Various Club Activities

"timeless audrey" was created by the Audrey Hepburn Children's Fund in order to raise funds for a joint-venture with UNICEF called, "All Children in School"™. This program is an educational initiative aimed at bringing 115,000,000 children, two-thirds of whom are girls, quality basic education in developing nations.

Visitors enjoyed seeing over 1,000 personal objects beautifully displayed in eleven time capsules. These items, all lovingly hand selected, include Audrey’s own wardrobe, costumes, original photographs, personal mementos, handwritten letters, books, jewelry, awards, movie clips and home movies. This exhibit that offers the most detailed and authentic glimpse into this beloved actress’s life and career.

The Real Audrey
"My career is a complete mystery to me. It's been a total surprise since the first day. I never thought I was going to be an actress; I never thought I was going to be in movies. I never thought it would all happen the way it did."

The real Audrey Hepburn story begins with a little girl who experienced the cruelty and consequences of World War II and who never forgot what liberation felt like or the images of aid arriving to her and thousands like her in Holland. Although she had dreamed of becoming a prima ballerina since childhood, the war rendered her physically incapable of it. Instead, Audrey turned a lost dream into the next best thing; she took modeling jobs where she learned to work in front of the camera, used her training to compete with 4,000 dancers for one of ten spots in a chorus line and, eventually, found herself in front of a motion picture camera. And that is how we came to know her, be captivated by her, and why we are still in love with her.

[source: www.audreyhepburn.com | life&career]

“For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.”

Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz

UNESCO World Heritage Site is a site (such as a forest, mountain, lake, desert, monument, building, complex, or city) that is on the list that is maintained by the international World Heritage Programme, A World Heritage Site is a place of either cultural or physical significance.

The Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm, also known as the English Grounds of Wörlitz, is one of the first and largest English parks in Germany and continental Europe. It was created in the late 18th century under the regency of Duke Leopold III of Anhalt-Dessau (1740-1817), returning from a Grand Tour to Italy, the Netherlands, England, France and Switzerland he had untertaken together with his friend architect Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff. Both strongly influenced by the ideals of The Enlightenment, they aimed to overcome the formal garden concept of the Baroque era in favour of a naturalistic landscape as they had seen at Stourhead Gardens and Ermenonville. Today the cultural landscape of Dessau-Wörlitz encompasses an area of 142 km2 (54.8 sq mi) within the Middle Elbe Biosphere Reserve in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt.

”Artists Talk”

Three talented Club members, Christina Norstorm Blankstein (painter), Ingrid Fraley (ballet dancer) and My-Linh Kunst (photographer) kindly co-hosted this event. While being engaged in different art fields, the three ladies have several things in common: they are all non-German and they have all had successful professions before settling in Berlin with their families.

On 30 June, we were honoured to be invited by the Director General of the Berlin State Library, Frau Barbara Schneider-Kempf, to visit the library building “Unter den Linden 8”. We were welcomed in the “Roter Salon” and given a short presentation by Frau Schneider-Kempf about the library and its impressive assets and also its surprisingly low funds for further acquisition.
The heads of four special collections, Herr Falk Eisermann, Dr. Katrin Böhme, Herr Roland Schmidt-Hensel and Herr Wolfgang Crom, brought some of their treasures to show us and shared their love and enthusiasm for these rare and precious items with us.
Among them were a map of utopian Schlaraffenland, a 2m-long pirated English edition of the Rhine panorama, an imagined birds-eye view of Dresden with the Frauenkirche, hand-written scores from Bach and Beethoven, impressive magnificently illustrated and bound Bibles and a miniature prayer book. Clearly a lot of thought went into the selection of items to be shown, the presenters having chosen items they thought would appeal specifically to an international women’s club.
We were then taken in two groups on tours through the construction and renovation site, where we received an explanation of the original axis-concept of the building by architect Ernst von Ihne and the new design, which will bring the former heart of the library – the reading room – back to its center, adding high-safety cellar rooms to protect the treasures as well as a modern space and structure concept.
A big thanks to Cary Greenberg and our wonderful Social Events team and everyone at the Staatsbibliothek who helped initiate and organize this fascinating event, which left me eagerly awaiting the talk by Frau Schneider-Kempf on 1 October.

JFK Information Evening

September 2009

Discovering the beautiful lake district in the south-west of Berlin from the comfort of a pleasure boat. The 7-Seen-Rundfahrt (7 lakes round trip) goes through the Wansee lakes as far as Potsdam and lasted just under 2 hours.