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Insecurity rising, spirits dropping. Life is going on in a most peculiar way.
Now the second lock-down has hit us and again people are cocooning. Home-office, home-schooling, TV and boredom. Just like in other countries around the world.
Berlin, a city so vivid, so inviting with its cafés, restaurants, clubs, galleries, museums, music-halls, opera-houses etc., etc., has turned down its temperature. But life, itself, seems to be struggling on. The art-scene especially is flourishing in a lot of places by investing creative powers in finding new paths through the fogs of time to re-reach their audiences.
Museums have started to put their treasures online so that everybody is able to take long, and now undisturbed, walks in places always intended to be visited but that viewers rarely succeeded in doing so because of lack of time.
Theatres and cinemas try to go on with modified arrangements; this does not mean that stages or the movies are modified, but that physical space in the auditoriums looks quite different now. Banners blocking two out of three seats: depending on the respective colour chosen, it reminds the guests of chocolate packs (a jolly red) or funerals (a decent black). Consequently, performances take place in front of very small but unusually committed audiences. Outside all lights are turned on shouting silently into the darkness, ‘We are still alive’.