LOVE/EROTIC POETRY

LAST LOVERS POEM

By Faith Merz

Heartbreak is not what I thought it would be. It is not fast and sudden, but rather like a cool slow burn. Like wanting to shower from the inside out, like the call of a train while I wait for it to snow.

I was brushing my teeth and thought I found your hair in my mouth. I’ve been sleeping with the window open because the cold air is the only thing that feels real. I’ve been trying to remember, I can’t quite recall what you smell like anymore. The heat of this warm bed is just mine, and the night air keeps moving in.

I had a dream I was with your mother, her belly full and round with the anticipation of you. The air was soft and gold and she spoke of all of her hope of what a good man you’ll be someday. As if my subconscious needed to form some kind of apology for all the havoc your pain would cause.

I have watched morning geese fly and the moon rise against the horizon. I have peered through my rearview window and found only absence in the backseat.

All too few words that come. Heartbreak is not what I thought it would be.

PROOF

By Mery Smith

Eyes closed Finicky clit

Reaching Quickly

Soft Soiled Thighs

Like puppies Twitching quake

Here it is

Underwear Evidence

Made love to Myself

Survived Everything Else

DENTICULATION

By Faith Merz

I do not want another love poem, I do not want another metaphor.

Star crossed lovers, fist full of roses, masticated mushy mushy. I want to chew with my teeth.

Make!

Me! Work! For! What! I! Want!

I do not want another love poem- for my teeth, the hardest parts of me, ache to know. The feeling of questioning, the taste of life, and all of its digestible forms.

EMPTY RUMMAGE

By Faith Merz

Pretending concepts collide, the poet aches and spurns. Where does love exist when no one is looking?

My home has been empty for months, designed increasingly for a quantity of one. I keep looking between the crack in my bed, behind the bookshelf, the couch cushions too. Convinced it’ll have the likeness of a marble, something small and lost. Where does something so precious hide?

Listen, I’m not sure how to write these things. And I don’t know where the line between adoration and heartbreak begins and ends. I’ve bent over backwards, all of the cupboards are wide open. And in the coming dawn the floorboards have all been released from their confines.

And as the fleeting song of the first sparrow breaks the day. I’ll turn, curled upon myself ankles hooked in silent prayer to wherever that marble may be.

I’ll turn in, and sleep with the lover deep inside of me.

BUTTERFINGERS

By Carrie Casio

inside. outside. around. inside again.

clumsy.

clumsy again. the misses are fine.

the hits are finer.

keep going Mr. Butterfingers.

Just.

Keep.

Going.

PROFUNDITY

By Faith Merz

Gravity falls to useless parallel oh, of what so many have tried to describe! On a bed of limbs, soft skin to caress, of muscles straining with unadulterated devotion.

Falling, endlessly falling, locked in a gaze that sends shivers down my spine. Press rose petals to my ear, simmer under each new crashing wave.

Going deeper, deeper, deeper still. Gravity must pay its penance, to be crushed by an equal force.

Somewhere in the depths, a part of myself rises and arches, faster and faster. My veins are glowing, legs shake as a slow boil turns into euphoria.

Find yourself, and make home in the deepest parts of me, wrap yourself around everything you can find there. Breathless antiquity, we fall as gravity and devotion coalesce.

SWEAT

By Carrie Casio

Sweet.

Sweater.

SWEET.

SWEAT.

Sweet sweat through your sweater. It’s too hot for this.

It’s too hot. Take off your sweater. There. Finally

EXPLODING CHEMISTRY

D.K. Weeks Kraken Kreative Studio

DO YOU EVER

D.K. Weeks Kraken Kreative Studio

Do you ever think of me, when you close your eyes?

Do you ever think of me, when you wish upon a star?

Do you think of me, when you dream?

Your dirty deeds replay, when I close mine.

Do you ever think of me, when you eff someone else?

Your “it happens to everyone” excuses replay, when I close mine.

Do I think of you, when I eff someone else? Banged hard on the mad scientist’s door addicted to his formulas.

