Three Walks through Berlin

Figure 8Berlin does have
Figure 9 some urban elements which would qualify as icons because of their beauty, their historical meaning and their function. I could have chosen the wrapped Reichstag building from the wonderful summer of 1995 as an example, because Christo and Jeanne-Claude have indeed managed to symbolize the transition, which has taken place in Berlin after 1989, and given it artistic expression. But the wonder lasted only for two weeks. The Brandenburg Gate is acknowledged as a symbol for Berlin all over the world (we realized that when this building was wrapped during renovation; everybody missed it). These images, and several more, are indeed being used in the city marketing of Berlin. But the wall has become the most prominent of all.

One of the places where we can see how closely the layers of history of the last century are connected to each other and how their messages 'cross over', as it were, can be found, as was already mentioned, in Niederkirchner-Straße between two of Berlin’s central districts, 'Mitte' and 'Kreuzberg'. The street was named after a communist politician who was murdered by the Nazis – one half of the city wanted to keep the name because Käthe Niederkirchner was a victim of the Nazis, the other half wanted to abolish it because she was a communist. Berlin is the place where two totalitarian systems have left their historical traces; sometimes in very different ways, sometimes in very similar ways. What you see, depends on where you stand. The wall 'ran' – if we stick to this image – through this street and separated for example a former museum building named after its architect, Martin Gropius (Walter’s great-uncle), from the Haus der Ministerien, House of Departments, which under the Nazis served as Hermann Göring’s Ministry of Aviation.
Figure 10 When the two Berlins, still separated, celebrated the 750th anniversary of the city in 1987, the Martin-Gropius-Bau hosted an exhibition, which could only have been called 'Berlin, Berlin'.
Figure 11 The course of the exhibition ended for visitors with a short peek through the back door – where they looked at the wall. But visitors were encouraged to look also to their right, where they could find the above mentioned ruins of the former Gestapo headquarters. The 'Topography of Terror' marks one of the central places of national-socialist terror in the capital of Germany. Another regime has disappeared, but tourists who want to learn about the history of National Socialism stand in front of the remnants of the Wall, remnants which are getting thinner and thinner, full of holes.

I will still try to contextualize my thoughts about the wall – or what has been left of it – in more general reflections about the presence of historical witnesses in the city of Berlin, about the meaning of history in the daily life of this city and about all the forms in which it, the city, uses history in order to give itself an expression – to tourists and visitors, to its inhabitants, but also to other cities that are able to throw other 'icons' into the ring of cultural economy – skyscrapers, Eiffel Towers, Big Wheels or a Laguna. Strolling through Berlin, we can find examples of Frederick the Great’s city, of the Berlin of the Enlightenment, of the upward-moving bourgeois Berlin of the 'foundation years' after 1871, of the arrogant Berlin of the Kaiser’s period – but World War II and the two post-war periods have dealt heavy, devastating blows to all these buildings and urban settings, so that a Berlin publishing house could publish a substantial lexicon of all the vanished buildings in Berlin some years ago.[i]

The wall, a rather weird artefact, has been more or less omnipresent in the city I am talking about. But at the same time, in the everyday life of the two cities, or half cities, it was also more or less invisible. Both aspects, the omnipresence as well as the invisibleness, will form the background for my argument. The materiality and material reality of something which was more than 43 kilometres long, a marathon wall, one could say, is as important for an understanding of this history as the way in which the two urban societies of 'Berlin, Berlin' managed to arrange themselves in a sort of 'culture of division' on both sides of the wall – so well indeed, that they didn’t see the wall anymore.

