The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape
304
The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape
304Paperback(First Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226558721 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2018 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Lexile: | 1330L (what's this?) |
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CHAPTER 1
Berlin Walls
The Monument
In a rarely visited corner of northern Berlin, piles of concrete debris fill a vast lot. This is not an unusual sight in what geographers call the "gray zones" of a city, those tracts of land somehow disqualified from more valued uses. Here, where the district of Pankow meets neighboring Wedding, machines are grinding the huge slabs of mangled concrete into smaller pieces, freeing up the land for some other use and turning the concrete into usable gravel. This ordinary industrial scene turns extraordinary when a closer look at the concrete reveals an unexpected sight: the famous spray-painted graffiti of the Berlin Wall. In 1991, this lot is a graveyard for a few of the one hundred miles of Wall that had enclosed West Berlin two years before. It is indeed located in a "gray zone" of Berlin, one of many fringe areas created by the presence of the Wall that is now reduced to rubble (fig. 1).
The Berlin Wall had been one of the city's premier tourist attractions. More than that, it was probably the most famous structure that will ever stand in Berlin. The Pankow lot, and a few others, contained what was left of it (with a few exceptions, as we shall see). Yet such boneyards were not tourist attractions. Indeed, they were scarcely known at all. If a monument can be decommissioned, that is apparently what has happened with the Berlin Wall. Did the concrete lose its aura when it was removed from its original location? Or did that happen earlier, when it lost its power to kill, so to speak — that is, when the guards stepped aside and let the crowds through on November 9, 1989?
The Wall retained a strange kind of magic in the days and months that followed, as Berliners and tourists hacked away at the concrete. Pieces of the Wall did indeed have a special aura: they were treated as holy relics that bespoke our deliverance from the Cold War. For that brief moment, the Wall was in demand precisely because it was disappearing. Detached pieces of it were valued as evidence of an apparently spontaneous will to destroy the Wall. The cold night air during that winter of 1989 — 90 was filled with the sound of pik-pik-pik. First Berliners, then tourists hacked away at the Wall. They contributed in a minuscule way to the removal of the concrete, but more significant was their ritual participation in the removal of the symbolic barrier. It was in this carnival atmosphere that the concrete was divested of its murderous aura and invested with magical properties (its high asbestos content aside) that made visitors take it home to display on mantels around the world.
These magical properties translated into its market value. The Wall, symbol of the epic confrontation between capitalism and communism, became a capitalist commodity. Enterprising locals sold hacked-off pieces of concrete from tables set up at Checkpoint Charlie and the Brandenburg Gate (fig. 2). Others would rent you a hammer and chisel so that you could chop your own. Still other entrepreneurs, more ambitious and better capitalized, filled crates and trucks with this East German state property and supplied genuine Wall fragments to American department stores in time for the Christmas shopping season. The result in Berlin was a cat-and-mouse game as East German authorities tried for a short time to enforce their ownership of the concrete, making a few arrests in the process.
As it stepped gingerly into a market economy, East Germany's brief post-Wall regime recognized that the Wall had become a commodity. It sought to assert its rights of ownership and to sell pieces of the Wall in order to raise badly needed funds for health care and historical preservation. A state-owned firm that specialized in the export of building materials was given the job of marketing the defaced concrete, now separated into its prefabricated segments. An auction in Monte Carlo in June 1990 attracted wealthy collectors and drove prices for painted segments of Wall into the tens of thousands of dollars. As East Germany passed into history, though, the Wall's aura faded and its price fell. A final auction in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1993 attracted only three buyers.
What does it mean to buy a monument? A brochure prepared for the Fort Lee auction described the segments of Wall as the perfect way to "decorate the entrance hall of your corporate headquarters, museum, or estate." Some pieces were re-erected as works of art — or were they just souvenirs? Others stood as victory monuments or Cold War booty, such as the piece ("hated symbol of, yes, an evil empire") proudly unveiled by former president Ronald Reagan at the dedication of his presidential library.
It was difficult enough to define the meaning of Wall fragments removed to sites where they stood alone. The idea of leaving pieces on their original site made no sense at all to most Berliners. Proposals to preserve parts of the Wall, and to create a Wall memorial in Berlin, faced organized and unorganized opposition. Every suggestion to preserve one section or another was met with a chorus of objections, particularly from neighbors. The overwhelming desire, it seemed, was to be rid of the hated obstruction. Before reunification, the East Berlin office for historical preservation identified stretches of the Wall worthy of possible preservation. But the signs identifying them as historical monuments were promptly stolen, and the chopping continued unabated. The assaults with hammer and chisel preempted attempts to save pieces of particular artistic merit, such as that painted by the American artist Keith Haring, who had died of AIDS early in 1990. Haring's section stood at the most popular pilgrimage site, next to Checkpoint Charlie, and it was quickly destroyed.