Casted spells through his sinner eyes dimpled my inner thighs.

Catalyzed by his curled toes my cherry bomb nails scratched down his white lab coat.

Moaned out elements one-by-one resulted in multiple alkali explosions.

Increased friction slides created bunsen burner heat.

Rapid expansion of large volume; extreme vigorous release of energy.

Sonic boom, exploding chemistry!

Your dirty deeds no longer repeat, when I close my eyes. I am no longer faking “Oh! Oh! Oh!” moans. My eyes now close in ecstasy more times than blink, each and every orgasm he gives me.

SWEET SWEET POETRY

D.K. Weeks Kraken Kreative Studio

Your touch, sweet sweet poetry, dragging of fingers upon skin curls my toes.

Your touchless, sweet sweet poetry, whispering of naughty words weakens my knees.

Your wake-me-from-sleep, sweet sweet poetry, moaning of ecstasy rises my moon.

Your dominance, sweet sweet poetry, tightening of silk sheets dimples my inner thighs.

Your permission, sweet sweet poetry, granting of my honey pot to come for you.

Sir, may I please taste my sweet sweet poetry from your honey dusted lips?

EVERYTHING IS FINE.

Illustration by Ron Evans

WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU, GIVES YOU TRAUMA

BY VERUCA SALTY

CW: trauma, spiritual bypassing, toxic positivity

Ok, unpopular opinion, but can we stop glamorizing our traumas and hardships and acting like we’re grateful for how strong they made us? Sure, we powered through them but that doesn’t mean our lives would not have been better if we hadn’t gone through the trauma. Imagine how strong we’d be if we were treated well and nurtured and cared for and NOT abused?!? I’m tired of seeing quotes like “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “calm seas bring peace but storms show your power.” I could have been plenty powerful without all of this emotional baggage. This whole mindset is just another cog in the spiritual bypass wheel. Spiritual bypassing is defined as the “tendency to use spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep or avoid facing unresolved emotional issues, psychological wounds, and unfinished developmental tasks.” The term was coined by Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist, John Welwood in the 80’s. Trying to use gratitude to ignore negative feelings and circumstances will not work in the long run. Why are we so ashamed to admit that we occasionally experience something hard!? Something that completely breaks us? It’s part of the human experience; another emotion in the human spectrum of feelings. We are not superhuman for avoiding the bad. We are actually so much more powerful when we own the hard, sit with the hard and fully work through it. We can’t ignore all the negativity and pretend like it somehow makes us ironclad. I’m so done with that BS.

You know what takes immense strength? Admitting you’re wrong, owning your hard and bad feelings, accepting that not everything happens for a reason and sometimes life is just unfair and relentless. Being honest! With spiritual bypassing and passing off our hardships as character building, we never truly let healing in. Without healing we can’t grow into our actual power and full potential. You cannot be a whole being if you’re ignoring parts of the human experience. Spiritual bypassing and toxic positivity are just new age ways to become a shell of your former self. Toxic positivity is defined as “dismissing negative emotions and responding to distress with false reassurances rather than empathy.” It often comes from a place of good intention but is ultimately the result of simply feeling uncomfortable with negative emotions. It’s a “feelings” buffer. It’s no different than drinking your pain away or fucking your way to self-confidence or any other addictive behavior that covers up the bad feeling with a false (and temporary) sense of good feelings. The dopamine is real but it always leaves you wanting for more.

Now, I’m all for a nice gratitude practice and I find value in those kinds of practices. But you can’t “positive affirmation” your way out of true anxiety, depression or trauma. Most people are going to need a lot more than a happy quote each morning to shift those deeply ingrained neural pathways. In a lot of ways, spiritual bypassing and toxic positivity are like hustle culture for our feelings. We get trapped in these societal norms that say we have to behave a certain way and present ourselves in a certain way in public spaces. We need to keep our feelings to ourselves because they’re messy and unruly. But the truth is, they’re supposed to be messy and unruly, that’s the nature of the human experience. It doesn’t all fit into nice little boxes that we can file away on our logical shelf. Feelings are not meant to be stifled or controlled or ignored. They are meant to be felt. But we don’t have time to feel sad or we can’t afford to express our feelings and risk causing a scene. We hustle our own damn emotions to keep up productivity. And it’s not ok.

