This past week has been busy, but
not too busy for the Fulbright students to visit another German city! Two Thursdays ago (August 29th) we
went to Kassel, which is about an hour [SOME DIRECTION] of Marburg. I considered Googling the direction we
traveled to get to Kassel, but I feel this more accurately represents my state
of mind the day of the Kassel trip. (Okay, I did Google it. Northeast.) It’s
hard to get excited about a city when most of the Germans you talk to just kind
of snort, “Oh, Kassel…” That’s what
happens when you talk to young Germans sometimes though. Just like the US, younger people seem to have
a bit more trouble mustering enthusiasm to travel to small towns versus the larger
famous cities. Also, most of the time, the majority of the Fulbright students are quite tired from long days of language class. So enthusiasm, let alone a sense of direction, can be a challenge.
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| Fulbright student on any given day of the week. |
This underestimation of Kassel’s
attractions proved to be incorrect.
Kassel is the home of the dOCUMENTIA (Documentar auf Deutsch), a huge
international modern art festival that takes place every five years and lasts
for 100 days. German artist and teacher,
Arnold Bode, established the festival to try and counteract the artistic repression
that over a decade of Nazi influence had forced on Germany. The artists who are chosen to participate are
given two years to develop their highly site-specific art pieces, many of which
are left permanently in the city following the festival. Although I’m not a huge modern art fan, there
were enough intriguing pieces placed around the city to make the visit to
Kassel quite rewarding.
We took the train to the Kassel
Hauptbahnhof, which is really not much of a main
train station. The tour guides we met
shortly after arriving explained that the original train station had been
almost completely destroyed during WWII.
There was one section that had survived that was quite lovely; however
the new train station was built around this older section, hiding the lovely
old architecture under a 50’s era concrete block. The colors of the station were decidedly 50’s
era as well. The pink, baby blue, and yellow
pastels really reminded me of pictures I’d seen of growing suburbs in the
United States during the 1950s and 1960s.
Most of Kassel seemed stuck in the past.
Most buildings were large and blocky, concrete slabs with the only splashes
of color coming from the pastel window shades.
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| An example of the buildings seen throughout Kassel. Note the tasteful orange-yellow window shades. |
But, in the midst of all this gray, drab
architecture, were a series of modern art installations that seemed at odds
with the rest of the city. The
distinctly modern and out-of-this-world art pieces clashed with the run-down
feeling of the other buildings. The
first installation we encountered was of a man walking up a slanted pole,
entitled “Man walking to the sky” immediately outside the Hauptbahnhof.
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| What's he gonna do when he gets to the end of the pole? |
After stopping for sandwiches at a bakery,
we made our way from the Hauptbahnhof to Friedrichsplatz, site of the
Fridericianum, one of several museums in Kassel, and my favorite art piece, 7000 Eichen – Stadtverwaldung statt
Stadtverwaltung. The name of the
piece is one of my first encounters with a German pun. The real word that Stadtverwaldung comes from
is Stadtverwaltung, meaning city bureaucracy.
The change from t to d in the word explains why the
installation itself was composed of hundreds of trees. Wald
means forest. Stadtverwaldung then
implies that state bureaucracy is similar to a forest of trees, unmoving,
uncompromising, and usually full of twisting and confusing ways to navigate
through it. The people of Kassel where
initially distressed by the piece Stadtverwaldung
as 7000 thousand oaks were planted throughout Kassel over the course of 5
years. This art piece permanently
changed the bleak face of Kassel, adding greenery to many corners of the
city. It still persists today with most
of the 7000 oaks still alive and flourishing today. Each oak that was part of the installation is
marked by a large basalt stone planted into the ground like a stool next to
tree.
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| 7000 Eichen, Verwaldung statt Verwaltung (7000 oaks, forests instead of bureaucracy) |
The next installation provided a
beautiful portrait of the Orangerie palace, where one of the powerful residents
regularly bathed in wine, just to prove how rich he was. (I would have, you
know, actually drunk the wine and found another way to prove my awe-inspiring wealthiness
and masculinity. Seriously, dude? My baths, they bring all the bees to the yard…)
He bathed in red wine regularly and encouraged some of his friends to do the
same. After each bath, the red wine was collected
and rebottled. The worst part of this
practice though was surely the fact that after the landgrave and his friends
bathed in the wine, not only was the wine rebottled but an additional 2 liters
of red wine was collected beyond what had been originally poured into the baths. I sincerely hope he was not marketing this
wine, but that possibility is simply to revolting to contemplate. Essence of landgrave, anyone? Well, that wine would certainly put hair on
your chest…or you know, kill you as you died slowly and painfully as your
internal organs revolted against your cruel regime of landgrave red wine. One of the two. But hey!
Chest hair! Be a man!
Speaking of manly men, after our
tour of the city, we were introduced to the most handsome man in all of Hessen,
Herkales. Herkales is part of the very
large monument that is part of the World Heritage Site and Bergpark Wilhemshöhe
above Kassel. Part of the 200 foot
monument, he towers above the park with his stunning height of 25 feet. In his naked glory, he nobly looks out over Kassel and the
cascading human-made waterfalls that run for 500 feet down towards Wilhelmshöhe
Schloss. The cascades do not run continually
as at least 92,000 gallons of water are needed to fill all the cascades. As the water runs down, it encounters a
couple locations were pressure builds up enough to produce a fountain, where
water shoots high into the sky before continuing is journey downward. While the water was not running the day we
visited, we still traversed the path the water would have followed to the
bottom.
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| Herkales, looking noble and naked. |
After running through the cascades
to the pool at the bottom, which a statue of Poseidon guards, the water
continues to a Roman aqueduct. Now, the
Romans never actually made it to Kassel, but one of the landgraves of Kassel
really wished they had (Who didn’t want to be conquered by Roman soldiers? Yay, death, destruction, and possible slavery!). He had a Roman aqueduct built to try and
convince everyone (besides SCIENCE.
Carbon-dating, look it up) that the Romans had actually come to Kassel. He convinced no one.
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| I, for one, welcome our new Roman overlords. |
Our final stop was at the Wilhemshöhe
Schloss. Since Goethe lived in Kassel, a
Gingko tree was planted by the Schloss to commemorate his brief stay, a
tradition in Germany. We all were told
to grab a leaf from the ground and take it with us for good luck. As we toured the grounds and walked back to
the Hauptbahnhof, our tour guide, a very sassy German woman, regaled us with
tales of the Brothers Grimm, who lived in Kassel and Marburg for much of their
lives, and their journey to get their fairy tales published, as they suffered
from the same hunger, which plagued many of their characters, living on a
single meal a day. Their loyalty and
love for each other was truly beautiful, and their own struggles highlighted
how much they might have wished for their own happily ever after, although, if
their stories are models, they seemed to realize that not many people got a
happy ending.
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| Good luck? Hope so! |
I walked away from Kassel with a yellow
Gingko leaf in my pocket and a new respect of site-specific modern art. Kassel was a concrete-covered gem of German
history. It’s amazing what architecture
can hide from or reveal to us.
