Abstract
Berlin has long been considered a particularly palimpsestic city, famously marked by two world wars, frequent and tumultuous changes of regime, and the building and dismantling of the Wall. Historical and other academic writing on Berlin tends to take two main forms: it either offers an overview of Berlin’s history across decades or centuries, or it focuses on separate phases of its development, for example, the Kaisers’ Berlin, Weimar Berlin, Nazi Berlin, postwar Berlin, the divided city, and, most recently, post-Wall Berlin. What distinguishes the three books reviewed here is that while their authors focus on the postwar (Jennifer V. Evans) and post-Wall (Janet Ward and Claire Colomb) periods, they propose to look at Berlin’s history as continuous rather than a sequence of epic events and benchmark years. Aside from their preference for a historically informed analysis of cultural, political, and economic developments, all three authors point at a prevalent longing for the myth of Weimar Berlin that reveals itself in various areas of Berlin’s urban life and politics.
In Life among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin, Evans notices the importance of prewar tales in the first decades following the end of the war. Reconstructing Berlin was, in her opinion, “as much about physical rebuilding as it was about hammering out new forms of citizenship and morality in a city besieged by competing ideologies” (10) and it necessitated engagement with past practices, particularly those known from the Weimar Republic. A careful reading of postwar diaries, journals, and letters demonstrates that for residents and visitors alike Weimar Berlin was “a template for contemporary encounters with what remained of the city” (12): people delusionally insisted on searching for signs of Weimar Berlin, or what they considered to be the authentic Berlin. Comparisons between pre-Nazi and postwar Berlin emphasize the catastrophic state of the latter and attest to its “atmosphere of near total collapse” (1). The confident “New Woman” of the Weimar period was “tempered by the violence of war’s end” and came to resemble the ruins she inhabited; the Berlin man was emasculated—by wartime defeat, by the “violent desire” of Soviet soldiers (44), and by the “virility of American soldiers” (158).
Evans divides her book into five sections describing typical places of interaction in postwar Berlin: the cellar and the bunker; the street; the train station; bars, cafes, clubs; and the workhouses and jails designed to solve problems related to growing juvenile crime. The first four deal with “geographies of leisure, memory, fear, experimentation, lust, emotion, and desire in the divided city” (182), while the last one analyzes “alternative geographies of home” (182). All of the described places lingered in the shadow of ruins or were themselves ruins.
The ruins in postwar Berlin represent for Evans “the breakdown of traditional authority . . . but [they] also helped shape the dynamics of a wide range of human sexualities and experiences.” They became “spaces of disorder” (45), of “irrationality and confusion” (44), and places of sex exchange between adult men and male and female street youth. The last was particularly common in the partly destroyed bunkers and cellars bearing still vivid memories of wartime and the collapse of “racial, class, gender, and temporal boundaries” that took place during the Battle of Berlin (33). For homeless, orphaned teenagers, bunkers were “important sites of communal identity” (39), “a world unto themselves” (40) with its own rules and hierarchies. The destruction of bunkers and clearing of ruins were supposed to correct mistakes both in behavior and in architecture: they were aimed at decreasing juvenile crime (primarily prostitution) that bloomed among the ruins and were seen as an opportunity by urban planners to regulate the results of Berlin’s nineteenth century “unbridled growth” (38). Unsurprisingly, neither of these corrective undertakings went smoothly; rather, they were characterized by difficult and sometimes literally painful negotiations of authority.
Certain ubiquitous features of postwar Berlin resurfaced uncannily after the fall of the Wall: reconstruction sites, rebuilding initiatives, spontaneous uses of urban space. Whereas Berlin’s postwar authorities used the ruins as an excuse to introduce new urban plans in both parts of the divided city, public officials responsible for urban development in the 1990s and the 2000s justified their plans for the “New Berlin” with the need to deal with urban voids, particularly those that appeared after the dismantling of the Wall. At the forefront of post-1989 urban planning policies was the policy of critical reconstruction introduced and executed by Hans Stimmann, Berlin’s building director and author of Planwerk Innenstadt, the planning and architectural strategy for central Berlin. Critical reconstruction advocated specific urban design prescriptions and “reinvented a supposedly ‘typical’ Berlin architectural tradition, that of the turn of the century commercial architecture and of Prussian classicism” (Colomb 210). This policy, Ward claims, made prominent Berlin sites “turn away from both contemporary architectural innovations as well as from a sustained engagement with the actual ‘historical ground’ of Berlin” (163). The critical tones in Ward’s and Colomb’s assessments of critical reconstruction echo the blunt statements by Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and other famous architects and urban planners who consider the effects of Stimmann’s policy neoconservative, reactionary, banal, and provincial (Colomb 212-3).