First Station: Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse

The first place to see is the former border crossing point (Grenzübergangsstelle) at Friedrichstraße train station. This 'border crossing point' had a very specific situation, because it was not located at the border but rather in the middle of East Berlin, because it was (and still is) the connection point between three means of communication between East and West in the city. Visitors from the Western part usually used the S-Bahn from the station Zoologischer Garten or the underground train from the southern district of Kreuzberg (Kochstraße) or from the northern district of Wedding (Reinickendorfer Straße) in order to arrive at Friedrichstraße station. Ralph Hoppe, the author of a very good book about this street,[ii] told me how he arrived in Berlin from a city in East Germany as a young student. Under his feet, he could feel the vibrations of an underground train, although his East Berlin maps did not show any underground rail under this street. The underground did indeed run there, but it went from the southern West to the northern West, and between Kochstraße and Reinickendorfer Straße it stopped only once: at Friedrichstraße. The other stations which had functioned until 1961, were closed, the train passed them slowly, and from the windows inside one could see soldiers with their guns pointed to the passing train: 'Ghost Stations' we called them and we became used to them as well. I instead used the S-Bahn, an urban fast train above ground. From Zoologischer Garten, it ran via Tiergarten, Bellevue and Lehrter Stadtbahnhof – after which station it crossed the Wall, from above one could see the two walls along the river Spree, the lamps, the mine fields and the guards with their dogs; newcomers stood at the windows – to Friedrichstraße train station.
Figure 12 It was, the whole time, a train station where you could board a train to Warsaw or Moscow. But it was also a border station. The train stopped, everybody had to get off and found their way through a labyrinth (which has been completely removed since 1989). One went down the stairs, up another flight, down again and finally one stood before several doors with inscriptions such as 'citizen FRG' or 'citizen Westberlin' or even 'citizen GDR' (because after the age of 65 one could commute between the two worlds) or 'allied personnel'. Guards controlled your passports, asked about the purpose of your visit, and then one of the doors opened with a humming tone and closed again behind you. Trapped between doors, you had to show your passport again, get a stamp on a day visa, and pay 5 Deutschmarks for it. Then the second door opened, you went to customs, showed your bags, changed 25 Deutschmarks into 25 different Deutschmarks (worth one tenth), and finally went out of the station – to find yourself still in the same city, but in another country with a different political system.

The difference in systems showed itself in different uniforms, in different currency, then – outside,
Figure 13on the street – in different (smaller) cars, different red and green lights and in the absence of Western style advertisements. Visitors spent a day in East Berlin (mostly trying to spend the 25 Marks), but had to go back before midnight and – after another control of passport, bags and money – re-enter the train station by way of a small side building, freshly sorted out into 'citizens FRG' and 'citizens GDR'. Many East Berliners brought their visitors to say good-bye, which is why this little building got the nickname of 'Tear’s Palace', 'Tränenpalast', under which name it is today a successful concert hall. On 22 November 2003, the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel published the following note: 'The "Tränenpalast" is looking for funny, sad and strange stories about experiences made in the former control hall at the border station. The stories will be used for a theatre production. Witnesses from both sides of the wall who want to tell their personal stories, please call the number ... The Show shall be produced next fall.'

There is one thing we can learn from this place: You can define 'border' more or less as you wish. It can be an idea rather than a fixed place – this insight alone might give us some doubt about the usefulness of the above mentioned projects of 'marking' the border.

Second station: Checkpoint Charlie

The second place where I would like to take you finds itself at the southern end of Friedrichstraße and closer to the site of the wall. The 'House at Checkpoint Charlie' claims to tell the story of the wall, but it is a very selective (and even personal) view that it offers. It is one of the most frequented museums in the city, full to overflowing with school classes and tourists from all over the world.
Figure 14 The house was founded by Rainer Hildebrandt (who passed away in January 2004) and is headed today by his widow Alexandra, who in September 2004 put up the new monument wall and crosses at Checkpoint Charlie. Rainer Hildebrandt was one of the participants at the Hearing in the Academy of Arts in 1995, where he argued very actively in favour of keeping – or even restoring – as much remnants of the wall as possible: 'We have already lost so much of Our Wall, we don’t want to lose any more of it!' Our wall? We will come to the difficult questions of who indeed owns the wall or its remnants, who is or was allowed to sell its pieces or to build on the grounds where it stood. But these words sounded strange: 'Our Wall'. In a certain way this wall – or what was left of it – had become the focal point for a group of people who, after so many years, still defined themselves (and created their museums) around its existence, present and visible or absent and invisible. The 'wall' was what made Berlin special. The 'wall' was used to describe the difficult relationship between East and West even after 1989: Although the wall itself was gone, the separation between East and West was still being felt and to some people it seemed (and seems until today) stronger than ever. The only word they could find for this feeling of ongoing separation was – 'a wall'.

