Easties and Westies

When I travel, I like to collect unique glass pieces—one of a kind martini glasses, hand-blown etched champagne flutes, that sort of thing. So I asked my buddy at the Hotel Adlon, Herr Lubo, where I should go. He suggested stilwerk, a collaboration of interior design, design products, and lifestyle accessories on Kantstrasse in the Ku’damm district.

It was a good pick. At first it sort of looks like an indoor mall, but once you go into the little shops spread over a six floor atrium, you find that these guys are selling things you won’t find at KaDeWe—or Ikea. One shop had plastic furniture with overtones of Eames but done in luminescent florescent yellow or red or blue. Another shop featured herb-stuffed pillows and duvets, called discheldeckes, in various seasonal weights. A haut kitchen design store had round cocktail shakers that looked a bit like tea pots and an astonishing espresso machine with a glass cupola water reservoir.

Another place had Bakelit napkin holders and art deco light fixtures. And I found my off-beat martini glasses: handblown orange glass on flamingo-like pink stems with breezy accents of blood orange clouds swimming through the glass. They’re almost too beautiful to actually drink from.

After I bought my glasses, I ended up chatting with a ceramic artist, Sabine Weissbrich. Weissbrich is part of an artist’s collective made up of eight women—four Ossis (a nickname for East Germans) and four Wessis or Westies—called Subotnik, which is a Russian slang word used to refer to the monthly Saturdays or Sundays when East Berliners had to work for free for the good of the state.

“We (the women artists) meet on weekends in an atelier to make our art, and I think it is our own subotnik,” Weissbrich said as she showed me around the gallery.

There was a marked difference in the women’s work and it took only a minute or two before I was able to easily recognize Ossis artists from Wessis. It began with color. “We have very different tastes,” Weissbrich admitted. “Sometimes I say, “Oh, this color is beautiful,’ and my friend from the East will go, ‘Oh, I hate it.’”

Weissbrich showed me her ceramic donuts dipped in glazes of yellow and purple and red, hanging above abstract slabs, like ashtrays, from an Eastern artist, that were gray and charcoal and midnight blue. “But now I am becoming interested in the way they make things and the colors they choose, and, I think, they are starting to learn from me as well. In ten years, I don’t think you’ll be able to tell an Ossis artist from a Wessis artist. It is all changing so rapidly.”