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| 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)
