BERLIN NOTES (LVII)

Konrad Giehr 'Checkpoint Charlie' (1968)

In Berlin, Steve and I ventured through Checkpoint Charlie for an afternoon in the east. Any print you had, newspapers, magazines, was confiscated by the East German border guards. It was a different society; you could feel the boot, the stasis in the streets, and you knew the oppression was real. It changed Steve permanently. After our European trip, the man who had preached that rock ’n’ roll and politics should never mix became an activist, his own music turning defiantly political. The power of the wall that split the world in two, its blunt, ugly, mesmerizing realness, couldn’t be underestimated. It was an offense to humanity; there was something pornographic about it, and once viewed, it held a scent you couldn’t quite get off of you. It truly disturbed some of the band and there was a communal sigh of relief when we moved on to the next town.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN 'Born To Run' (2016)

BERLIN NOTES (LVI)

Hagen Pelka 'Bahnhof Gesundbrunnen von der Swinemünder Brücke' (1984)

Now that the Wall is gone, the city is twice as big and has changed so much that he often doesn’t recognize the intersections. Once he’d known all the city’s bombed-out gaps, first with rubble, then without. Later still there might be a sausage stand, or Christmas trees for sale, or often nothing at all. But recently all these gaps have been filled with buildings, corner lots built up again, firewalls no longer visible. As a child, before the Wall went up, he sold blueberries (having picked them himself) at the West Berlin train station Gesundbrunnen so he could buy his first glossy ball. Glossy rubber balls existed only in the West. When he saw the Gesundbrunnen station for the first time after the fall of the Wall, the tracks leading east were completely overgrown with tall grass, the platforms covered with birch trees swaying in the wind. If he’d been a city planner, he’d have left it just like that in memory of the divided city, and to symbolize the ephemeral nature of all things built by human hands, and maybe just because a stand of birch trees on a train-station platform is beautiful.

JENNY ERPENBECK 'Go, Went, Gone' (2015)

BERLIN NOTES (LV)

René Burri 'Along the Berlin Wall' (1961)

Yet despite its physical absence here and elsewhere in Berlin, the dividing wall maintains a vivid presence. Indirectly visible through its historical traces in the otherwise puzzling layout of certain streets and buildings, it can also be seen in the differing visual cultures of East and West: not only in the different styles of architecture and levels of building maintenance, but in the different styles of interior design, like the East Berlin taste for oilcloth table coverings, artificial flowers, and regimented white lace curtains. To the frequent dismay of motorists and public transport commuters, the wall is still strongly felt through the chaos of continuing traffic changes (for example, detours due to road or building construction, disrupted service and altered routes for bus, U-bahn, and S-bahn lines) that its sudden disappearance has engendered after over a generation of walled Berlin life. The enormous, frenetic mass of continuing construction that has overwhelmed Potsdamer Platz paradoxically reasserts the wall it has effaced, by being not only a constructed obstacle of monumental scale but an international tourist attraction as Europe's largest building site. In short, the now absent wall dividing East and West remains in many ways the structuring principle of this unified city, just as the divided cities of East and West Berlin were defined essentially by their contrasting absent parts.

RICHARD SHUSTERMAN 'The Urban Aesthetics of Absence' (1997)

BERLIN NOTES (LIV)

Berlin - Kiefholzstraße am 14.9.1986

At first, when he was new here, he had examined the border wall, whose most notable feature was that it divided the city down the middle instead of surrounding it. But the view from any one of the lookout towers built to afford Westerners a glimpse of life behind the Wall had invariably disappointed him. In no place did the infamous construction achieve the height and breadth of his imagining; it looked more like the cheap realization of an architectonic formula that achieved its fullest expression in the center of the city. At that time he developed a mental image of a city expanding evenly from the edges toward the center, following a program of continuous cell division that seemed exclusively designed for inward expansion. The strangest thing was that the inhabitants appeared not to notice their own Wall complex, for their unceasing separations seemed to trace a pattern that was etched inside their souls. 

