The day after his arrival in Berlin, on 12/12/36, Beckett bought a booklet of 12 tickets for the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum. He used ten and also visited, usually more than once, the other museums of the Museumsinsel, the Nationalgalerie and the Tell Halaf Museum. As in Hamburg, he found modern collections closed to the public, for instance on the upper floor of the Kronprinzenpalais. As before, he could still view some modern works, but much of his six weeks in Berlin was spent in Renaissance collections. How closely his study of art intertwined with his perspective on the world around him, becomes clear when he describes scenes from his walks through German cities in the language of Dutch landscape painting, or his New Year’s Eve as having “an atmosphere of van Brueghel the Younger” (31/12/36).
His literary work, too, echoes with impressions from his Bildungsreise. In the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, the Flemish Baroque painter Adriaen Brouwer particularly captured his attention and the motifs of “Brouwer, dear Brouwer” (05/02/37) may be found again in the characters and scenes of Waiting for Godot, while the man at the window in the upper left corner of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Dutch Proverbs joins a cast of figures that Beckett related to, drew on (Walther von der Vogelweide, see Module C) and wrote (Belacqua in More Pricks Than Kicks, 1934).
