diff --git a/content/20260520_stadt.md b/content/20260520_stadt.md index 1327224..8854f28 100644 --- a/content/20260520_stadt.md +++ b/content/20260520_stadt.md @@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ date: 2026-05-20 18:00 author: T. F. tags: culture, shopping, discovery, music, books slug: downtown -era: 1992-1999 +era: 1992-99 location: 49.40940095971948, 8.693200961471124 read_more: Let's go → diff --git a/content/20260521_berlin_dome.md b/content/20260521_berlin_dome.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..92b3aa5 --- /dev/null +++ b/content/20260521_berlin_dome.md @@ -0,0 +1,16 @@ +title: Lustgarten +date: 2026-05-22 12:50 +author: T. F. +tags: city, berlin, music, sky, nature +slug: lustgarten +era: 2002/09 +location: 52.52009344589064, 13.399786604083824 +read_more: Drift away → + +In the two decades I have lived in Berlin, one of the few places that has held an unusually magical vibe and meaning for me is the immediate area around the *Berliner Dom*, that monumental cathedral on the *Museumsinsel* in the heart of the city. Its voluptuous neo-baroque appearance contrasted sharply with the socialist architecture of nearby *Alexanderplatz* with its iconic TV-tower punctuating the skyline, especially during the years when the brown, glass-clad, monster of the *Palace of the Republic* still cast its shadow over the area. The church overlooks the geometric *Lustgarten* park stretching toward the column-lined, Roman temple like, *Altes Museum*. The atmosphere has always seemed strangely out of place to me. Like fragments of imagined cities thrown together into one almost dreamlike landscape. + + + +A particularly unforgettable moment tied to this place was one July evening in 2002. The weather was unusually bad for mid-July, with occasional rain showers and gusty wind. My girlfriend, a handful of old friends, and I sat on the grassy area north of the cathedral with a hundred or so others, drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and listening to the concert of French electronica/dream-pop duo *Air*, from afar, the music drifting across the park from the *Museumsinsel Festival* just a few hundred meters away. Their music had played a crucial role in all of our late coming-of-age. I recall letting myself get caught in a gripping swell of *Air*'s [ethereal soundscape](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpahYJ7UpP4), the music building tension in complete synchronicity with the increasingly violent bursts of wind tearing through the chestnut trees, swaying them in a dance to the beats, carrying hundreds of leaves into the sky and sending them spiraling around the oxidized copper tips of the cathedral’s towers. The harmony between the elements felt so perfectly choreographed that people in the little park began clapping and raising their voices in spontaneous joy. + +Several years later, on a late summer evening, crossing the *Lustgarten* with my iPod on, emotionally shaken and lost in anxious thought after the end of a five-year relationship, insecure and afraid of what lay ahead, I found myself suddenly transported back to that moment. The gritty big-band horn hook of [The Prodigy’s "Stand Up"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8axq-EVyhTw) faded into my consciousness when something in the sky caught my eye. Above the cathedral that was glowing in the orange light, an enormous flock of thousands of birds was murmurating. Just as the track's breakbeat and fuzzy bassline kicked in, building toward the first drop, the fluid mass of birds shape-shifted into a tongue-like wave spiraling upward. The convergence of image, sound, and my own fragile emotional state hit me with such force that tears sprang to my eyes and I had to sit down. It was a moment of simultaneous grief and breathtaking joy, instantly echoing that evening with *Air* years earlier, and I lay down on a stone bench and kept watching the birds, the track on loop, for I don’t know how long, crying, desperately trying to hold on to the moment for as long as possible. \ No newline at end of file