PETER SCHNEIDER 'Couplings' (1992)

BERLIN NOTES (LIII)

Horst Sturm 'Bertolt Brecht und Helene Weigel am 1 Mai' (1954)

Mr. K. preferred city B to city A. "In city A," he said, "they love me, but in city B they were friendly to me. In city A they made themselves useful to me, but in city B they needed me. In city A they invited me to join them at table, but in city B they invited me into the kitchen."

BERTOLT BRECHT 'Stories of Mr. Keuner'

BERLIN NOTES (LII)

A woman builder makes repairs to the roof of Berlin's town hall (1910)

As a matter of fact I went to Berlin at a very interesting historical moment. Since 1870, when Berlin had changed from the rather small, sober, and by no means rich capital of the Kingdom of Prussia into the seat of the German Emperor, the homely town on the Spree had taken a mighty upswing. But the leadership in artistic and cultural matters had not yet fallen to it. [...] But ofrecent years, with the rapid economic rise in Berlin, a new page had turned.

It was just at this period of its transition from a mere capital to a world city that I went to Berlin. Coming after the lush beauty of Vienna, inherited from great ancestors, the first impression was rather disappointing. The exodus to the West End, where the new architecture was soon to become manifest as against the pretentious houses of the Tiergarten quarter, had but just begun, and the architecturally tedious Friedrichstrasse and Leipzigerstrasse, with their clumsy ostentation, were still the centre of the city. Suburbs such as Wilmersdorf, Nicolassee, and Steglitz were only accessible by a tiresome journey on the street cars, and it was almost an expedition in those days to reach the lakes of the Mark with their sharp beauty. Other than the old Unter den Linden there was no real centre, no promenade like our Graben and, thanks to the old Prussian thrift, there was no suggestion of general elegance. [...] In every detail one felt the closefistedness of Frederician husbandry. The coffee was thin and bad because every bean was counted, the food was unimaginative, without strength or savour. Cleanliness and rigid and accurate order reigned everywhere instead of our musical rhythm of life.

 

STEFAN ZWEIG 'The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European' (1942)

BERLIN NOTES (LI)

Piero Vivarelli 'Oggi a Berlino' (1962)

Monday, September 6, 1948

As of today we not only have two city police forces, but also two city parliaments. Perhaps by tomorrow we will have  two city governments and along the sector boundary a Chinese wall with battlements and watchtowers. Perhaps then one will need a visa to go from Charlottenburg to Unter den Linden. Just as we thought back then in July 1945 when the four-power occupation began. Perhaps.

RUTH ANDREAS-FRIEDRICH 'Battleground Berlin: Diaries, 1945-1948'

BERLIN NOTES (XLV)

Hans-Günter Quaschinsky 'Berlin, Bernauer Straße, Grenze' (1955)

They are all making plans alone. The plan is a tunnel, or you would have to go straight out into the desert, would have to free the camel from the zoo, untie it, saddle it up, ride on it through Brandenburg. You could depend on the camel.

It must be a "disharmony." Something is seeping through the whole city; everyone is sure they have read or heard "disharmony," and some even thought about it, but publicly it’s nowhere to be found. Still more trees are being planted, all in the sand, trees from the desert experience.

Berlin has been tidied up. (…) The sand is everywhere now – in the shoes, on the coal. (…) Below it, a pub is still open in Alt-Moabit, but no one understands how it’s possible. After all, the city has been tidied up. The owner pours double schnapps, then buys a round himself; his pub was the best, the oldest, always full of people. But these people are no longer in Berlin. (…) No one wants to talk anymore either, they speak only to say something, anything, and in any case everything runs out of the corners of their mouths and away, everything double.

At night all Berlin is a place for turnover and exchange. Everything gets mixed up in confusion, then some people pull away. Espionage has an easy time of it, every collapse is transparent. Everyone is out to get rid of his own secret, to surrender his news, to break down during interrogation. Everyone has everyone else on his neck, and in the dim light no one can check the bill foisted on them. Outside it’s morning again, it’s too bright. 

