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 (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 (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 (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 (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)