Observing the map

One half of Kochstrasse is now called Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse which immediately makes the tourist map I picked up at the airport last week out of date.

On 11 April 1968, Rudi-Dutschke, a prominent activist in the left-wing German student movement, was shot in the head and chest by a young man named Josef Bachmann. It has been written that Bachmann was heavily influenced by a campaign against Dutschke by the mass media, particularily by the newspaper Bild-Zeitung who ran the headline "Stop Dutschke now!". Some students held the newspaper responsible, sparking riots and the siege of Bild’s facilities across the country.

Throughout most of its history, Bild’s head office has been based in Hamburg, but in March 2008 Bild moved its headquarters to Berlin. The new Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse runs from the offices of the left-wing daily newspaper ‘Die Tageszeitung’ to the base of a soaring glass high-rise which houses the new Bild offices.

I was speed walking down a street.
Suddenly a tall young guy ran up beside me. He was holding a microphone attached to a hard disc recorder. He said something incomprehensable to me as he struggled to keep up. I laughed.
“I can’t say, ‘I can’t speak German’, properly in German yet!”.
“What do you do here?”
“I am an Artist”.
“How do you find the mood in Berlin?”
“Relaxed.”
“It’s better than London?”
“It’s different.”
He told me I’d be on a radio station that evening then skipped across the road and went into a building.

The show that M and C both recommended to me separately is at number Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse 26 (formerly Kochstrasse 60) MK Galerie Berlin. This is not to be confused with Merry Karnowsky Gallery on Torstrasse. The gang of galleries at Rudi-Dutschke 26 are similar to the other local clusters at Zimmer Strasse and Lindenstasse. Every space had used the same floor paint that I’d used to paint the studio floor this week. I have paint finish envy. Two thin coats on a porous floor will not give you the showroom quality finish that these spaces have.

I visited the knicky knacky photography shop near where I’m staying. The man who owns it asked me where I’d come from, then told me how lucky I was to live in the same country as Paul McCartney. I told him he should visit Liverpool, full of strong swimmers from Ireland. He was interested in a zebra crossing near Abbey Road Studios. I told him this was in London.

When I told T the title of this blog she said “No! That’s that awful quote from the Berlin Mayor’s speech.”

It turns out that T’s auntie used to babysit the Johnson kids when their family lived in Brussels. She couldn’t tell us much about Boris as a child, with him being the eldest and keeping himself to himself. Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, is the eldest of the four children of Stanley Johnson, a former Conservative MEP and employee of the European Commission and World Bank, and the painter Charlotte Fawcett.