Janne Teller – blog 7:
While writing and wandering about Berlin, I’ve also taken the time to go to several operas, die Philharmonie, as well as to dive into some of all the arts at display in the city. It’s the eternal choice for a writer: the one between living and writing about living. Or somehow manage to turn the writing into living. Sometimes I’m better at it than at other times. Here in Berlin, all three have worked rather well together, and I’ve enjoyed spending the afternoons getting to know German painters I didn’t know, see works unbeknownst to me of painters I did know – with the good conscience of a morning spent working on my new novel that’s slowly growing into being. And when it comes together the way it has, every part of life seems to have its own place in the process: the art seen feeds the art being produced. Not directly, I don’t write about any of what I see; but indirectly, the energy that artists of many centuries have divulged is right there in Altes Museum, Alte Nationalgalerie, Gemälde and so on, for me to absorb, carry with me and slowly transform into the energy I myself can divulge through my literature. I eat art. that’s what’s become evident to me while being here. When I’m upset, the Italian Renaissance calms me, when I’m sad, the French impressionists lift my spirits, if I should be too happy a walk through the Dutch 17-18th century gloom will no doubt temper my exuberance … But it’s also more subtle, the transfer of something I don’t know of and which I’m unaware of happening before I suddenly notice myself walking around smiling, as if having been offered a gift of neither binds nor boundaries. The same happiness that can come over me during an opera aria, even one I might not take to particularly, yet that sensation of being granted something more, something beyond myself, something feeding my spirits – and giving me the energy to write even when I thought I was depleted. More prosaically: the ability to feed off of paintings can come in particularly handy in Berlin galleries: nowhere else in the world have I been so unsuccessful looking for edible offerings in museums, as in this city. From the Metropolitan and Moma in New York, over Louisiana and Glyptoteket in Copenhagen, to Pompidou and the Louvre in Paris, as well as even the Pinakothek in Munich, there are cafe’s or restaurants you’d have reasons to visit also without visiting the museum. Why not in Berlin? Did I overlook something when in my search around the magnificent Museumsinsel on a Thursday late opening-night, I ended giving up and retire to Gendarmenmarkt? Is it not part of the Berlin city culture? Or is new Berlin, the unified Berlin, still so much a place under construction that its artistic dining offers are yet to come? In the latter case, may I make the argument for a topclass eating place, with an ad-joint cafe and bar right at Museumsinsel …. Till then, I’m glad I have a full board stipend here at the Bleibtreu Hotel – and then that I’m able to eat art …