'Can the Berlin Wall', Rainer Hildebrandt asked, 'attain as much symbolic power as the Wall of Troy, the Wailing Wall, or the Chinese Wall?' And he goes on: 'One day we will write THE WALL with big letters.' The way for the wall to become an icon was paved early, maybe already with the first photographs of its building, of the walled-in windows and doors in the houses at Bernauer Straße, of the first refugees crossing the still imperfect border lines, of the soldier who jumped over the fence at Checkpoint Charlie, and especially from the moment when West Berliners started to use it as a decorative canvas for graffiti, political slogans and messages. With the help of the museum, this perspective on THE WALL with big letters became the 'official' one in Berlin, the one still presented to visitors and tourists. But this image of the wall’s centrality in Berlin’s everyday-life does not fit in, or at least only very partially, with the way both urban societies lived with this symbol of separation for nearly 30 years. Both urban societies have arranged themselves or made themselves comfortable behind – or in front of – the two walls between 1961 and 1989, and they both have managed to organize their ways in the city – around the wall or in a distance to and from it. The museum does not tell us about this way of life with (or rather, without) the wall.

Third Station: Bernauer Straße: Politics of Memory in Berlin

Figure 15Coming back to our walk through Berlin, we have to go to a third place: Bernauer Straße.
Figure 16This street, one of Berlin’s 'history miles', has become famous because the pictures of people jumping out of their windows when their houses were made part of the 'Wall' itself could be seen all over the world. The houses were torn down later; as late as 1984 a church which stood in the way of the Wall, 'Versöhnungskirche', 'Church of Reconciliation', was destroyed. Today, there is a provisional wooden chapel, built over one of the many tunnels used for escape from East to West Berlin. Next to it, there is a centre of documentation about the history of the wall. And again next to this centre, there is Berlin’s central (but rarely visited) Wall Memorial where the former wall structure – torn down in the euphoric moments in 1989 and 1990 – had to be reconstructed for the sake of documentation and memory. The whole place looks like a huge wall of mirrors.

This image – a memorial in the form of a mirror or several mirrors – needs some background explanation of the wide
Figure 17field of memorial culture in Berlin – and the crucial question of the materiality of memory. The Berlin of the post-wall era has to find and define new 'economies of signs and images'. It has to find its own place along the former lines of 'East' and 'West', as well as between past and present. Until several months ago, one could still see the slogan 'Neue Zeit' — translated, 'New Era' — (which in fact was a left-over from the old times, advertising for one of the 'Blockparteien' in East Germany, but it looked like a promise for the future). Where should this 'new era' find its orientation? The Berlin of the era before 1933 was a city of newspapers and printing houses; it was a city of fashion; it was also a city of luxury and pleasure and, at the same time, of poverty and social struggle. It wanted to be a 'city of light', just like Paris, and celebrated itself, 'Berlin im Licht', ‘lluminated Berlin’, in October 1928. Still, not one of these old cultural economies could really represent Berlin, when we compare it to the role of fashion in Paris or the role of music in Vienna.

