Dresden Tiki and more

When I heard about shooting my next German TV movie in Dresden, I was looking forward to getting to discover this famous location in the ex-GDR. I had emigrated to the US almost ten years before the wall came down and never had a chance to see much of East-Germany.

I certainly did not expect to find any Tiki. Anybody who knows a little WWII history knows about the almost complete destruction of Dresden in last days of the war. It was the European version of Hiroshima, a conscious move by the Allies to break the last resistance of Germany:

Before this, Dresden had been the "Florence of the Elbe River". I had been built up by Kings and rulers in Baroque splendor. After the war, the GDR did not have the money to rebuild on a large scale, but since the reunification, the city fathers decided to bet on tourism and completely restored the historic center of town:

Now, having been born in Europe, I am unimpressed by such ornamental excess, much like Colin Farrell in "In Bruges". I am a convinced 20th Century modernist and inhabitant of the New World. The fact that these buildings had been restored and were not fully original did not help much. To me, Dresden Central was a tourist Disneyland...

In that respect, the City reminded me of Paris. But then, other cities I had been to came to mind. Dresden's twisted history has left its marks. My Hotel was in a sort of a "backstage" part to the pretty center, in dingy Friedrichstadt. Here, history had not been erased:

And here I was reminded more of Havana, or even Detroit: Hollow eyed houses and abandoned buildings that had never been renovated...

...mixed with GDR Plattenbauten and remaining old apartment buildings:

This, and many empty lots:

As a matter of fact, rubble rocks were on sale here, 1.- Euro a piece!:

Why am I telling you all this? To have you share my surprise when I discovered this:

A Tiki ice cream parlor!
The back opens to an area called the "Kunsthof" (art yard):

...and its building sports exotic animal sculpts and unique wicker balconies:

I immediately felt welcome :) :

The interior is lovingly constructed with any exotic materials available:

It displays two fine murals:

...and tables imprinted with logo Tikis:

I'd never thought I would find a "Tiki Breakfast" on a menu:

...which has a nice cover with art by Miles Thompson:

...and a brief, concise description of Tiki style on the inside:

As I was sitting in the Tiki, listening to Martin Denny on an Internet radio station while rain was pouring down, the full effect of a tropical island in the urban jungle took place:

I found the Tiki Cafe because we were shooting in a neighborhood across the river called the Neustadt...

A part of Dresden which has survived the war and communism and has been kept historically intact, and is now the cultural and subcultural heart of the city.

The Tiki was opened by two guys, both fans of American 50s culture. One is the descendant of the Neumann family, who has been supplying Dresdeners with ice cream for generations, and the other, Mirko Glaser, heads a Country/Rockabilly band called the "Lazy Boys", which I had the pleasure of seeing live:

They have toured the States, and been to California many times

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDmEPQeITzM

The Tiki Cafe concept has proved so successful for them that they opened a SECOND Tiki in the Hecht quarter, just North of the Neustadt:

Both Tikis serve alcoholic ice cream concoctions as well as cocktails:

It was very gratifying to see Tiki places such as this, being so lovingly constructed and successfully adding to the cultural fabric of a city.

Coming up next: The Dresden Anthropology Museum, and the Kirchner Studio, birthplace of the "Bruecke" artists group.

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2011-07-13 10:18 ]

How do you feel about the place borrowing your art from the BOT, BigBro?

On 2011-07-11 00:52, Chuck Tatum is Tiki wrote:
How do you feel about the place borrowing your art from the BOT, BigBro?

I think you should sue them. :wink:

Thank you for the ice cool post. Great find!

Chuck, I cannot imagine anything more gratifying than finding evidence of the influence of my books all over the world, from Waikiki to Prague and now Dresden. I collect anything from boxer shorts to CD covers that use imagery from my books because they show how I accomplished my goal to have Tiki become a pop culture icon again. If anybody would use images from the books en masse and start making a mint on it I would object, but so far that has not been the case. Sure, lotsa money is being made on the Tiki revival, but nobody has gotten rich on it, me included. That was never my goal, I just pursued what I loved.

