Place In Place Of: Berlin

Seeing History

Looking for remnants of the past in Berlin often digresses into trips to see large scale monuments – but deciphering these monuments is tricky business and coming to decisions about how to represent war and loss in Berlin is even more tricky. To complicate the situation even further the East/West split generates another whole set of issues. How do you represent a united German view of remembrance when the country effectively took two different paths in this process?

There seems, even now, to be a constant buzz about contested public space. Recently, a memorial near Check Point Charlie was removed after the lease on the land turned over (more context here). The memorial was created to honor those who were killed attempting to cross the Wall and consisted of a field of black crosses. Some contributing factors were that the memorial was only in existence since last October and that it was not funded by the state in any way. And though it lay close to Check Point Charlie, the site itself did not have a specific history (a site of escape, etc.). Its removal sparked a debate throughout the city (and abroad) and aroused discussions that seem to be just below the surface at all times. What is preservation? Where is history? Who should be remembered, and how?

Another hotly debated topic is the preservation or destruction of the Palace of the Republic – a building that was built by the GDR on the site of the former Hohenzollern palace. This article from 2003 threatens that citizens should get a last glimpse, implying imminent threat to the structure. But it is still there and the debate continues as the Palace of the Republic falls into a wretched state of disrepair. The site is prime real estate for the historic center, right on Unter den Linden. The structure is in stark contrast to the “old world” feel of the other structures close by (Schinkel’s Lustgarten, Alte Museum and redesigned Protestant Church). It is proposed to re-build the old 19th-century Baroque Hohenzollern palace after the demolition – restoring the historical center to its pre-war existence. A fake palace in a democratic state, strange.

It seems to me that the GDR Palace of the Republic is a remnant of Real history – recent history, as unpleasant as it may be. A re-built palace would be only a representation of the past and a myth. It is a nostalgic decision to attempt to return to a time before the Royal Palace was destroyed by war, when Berlin fit neatly into the Romantic notion of how Europe should look (to visitors in particular). But what the GDR building provides me, from an architectural standpoint, is great visual breadth and an architectural map of the actual history of the space. I can walk from west to east on Unter den Linden and understand the moments where history changed common space, without the interruption of nostalgia or glorification. It seems so honest the way that it is.

If people were to eradicate architectural landscapes that made them uncomfortable, wouldn’t the Lustgarten itself be a candidate for demolition? The Third Reich used this same square as a backdrop for dramatic rallies and speeches that make any normal person shutter – but this history is less visible – so the architecture remains, uncontested.

Posted by Meredith at 13:49 on July 27, 2005

Gentrifizierung - Kolonie Wedding

Berlin has a relationship to artists that is both seductive and repellant all at once. Gathering information and understanding more about this relationship is complicated for a variety of reasons and my primary sources have been some friendly ex-pats, some natives and an occasional website that provides English translation. I worry that my critique is not properly informed – but I will go ahead with it anyhow and trust that if I make a terrible blunder someone will kindly send me an email correction. This critique involves a number of organizations and it is tough to understand how they connect to one another (as arms of local government, as autonomous non-profits, as collectives, as commercial ventures). But here goes…

I first learned about Kolonie Wedding (Colony as in colonize – Wedding is a district of Berlin, not a puffy white dress) from a native Berliner after inquiring where we might find some alternative art spaces (non-commercial). I understood Kolonie Wedding, at that point, to be a collaboration of artists who had started renting studio and storefront space in Wedding because of its low cost and availability. After attending an opening this past weekend I came to find out that the situation was quite different. Kolonie Wedding is rather a situation that was offered to artists by a company called Dewego. And Dewego is in turn a company who’s major shareholder happens to be the city of Berlin. Kolonie Wedding provides spaces free to artists, as well as organizing monthly walk-abouts and printing for publicity. Artists are required only to cover the cost of utilities. Dewego is also aligned in this venture with other local businesses and an EU project that I have yet to read up on.

The arrangement between the collaborative partners and the artists gets even more complicated when you start to uncover Wedding’s social, cultural and economic context. Wedding had been a working class neighborhood since the 19th century and from what I read has maintained its distinction as a “red” labor district – in fact it was often targeted by the Nazis in the 1930’s because of this very characteristic.