I would argue that for many periods of its existence Berlin was characterized by its quality as a 'new city'. Its 'novelty', its unfinished look was what made it different from other great capitals – and this could be exactly the character to which the Berlin of today, uprooted and in the middle of changes like no other place in Europe, could turn in the search for its new identity. It could be. Berlin’s search for an urban identity takes place in the field between history and the future, and it turns around one question: in creating a future for the city, how big should the share, the portion of history be? In the struggle of overcoming the past – or rather, at least the heritage of two dictatorships – how great should the respect paid to the ruins and leftovers of this heritage be? One of the contestants at the Academy of Arts found prototypical words for the dilemma: 'The memory of places is already more or less wiped out. Still there is some kind of "break" or "aisle" [German: "Schneise"] which will also soon be invisible and gone. This is not only a reason for joy, because this quick disappearing of the traces is leading to a dizziness, a whirl of events, which drives the just-has-been into a "never-to-be-seen-again", whereas the present, the "today" maintains its position totally.'[iii]

A similar sentiment – and, I would say, sentimentality – can be found in a text written by the authors of the documentation 'The Berlin Wall Today' from which I was quoting earlier. Polly Feversham and Leo Schmidt describe the wall, full of holes, crumbled away, in a nostalgic tone: 'Even in an unattractive building such as the Wall, the ruin of a former Wall, we cannot deny a special quality, a kind of ability to provide us with images of emotional care ["Zuwendung"] and with the notion of pain when we see how this pathetic structure, cut to pieces, has lost its former unity ["Geschlossenheit"] so visibly.' I repeat the whole sentence in German, because it is so hard to translate (and even harder to understand): "Selbst bei einem so unattraktiven Bauwerk wie der Mauer ist die der Ruine innewohnende Fähigkeit, emotionale Zuwendung und Bilder auszulösen, nicht gänzlich zu bestreiten – es liegt auch eine Schmerzlichkeit darin, wie diese erbärmliche, zerstückelte Anlage ihre ursprüngliche Geschlossenheit so offenkundig eingebüßt hat."[iv]

The wall has lost its 'unity'. Yes, and only because of that Germany could be united and the communist system collapsed. But for some minds this news seems to lose importance compared to the catastrophe that happened to 'Our Wall'. This fear of the present has many sources. It is of course true that both regimes, which ruled in and from Berlin in the twentieth century, have tried to put their stamp on the capital as a sign of their power. The builders of the national-socialist regime used traces and remnants of each period of German history when it fitted their plans, from Charlemagne via the Crusades and the Reformation up to Bismarck, but at the same time the regime can be described as a ruthless machine of modernization.[v] Hitler’s architect Albert Speer broke gigantic roads through the cityscape in order to create his 'Germania'. On the other hand and in different ways, the system we came to know as 'real existing socialism' connected itself ideologically to the – in this case democratic – traditions of German history which rhetoric did not prevent it from tearing down great parts of Berlin’s centre in order to create big spaces for mass gatherings. The new Berlin after 1989 does not want to be seen in the follow-up to either of these 'traditions'. Its planners therefore try to find a kind of respectful way of treating the historical heritage and the witnesses of each period of the city’s history. This effort has been named a 'critical reconstruction' of the urban structure (and atmosphere) from before 1933, and it includes the famous 'Traufhöhe', the regular height of buildings that should not go beyond 21 metres, a law which has rendered quite a number of investors nervous.

In opposition to these tendencies, I would again argue that this fear of a loss of memory – 'Gedächtnisverlust' – is rather untypical for Berlin. The historian of Jewish Berlin, Ludwig Geiger, introduces his masterpiece, Geschichte der Juden in Berlin, published in 1871 for the double occasion of the bicentennial of the foundation of this community in 1671, and the unification of the Reich in that very year, with the following words: 'Berlin is not a city of the middle-ages. It dates back to the first centuries of the second millenium (around 1225), but it doesn’t know the gleam nor the disgrace, not the dignity nor the lowness of the old Germanic towns' ('Es kennt nicht den Glanz und die Schmach, nicht die Würde und Niedrigkeit der altdeutschen Städte', [vi]).

This quality of Berlin, to be new, 'like the whole state', Prussia, and not to be connected and hence indebted to the image of the old German town, has prepared the city, Geiger argued, for the reception of strangers, of immigrants; this quality has given Berlin the 'wonderful ability' to 'melt together foreign components'. 'The Jews have come as foreigners into the country, and it has taken less than a century until they saw themselves as citizens.' Until they saw themselves as citizens – we see the critical point in these words from our point of view today; for Geiger it was clear that his fellow Berliners shared this view in 1871.