Even in its comical afterlife, the Wall continued to divide Berliners. After November 9, 1989, at least the non-German press routinely referred to the Wall in the past tense. Yet only at a few tourist sites, such as Checkpoint Charlie, did the popular onslaught come close to obliterating the concrete wall. Most of the hundred miles of border fortifications remained largely intact for months. What had disappeared, rather, was the symbolic Wall — which meant that the concrete and the symbol were no longer the same thing. To understand the Wall, then, we must understand what it meant. Symbols and monuments are invested with their meaning through human action, so we can best understand the Wall (and its physical and metaphoric demise) by looking at the way it has been treated.
Wherever human beings live, they endow the things around them with cultural meaning. Places and objects become resonant symbols that embody hopes, fears, and value. That is, they become monuments, as the Wall did. Often a monument defines a group's identity, marking a place honored by, say, all adherents of a religious faith or all members of a community. Such monuments are rarely controversial. In Berlin, by contrast, the landscape is politicized in the extreme, and undisputed monuments are the exception. The Wall and other Berlin monuments recall controversial deeds, mostly of the recent past, deeds that prevent any consensus about the sort of things monuments are supposed to embody, such as a national identity or a common ideal. It is this deep uncertainty that makes Berlin such a contested landscape, and creates a charged atmosphere that foreigners find hard to grasp. One controversy in recent U.S. history that approached the intensity of feeling in Berlin was the design proposed for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, which reopened wounds in the nation's sense of itself. In Berlin, Germany's wounds still lie open everywhere.
More than a century ago, the young Friedrich Nietzsche lamented his fellow Germans' overdeveloped sense of history. Only by selective forgetting, according to Nietzsche, can we overcome a sense of helplessness in the face of historical destiny. He argued that only the ability to forget makes creative action possible. In short, if I cannot select certain facts from history and discard others, I will never have any beliefs firm enough to act on. In the wake of Bismarck's unification of Germany in 1871, Nietzsche was appalled by Germans' blind Hegelian confidence that the forces of history were on their side. But the events of twentieth-century German history have given a new coloration to his thoughts. Today's historical paralysis is a product not of complacency but of fatalistic angst. Some Germans fear that the weight of past misdeeds has made their fellow Germans uncertain what it means to be German and afraid to act in the name of Germany. The Germans thus accused see things differently: they say that any move to discard the burdens of the past will return Germany to blind confidence and thus to disaster.
Monuments are nothing if not selective aids to memory: they encourage us to remember some things and to forget others. The process of creating monuments, especially where it is openly contested, as in Berlin, shapes public memory and collective identity. That process can take very different forms, however. There is an obvious difference between the Berlin Wall and a monument like the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.: the builders of the former did not intend to create a monument; they had other purposes in mind. But the Wall, too, became an important monument because it took on a meaning of its own. Both kinds of monuments, the "intentional" and the "unintentional," give form to the collective memory of a city.
The Wall became an unintentional monument to the remarkable era in which two rival states simultaneously claimed Berlin. The division marked by the Wall, in turn, grew out of the shattering era of German history that culminated in World War II. Thus the Wall was built — literally and figuratively — atop the ruins of war, terror, and division. And it, too, is now among the ruins and memories of Berlin. The Wall — from concrete, to monument, to rubble — gives form to the story of Berlin and of Germany in our time.
The Barrier
When East German border troops and construction workers sealed the border with West Berlin on August 13, 1961, they put an end to a peculiar episode in the history of the Cold War. During the 1950s, Berlin had been the one place in Germany where East and West truly met. Families and friends scattered across the two German states could rendezvous in Berlin. Berliners lived astride the Iron Curtain that divided the rest of Europe. Two currencies and two political systems coexisted awkwardly, with people and goods passing frequently, if not always smoothly, between them. On August 13, that changed abruptly. Sixty thousand people who lived on one side and worked on the other lost their jobs. After 1961 people and vehicles in Berlin circulated within one half of the city or the other. Neighbors who could no longer see one another grew apart.
West Berliners, now walled off from their poor cousins in East Germany, began to share in the prosperity of West Germany's postwar "economic miracle," thanks in part to enormous subsidies from the Bonn government. West Berlin never became quite like West Germany, however: its subsidized economy, peculiar legal status, and frontier allure meant that artists, draft dodgers, and nonconformists (but also pensioners) were overrepresented, businessmen and factory workers underrepresented in its population. Nevertheless, the city displayed the neon signs, shop windows, new cars, and most of the other trappings of postwar Western prosperity.