After the war, Wedding fell under French occupation (the city was occupied by the French British, Americans and Soviets). It was one of the few unfortunate districts that bordered the Berlin Wall. Because it was occupied by the French it fell to the west of the Wall, but suffered greatly from the Wall’s existence. When the Wall went up in 1961 the businesses of Wedding lost much of their clientele who lived in neighboring Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte. Like Kreuzberg (another western border neighborhood), it went into decline. Wedding was also the site of many of the early and dramatic escapes from the East. It is now home to the Berlin Wall Documentation Center.

The trauma of WWII and then the building of the Wall left Germany in a situation where it needed to add to it existing population. West Germany adopted a liberal immigration policy and in particular offered guest-worker (Gastarbeiter) permits quite freely. As compensation for the wrongs of the war West Germany also adopted a liberal policy on the immigration of people seeking political asylum. Read more here about Germany and Immigration.

These actions lead to a great influx of Turkish immigrants. Germany now has the largest Turkish population outside of Turkey. Though the largest section of Turks is in Kreuzberg (another western Wall district of Berlin), Wedding also has a large Turkish population. Many of the on-line references use very strange language to describe this fact – noting rather that the district is “multicultural”. An article in the Deutsche Welle even suggests it is becoming a ghetto (a suggestion that I find baffling). In fact, Dewego openly stated that the artist programs “are very long-term projects that aim to attract a different demographic to Wedding.”

There seems to be a pattern here – although this is certainly a simplification to a process that has been long and complicated.
1. The Wall goes up
2. Neighborhoods that are cut off by the Wall suffer greatly
3. Natives leave those neighborhoods for greener pastures
4. Unoccupied housing deemed undesirable by natives is occupied willingly by immigrants (Turks)
5. The Wall comes down
6. Neighborhoods start to redevelop
7. Some are gentrified quickly – others maintain an immigrant population that has been settled there now since the 1960’s
8. City, in part with Developer and others, invites artists to pioneer gentrification in particular neighborhoods
9. Artists, excited by great opportunities to work and show , move into the spaces that are offered to them in marginal neighborhoods

So herein lies the dilemma. We know that artists are commonly pioneers of gentrification. But is gentrification any more or less problematic when it is arranged by an organization with specific political or economic intentions? And is it more problematic when that organization’s expressed intention is to change the neighborhood’s “demographic”? What are the responsibilities of the artists to their new neighbors?

Berlin makes a special problem of these issues, first because of the history of the actual built environment (having been obliterated and rebuilt so many times), but also because of its receptive attitude towards the arts. It is a city that I do perceive as being exceptionally hospitable to artists. It is a city whose local government seems to be invested in artists as vibrant and vital part of the city’s landscape. But based on my current understand of the Kolonie Wedding project, I am suspicious of the alignment of business, government and artists.

This is a subject that I will continue to pursue while I am here in Berlin. If you have additional information or links on the subject I would love to hear from you. I have provided links to my sources in the body of the text, but you can also link to them here:

• Kolonie Wedding
• Berlin Gets Creative About Waste of Space, Deutsche Welle
• Berlin Restored to New Glory—Story discussing Dewego
• A bit on German Immigration Issues and Policies
• A Brief History of Wedding
• Berlin Wall Documentation Center

Posted by Meredith at 23:57 on July 20, 2005

Some more Punkt - usPunkt

We seemed to have settled into a certain way of understanding the space of Berlin: through a series of points (locations) that are connected – physically, conceptually, historically. I embarked on a project on the 4th of July marking site of political events with in the city of Berlin. Berlin itself is a site of historical and political contention, so I started with the sites that I know thus far, ones that are in some cases frightening and haunting, and others hopeful.

At each site I deposited a crocheted red, white and blue target (about the size of a coaster). Underneath each one is a card marked with the web address uspunkt.blogspot.com—where the project is explained. In most cases this site will act as a place for me to deposit writing and thinking about the American political landscape—but also as a place to ask for help. From who, I don’t know.

