Stargazing

At the end of our street, whose name, Stargarder, always makes me of think of stargazing (though it actually refers to a city in northwest Poland, a couple hours from Berlin), is a planetarium, one of the largest and most modern in Europe. It is one of those buildings that, if you didn't already know you were in the old East, would tell you immediately. I say that despite its looking a lot like Epcot Center in Florida, but perhaps the point is that only dedicated Cold Warriors ever thought that giant, many-paneled silver balls were a good look for a building. Next to Epcot, the Zeiss Grossplanetarium is smaller, more domestic, its silo-like neighboring structure and arboreal setting giving it an almost rustic air, like a relic of the Space Age landed in a slightly scuzzy forest clearing.

I first saw the planetarium on our second day in Berlin, when we cycled to the Pankow Bürgeramt, a complex of official buildings, to get our Anmeldung, the paper that makes your residence in Berlin official. The visit to the Bürgeramt, whose mangy grass, barbed wire, looming smokestack, and air of severity and neglect give it a most unfortunate resemblance to a concentration camp, is a story too good to abbreviate here; I'll tell it another time. Anyway, there they were, three blocks down our street where it ends at Prenzlauer Allee, two giant totems of German historical weirdness: glowering yellow-brick Prussian officialdom on the right, silvery Communist planetarium to the left.

I rarely go to that end of our street, and didn't think of the planetarium again until I saw that múm, the Icelandic band, was giving a twentieth-anniversary concert there over two nights in September. Though I don't really know múm's music, I had a dim idea that their front people were ghostly twin sisters who sang in elfin high voices and played cello and other instruments rather well. I had seen them in two video installations by the patience-testing Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. Like everything Icelandic, they (and Kjartansson's art) seemed earnestly weird, un-jaded, connected to nature in a way I envied. Surely this promise of unspoiled refreshment is what has made Iceland the Portugal of the north, the obscure place that seemingly everyone has been to?

So I bought a ticket, awaited the date, and last night at 8 o'clock cycled three blocks down our street to the planetarium, whose lobby glowed blue, shedding light on the difficulty of finding a bike parking space in a city where cycling is the way to get around, especially in the múm demographic. Two flights up a spiral staircase, I was ushered to my seat, which reclined in Economy-plus fashion, forcing you to look up at the ceiling. An opening set by one of the band members (not one of the elfin twins), whose beautiful voice was a little crowded by busy electronic backgrounds, gave an inkling of what the show would be like: music you could get lost in, with simple, repetitive English lyrics, and above you, on the dome of the ceiling, the movement of the stars, the earth spinning at a distance, close brushes with the pores of the moon. I forgot that I was inside for minutes at a time.

The actual show was all the more remarkable, especially for the lead singer Gyda Valtysdottir, whose twin Kristin Anna no longer appears with the group. A superb cellist (she studied at the Basel Musik Hochschule), Valtysdottir plays standing up with the instrument strapped to her, occasionally switching to guitar or keyboard. A few times she set down her instruments to perform jerkily elegant moves, as if Pina Bausch had incorporated burpees and sun salutations into a dance piece. It was hard at times to tear your eyes away and contemplate the ceiling, but eventually most eyes gravitated upward.

"Slow down...so I can catch you," sang Valtysdottir, over and over in her soft voice, giving an earthly, indeed erotic tinge to the spiraling of planets overhead. "Thank you," she said towards the end of the concert, "for spending these few, very small moments looking down at our planet." Without a word about the environment or Greta Thunberg, the concert left me feeling reverent towards the earth in a way that East Berlin doesn't usually make me. A little vacation to Iceland, it left me yearning for time in nature.