East Berlin certainly looked different. Its gray buildings did not merely lack a coat of paint that their Western counterparts had; there were fewer new buildings, and fewer of the old ones were being renovated. Fewer cars, fewer shops, less advertising, and less bustle gave most Western visitors the impression of a dreary and lifeless place. The colors were more drab, the sounds were more muted — and the smells were different too. Two distinctive aromas pervaded the streets of East Berlin. One was the exhaust of the Trabant (or Trabbi), the tiny standard-issue East German car, whose two-stroke engine burned an acrid mixture of gasoline and oil. Trabbis were not as numerous as Volkswagens and Opels in the West, but many were about, despite a typical wait of ten years before a citizen could become the proud owner of one. The other familiar smell came from the burning of soft coal, East Germany's only domestic source of energy and hence the main fuel both for industry and for home heating. It turned the winter sky brown in both Berlins, but its aroma was most pungent in the quiet residential streets of the East's older neighborhoods, where (as in much of West Berlin) most apartments were still heated by coal-burning tile ovens.
Berlin had been divided into twenty districts in 1920 (fig. 3). The four occupying powers apportioned them in 1945: eight to the Soviets, six to the Americans, four to the British, and two to the French. The zigzag course of the Wall across the city was thus largely determined by arbitrary administrative decisions in 1920 and 1945. The district of Mitte (Middle), the historical center, lay in the Soviet sector, but after 1961 it bordered the Wall on its southern, western, and most of its northern side. Across the Wall to its south, the tenements of Kreuzberg were cut off not only from the city center but also from the parks in Treptow, to the east. East Berliners who lived just north of the center could no longer walk across the sectoral boundary to Wedding's many small shops and cinemas. Those businesses, in turn, lost their customers in 1961 and many soon closed.
By severing long-established paths of inner-city circulation, the Wall created peculiar urban backwaters in the center of Berlin, devoid of the usual bustle of pedestrians and — what was often more noticeable — of automobiles. This was true, in different ways, on both sides. The crucial difference was that the approaches to the Wall's Eastern side were carefully controlled. Apart from official ceremonies, Easterners were discouraged from approaching the Wall and even taking note of its existence. Those East Berliners who lived in the streets next to the Wall had to adjust to special restrictions, intrusions, and inconveniences. Friends from outside the neighborhood could never just drop by, for example: permission had to be obtained from the police.
Unlike Easterners, West Berliners were free to heap scorn upon the Wall, or to gaze over it, but in the end they, too, mostly sought peace of mind by accepting the Wall or ignoring it, by coming to think of their city as an island connected by causeways and air corridors to a Western mainland. The commonly used "island" metaphor is an apt one, since the Wall created quiet recreational spaces on the newly established edge and, more generally, came to be seen — or rather not seen — as the edge of the world.
In contrast to the East, the Western side of the Wall was a notably disordered space. Neglect of the streets, bridges, and other structures abutting the border was apparent to anyone coming from other parts of West Berlin or West Germany. The proximity of the Wall devalued old neighborhoods, particularly in Kreuzberg, and their working-class populations were increasingly supplanted by an odd mix of Turkish immigrant workers and the growing West Berlin alternative society of self-styled dropouts, artists, musicians, punks, anarchists, and squatters in abandoned buildings. The marginal location of West Berlin in general and eastern Kreuzberg in particular nurtured the Kreuzberg "scene." (When the Wall disappeared, Kreuzberg became centrally located, and real estate speculation doomed the "scene.")
The act of crossing the forbidden border naturally became wrapped in its own aura of liminality. The ordeal of a legal border crossing was experienced at least once by many people, even, by the 1980s, many East Germans. Within days of closing the border in 1961, the East German authorities had reduced the number of checkpoints within the city to seven, most of which they designated for exclusive use either by West Berliners, West Germans, or foreigners. The most famous was the crossing for foreigners, Checkpoint Charlie — as the Americans (and everyone else) had named their official gateway to the Soviet sector. Because crossing into East Berlin represented a journey far greater than the short distance across the street, Checkpoint Charlie became associated with mystery and intrigue, a reputation enhanced by dozens of spy novels. So, too, did the Glienecke Bridge, which connected West Berlin with Potsdam, the place where East and West exchanged spies.
Westerners could also travel by subway or elevated train to the Friedrichstrasse rail station in East Berlin and formally cross the border there. Friedrichstrasse was the typical departure point for the fortunate East Germans who received permission to travel to the West, and for Westerners ending family visits. Departing travelers were processed through a new annex to the station. The building, a place of painful leave-taking, acquired the nickname "Palace of Tears."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Ghosts of Berlin"
by .
Copyright © 1997 The University of Chicago.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Illustrations,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
1. Berlin Walls,
2. Old Berlin,
3. Metropolis,
4. Nazi Berlin,
5. Divided Berlin,
6. Capital of the New Germany,
Afterword: Two Decades Later,
Chronology of Berlin's History,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,