Ossigeno

156 157 Looking at Berlin : Day five: I'm on the corner of the Scheunenviertel 4 of Mitte, where in the 1920s the architect Hans Poelzig designed four blocks in what is now the square dedicated to the memory of politics, philosophy and the Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. There, based on the principles of strict architecture, the Kino Babylon was built, the real eye of the capital. To look at Berlin, its fauna, the imagery that flows from the cornea through the optic nerve to the brain of the metropolis, you have to sit on these chairs. Here the ceremonial rites of society are celebrated daily of a tribe that, from its foundation to now, no traumatic event has never really managed to remove. The Babylon is an art cinema where, cyclically, the independent, culturally voracious and dissident soul is placed on the scene of the city. The climate of the archipelago is not gentle at all, and in these halls with their rational architecture, built for the people according to the Sachlich philosophy, the community of these islands finds refuge and gathers in a circle to hear stories of distant lands, in the evenings of the long, harsh winters. A place to see and observe the inhabitants of these places - the informal, the hipster, the expatriate, the refugee, the wage-earner, the neobourgeois, the artist, the Berghain animal 5 and all the rest of mankind falling into the modern anthropologist’s diary (or into the metropolitan voyeur's one, which basically means the same). Every Saturday night the Kino, based on the motto "Zero o'clock - Zero euro", offers free viewing of silent films set to music by Anna Vavilkina who plays live the original organ, the only one still operating in Germany in the same place it originally started. I go out again to find myself later at the base of the Kreuzberg , the mountain that gives its name to the �uarter. I climb it, crossing the Viktoriapark and skirting the waterfall that flows through it, up to the top, where the great neo-Gothic spire in bronze designed by Schinkel to celebrate the victories of the Napoleonic wars, is a finger that is pointing to the sky like someone about to utter a sentence. From here I delve into the town, mentally drawing a map. From here the view is total, from the abandoned Observatory of Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain) to the Socialist mastodons, the Baroque cupolas of the twin domes of Gendarmenmarkt to the Television Tower and the neo-Gothic towers scattered everywhere, from the abandoned amusement park to the endless green spots of parks and the cranes, the huge metal birds slowly throwing new bridges between the Islands. Descending into the valley, I collect a fragment of life abandoned by others: “Ma petite Margot, en cette dernière soirée Berlinoise après 2 semaines dans un petit paradis loin du notre, je réalise que notre cohabitation a atteint son terminus…Alors je dois te dire quandmême que tu as été une très belle rencontre, malgré quelques non-dits. Mais surtout, retiens bien que tu garderas ta place dans notre palace! Je te fais plein de bisous partout, ma Gomar ❤ Celine” classified in my notebook with the following words: ` ethnographic department: goodbye to Berlin. s e n s e s a n d t h e C i t y i s e n s i e l a c i t t à 4. "Barn Quarter"