Museumsnacht Köln

This past Saturday, a number of museums in the city Cologne (Köln in German), open their doors from 7pm to 3am for the low price of 17 Euros. How could I stay away? Christine and I hopped on a train to Cologne, which thanks to our student tickets costs us nothing. When we arrived at the central train station and stepped outside, we saw the following.

entrance to the excavation site

That is a view of the Cologne Cathedral. Sadly, I did not have a chance to go in, but I did get to go below. After picking up tickets from a nearby, we made our way to the Kölner Domgrabung (Cologne Cathedral Excavation). The entrance to the dig is through a peculiarly shaped tunnel. The entire site had been sealed up centuries ago, so in order to break through, round cores of stone were extracted from the wall in the outline of a door. The process was sort of like opening a pumpkin by taking an apple corer all around the top.


Once inside, I felt almost like I was in a cave. The walls varied from brick to rough and uneven stone. The walkways consisted of metal grates that allowed us to walk over and look down into the ancient foundations. Guides dotted the catacombs to answer questions and share interesting facts about each area. The most memorable for me was one where I could see miniature columns in the ground below the walkway. When I asked about them, the guide explained that before the first iteration of the church had been constructed Romans had used the area for regular housing. The columns would have supported floorboards. An oven would then warm the air underneath, thus creating a heated floor system. I knew the Romans were clever, but it still amazes me what they could do all those millennia ago.

After the excavation, we headed to the Chocolate Museum. The first floor covered cacao bean production. It even had a small room meant to emulate a tropical rain forest. Having just come inside, the hot and humid air was a welcome change. Now, I do not know for sure if the plants were real or not. However, if they were then people with allergies had best beware of mangos.

The next stage of the museum got into chocolate processing. We saw machines for grinding treated beans into cacao butter and cacao mass, of which the latter goes on to turn into chocolate. Devices for heating, mixing, stirring, molding, and packing the sweets surrounded us. As a pair of engineers, we were kind of geeking out about the whole thing. She wanted to run a factory. I wanted to design the robots.

Eventually, we moved on to the next floor. We found ourselves plunged back in time. The section explored chocolate's history, starting with the Maya. (Okay, it actually started with some other culture in Central America, but I've forgotten its name.) I recall reading that human sacrifices were allowed the rare privilege of smoking tobacco and drinking chocolate beverages. The beverages were colored with red dye to symbolize blood. I suppose if you're going to die, drinking hot chocolate and smoking a pipe is not the worst way to spend your last days.

The history lesson continued into European imperialism. One display held porcelain from the 18th century when Europeans learned the secret to its creation. Having a special set for chocolate drinks seemed to be quite the fashion. Further along the timeline, we saw several unbelievably quaint vending machines.

perhaps a little impractical, but adorable nonetheless

After the chocolate museum, we headed back to the area around the cathedral. There we found the Museum Ludwig. This art museum had stricter entrance policies than the other places we visited. They felt up purses at the door to check for water bottles. All bottles had to be thrown out then and there. This would have bothered me less had there not been a cafe selling drinks just inside the doors. It seemed the regulation had more to do with profit than protecting the artwork. Before we could go to the museum proper, we had to lock up our bags and coats in one of the coin operated lockers. Put in a 50 cent coin and you can remove the key. With our possessions safely stowed, we could at last see some art.

The first display was photography. I would not call that my favorite medium. Quite often I cannot find a line between intriguing composition and a snapshot of junk on a table, and don't get me started on photos of other photos. One picture however caught my attention. From afar it looked like the leg of a ballerina on point showing the sole of the shoe. However, something seemed off. As I stepped closer, I realized that what I had mistaken for a tutu was just a wisp of pink gauze, and the leg itself belonged to some cloven hoofed animal. The artist had tricked me, and he had used a real image to do so. I respected him for it.

The next work to catch my attention would have gotten it had I been blind. It consisted of a large empty room painted red with slogans written in enormous letters in white over the floor and along the walls. Black and white photographs that all looked like they had come from the 1960s to me hung on the walls with captions below. They all said something along the lines of "We are forced to conform," with respect to various aspects of life. As if that were not dramatic enough, a recording of a man with a deep, sinister voice blared over it all. The sound of uneasy crowds or screams or vomiting played in the background while the man intoned "My people are better than your people. We invented everything," along with similar statements. Standing in the center of all that, caught between the hateful recording and the scornful walls, I felt cramped despite the size of the room. Part of my brain was trembling "This political and social commentary is judging me!" Another part screamed "The arrogance! Does this guy think that rehashed sheeple dribble and a few predictably poignant questions deserve to be blown up to such a scale like it's something new?" I got out of there fast, disturbed on two fronts. I suppose in that sense the art succeeded. It made me feel something.

Most of the other pieces were equally modern or post modern or pre-future or whatever the term is for art that does not try to mimic reality. One section though was devoted to Picasso and other cubist works. While I have never found late Picasso particularly moving or attractive, I admired the intelligence it must take to hold so many perspective in view at once. Me being me, I try to put the pieces back together to reconstruct the original. Perhaps I am missing the point there, but then who can tell me how to engage with art?

After exhausting the museum, which compared to the Art Institute in Chicago seemed only of middling size, we finally took the 11:15 back to Aachen. I collapsed into my bed and succumbed to that special kind of tired only museums can give you.