Postcard From Munich ....

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30883, 16 October 1965, Page 5

Postcard From Munich ....

.By

Molnar

pIRST world exposition of Transport and Communication. The transmission of the word becomes faster, better, clearer. Everybody wants to communicate. Nobody wants to listen. Models of hexagonal communication satellites, like tenfacled doodles, gyrate, dispensing hexagonal news. They have the clumsy charm of early flyingmachines. A space station looms in the sky 200 feet high suspended on wires, a small scale sunset turned into stone. Rockets of enormous size menace the stars with intrusion. They were given mythological names. Letters are sorted electronically at enormous speed. Planes are sorted electronically at enormous speed. Everything sparkles, crackles. Everything arrives safely to its destination. Everything starts again. In the Swiss pavilion is the world's first complete cyclorama. Standing in the centre of the room you are travelling across Switzerland in a bubble. The illusion is complete. So is the discomfort of turning around all the time so as not to miss the world behind you. I’d better take a good window seat, Munich is back at its gayest period. King Ludwig is reigning. His buildings

in all their eclectic splendour dominate the city. Gothic, classical, baroque, they make every street into a setting for an operetta. The black storms from the Alps unleash Wagner, but the little gold and white baroque churches hold firm. Everybody praying in the cheerful fantasy of their interiors goes straight into a Catholic heaven.

People are prosperous, happy and political. Freedom to blame the Government still has not lost its charm. But ideological issues are less and less important. Europe has reached a political maturity. Th annual beer festivals are about to start. Enormous halls, each td~hold 8000 jolly Bavarians at their most exuberant, are being constructed. Brass bands will be playing, and singing and drinking will be in earnest. This is the place where the smallest measure of beer is a schooner. In the Neue Kunsthalle I saw the first total picture. It was an enormous room, specially constructed, with levels, platforms, extrusians. The picture runs alongside the walls,, climbs up the ceilings, oozes down the stairs, swamps the floor, bright reds, blues, yellows, ambush you from ail directions. It was hell. "Let's have tea in the Picture today" says the hostess.