INGEBORG BACHMANN 'Ein Ort für Zufälle' (1964)

BERLIN NOTES (XLIV)

Edward Hopper 'Approaching a City' (1946)

What lures me, amongst many things, was when I first went in there, there were great segments of the city that were empty. There were lots, where buildings had stood. The first thing that it reminded me of was when I was a child, in the Bronx. We used to play in lots that looked like that, of course they were lots without buildings. But here the buildings were destroyed, erased. So there was a correspondence between the lots that I knew as a child and this place in Germany that had these empty lots. That was number one. Number two, what struck me was, although the buildings had been destroyed, and had disappeared, the aura came through the ground. In other words, the physicality of the buildings were not there, but one could feel the sense of structures having been there. That was what we were talking before. There were disappearences that had occured, but yet the atmosphere of these structures was coming out of the earth. That was two. Number three, the strange condition of sensing Edward Hopper. Hopper's paintings were basically of Hoboken and places like that. Somehow, there was a condition in Berlin that brought back senses of Hopper. That was I tried to do, by the way, in my structures that I built in Berlin now. To capture some of those, amongst other things, some of those things.

JOHN HEJDUK in conversation with David Shapiro (1991)

BERLIN NOTES (XLIII)

Ⓒ Neue Nationalgalerie, Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Reinhard Friedrich, 1968.

I love Mies. My colleagues may not love Mies, but I love Mies. I love Mies' architecture. The Berlin Museum without a doubt. David, the only other time I had an architectural experience - when I came into Berlin, my soul looked up at the cantilever of the Mies National Museum, the black building made of black steel - was when I was a kid and I went to Italy with Gloria for the first time and we went down to Paestum. When we arrived and saw the Paestum Temples, we looked up and we saw the capital, the column and the lintel, and it was a religious experience. Not too many religious experiences in one's life, and I had two or three of them. But the other one was when I went into Berlin and saw the Berlin Museum at night. There is something about Berlin's air. I want to make this point. To see a black building in the Berlin night, which is blue of the night, the dark blue of the night. The blue of the night is crystal. The air is crystal because Berlin is surrounded by water, Berlin, all kinds of water. So it's a different kind of air that forms an atmosphere which is crystalline, black-blue, you had the black steel that's Berlin.

JOHN HEJDUK in conversation with David Shapiro (1991)

BERLIN NOTES (XLI)

Daniel Libeskind 'Out of Line' (1991)

Berlin could be seen as an exemplary spiritual capital of the twenty-first century, as it once was the apocalyptic symbol of the twentieth-century demise. The identity of Berlin cannot be re-founded on the ruins of history or on the illusory ‘reconstructions’ of an arbitrarily selected past.

The transformation of the shape of (future) city must be accompanied by corresponding changes in the mentality associated with prewar lot lines, anachronistic visions, dreams that money can buy. What is necessary is an optimistic view of the twenty-first century: a radical rethinking of zoning, function, property, and program. These categories are no longer appropriate to the changed relation between capitol, capital, public responsibility, and the end of ideology.

What we need is a connection of Berlin to and across its own history. This connection, this movement, goes through the relation of the old and the new, capitol and capital, full and empty, the 'no-longer' and the 'not yet'.

The lost center cannot be reconnected like an artificial limb to an old body, but must generate an overall transformation of the city.

Potsdamer Platz can be the place where the East-West, center-periphery division can overcome the conflicts that were born, witnessed, and died in this very place.

These conflicts cannot be resolved by reconstructing a hollow past, but by laying new foundations and new images that are open to concrete dynamics.

DANIEL LIBESKIND 'Out of Line' (1991)

BERLIN NOTES (XXXVI)

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)

BERLIN NOTES (XXXV)

Walter Sanders 'Berlin Airlift' (1948)

I have distant memories of Berlin as a battle field: in the foreground of my mind a field of ruins, a capital devastated by the airborne fire of a strategy planned to strike at civilian populations, to demoralise whole societies.

