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| Paul Schutzer 'West Berliners waving to their relatives on the unseen Eastern side of the Wall' (1962) |
Here I am, I'm back in Berlin, and as usual I can't get the hang of it.
I've been coming to this city, off and on, for well over thirty years and each time it's different. The world has changed and so has Berlin.
Berlin is harder than it used to be because the most famous landmark has gone. «You're in the East», my driver keeps saying, in spite of the fact he himself is barely old enough to remember the Wall. Then later: «You're in the West». But the dedicated tourists who go looking for Berlin's distinguishing feature can't find it. They made a big mistake. They pulled it down.
The city of the famous Wall not actually having a wall. And the argument about the Wall is one part of a much larger argument the city has been with itself, what it calls the Haupstadtdebatte. What do we do about the capital? What do we do about the past?
Ah yes. The past.
Look at the everyday surface of Berlin, quotidian Berlin, once the city of confrontation, the city of demarcation, one ideology divided against another and separated by a wall. What was Hitler's ambition? To conquer Europe, certainly, but only as a pastime while he pursued his two more serious purposes: to kill the Jews and to rebuild Berlin. Read Speer. Why was Speer favoured? Why were Speer and Hitler intertwined? Speer found himself as close as anyone ever got the great dictator. Because Albert Speer was what Adolf Hitler dreamed of being.
He was an architect.
I see Hitler got what he wanted: not only was pre-war Berlin destroyed by Allied bombardment, but key parts of what was once Soviet Berlin have vanished as well, torn down in the last twenty years in a fit of righteous horror at past sufferings. In 1989, it was predicted that the reunification of Berlin would present the greatest architectural opportunity of the century. But truthfully, how has it worked out?
My best-ever visit to Berlin was just after the Wall came down. It looked poised to take off in new and wilder directions. A city with so much history was shifting once more to let history take another fascinating turn. But today, yhat's not how it feels. No, today it's as if the city's taking a holiday from history. «We had enough history. See where it got us.» Berlin, once the city of polarity, of East and West, of democracy and comunism, of fascism abd resistance, the twentieth-century battleground of art and politics is now the city of the provisional. And that's exactly why people like it.
It's not about ideas. It's about lifestyle.
DAVID HARE 'Berlin' (2009)