Rather than merely repeating the already widely known facts on contemporary Berlin’s spatial and identity politics, Ward proposes “to view Berlin as a ‘bordered’ realm” (xiii). She discusses “the nature and significance of borders in the modern and postmodern world” (xiii) and explains the bordered condition of Berlin before, during, and after the city’s division. Ward’s book is the testimony of a Berlinkennerin, a manifestation of knowledge of and fascination with the city. Particularly appealing is the book’s interdisciplinary character and the skillfulness with which the author supports her reading of Berlin’s architecture, urban planning, politics, and economy with quotes from philosophy, film, and literature. Like Evans, whose expressive descriptions of postwar urban sites are worthy of a poet, Ward does not shy away from metaphors and imaginative analogies, which make the book a compelling read. She compares Berlin to a Kafkaesque city, “eternally sought but never reached” (27), a “frontier that transforms those who engage its border condition” (36).
In her reading of Berlin’s border condition, Ward is clearly indebted to Henri Lefebvre, particularly to his observation that “no space ever vanishes utterly, leaving no trace” (qtd. in Ward 60). Grounding her argument in a brief analysis of everyday and political life in postwar and divided Berlin, Ward notices that the Berlin Wall “was in place before it was built” in 1961 and “remains after it has been dismantled” (95). This “spectral longevity” (59) of the Wall remains puzzling for Berliners and visitors alike. The rushed demolition of nearly the entire Wall has been not only dissatisfying for tourists who roam the city searching in vain for the traces of the former inner city border, but has also led to “most young Germans’“ ignorance of where the border used to be (102). Although Ward understands the practicalities of why large parts of the Wall needed to be dismantled after 1989 (property rights, the market value of inner-city land, the need to re-establish infrastructure between East and West Berlin, among many others), she also notices that “to help us remember we need artifacts, signs, paths to tread, walls to touch, or voids that are at least still there” (102). Traces of borders are sometimes “unofficially” still needed, Ward claims, even after borders themselves become “officially” obsolete (98). Reflecting on Georg Simmel’s claim that the “border is not a spatial fact with a sociological impact, but a sociological fact that shapes spatially” (qtd. in Ward 113), Ward argues for a shift of emphasis in the studies on the Berlin Wall: she is more interested in how people shaped the Wall rather than how it shaped people (95).
When Ward writes that Berlin’s identity remains “tied up in the Wall” (113), she refers both to the actual concrete structure—the “unintentional monument” (113)—and the city’s “long-term ‘frontier’-status” (xiv), meaning both internal and external borders. Historically, Berlin has been a divided city from the fourteenth century (when Berlin and Cölln were twin towns) and was united into a larger whole as late as 1920, only to be divided again between the occupying powers after the lost war. The Wall was “a synecdoche for the entire East-West line dividing . . . the world” (26). Whereas its dismantling symbolized the end of the Cold War, it failed to erase completely the West–East division. For centuries, Berlin remained on the eastern periphery of Western Europe and it holds on to its status of a border city today. The city’s border condition calls for perspicacious, inclusive, and reflective planning policies and practices—a challenge post-Wall Berlin has had trouble meeting.