As the main target of the allied air forces, the capital of the enemy state had to be annhilated. After London and in anticipation of Tokyo, Berlin had to be transformed into a desert of some eighty million cubic metres of rubble, a TABULA RASA.

Situated at a crossroads of railways and canals in the great north-German plain, as early as 1926 Berlin had become the aerial turntable of Europe. One of the world's most sprawling cities also came to have the most open skies.

In 1939, the construction of Tempelhof airport further increased its aeronautical ambitions, as if the Futuristic myth of the "flying nation" were bringing together Aryan and aerial -- not just "land" and "blood" but also "the air", the realm of atmospheric domination.

In fact, the victory of the Western allies was not achieved in 1945 but in 1948, with the Berlin Airlift, which continued until 1949 -- an unprecedented aero-strategic event in response to the terrestrial blockade of the German capital by Soviet forces.

The partitioning of occupied Germany and the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 were therefore the manifestations of a historical event whose importance has been underestimated: the advent of the skies as a vital factor in the history of nations during the 20th century.

So, in the desert of the TABULA RASA, in the fields of ruins encircled by hostile forces, Berlin, restored capital of a reunited Germany. has become a building site, probably the biggest in the world, equalled only by Shanghai.

After the bombs, artillery barrages and "Stalin organs", the heavens con no longer wait. Once again, there is the urge to destroy, to wipe out not only what is really ugly, but anything which spoils the prospect of a glorious globalisation.

In keeping wirh these reconstituted façades, these "recomposed" historic monuments in the centre of the Potsdamer Platz, the absence of the architectural authenticity we find elsewhere reveals the uncertainty of the present time.

Nature is not a temple but a building site, claimed the supporters of historical materialism of sinister memory... When one sees the state in which they have left this "building site", from the Baltic to the Aral sea, one can only hope that the wide-open building site that is Berlin will not repeat the town-planning errors of the last century.

PAUL VIRILIO 'Open Skies over Berlin' (2000)

BERLIN NOTES (XXXIII)

Armando 'Zonder titel'  (1957)

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.

ARMANDO 'From Berlin' (1996)

BERLIN NOTES (XIX)

Des enfants se risquent à regarder au-dessus du Mur de Berlin dans le quartier de Kreutzberg (1963)

West Berlin, May 1978: a city under siege yet open. [...] As with any siege, there must be fortifications, or at least a wall, and here this was built not by the besieged but by the besiegers, not so much to surround the other as in self-defense against the fascination exerted by the other, and to prevent defection from within its own ranks. In this sense, the Berlin Wall marked a singular advance in the 'de-construction' of the binary oppositions upon which our culture rests.

A wall: in truth, at least in its most recent form (1967), a mere barrier, a simple partition [...] that now seems absurdly miserable.

Recto/verso, obverse/reverse: the wall - like an écroché, like a ruin: the ruin that it was from the begining - had no readily identifiable wrong side. [...] The people on the other side, like the prisoner's in Plato's cave, perceived only an echo (in the distance, beyond the no-man's-land).

HUBERT DAMISCH 'Skyline. La ville Narcisse' (1996)

BERLIN NOTES (XII)

Spielvogel 'Berlin Wall at Stresemannstrasse' (1985)

Imagining Nothingness is:

Pompeii – a city built with the absolute minimum of walls and roofs...

The Manhattan Grid – there a century before there was a “there” there...

Central Park – a void that provoked the cliffs that now define it...

Broadacre City...

The Guggenheim...

Hilberseimer's “Mid West” with its vast plains of zero-degree architecture...

The Berlin Wall...

They all reveal that emptiness in the metropolis is not empty, that each void can be used for programs whose insertion into the existing texture is a procustean effort leading to mutilation of both activity and texture.

REM KOOLHAAS 'Imagining Nothingness' (1985)