Only when the general consciousness about the destruction of Jewish Berlin – which indeed was a destruction of the inner unity of this city – had grown substantially, say around the late 1960s, a new 'politics of history', 'Geschichtspolitik', could begin. It discovered the meaningfulness of 'authentic' places and dedicated itself to the preservation of historic sites and turned them into memorial places. Berlin’s traditional 'American' ruthlessness – make way for everything new – was replaced, step by step, by a tendency which has been labelled as 'topolatry', an idolatry for places.[vii] Not only do we try to document what has been destroyed, for example the New Synagogue of 1866 which had been ruined during the war and was re-erected partially as a 'Centrum Judaicum' in 1995; we also try to make the crime of destruction itself visible, at the scene of crime.

This has brought Berlin some very interesting places of memory. The strongest of them is a 'wall of mirrors' on the market-place in the district of Steglitz, in the south of Berlin.
Figure 18The mirrored wall carries historical information, names of victims, but it is at the same time a mirror in which you see yourself at the very moment you look at history. The most disputed example is just in the process of building, close to the Brandenburg Gate, in an empty area where a place of memory is 'staged', the 'Memorial for the murdered Jews of Europe'.
Figure 19 The form in which the 'places' of national-socialist terror have been documented has a great influence on the aesthetic practice in which Berlin intends to commemorate the wall. More than that, the official politics of history create platforms where the two dictatorships are brought closely together and memory is dedicated preferably to 'all' victims of the two dictatorial regimes of the twentieth century.[viii]

[i] Andreas Hoffmann, Verschwundene Orte: Prominente Abrisse in Berlin (Berlin, 1997).

[ii] Ralph Hoppe, Die Friedrichstraße: Pflaster der Extreme (Berlin, 1999).

[iii] Gerwin Zohlen, "Idee, Konzept, Technik", in Das Kupferband zur Erinnerung an die Berliner Mauer (Broschüre: Berlin, 1995) (zum Senatshearing vom 14. Juni 1995).

[iv] Polly Feversham and Leo Schmidt, Die Berliner Mauer heute: Denkmalwert und Umgang (Berlin, 1999), 131.

[v] The spirit of modern Berlin is best captured in Karl Scheffler, Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal (Berlin, 1910.) See Joachim Schlör, 'Das Ich der Stadt: Debatten über Judentum und Urbanität' (Habilitationsschrift Universität Potsdam, forthcoming fall 2005).

[vi] Ludwig Geiger, Geschichte der Juden in Berlin: Als Festschrift zur zweiten Säkularfeier, im Auftrage des Vorstands der Berliner Gemeinde bearbeitet von Ludwig Geiger (Berlin, 1871), S. V.

[vii] The term was first coined by Karl Markus Mickel in Kursbuch, as a way to describe the German fixation on places of memory. See Konrad Köstlin, 'Die Ortlosigkeit der Globalisierung, die wie das Internet überall und nirgends stattfindet, erzwingt die "Topolatrie", wie Karl Markus Michel "die Magie des Ortes" genannt hat, die damit ein Kennzeichen der Moderne ist.' (Versuchte Eigen–art: Region und Kreativität. Betrachtungen zur Betonung des Regionalen. Zolltexte, http://www.nextroom.at/article.php?article_id=3913, 06-01-05).

[viii] After 1989, federal, state and local institutions have been founded in Germany to strengthen co-operation between the existing memorials dedicated to the memory of victims of the Nazi regime and new memorials dedicated to the memory of victims of the communist regime – in some place like the former concentration camp (and later Soviet camp) Sachsenhausen memorials had to be 'integrated' somehow. But conflicts appeared quite soon, in several states representatives of Jews in Germany and of former political prisoners under the Nazi regime have left these institutions because they feared an intended equalization of the two dictatorships.