By the end of 2019, Olaf Metzel bought the two-volume edition of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Berliner Chronik/Berliner Kindheit um 1900’.
Rereading it, he was reminded of his own childhood in Berlin: “This was in the 1960s, but there are individual descriptions by Benjamin that were quite familiar to me. The pantry, the special relish of baked apples, the noisy ambience of the beer halls. Not too much had changed about that.”
The ruins of destroyed houses between the new buildings, were something completely different, however. They seemed like foreign objects, and “had a different, inexplicable presence and attraction”.
Childhood patterns as a program of contrasts were the occasion and starting point for a series of new sculptures in different techniques and materials: ‘Berliner Kindheit’.
