The composer monument on Griegstrasse Photo: Oliver Ohmann
By Oliver Ohmann
If you turn off Oberhaardter Weg on Königsallee in Grunewald, you will come to Griegstrasse. A fine area, with beautiful homes.
On a walk there I stumbled upon a bronze conductor, man-high, on a pedestal. But it is not the Norwegian Edvard Grieg. I know him, he looks different. Kind of like Mark Twain, with flowing white hair and a mustache.
The man on the pedestal is more reminiscent of a scene from a Harry Potter film. The maestro depicted swings his baton as if he were about to perform an Expecto Patronus spell. I learned from the neighborhood that a local resident put up the sculpture around ten years ago.
The aforementioned Mark Twain, author of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, lived in Berlin from October 1891 to March 1892. A gifted observer who wrote of Berlin shortly after returning home to the United States: “The main body of the city looks as if it had been built in the last week, the rest looks as if it had been built perhaps six or even eight months ago old.”
For Mark Twain, Berlin was the Chicago of Europe and he added: “I don’t think there is anything on earth that you can’t learn in Berlin – except the German language.”