print version of what we had in America as the Schwann Calatogue, and now it’s turned into two telephone books (giant things!) that you can look up anything in print. It’s amazing, it’s like a time machine back to the glory days of classical music record stores. So when I saw this, I said to myself, “Wow, these Germans, they’re so cultured, they’re so cool,” and even though Americans used to have Tower Records, they don’t anymore and we’re forlornly ordering things online, which may be the way of the future, but it’s nice to have a real record store and all this other stuff under one roof. Six floors of it, in the middle of Berlin. But then I discovered that back story which is that Mr. Dussman is a kind of eccentric. He made his money in janitorial services and old age homes, he loves the Staatsoper, and he gives them a lot of money and he put this thing up as a kind of folly. So even though it doesn’t really prove that the Germans are more cultured than the Americans are, it is a wonderful testimony to the vision of one somewhat eccentric but kind of wonderful character.

— John Rockwell

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