Being away from America has done nothing to lower my anxiety about home. I suppose it shouldn’t.

Posted by Meredith at 17:54 on July 13, 2005

Mein Name ist Meredith. Ich spreche English.

The Audio in German: Mein Name ist Meredith - Ich spreche English. Können Sie es bitte für mich Deutsche lehren. Ich kann nicht bezahlen nur ich kann tauschhandel. Ich kann Sie lehren das Programme Dreamweaver, Photoshop und Final Cut für der video. Ich kann Sie lehren zu stricken und zu täkel.

Wenn Sie interessiert sind bitte eine e-mail schicken. Das ist meine Kunste Project.

Translation in English: My name in Meredith. I speak English. Can you please teach me German? I can not pay but I can barter. I can teach you the programs Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Final Cut. I can teach you to knit and crochet.

If you are interested, please send me an email. This is my art project. Thank you. jmwarner at knittingcommunity.org

Posted by Meredith at 23:51 on July 3, 2005

AEG Oberschöneweide

AEG Oberschöneweide was part of the East German Industrial Center, producing transformers, energy and electric cable. The industry was abandoned in the 1990’s and now we (and other artists like us) stay here for a few months. Not in the AEG building but in a neighboring building that is part of the same complex. Other studios are here and some smaller businesses fill in floor by floor. But to the best of my knowledge, much of this huge industrial site is still vacant. These massive buildings follow the Spree south toward the edge of Berlin.

My research into this subject has been hampered by a lack of documentation and my inability to read German. Here is what I do know. The AEG building (the image I posted, though I can not confirm this is the right one) was designed by Peter Behrens between 1909 and 1914 (during which time his assistants were a laundry list of soon to become super-star architects like Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe). That information was provided by my current read - The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape by Brian Ladd. So far an excellect read and doing a great job of helping to make more sense of this place.

But what this really brings me to, and I will expand upon in the future is the role of the artist in the process of gentrification. Here in Berlin this process seems magnified - even more rampid than what was described recently in the NY Times as the new SO-BRO area of the South Bronx.

Posted by Meredith at 16:44 on July 1, 2005

Guns and Combs

The Colors of Berlin PUBLIC TRANSPORT (see image left). Our friends remarked at first that the wallboard pattern on the S-46 looked like guns and combs (it does). At closer inspection you see they are tiny representations of local historical monuments.
We spend a large chunk of our time on the trains and trams in Berlin. It is a pleasure to know that it takes me three weeks to even realize I have not been in a car for that long. I find public transportation to be a pleasure (of course I still rubber-neck at everything in sight). But even when I did live in a city for longer than a few months, I enjoyed my state of car-less-ness. Driving makes me hostile, uptight. It forms this huge impenetrable bubble around me - one where I care little for the people around me. I remember my last week in Philadelphia, prior to moving to Austin, TX - I was cut off abruptly by a woman in a construction zone (she was also in a car). My blood was boiling and so I leaned out the car window and hollered some obscenity at her (I was also shaking my fist at her). It was one of those moments you can she yourself from a far and you think - who the hell is that? I knew at that moment I needed a break from Philly. Unfortunately I was moving to a place even more dominated by cars. Texas. Land of Brisket and Bush.

Posted by Meredith at 13:45 on July 1, 2005

To Marx and Engels

The government of post-reunification Berlin decided to leave Marx and Engels alone. Perhaps this is because the monument lacks the heroic bravado of so many of the other GDR-era monuments. The bronze figures are not quite three times as large as the average person and they are placed rather informally on a low pedestal in the cobblestoned expanse of the Platz. Both figures are solemn and passive: Marx sits calmly, almost benevolently, as Engels stands just left of and behind the better-known figure. One can walk right up to Grandfather Karl, place a hand on his knee or rest an elbow on his thigh, and have a memorable photograph taken.

Or maybe Marx and Engels remain in Berlin because of the popularity and relevance of their ideas. The Marxist critique of politics, culture, art, and literature etc. has been developed and refined by so many thinkers in the 20th century, and it is Marxism which has fueled the more strident and radical (and much needed) voices of the Left within the context of numerous democratic societies and states. Marx and Engels do not only belong to the troubled histories of communism and socialism.