In a chapter on politics and planning, Ward notices “unexpected infrastructural continuities” (190) between urban planning practices in Weimar, Nazi, and postwar Berlins. Ward toys with the idea that Albert Speer, the infamous planner of Hitler’s Berlin, “the reactionary advocate of obscenely sized totalitarian architecture,” can serve as “a point of continuity” (183) between pre-1933, post-1945, and post-1989 urban renewal projects. Speer adopted some of the models of planning urban flow from the Weimar period “but then applied them in the service on new goals” (173). There is little doubt that Speer was indebted to his “avant-garde predecessors from the 1920s,” but it remains uncertain whether this is enough to consider him “a modernizing urban planner” (183). Weimar Berlin’s infrastructure and architecture bloomed under Martin Wagner, the social democratic director of urban planning (1926–1933). Wagner managed to “build into being an enhanced global relevance” (163)—something at which Stimmann spectacularly failed. Ward attributes Stimmann’s lack of success to the image and credo he approved for Berlin that “emanated from the still-intact modern city—the same city that Wagner regarded as a launch-pad for change and innovation” (163). One of the greatest shortcomings of critical reconstruction is that it turned away from Berlin’s “actual ‘historical ground” (163) and ignored Wagner’s planning accomplishments that contributed to Weimar Berlin’s worldwide prominence. “When the bottom fell out of the Weimar Berlin economy in the late 1920s,” Ward writes, “Wagner dedicated himself to the needs of mass housing in a broader sense of Wohnkultur. Post-Wall Berlin did not change course, even when it became clear that a reconstructed Berlin would not a world city make” (164).
Ward is no stranger to Weimar Berlin: her 2001 book Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in the 1920s Germany is highly acclaimed and much quoted, also by the other two authors whose books are reviewed here. In Post-Wall Berlin Ward demonstrates that her knowledge of Berlin’s history, culture, and politics extends far beyond the Weimar period, but also that Weimar Berlin remains an important point of reference in an analysis of the contemporary city. The globally acknowledged allure of Weimar Berlin resulted from its truly modern condition, its Zeitgemäßigkeit. Post-Wall Berlin, on the contrary, fails to set trends in architecture and urban planning and its most discussed monument, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is, in Ward’s opinion, anything but zeitgemäß. Ward likens the Holocaust Memorial, as it is commonly called, to “a mass death-equivalent of a Prussian nationalist monument” (249) and criticizes it both for its monumentality and the “narrowness of its mission: namely, its exclusivity for Jewish victims” (242), which forced other victim groups (homosexuals, Roma and Sinti, victims of forced euthanasia, among others) to create their own monuments and which was “dangerously close to Nazi techniques of categorization” (242). Ward’s critique of the Holocaust Memorial takes up an entire section of the book (“Holocaust Divides: Memorial Architecture in Berlin”). She juxtaposes Peter Eisenman’s monumental “cement graveyard” with a more subtle, unrealized project proposed by his competitors in the bid for a Holocaust memorial, Renata Sith and Frieder Schnock: a bus stop in the middle of the allocated site (between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz) where people could get on a bus that would take them to one of the numerous sites of former concentration camps in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Convinced that Eisenman’s memorial “offers its public less than a Holocaust monument ought to give” (264), Ward turns her attention (and sympathies) to Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, which she considers “an unintended Holocaust memorial . . . that fits the criteria that [Eisenman’s monument] and its debate failed to actualize” (260). As in the case of other topics presented in the book (the city’s bordered condition, the afterlives of the Wall, urban planning, and city branding), Ward minutely follows the debate on the Holocaust Memorial in local, national, and international media and discusses various responses to the Memorial by politicians, artists, and intellectuals. Ward’s account of the Holocaust memorial debate is informative, versatile, and firmly grounded in the contemporary political, economic, and cultural context.
The Holocaust Memorial has been one of the most debated projects in post-Wall Berlin and key to the city’s image. The desire to develop and control a particular city image that would bring Berlin more foreign investments, more tourists, and more recognition both within Germany and abroad lies behind the place marketing practices and the politics of urban reinvention discussed by Colomb in her book Staging the New Berlin. In her carefully laid-out analysis based on meticulous, decade-long research, Colomb argues that the newly constructed and reconstructed landscape of post-Wall Berlin “was not only being physically built, it was also staged for visitors and Berliners and marketed to the world through city marketing events and campaigns which featured the iconic architecture of large-scale urban redevelopment sites” (1, emphasis in original). Here, again, it is impossible to escape analogies with Berlin of the Weimar Republic, a city of urban spectacles, a city that turned itself into a spectacle. Moreover, many of the marketing slogans, images, and practices developed in the 1990s as part of the New Berlin strategy “and often presented as innovative by their inceptors” (40) were in fact mere echoes of place marketing practices of the Weimar period (particularly displays of light, international exhibitions, attempts to include Berliners themselves in the city marketing strategies and to change negative perceptions of Berlin by non-Berliners, involvement of private sector companies, among many others). Colomb is particularly interested in exploring “the relationship between place marketing, the politics of urban development and the spatial politics of identity and memory construction in reunified Berlin” (5) whereby she places herself in a mostly Anglophone strand of scholarship that addresses place marketing “as part of a wider agenda of critical inquiry into contemporary processes of urban restructuring” (21).
