Berlin is an ugly city with beautiful remains. Berlin was badly mutilated by bomb, but not destroyed beyond recognition like Dresden or some of the cities in the Ruhr. Afterwards, it was still possible to tell which streets were which. Unlike Dresden, but Erich Kästner has described this in his diary.
What do I mean by beautiful remains? I mean the few lovely buildings, erected decades ago by the burgeoisie, which have been left undisturbed in dreary cities ruined by post-war architecture. After May 1945 it was necessary to build residential areas fast; people wanted a roof over their heads again. These neighbourhoods are vast spiritual wastelands, yet Berlin is full of them. At a larger stage, concrete high-rises popped up everywhere. Utopian architects assured us that they were the ultimate in aesthetic pleasure and that they would make humanity happy, but I, for one, find them depressing.
And yet the war is not the chief offender. After 1945 people demolished countless jaunty little houses and buildings from the late nineteenth century. Here too the rule was: new is good, old is ugly, out with the old. In recent years, people have become more cautious about knocking things down. The frenzy modernization has abated somewhat. People are back on the right track. They’re renovating.
In the meantime, a question has arisen: can you make a sweeping statement of that sort about modern architecture? Can I say that I loathe all (or nearly all) of post-war architecture? No. Because then, what about modern art? What about your own paintings? Exactly.
Berlin is a young city. It doesn’t have a majestic medieval past. Oh, here and there you might run across a dilapidated village church looking in disgruntlement at the city around it, but there are no proud Romanesque or Gothic cathedrals. You do see a host of churches built in neo-styles, mostly during the last century, but we won’t hold that against them. Better a neo-church than no church. A little circumspection can’t hurt.
So Berlin may not be a beautiful city, but it is exciting. What makes it exciting is the occasionally unbearable tension between a seemingly carefree present and an oppressive past. Berlin is a city teeming with places and traces.