These folks here are hard working, talented artists that did a good job in perpetuating the art form. For most Tiki creators, it is the love for the genre that makes them do it first, then the money. Nothing makes me happier than seeing a Tiki venture succeed - with or without my inspiration.

Before I continue with other urban archaeological finds, here a quick addendum:

Last night I was lucky to catch a ride to swing by Mirko Glaser's OTHER endeavor, his Jazz bar. To show that he is not just a country bumpkin, here are some photos of the "Blue Note":

The Blue Note is on the same street than the Tiki Kunsthof...

[
(my night time photo of its sign looks like a sticker, it's so crisp!)

...called Goerlitzer Strasse. Mirko told me that when he opened the Blue Note, many years ago, it was the only place on the street, with most buildings being empty and falling apart. Now the street is the center of a vibrant club scene:

The Blue Note looks like a classic mid-century Jazz club...

A long tunnel of a bar...

..with low lighting...

...and live Jazz, this time a quintet with two alto sax delivering a classic Gerry Mulligan style bar jazz, with interesting versions of "Caravan", and a great tune written by Mirko Glaser:

http://soundcloud.com/mirkoglaser/addicted-ive-kanew-quintett-s

A cool place, with only one slightly incongruous (non-Jazz club) piece of decor...

...to which we will happily turn a blind eye. :)

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2011-07-21 14:54 ]

Now, this is nice. From time to time, someone is finding something in Germany. Never heard of this locations, but it is good to know. Dresden is quite far away for a shake. But you´ll never know. Danke, Sven

In every new location I go to I am looking forward to visiting the Ethnology Museum. I love old-fashioned Ethnology and Natural History Museums, after all they inspired many of the concepts of Tiki Lounges.

The Dresden one is in the Japanese Palais:

To my disappointment, it only mounts temporary exhibitions, and has no permanent collection on display. So this time, none of the exhibits were about any of the Oceanic cultures. But to the culturally curious there is always something to discover:

One thing I really liked was the that courtyard had these Asian support post figures that reminded me of the Genie on the Zombie Village menu. The kind of fairy tale book illustration Asian that quickly became politically incorrect in the 2nd half of the 20th Century

They still stand as a reminder of a romantic fascination with exotic cultures...

...and of an ornamental architecture that quickly became extinct with modernism - except for Tiki! :)

One of the current exhibits was on Amazonian Indian tribes, and showed some interesting examples of body modification then and now...

...and the use of blow guns:

...giving the term "blow" for Cocaine a very literal meaning!

Most interesting were the use of bark cloth and basketry for Duk Duk-like costumes:

...displayed here in front of an A-frame hut:

Then there were other paralels to Oceanic cultures, like head trophies:

Among them, most famously, the shrunken heads:

Here with the first SLOTH shrunken head I had ever seen!
Then there was an exhibit on exotic landscape wall papers, forerunners to Poly pop bar murals:

The most rewarding find were several Museum publications on Oceanic art (x-ept the French one):

...of which this one was right up my A-frame alley! :) :

A 661 pages thick tome an the cult houses of New Guinea with a slew of never before seen photos and diagrams, of which I can only share a few here:

A museum visit well worth it!

Awesome thread, and awesome finds Bigbro. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks Ernie! Here's something for you the artist:

Readers of my tome "Tiki Modern" know of my interest in the early 20th Century artistic Avantgarde in Europe and the inspiration they drew from Oceanic and African native art. I had touched on it in the Book of Tiki, but went further into it in Tiki Modern. Besides the Parisian "primitive art" fans like Picasso and the Surrealists, I became fascinated by the German artist group "Die Bruecke". After finding an amazing photo (Tiki Modern Ch 2, Page 28) of a 1921 exhibition where the Bruecke members displayed their paintings of primitive masks and sculpture right next to Oceanic carvings (in an obvious parallel to the Tiki Revival), I researched the source of their inspirations.