Accepting all of the varying emotions (hard and good) allows you to fully process the trauma and HEAL. Let’s stop running away from our problems and meet them head on. Look at that storm and dive in. Don’t tell the storm, “no thanks, I’m good, I’ll just pretend like this made me stronger.” Weep for yourself. Mourn the losses that your storms have created in your life. Feel those feelings. You can do it. You were made for this. C

by ron evans

This January saw the opening of a conversation-starting art show at Confl uence Gallery in Twisp. “Filthy Little Pictures” — a title we will talk more about in a bit — is a group art show featuring works of erotica, the nude form and sexual expression.

“The contributing artists were asked to shine their creative lights on the shadows cast by shame and to celebrate the human form and all its variations of physical expression. Artists were given almost total latitude within the confi nes of the show’s theme — as it should be, with a show celebrating freedom of expression.” says curator Penelope Varn.

I reached out to Varn to chat about this exhibit (which will run through March 5th) and to see how the locals reacted to such a prominent public display of Filthy Little Pictures.

Tell us a little about your background in the arts, and your role at Confl uence Gallery.

I have been on the board of Confl uence Gallery for several years and in the past couple of years, I’ve been on the gallery’s show committee, which concepts and curates all the shows (to be clear, each curator on the committee concepts his/her shows and pitches them to the committee, which votes on the ideas once a year at its annual meeting, in which we plan all the shows for the coming year).

Before that, I was on the board of Coyote Central, a Central District arts organization in Seattle. My professional background is print journalism. I was an energy reporter for maybe a decade; I have a masters from University of Texas (at Austin) journalism school. In undergrad, I studied art history and languages with the goal of becoming an art dealer. I also have been an oil painter, but I don’t throw those pearls before swine.

Tell us how and when the concept for Filthy Little Pictures arose?

I had been pushing the show committee for two or three years to have another erotic art show. Maybe a decade ago, the gallery had an erotic art show, called XXXY, I think. It caused quite a stir in the community, which can tend toward the provincial. I think the (non-profi t) gallery only lost one donor over it, in spite of a 4-foot-long blue penis sticking out of the wall. Anyway, I had pitched an erotic art show last year, with the title “Stains on the Bed,” but nobody would go for it — probably because the title scared some of the more cautious committee members. Then this year, I pitched Filthy Little Pictures, and the show committee decided it was time for Twisp to have another erotic art show. It’s really a rather tame show — in fact, I was hoping for less tame than what resulted. But the way I run my shows is that I give artists my theme, and let them use my theme as the rails for their artistic vision — then just let them run with it. I’m not a dictator about it. It’s art, and art is about individuality and personal freedom, sort of like Nick Cage’s jacket in Wild at Heart.

“I insisted on titling the show Filthy Little Pictures as a way of appropriating the phrase that someone like my mother would employ in her description of the show.” ~ Curator Penelope Varn

How many artists are featured in Filthy Little Pictures - are they all local?

About 22 artists, half local, the other half regional, except for Benjamine Lester, who hails from Dallas, Texas.

Even when presented as art in a gallery exhibition - nudity and sexuality always seem to be somewhat controversial. What has the response from the community been like for this exhibit? Has there been any hesitation or resistance against presenting it?

Initially, the Confl uence board of directors and Executive Director, Kaileah Akker expressed worry about community reaction to the show, but we have had almost no negative reaction. This time around, the community embraced an erotic art show — so it appears Twisp has come around in terms of accepting freedom of artistic expression.

I’m sure there are many things you’d love to see come from this exhibit, but if you had to choose one thing - because some annoying magazine publisher asks you to - what would that be?

