The Chapel of Light aka, When Not to Take Pictures

Hidden away like a precious secret, or a memory, at the centre of Berlin, there is a small, quiet space, surrounded and protected by tall dark trees within a tall grey wall. You can only find it by making your way through a tangle of tramlines, empty spaces where buildings once stood, tourist cafes, U-Bahns and roads busy with lorries going in and out of the Charité hospital. But the Dorotheenstadt cemetery on Chausseestrasse is a bit like the Tardis – once you go in, it feels bigger than it did from the outside, and you start to forget that the outside is even there. I felt I could easily stay there til dusk, content to fall asleep next to the calm gravestones and sheltering trees.

Although I had never even heard of it until this year, it's a famous place, a place suffused with Berlin memories and histories. Stories about Berlin suddenly become less abstract, more human, as I see the names of the people buried here: Bertoldt Brecht, Helene Weigel, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin's architects Schinkel and Stüler, Johann Borsig (one of Berlin´s first industrialists, the factories named after him are still going); the writers Anna Seghers and Christa Wolf, the GDR dramatist Heiner Müller, Sven Lehmann of "Herr Lehmann" fame (actor and poet late of Kreuzberg, dead at 42), Gisele May (actress of Berlin renown, dead at 90-odd after a last stint on the Ku'damm); poets and actors, architects and politicians, philosophers and men of industry (not to mention the man who invented the pillars you put adverts on in Germany, Mr. Litfass). Their Berlin bones all lie here and speak to us of Berlin itself. Brecht and Helene Weigel lived next door when they returned to Germany; Johann Borsig worked here a century earlier in a huge grey house that survived the bombs and still bears his name above the pompous, larger than life statue that decorates the façade. People bring flowers (or cigars, or whisky, or photographs of Ibiza) and leave them for their heroes or heroines.


 But it is surprisingly quiet. When I went there first, on my own, a couple of months back, there was hardly anyone about. The noise of the city seemed to suddenly dim as I made my way through the gates and up the sandy paths towards the little cafe. A large black cat with stripy paws like monochrome socks was licking its paws casually in the middle of the path. A Berlin-chic, middle-aged couple with leather jackets and bleached hair argued quietly over coffee before continuing their argument amongst the gravestones, but they turned out to be the people who look after the graves (obviously even the volunteers are glamorous). Some Japanese tourists with black umbrellas clutched coffee as they stood uncertainly by some of the more imposing graves.  All these people, and the cat, kept disappearing and reappearing out of the little paths as I wandered slowly from place to place absorbing the strangeness and quiet of it all, as if the cemetery liked to keep its visitors to itself; they seemed a long way away. It felt as though a thirst I didn't know I had was being slaked; a thirst for stillness, continuity, a sense of the past, a sense that people's bodies are still connected to the earth and the trees, even in this most disconnected of cities.

Gravestone of the poet Becher

Two ladies buried together...

But there's also an oddly futuristic element to it. Again like the Tardis, the strange simultaneity of history is conspicuous, bringing you smack bang up against the odd nature of past and future everywhere. Towards the back of the cemetery is a wall commemorating the family of the Austrian Ambassador in the nineteenth century; he and his wife are buried there with their five French-sounding daughters, who all predeceased them in the space of months. Yet, the wall is also marked with the scars of shells fired in the last days of the Second World War. Just along the way, a delicate pillar marks Schinkel´s tomb, surprisingly modest, recalling for us an elegant, enlightened Berlin. But his life overlapped with the industrial revolution right here on this street. Johann Borsig, buried a few yards away, built one of Berlin's first factories on the corner of Chausseestrasse itself, shortly before Schinkel's death, and evidently enjoyed bombast; in a disconcerting homage to Schinkel, Borsig's tomb is designed like a miniature opera house, complete with a miniature copy of Schinkel's design for The Magic Flute decorating the interior of its dome. It also has a touchingly large stone plate commemorating his wife: a Prussian, not overly elegant matron in stone, surrounded by cherubs.

Schinkel's tomb (front)

Borsig's tomb and the memorial plate to his wife; Stuler's grave beyond, left

 

Borsig-Haus, Chausseestrasse

But as you enter the cemetery, one thing stands out oddly, a bright white plain building that at first glance appears to have no particular relation to the rest of the graveyard. This is the chapel, where we came on a Friday night to see James Turrell´s light installation, something I´d heard about but never seen.

            James Turrell is a Canadian artist who specialises in light. Light for him is a revelation of many mysteries and he designed the installation for Berlin some years ago. Every evening, the light in the chapel gradually changes, bathing the building, and its visitors, in different combinations of colour and shadow. Around 50 of us had gathered on the plain wooden benches inside as it got darker outside. One of the guides introduced us to what was going to happen. It was impossible to see where the light changes were coming from, but gradually, we became aware of how the white altar now looked blue, or turquoise, or grey. And as the light changed, our brains changed their perceptions too. Our brain creates colour in response to other colours; if our eyes are exposed in a particular way to blue, for example, we will see other things as orange even if they “are not actually” orange. Orange is the complement to blue as green is to red.  And so gradually we became immersed in a pool of light where we also were actors, creating the colours around us that in turn influence our own emotions and mood.

Our guide asked us, at the artist's request, not to take photos, although it is not forbidden. She didn't say why, but this is my guess. Photographs act by capturing light, pinning it down. And they also try to pin down a moment of time: this is exactly what this looked like when...But the installation questions our perceptions, not only of light but of time; light is what informs our perception of time. The cemetery questions our perception of time too, and the chapel had its own Tardis-like aspect; as the light changed, it seemed sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller than it had from the outside. This can't be seen on a picture, but something of the beauty of the colours can be felt. Maybe.

Over the next few days, as we visited gardens, lakes and buildings, I wondered what pictures I was creating in my brain and how one thing I saw was influencing all the others things I was seeing. Like in Milan, where after I'd seen hundreds of Renaissance paintings, I started seeing the people around me as if an artist had grouped them with a profound intent. Their meaning began to shine out differently; time seemed to slow down as I looked at them. 

            And here are some pictures after all –  not ones I took, but postcards that the cemetery administration has produced in order for people like me to find a compromise and tell other people to come and see the installation for themselves. So you see, I can't resist a good picture either. Even though my pictures of pictures are only the tiniest reflection of what the experience was like...