#52

Welcome 2023! May you be a peaceful, happy and fabulous new year. For the perfect start we´ll just give you a little support, as always with our very own Orania.recommendations.

How about some classical new year´s concerts? On Tuesday you could listen to Diana Damrau, one of the most popular Sopranos in Germany these days, at the Philharmonie. And if you don´t have your tickets yet to experience artistic director and principal conductor of the Berliner PhilharmonikerKirill Petrenko, please don´t be sad: on 27 January you can just enjoy one of his concerts online via live stream.

As usual at the end of the year, we would also like to have a look at the past. Berlin offers a great variety of opportunities for doing so and we chose worldknown Checkpoint Charlie today. Did you know that it only takes a 25 minute walk northwestwards following Oranienstraße from here to there?

The permanent exhibition Blackbox Kalter Krieg (eng.: Black Box Cold War) helps us brush up our knowledge about the times of German division for a start.

In order to fully understand what life near the Berlin Wall meant, we let Yadegar Aisisi´s 900 m² panorama installation Die Mauer take us back to Berlin Kreuzberg in the 1980s.

Wow, that was intense, wasn´t it? Let´s find something against our rising melancholy and head towards the district of Wilmersdorf and its brandnew Pop up Gallery at Hohenzollerndamm. The exhibition “Rosa sehen statt untergehen“ (rough translation: think pink and don´t give up) shows the work of more than fourty artists and designers trying to depict a counterweight to the feeling of crisis in Europe. Some of them have never shown their work in public before – the motto artist and curator Mari Otberg had chosen was: “artists for artists“. You can still enjoy the exhibition until Tuesday.

We´re sure this building site fence didn´t visit the optimistic exhibition before drowning itself in the pond…

Let´s continue seeing some art. This year´s Hannah Höch Prize for outstanding artistic life´s work goes to ninety-year-old Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, who has spent most of her life in Berlin (good choice). The exhibition, that is being shown to honour her oevre at the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings), is really worth seeing. Her typewritings have not lost their relevance in the last 30 years, neither visually nor speaking of the intention of her work. (© photos: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett/Dietmar Katz, © Courtesy of the artist and ChertLüdde, Berlin)

On our way home we pass a building that immediately seems inviting and warm with its large windows and ship-like balconies. Betahaus is in fact a coworking space and event venue, allowing us to start our year with some important networking. Maybe we join the community for a betabeer on the rooftop terrace the last Thursday of the month? Or we start getting to know some people and even brush up our German during German lessons every last Wednesday of the month. Many nice ways to get in touch with young enterpreneurs and innovators here. 

But now it´s time for us to go home. We haven´t been there for far too long (even if it has only been a couple of hours). How about you? When may we once again welcome you back to Berlin?