Mary LouMcCollum Nude Resting by

I would love for this show to broaden people’s horizons in terms of embracing freedom of visual expression and for artists in particular to experience community acceptance of erotic works. I think we could regress into a Neo-Puritanism — given the political climate — if we aren’t, as a society, careful. I hope in some small measure, this show eases us toward a more inclusive and less censorious future.

The phrase Filthy Little Pictures certainly gets my attention. It also looks great on a poster. Talk a little about the title of this exhibit.

A lot of my show ideas spring from my ideas for titles (like The Color of Words, a previous show that featured visual interpretations of literary works). This time around, though, I heard the voice of my mother, a rather prim Southern Belle (now a dead one), who would have said of, say, Benjamine Lester’s piece, titled “Catch,” “Now that is just plain fi lthy.” As a kid, I took great humor in that word. So when I was concepting the show, with a tongue-incheek attitude, I insisted on titling the show “Filthy Little Pictures” as a way of appropriating the phrase that someone like my mother would employ in her description of the show.

A FEW ARTIST COMMENTS

I was inspired by Penelope’s vision of bringing to light the perceived “shame” that has been put upon us by society over the years, decades, centuries. Humans have bodies. Bodies have biological imperatives to perpetuate the species (pretty much true for every living thing). And we have certain tools and desires to get this accomplished. Someone decided along the way that we should be ashamed of this body and its directive to procreate (or at least participate in the various rituals, even if having a baby is not the main objective). I loved creating pieces that might help dispel the taboo of being ashamed of what we are and how we do it with the “tools” we have. In my little peep shows, I wanted to instill a bit of levity on what some consider a heavily loaded subject. The vagina as a miraculous organ, the penis and its pliable nature, and Bondage as a means to an end. Sex should be fun! And whatever way a person needs to get off (between consenting adults and within legal limits) is fine with me. ~ Joanne Marracci

From the very beginning of my artistic journey, I have always been drawn to the nude form. I, and many other artists with a similar calling, experience backlash and even hostility when displaying our artwork in public and even social media. That is what I love about this show! “Filthy Little Pictures” - perfect satire describing what our work is so often referred to. People come to this show primed to expect the taboo, but what they find is an open mind to experience the beauty these talented artists bring through their calling. Because, we will not paint just trees. We will use bare chests, genitals and buttock to explain our experiences being human; and all the pain, joy, sorrow, sexuality and vulnerability our talents will allow. ~ Benjamine Lester

I have worked with Penelope in a number of shows and had the pleasure of doing commissioned work for her also. I enjoy the confrontational aspects of erotic art. Nothing seems to scare people more than their naked bodies, yet human sexuality is one of the foremost aspects of our existence. It is reflected in our art, media, music, culture, and everyday connections with our fellow humans. To be included in a show that addressed this subject was a true pleasure. That said I really dig porno. ~Vern White (Vblast)

Reflection 1 by Sarena Johnson Safe Word by Joanne Marracci

I think you can go onto my original FB post announcing the show — when I posted the show flyer — and you can see two people beating up the show title. They could not grasp that the title was born of humor mixed with appropriation.

Have there been any surprises in the reactions or conversations you have witnessed from guests as they make their way through the pieces on display?

Unfortunately, I don’t have any good anecdotes for this question. All the feedback I’ve personally received from the show has been positive. Maybe that is because we put a “Viewer Discretion Advised” sign on the front of the gallery to avoid anyone being caught unaware by a genital or two — which means that only people WANTING to see genitals would be in the gallery.

Tell us about the work of curating art for exhibitions. Do you have a set process for finding new art and creators that excite you? Or is it a bit more varied?

I don’t have a set process. I’m sort of “abstract random” in the way I do things. This show was open call because I wanted any artist who desired to create work for this show to be able to; the show was about freedom of expression; I wanted to provide a platform for anyone who wanted to engage in that freedom. Usually, however, my shows are invitation only and I have a vision for the way I want the show to look, so I select artists whose styles work with that vision. I also try to find artists whose work is new to the community, so I tend to look outside of the local pool for new talent.

