jürgen fauth’s muckworld

(photo: soupflowers)

It’s no secret that Marcy is a great connoisseuse of pools the world over — from the gigantic Moses-built Astoria public pool to the Kaiser-Friedrich-Therme, the Nerobergbad, and Stadtbad Mitte, this summer we dunked our tails in chlorinated waters from the Hell’s Gate to the Spree. So when we stumbled past this ancient-looking city pool all lit up event-like the other night, we just had to just stick our heads in.

Lo and behold, the pool wasn’t filled, wasn’t even operable, but on two balconies, an orchestra was performing works by John Cage (”Atlas Eclipticalis,” “Songbooks”) and Bernd Thewes (”Seufzer-Halde”), with a guy down in the pit doing choreographed movements along to the music. If you had to come up with a parody of a Prenzlauer Berg art happening, this would do — but the sounds, light, and motion did transform the dilapidated building into an eerie, subterranean dreamscape, a pagan temple perhaps, devoted to the Gods of Chlorine.

The Stadtbad Oderberger Strasse has had a bumpy history; the Trockenschwimmer Festival went on for the rest of the weekend with performance art, readings, and more music.

Here are a few minutes of footage from the event:

This is not what architect Peter Eisenman had in mind when he designed the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a field of concrete slabs (or stelae) on a 4.7 acre site between Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate: “The stelae are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason.” (Wikipedia)

It’s possible that the man hopping from stone to stone like Q*Bert in the photo above is enacting some sort of postmodern commentary on Eisenman’s intentions — after all, “losing touch with human reason” is second nature to some of us, and “an uneasy, confusing atmosphere” is what we like to call “the modern condition.” Either way, instead of remembrance, introspection, and grief, the 2,711 stones seem to invite inappropriate behavior. Visitors can be seen sunbathing on the stelae, playing hide-and-seek, or eating curry sausages.

Other scandals and failures accompanied the memorial: the stelae were covered in anti-graffiti paint by Degussa, a company that produced Zyklon B for the gas chambers, the stones are already beginning to crumble, light fixtures are broken, and Der Spiegel reports that in the darkness, drunkards from a nearby club come to urinate and horny couples screw in the maze.

Perhaps R. Mutt would have enjoyed the Stelenfeld’s playground repurposing, but there is a harsh lesson here about the disconnect between artistic intention and actual use; clearly, the memorial’s symbolism is too arbitrary, too wide open to interpretation, to produce the desired effect. I don’t know of another memorial that fails on such a spectacular scale.

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Yeah, we snickered more than a few immature snickers at the name of this town in northeastern France. Bitche, pronounced just like you think, is dominated by a massive citadel that withstood an entire year of siege during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Today, you can take an audio-visual tour through the underground fortifications. As you pass through the bakery, the well, the officer’s quarters and so on, bits and pieces of a movie about the siege are projected on screens slyly installed below the vaulted ceiling.

It’s a peculiar way to see a movie, akin to sitting inside the real Helm’s Deep watching a version of The Two Towers where Gandalf and Éomer never show up. But despite the presence of Virginie Ledoyen as the scheming wife of Napoleon III, the film never takes on a life of its own beyond the cheesy illustration of historical events and some vague points about the futility of war in general. We didn’t feel the need to pick up the full-length DVD in the gift shop. Let me tell you though: there’s a patisserie downtown that serves some truly bitchin’ chocolate cake.

La Forteresse Assiegee. Gerard Mordillat, 2006. **

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“The greatest festival in the world!” an old friend of mine enthused, without apparent irony. And who knows? Maybe he’s not entirely wrong: the Weinfest Wiesbaden, an annual gathering of Rheingau wineries on the Marktplatz, is known as “the world’s longest wine bar,” with over a thousand different kinds of wine and an average consumption of 250,000 bottles in ten days, primarily Riesling. If you go only every few years, it’s definitely a good time — although not without its risks.

• More photos on Flickr
• Previously on muckworld: Wiesbaden and the Kaiser-Friedrich-Therme

A few pictures from the city I used to call home, the town where Priscilla met Elvis. More Wiesbaden facts:

• The thermal springs of Wiesbaden were first mentioned in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia in 121.
• By 1800, there were 2,239 inhabitants and twenty-three bath houses. Among visitors to the springs were Goethe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Wagner, and Johannes Brahms. In 1900, there were 86,100 inhabitants and 126,000 visitors. In those years there were more millionaires living in Wiesbaden than in any other city in Germany.
• The Wiesbaden synagogue was destroyed during Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938.
• Wiesbaden is home to the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation.
• Volker Schlöndorff and John McEnroe were born in Wiesbaden.
• Sting, Lionel Richie, and Luciano Pavarotti have performed on the Bowling Green in front of the Kurhaus.
• Wiesbaden’s coat of arms features three times as many fleurs-de-lys as New Orleans.
• More photos from previous trips.

In Sarreguemines, France, Ludivine Sagnier and Claude Chabrol hold their own among the blockbusters. (Here’s the trailer.)