There’s a new temporary museum at the former site of Reich Main Security Office in Mitte, Berlin called Topography of Terrors, which documents the history of the organizations who used the site as a base of operations, including the Gestapo and the SS.  It was at this location that the transports and concentration camps were organized, and enemies of the state were detained and tortured.  The museum building (by architect Ursula Wilms) is, appropriately, a banal and chilling one, a flat glass ring layered with metal scrims that sits within fields of rubble-like gravel.

The exhibitions themselves are powerful, with lucid text and graphic photographs.  But they’re the kind of materials that could be displayed at any holocaust memorial at any place in the world. When I visited, on a brilliant summer afternoon, there were crowds gathered inside, on the very ground where these atrocities originated.  We wanted to know about the place itself.  What was the building like?  What were the detaining cells, the conference rooms, the bathrooms, like?  What was the architecture of the regime, how did it empower those in charge, and how was it complicit in what happened?

Does art always have to go deep?  The Kohlhaas Curtain, the Frank Stella - Santiago Calatrava collaboration on view now at the New National Gallery in Berlin, makes me feel that it doesn’t.  Big, bright and bold, the installation consists of nearly 100 linear feet of paintings on white tarp (by Stella) wrapped inside and outside a giant wire drum (by Calatrava) that’s suspended in the center of the glass-box gallery (by architect Mies van der Rohe).

The paintings might not be so compelling in themselves, but as displayed in the round like this they energize the gallery, drawing visitors forward while keeping the majestic panoramas along the edge of the building clear. The Curtain is installed at just the right height, so that guests can wander underneath and, for a few minutes, get lost inside. The artwork adds a welcome bit of funk to the archly elegant gallery. It pleases the eye, doesn’t get in the way, and doesn’t require too much thought.  It’s the finest kind of decorator art.

Since I know classical architecture primarily through line drawings, I’ve understood it more as an aesthetic program than as a manner of building, as a very fine and particular language.  Now, after seeing the Pergamon Altarpiece at the Staatliche Museen in Berlin, I know that classical architecture is built from mortar and stone, and that it can possess an enveloping, elemental power.  There’s only part of the altarpiece in the gallery, a portion one third the size of the original.  Nonetheless its effect is spectacular.

I can’t justify the actions of the archaeologists who found this structure in Greece, dismantled it, shipped it to Berlin, and reassembled it here.  But I understand why they did it.  These men saw something powerful in the architecture and wanted to keep it for themselves.  What’s most surprising about the altarpiece is how fragmentary it is.  Most of the statuary in the friezes is only half present, with figures missing limbs, noses, and chunks of flesh, and what features remain abraded by centuries of weather and wear, and patched together with plaster.  There’s a terrible, tumultuous power in these fragments. They’re rich with feeling.

I went to Babelsberg, a hamlet just outside Berlin, with a starstruck friend who wanted to inhale some of the glamor (or, as she would spell it, “glamour”) of that place where, before WWII, the great German movie stars and directors lived.  On a drizzly afternoon we walked down Virchowstrasse, a curving street along the Griebnitzsee, and took in the sterile, handsome mansions on either side.  And we remained unmoved.  My friend explained that many of the houses had been seized by the Nazis during the war, and their owners forcibly expelled.  Now successful business people lived inside, kept the curtains drawn, and parked their massively expensive sports cars out front.  One could feel the rot of it all, right through the pristine facades and the pretty landscaping.

Later, when talking with a clerk at the S-Bahn station, we learned that we had, on our walk, unknowingly, passed the Villa Urbig (also known as the Villa Churchill), Mies van der Rohe’s first house from 1917, a two-story confection of pink brick that might be even more tragically conventional than Le Corbusier’s first house, the Villa Schwob.  The Villa Churchill is famous for another rather important reason: Winston Churchill stayed here during the Potsdam Conference.  Now a German real estate tycoon lives inside in amnesic splendor.  Although I care about Mies I did not want to go back and see the house, and did not feel sorry at all that I had missed it.  I was quite happy to leave town.