Do you encourage artists to reach out about exhibiting their work at Confluence Gallery outside of open calls? And is there any advice you could offer to artists who are maybe intimidated about approaching galleries?

I always encourage artists to register with the gallery’s Call to Artists list, so that they can see upcoming opportunities to exhibit their work. If I have a new artist approach me with her work, I will also send it around to Kaileah and Joanne Marracci, the show committee boss. And if a new artist’s work gets on my radar, I will try to work it into the shows I curate, whenever the work is suitable. In fact, one new artist who approached me a few years ago, Victoria Weber — her work was so stunning that I concepted “Cascadia” just to put her on the cover of a show. And that show turned out to be one of the gallery’s biggest selling shows ever.

Advice for artists about approaching galleries — the worst that can happen is that a gallery boss or curator says “No.” The most successful artists and writers have heard “No” probably more than any other type of professional. So you have to relax, say to yourself “Who the fuck cares if they tell me ‘no’?” then send in your work for shows in exactly the way the gallery asks you to. Make sure your work fits the show theme and make sure you read all the submission guidelines. For invitation-only shows, the curator contacts each of the artists she wants in her show and asks them. Then she sends the artists who say yes a set of submission guidelines, a gallery contract for artists, a show timeline and stuff like that. For shows that are “Open Call,” artists register on the Confluence Gallery web site to receive “Calls to Artists” for upcoming shows. Then when they get a call that fits their style, they just follow the directions to submit their work. Then, the curator will individually tell them if their work will be accepted for the show.

What’s coming up next for Confluence Gallery when Filthy Little Pictures wraps up?

“Biophilia: A Love Story,” which focuses on the connections between all living beings, and the fading, but innately human instinct to connect with nature. The show will open on April 30th and run through June 12th, 2022.

Do you have a dream project/exhibit you’d like to see come to fruition maybe a bit further down the road?

Actually I have an upcoming show that is my dream show, called “The Opposite of Entropy,” in late fall of 2022. It will be an abstract show, featuring Don DeLeva, David Hytone, Whiting Tennis, Vern White, Brian Scholdt, and other abstract artists. Also my dream as a collector — I’m dying to get my hands on some of this work that will be featured, and hang it in my own house.

Gustav Wunderwald’s Paintings of Weimar Berlin

Fabrik von Loewe & Co. (Moabit), 1926 NOTE: This article was written in Europe so different spellings and grammar rules apply. Probably. -The Comet

By Mark Hobbs

Berlin in June 1945 was not at all a pleasant place to be. As the dust settled on what was left of the city, blown to smithereens and now occupied by Russian and Allied forces, the landscape painter Gustav Wunderwald died from water poisoning in a hospital in the western suburb of Charlottenburg. He was sixty-three years old.

In the seventy years or so that have passed since his death, the city that Wunderwald painted over and again during the years of the Weimar Republic has been divided, rebuilt, reunified, and revived. And yet, despite the waves of history that have beat relentlessly, remorselessly against Berlin, were he alive today, Wunderwald would still recognise many aspects of the city that he painted during the late twenties. And now, with the lapsing of copyright on his paintings in many parts of the world, digital copies of these paintings are becoming more widely available, making it easier to view his work, and to better appreciate an artist who deserves wider recognition.

Born in Kalk, an industrial suburb on the outskirts of Cologne, Wunderwald experienced first-hand the modern, industrialised city from a young age. Showing early signs of a proficiency in painting, he undertook a two-year apprenticeship under the guidance of the painter Wilhelm Kuhn. Wunderwald quickly found his niche in theatrical and stage set design, taking a job as a scenery painter in Gotha in 1899. For the next thirteen years, his skills led him through a succession of jobs in a variety of cities. After a year in Gotha, he spent four years in Berlin (1900–1904) working at the studio of Georg Hartig and Company, where he specialised in theatrical set painting. From Berlin, Wunderwald moved to Stockholm, and then onwards to Düsseldorf, Innsbruck, and Freiberg over the course of the next eight years, before moving back to Berlin in 1912 to work as a stage designer at the German Opera House.