One of the group's founders, painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, was apparently inspired by some Palau Men's Club House beams he saw in the Dresden Ethnology Museum in 1907:

The Palau "Storyboard" gable concept was later used for American Tiki temple entrances by Trader Vic, Steve Crane and others:

The free depiction of sexuality in the Dresden boards was a boost to Kirchner's attempts to break with established, stuffy mores of early 1900s Germany. He decorated his studio with curtains with sexual motifs he painted, and furniture he had carved after primitive art pieces. He later did the same in his Berlin studio.

Here a bad quality j-peg of the Dresden Studio curtains:

...and a 1909 painting of a nude bather next to a table he carved:

Here is a mirror carved by Kirchner some time later:

(One can see why I drew a comparison between a Kirchner carved chair and the Witco Wahine chair in Tiki Modern)

Later Kirchner carved a complete bed and other furniture in this primitivist style.

Maybe some folks here can now appreciate my surprise when one day, on the way to the discount food market in the street where my budget hotel stood, I stumbled onto this sign:

Without my realizing it, I was living in the very street where Kirchner's first studio had been!:

To better describe the mood of his atelier, here a description for a piece auctioned by Sotheby's:

"In September 1905 Kirchner moved to a new studio in a former butcher's shop in a working class district of Dresden, a space that became the focal point for the Brücke group's bohemian lifestyle. Kirchner filled his studio with textiles, batik hangings, sculptures and paintings, many of them inspired by the artist's encounters with tribal art in Dresden's museums and libraries. Gustav Schiefler was later to describe Kirchner's studio in 1910 as 'a primitive setting, born of necessity but nevertheless strongly marked by his own taste. He lived a disorderly lifestyle here according to bourgeois standards, simple in material terms, but highly ambitious in his artistic sensitivity' (quoted in exh. cat., Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: The Dresden and Berlin Years, London, 2003, p. 17).

Executed circa 1909, Liebesszene I belongs to a small series of erotic reliefs in terracotta, some of which, along with other early works in the same medium, are now believed to be lost or destroyed. Terracotta was an unusual medium for Kirchner; aside from these works in terracotta and other reliefs and figures executed in stone and metal, Kirchner's sculptural oeuvre is almost exclusively carved in wood. In its blatantly erotic subject matter and simplistic stylisation of the figures, the present work displays the influence of carved wooden beams from the Palau Islands in Micronesia that Kirchner had seen in the Ethnographic Museum in Dresden, while the medium of the relief itself may have been at least partly inspired by the doorway decorations from the Indian cave temples at Ajanta which Kirchner discovered illustrated in Dresden's central library. The subject matter of Liebesszene I also mirrors the louche, bohemian lifestyle and lax attitudes towards sex and nudity that characterised Kirchner's own surroundings. This atmosphere, depicted in numerous drawings and sketches, was present everywhere in the studio itself, from the roundels of couples making love on the curtains between the two rooms, to the wall hangings in his bedroom, reflecting the Brücke and Jugendstil ideal of art, lifestyle and decoration harmonising in a single creative unity."

I personally am very fond of this simple nude sculpture, modeled after his girlfriend Nina Hard:

[ Edited by: bigbrotiki 2011-07-16 15:00 ]

On 2011-07-12 00:25, bigbrotiki wrote:
Chuck, I cannot imagine anything more gratifying than finding evidence of the influence of my books all over the world

...and besides: if anyone, I would sue them. It's MY illustration! And I'll sue you, if you sue them!

This humorous message was brought to you by the painter and creator of the BOT cover and mug :)

Is Tiki-style acknowledged as a California-born (or even American) mid-century pop culture in Europe ??

Or do they view it simply as a generic homage to Polynesian culture ??

John-O, the average German would ask "What's Polynesia?" Hawaii was so far away from post-war Germany, it had very little pop-cultural impact, here a rare example from the movie "Paradies der Matrosen" from 1959:

Nowadays there's even much less awareness of any South Seas subject matter. If you observe the decor of the Tiki Dresden, it is very Surf and Beach oriented, so European Tiki revival stuff is definitely more American pop culture connected.

Those flavors sound yummmay!!!