Handel and Virginia Woolf

Berwick Church

Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum

Our early summer trip to England and Germany was delightful. Our themes were music, art, literature. We visited the homes of Handel (1 in London, 1 in Halle), Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Horace Walpole, Goethe (his home in town and his cottage in the park), Paula Modersohn-Becker, Heinrich Vogeler, Max Liebermann, and Bertolt Brecht. We went to lovely churches: Berwick church in Sussex (with paintings on the walls by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant), St. Martin-in-the-Fields (where we heard a noon concert), St. Peter and Paul in Weimar where Herder preached. We went to museums: The Brighton Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, The Foundling Museum, the Kunsthalle Bremen, the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, the Goethe Museum, the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, the Weimar City Museum, the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle, the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Wannsee Conference House. We strolled along the Downs above the chalk cliffs at Beachy Head in Sussex, we travelled by ferry overnight from Harwich to Hook of Holland, we took the old-fashioned Moor-Express train from Bremen to Worpswede, and we went on two river boat tours, one in Halle and one in Berlin. And then there were the concerts: at the Town Hall of Lewes, Jordi Savall at the Handel Festival in Halle, and the Akademie für Alte Musik in Berlin. And best of all we got to see my great-nephew Tyler in Berlin, where he is studying at

Humboldt University.