In 1915, Wunderwald was conscripted into the German army. Training in Königsberg was followed by despatch to Macedonia, as part of a replacement battalion for the German Army’s 43rd Infantry. Wunderwald was fortunate in that the Macedonian Front was a stable one, which saw little of the bloodshed that characterised both the Western and Eastern Fronts. Wunderwald even had time to paint pictures of the Macedonian landscape and towns that he saw, giving him the opportunity to hone his distinctive palette of dark colours.

In the wake of Germany’s defeat in 1918 he returned to Berlin, where he sought to establish himself as an independent artist, using his Charlottenburg apartment as a studio. Some eight years later, in 1926, Wunderwald’s persistence paid off when he came to the attention of Berlin gallery owner Karl Nierendorf and the prominent art critic Paul Westheim. Later that year, seven of Wunderwald’s paintings appeared in an exhibition entitled Das Gesicht von Berlin (The Face of Berlin) at Nierendorf’s gallery. To coincide with the exhibition, Westheim wrote a lead article on Wunderwald in his own art journal Das Kunstblatt, reproducing several works by the artist. For a few brief years, Wunderwald’s urban landscapes attracted attention in high places. Among those who brought his works were Gustav Böß, then mayor of Berlin, and the screenwriter Hans Kyser, writer of the script for F. W. Murnau’s 1926 filmic adaptation of Faust. Wunderwald continued to paint and exhibit until 1934, but without doubt his most prolific phase, and the period in which he produced his very best works, was between 1926 and 1929, when he repeatedly painted scenes from Berlin’s industrial areas. He worked as a film colourist for the German film conglomerate Ufa from 1934 until his death in 1945.

Wunderwald’s oeuvre consists chiefly of landscapes, many of which depict Berlin and its surroundings. The grey streets of the city’s working-class areas, to the north of the city centre, are just as often depicted as the cleaner, airier streets of the city’s affluent west end. Rural landscapes also figure, including views of Berlin’s lakes and the countryside around the Havel river. Despite the variety of scenes, it is for his depictions of Berlin’s working-class areas that Wunderwald is best known, largely thanks to Westheim’s article in Das Kunstblatt, in which he praised the artist’s “unromantic and objective [sachlich] approach” to the “bare and unprepossessingly rough world” of Berlin’s industrial neighbourhoods. Subsequent art historical writings have continued to associate Wunderwald with the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit (new

Unterführung in Spandau, 1927 Brücke über die Ackerstraße, 1927

objectivity) style of painting that emerged during the Weimar Republic, in which urban landscapes — with their typology of tenements, smokestacks, gasometers, and railway lines — were a dominant genre.

Wunderwald’s paintings of Berlin’s working-class neighbourhoods have an enigmatic quality about them. They employ a sooty palette of warm browns and greys, and have a stillness and architectural solidity to them that can perhaps be accounted for by the artist’s prior experience as a painter of theatrical scenery. One could well imagine scenes such as Fabrik von Loewe & Co. or Brücke über die Ackerstraße as backdrops to theatrical adaptations of Weimar-era novels like Alfred Döblin’s Berliner Alexanderplatz, Hans Fallada’s Little Man What Now?, or Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin.

Amidst the tenement blocks, factories, smokestacks, and advertising hoardings, Wunderwald found no shortage of subjects to paint. In a letter to a friend, written in the winter of 1926, he wrote: “Sometimes I stagger back as if drunk from my wandering through Berlin; there are so many impressions that I have no idea which way to go.” Wunderwald, describing his search for inspiring scenes to paint on the streets of the city, was not the first and by no means the last individual to find themselves overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of Berlin. His description of feeling drunk through sensory overload brings to mind fellow Berliner and sociologist Georg Simmel’s description of the “intensification of nervous stimulation” that the modern city-dweller encountered on the streets of the metropolis. Most urban inhabitants, argued Simmel, adopted a blasé attitude in order to protect themselves from the excess of sights, sounds, and movement encountered in the urban public sphere. By contrast, some individuals — like Wunderwald — consciously chose to immerse themselves in the tumult of the big city, wandering around its streets in a state of rapture, just as Baudelaire had done in Paris half a century earlier.

