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A young man is running towards the completely renovated Neue Nationalgalerie.
He sprints, makes a jump and soon hangs his hands on the edge of the terrace plinth.
There is not enough strength to pull it up.
Not even on the second attempt.
A construction worker watches and thinks his part, there are no other spectators.
It's a pandemic and the Neue Nationalgalerie has already been unveiled, but you are not allowed in yet.
The key will not be handed over until April 29, after around five years of construction.
If you don't come here to climb, you will remember all the encounters, exhibitions and conversations in this house when you see the unveiled building, which has also been a social place like no other museum in Berlin, especially in the summer when you were long could be on the terrace to look inside from the outside.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's building is about to reopen
Source: Marlene Gawrisch / WELT
With Otto Piene, for example.
The ZERO artist coined the term “Sky Art” and was honored with a solo exhibition in the year before it was closed.
During the interview, he sat in the elegant director's room and remembered the sky over the north German homeland of his youth, from which bombs had fallen, fire, death, conjured up by Germans.
And how he later wanted to transform this threatening heaven into its opposite, into a “place of world understanding” and redemption.
How nice, one thought, that he could say that right here, in this house built by an emigrant.
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Mies van der Rohe designed the Neue Nationalgalerie at the invitation of West Berlin, but preferred to stay in America himself.
Piene, too, preferred to live in Massachusetts rather than return to Germany permanently after his resettlement in the 1960s.
The 2014 exhibition in the Neue Nationalgalerie rounded off his work and life, just as it rounded off Mies van der Rohe's work.
All around, above all, width
Source: Marlene Gawrisch / WELT
Mies could no longer attend the opening of the house in 1968, he died in 1969. And Otto Piene?
He died after final preparations in 2014 in Berlin during a taxi ride, just days before his work turned the National Gallery into a friendly happening and total work of art.
That too, one now thinks when looking at the unveiled New National Gallery, is also in the hall: the lives of the people who worked here.
But not earth-heavy and plaque-like, but very light and graceful.
Nothing weighs heavily on this exhibition hall, not even after half a century.
You can take a quick look over here as you drive past and understand a lot;
the Nationalgalerie is in a way as normal and functional as a gas station.
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On the other hand, everything is well considered here.
Solitary perfection as a contrast to the untidy present.
Opposite, on the neighboring property, piles of sand and balls of reinforcing iron pile up.
The museum of the 20th century is being built out of the ground with large machines, which will take a few more years.
A look through the fence: Nobody is allowed in yet
Source: Marlene Gawrisch / WELT
And around it stands that panorama of chaos that this part of the capital still is today: the incoherent Kulturforum, the lost St. Matthew's Church from the 19th century, the playful postmodern skyline of Potsdamer Platz and the broad Bundesstrasse 1, which leads from the new, old east-center to the golden west.
Disparate, with no real connection.
And the Scharoun State Library now urgently needs to be renovated.
What's next?
Alexander Calder will be shown from August.
We'll see how.
The hall does not forgive doing something tried and tested again.
Your elegance is also a stress test.
You have to behave towards it, you can't take a GroKo attitude to the world here.
Udo Kittelmann, who was most recently director of the Nationalgalerie, had filled her last months with ephemeral events, with happenings by Allan Kaprow, with melting ice cream, with people who met each other.
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In retrospect, it is good that exactly
the
last act was before the break: to emphasize the lives opposite the museum.
Even with Otto Piene's “The Sun Comes Closer” there was social sculpture in addition to art, specially created colorful cocktails, psychedelic projections and music, it was a mixture of the hippie California of the sixties and postwar coolness, with an insane amount of space around it.
You will have to get used to something like this again as a corona hermit.
Slowly, step by step.
Otherwise you get the social heart attack.
Last lap, last finish
Source: Marlene Gawrisch / WELT
So one more lap around the still closed National Gallery, peek through the site fence again, familiarize yourself again.
What is really good: that the National Gallery was once veiled, and therefore not a matter of course.
The last works are being carried out, a pavement is paved.
The climber has still not made it to the terrace.
But maybe, you suddenly think, maybe this wool-capped person respects that super-fit temple too much to step on the pedestal ahead of time.
Maybe this is not an attempted trespass, but a ritual of exhaustion: practice, carry on, get better.
The “Modern” happening is never over.
Fortunately, because then it would be over at some point.