In Germany, I’ve learned, preparing and eating a hard-boiled egg are acts undertaken with tremendous seriousness.  There are lots of special devices (cups, spoons, timers, cutters) to help.  My favorite is this egg-shaped, egg-sized musical timer that one stores inside the fridge with one’s eggs and boils in the water with them.  The timer comes in different colors, including gold, and with different musical programs, including classical, disco and rock.

It’s striking to think of the engineering that went into this little gadget.  It first beeps to indicate that the water is boiling, and then plays three different songs to indicate when the egg should be removed if it is to be runny, soft, or firm.  (There’s a rather humorless video demonstration here.)  I witnessed one family trying their musical egg timer for the first time, and it stirred up a bit of anxiety.  Was that the first beep just now, or the second?  Was is too great a risk to leave the eggs in the water until the end of the last song?  Why was someone leaving the kitchen now, when the egg might sing at any moment?  This instrument turns the act of boiling an egg into high drama.

I escaped the midday heat last Tuesday inside the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin’s museum for contemporary art.  There I crept through the cool, dark galleries full of cool, dark sculptures and installations.  Then, at the end, I found myself in a light-filled room with three enormous Cy Twombly canvases.  In contrast with the other art, terse assemblies of plywood, steel, felt and humming neon lights, they had a sweet, expansive lyricism.  It made me think of Twombly as more than a conceptual artist who fetishized the acts of drawing and making, and, for the first time, as a painter.  So I was sad to heard that he died earlier this week at the age of 83 at this home in Rome.

The canvases in Berlin are textural and textual.  Each is a blank field of white paint layered with scrawls, splotches and writing, and then more white paint.  The surfaces float in and out of focus; they’re ephemeral and engaging.  There is, across one, in Twombly’s looping script, “I am Thyrsis of Etna/blessed with a fine voice,” and it seems less like a literary allusion than a cry for someone, anyone, to listen and bear witness.  These canvases have at their heart an elemental need for expression.

Architect Peter Behren’s AEG Turbine Factory in Berlin, from 1909, is a canonical work of modern architecture, marking the moment when all the proprieties (structural, ornamental, linguistic) of classicism were loosened and fell away.  One afternoon I made a pilgrimage to see the building and was stunned to find its front facade covered with netting and scaffolding.  It upset my memory of the building’s iconic photographs, taken from across the street, which show the heroic unbroken bank of windows there.

It’s comforting that the Turbine Factory sits on a lively street, Turmstrasse, in an unassuming and up-and-coming part of the city, Moabit.  And it’s comforting that the Turbine Factory is still a turbine factory.  The day I visited was a warm one and rows of windows were thrown open, through which I heard the spinning and clanking of machines.  The building still feels bold, and resembles no other building I can think of, traditional or contemporary.  The exposed steel columns at the side are remarkable.  And so is the depth of the building; it stretches back for two blocks.  The looming front facade, although it’s just a little bit higher than adjacent apartment blocks, has a stony, classical repose.  Unlike a lot of iconic buildings, this one exceeds its presence in famous photographs.

The gold trinkets and bowls on display at the Neues Museum in Berlin beneath the banner “Schliemann’s Troy” aren’t Schliemann’s and aren’t from Troy.  They’re reproductions of the treasures that the German archaeologist unearthed in Hissarlik, Turkey in 1873, incorrectly attributed to the Homeric city, and illegally smuggled from the country.  The find made Schliemann’s reputation, and a photograph of his wife Sophia wearing what he believed were Helen’s jewels caused an additional sensation.  Why did Schliemann dress her in the pieces, “every one of which is of inestimable value to archaeology,” and then circulate the photograph?

The jewels – or, should I say, the reproductions of the jewels on display at the museum – are truly majestic.  The diadem, earrings and necklace are crafted from shards of yellow gold hammered paper-thin that catch light and shimmer like a liquid.  They’re exuberant, excessive and dramatic; they’re exactly what an ancient queen should wear.   Sophia, with her high-collared dress, tight bun, and pursed lips, has really not gotten properly into the spirit of things.