Wunderwald was not the only person wandering the streets of Berlin in search of inspiration during the late 1920s. Writers like Siegfried Kracauer, Franz Hessel, and Joseph Roth were also on the prowl, attracted to the city’s relentless pace of change, and in search of subjects worthy of writing about in the newspaper feuilletons. These flâneurs, like Wunderwald, wandered back and forth through the streets of Berlin’s urban landscape, obsessing over the ways in which the scenes that they encountered had endured and changed. In late 1932, the writer Siegfried Kracauer recounted his surprise and sadness upon finding out that a favourite café on the Kurfürstendamm had shut down. Kracauer’s first inclination that something is wrong comes when he tries to open the door, only to find it locked. Startled, he peers through the window and sees that the interior is empty. Surely, thinks Kracauer, it must have been cleared out overnight, as the premises had been lit up just the previous evening. “Or”, he asks, questioning his ability to adequately recollect the passage of time, “am I deluding myself?” Walter Benjamin also acutely felt the shock of change upon the streets of Berlin. He explored them in his text A Berlin Chronicle, which he claimed was not so much an autobiographical account of his childhood, than an account of the experience of place, “of a space, of moments and discontinuities.”

Berlin was — and still is — a city of “moments and discontinuities”. In 1910, the architectural critic Karl Scheffler wrote of Berlin as “always becoming, never being”. Scheffler’s phrase, oft-quoted thanks to its enduring relevance, referred to the city’s rapid growth throughout the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. When the city became the capital of a unified Germany in 1871, it was already well on the way to becoming one of the new nation’s most important industrial centres, thanks to its burgeoning railway construction industry. From 1890 onwards the city’s rapid growth was further bolstered by a new electrical engineering industry, spearheaded by Emil Rathenau and his Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft (AEG). Between 1871 and 1910 Berlin’s population jumped from 824,000 to over two million inhabitants. A large proportion of the new inhabitants were immigrants from the surrounding provinces, who moved to Berlin in search of work in industrial districts such as Wedding, Moabit, and Prenzlauer Berg, districts characterised by long streets of densely populated tenements and factories.

The city that Scheffler wrote of was that very same encountered by Wunderwald during his first stay in Berlin between 1900 and 1904, and this sense of constant flux is key to developing a better understanding of Wunderwald’s portraits of the city. Thanks to his frequent tendency to specify the places he painted in the titles he gave to his works, and with the aid of the city’s digitised address books, it is possible to look at the paintings he produced of the city in the twenties and figure out what the same scenes looked like years earlier, when he first saw them (if he did at all). What’s clear from such an exercise is that in many cases significant changes had taken place in the scenes that he painted.

This is best illustrated in a 1927 painting by Wunderwald of Travemünder Straße, in the north Berlin neighbourhood of Gesundbrunnen. Travemünder Straße was a relatively new street, having been constructed in 1906; that is, after Wunderwald had departed Berlin for the first time. In order to lay out the new street, Berlin’s municipal authorities partially demolished one of the city’s most ostentatiously decorated tenements, built in the 1890s and known as the Luisenhaus, the rear of which can be seen at the right of the painting.

In spite of the wholesale destruction of the city during the Second World War, it is still possible to visit some of the streets that Wunderwald painted in the 1920s, and recognise the scenes he depicted. Any tour would have to include a trip to the northern district of Wedding, to see the monumental iron railway bridge that weighs heavily over Ackerstraße, the busy street intersection of Müllerstraße and Seestraße, and factory buildings and tenements on Lindowerstraße. Given how much has survived and how much has changed — moments and discontinuities — I like to think that Wunderwald would be happy to wander about present-day Berlin, a city that remains in a perpetual state of flux, just as it was in his own day.

Originally published in The Public Domain Review at publicdoaminreview.org. If you wish to reuse it please see: publicdomainreview.org/legal/ c