Colomb defines place marketing as “a field of public policy producing discourse on the city relying on visual representations (imagery) of the urban” (9, emphases in original) and applies various methodologies (cognitive and discursive approaches to public policy, critical discourse analysis, and visual analysis, respectively) to match her three-part analytic framework. After a chapter on the nature of place marketing in general, its paradoxes, and the challenges it faces, Colomb moves on to discuss the specificities of place marketing practices in post-Wall Berlin.
Probably the most distinctive among the New Berlin’s image building practices was Schaustelle Berlin (Showcase Berlin)—a series (1996–2005) of architectural and cultural events marketing Berlin’s new cityscape to everyone who had to put up with ongoing construction works, that is, Berliners and visitors alike. Its primary aim was “to transform ‘the largest building site in Europe’ into a visitor attraction” (Colomb 193). The construction site marketing was epitomized by the Infobox, a temporary (1995–2001) information pavilion documenting and providing view over the work in progress that was Potsdamer Platz. The idea behind the immensely popular (up to 10,000 visitors a day) Infobox was to turn Potsdamer Platz “from a construction site into a ‘destination’ via the dissemination of images of the past, present and future site, associated with a powerful narrative about its symbolic role and meaning for the new Berlin” (149). This unequivocal fascination with architecture, construction, and engineering echoed “the celebration of new technologies which characterized the promotional representations of Berlin as Weltstadt in the 1920s” (195). The very choice of Potsdamer Platz—a square immortalized in literature, music, film, and visual arts of the Weimar period—as the center of the Schaustelle Berlin and of the “New Berlin” in general was yet another sign of the longevity of the Weimar myth as a reference point for contemporary Berlin.
In the early 1990s, on the wave of enthusiasm generated by the fall of the Wall, Berlin’s place marketing practices focused on Berlin as the new capital of reunited Germany and were almost entirely publicly funded. As early as 1993, however, local authorities realized that their hopes for a top global status were not going to be fulfilled and became open to various kinds of “public-private partnerships . . . set up specifically to market the new Berlin to different target groups” (Colomb 1), the most prominent of which included Partner für Berlin and Berlin Tourismus Marketing (112–43). The sheer number of place marketing actors led to concurrent image campaigns based on various themes (137), often to confusing effect, yet it is possible to distinguish two general trends. In the 1990s, place marketing practices were dominated by grand narratives (Berlin as the future capital city, Berlin as an economic leader, Berlin as a sports city, Berlin as a bridge between the West and the East) that did not manage to hide the fact that Berlin is a contradictory city (309). In the early 2000s, public officials and city marketers understood that “it is precisely because of [Berlin’s contradictory nature] that many residents and tourists have come to Berlin” (309) and adjusted their campaigns accordingly, celebrating Berlin’s diversity, edginess, and even its poor economic situation. (Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, famously described Berlin as “poor but sexy” and the catchphrase was instantly adopted by the general public as a slogan for contemporary Berlin.)
Whereas postwar Berlin resembled a mosaic of liminal, gender-charged places scattered randomly in the shadow of the ruins—a far cry from the luminous and splendid Berlin of the Weimar Republic—post-1989 Berlin, though driven by the urge to become a global city once again, has lingered in the invisible shadow of the dismantled Wall and remains a border city long after the official border became obsolete. Despite the elaborate place marketing strategies, their intensity and innovativeness, and the city’s “self-(re)presentation . . . as one of the most vigorously imagined and maintained world cities” (Ward 328), Berlin’s economic and demographic growth has been much weaker than expected. Spending millions of euros on marketing the city to its inhabitants and potential visitors and investors may not be a strategically smart idea after all. What Berlin needs instead, Colomb argues in the final paragraph of her book, are “new (democratically debated) visions of urban development and urban life that can engage the imagination and participation of a majority of Berliners, promote a more ‘just’ city and address the local and global environmental, economic and social challenges which the city is facing in the twenty-first century” (315).