On a recent afternoon I watched numerous tourists from all parts of the world walk into the expanse of the Platz, gawk quizzically at the two old, bronze gentlemen, and then either snap a photo or saddle up next to the statues to have their picture taken. I was particularly amused by a large group of Asian men—from which Asian country I don’t know—who so methodically went up to the statue one by one for a photograph. Did they know who these two men were, or was this just another stop among many in their sight-seeing itinerary around Berlin? It most likely doesn’t matter either way.

It occurs to me that allowing Marx and Engels to stay in Berlin might have been a bit more cynical, though: a big-time F-U from Capitalism to the tired (ergo, ineffectual) ideas of Marx, Engels, and their ilk. In Berlin, in Germany, in eastern Europe, Capitalism has triumphed. Sony, Daimler-Benz, and Price Waterhouse Cooper have built their corporate castles on the very site of the Berlin Wall! All the radicals and punks have been kicked out of their unheated utopian squat houses and the Lefties now sport around town in Diesel jeans and Campers listening to Chomsky podcasts on their mp3 players! (Hey, that’s me, too.) So Marx and Engels can stay and isn’t it quaint this relic from a time before neoliberalism gave us free-market democracy. Look, take a picture.

Posted by Jeremy at 23:50 on July 28, 2005

All the way around the Palace

Read more about the former GDR’s Palace of the Republic.

Posted by Jeremy at 21:52 on July 24, 2005

Denkmal (Monument)

(The etymology of monument begins with the Latin monumentum, literally, “memorial,” from monEre, “to remind.” The German word, Denkmal, appears to be comprised of denk, a root meaning “thought” or “mind” and mal meaning “mark.”)

Perhaps a monument, as long as there remains some extant trace of it, will always remain a monument to something, intended or not.

The respective governments of West and East Berlin, a divided city for so many years, erected monuments to those historical figures and events which might symbolize the ideals and values and histories suitable for each political ideology, for each image they desired to project to themselves and to the world. After World War II and the division of the East from West, each side sought to claim some connection to a past and a tradition somehow not entangled with the egregious sins of the National Socialists (Nazis). One side sought identification with the heroic antifascism of the Communists, the other wished to identify with the slightly militaristic but culturally rich heritage of the 19th century, as well as the victims of fascism. (These numerous questions and difficulties regarding Germany’s relationship to its past extend to many other areas, including architectural preservation, urban planning, even the naming of streets, as Brian Ladd’s Ghosts of Berlin reveals.)

After reunification, many (politicians) in West Berlin found the monuments of the East embarrassing and distasteful—colossal statues of Lenin were deemed incompatible for the united, neoliberal Germany of the future. These views have been met with protest from leftists and a few intellectuals simply interested in preserving an inclusive, collective version of the Germany’s past which might embrace all of Berlin’s monuments as historical markers rather than specifically political ones. Yet many of the GDR’s monuments are gone and their streets have been renamed. In Oberschöneweide—our home in East Berlin—I discovered a weather-worn pedestal which at some time no doubt held aloft a figure or group of figures. A couple of brass numbers still dangle from the stone, leaving no discernible trace of who or what the monument once marked.

What remains is an abstract monument; its historical referent is vague for those of us who either didn’t know it when it was whole or have forgotten it. Yet it still serves as a marker. For me, it marks another instance of the city’s partial forgetting (or partial remembering) of itself. It marks an uneven act: a sloppy coat of paint, or a poorly scrubbed pot, or the ragged marks of pencil on paper after it has been hastily erased.

Posted by Jeremy at 11:27 on July 19, 2005

A Typology of Mess Punkte

Within the course of walking down any given block in Berlin, you might notice out of the corner of your eye a small raised metal disc or knob placed on the sidewalk; it might be brass or steel, with a weathered patina or gleaming new and shiny. And maybe what draws your attention in further, then, is this: there appears to be letters embossed or stamped in relief around the circumference of the disc. So, the tiny metal dot seems to have some intentionality invested in it, some vague purpose to its being where it is. Closer inspection allows you to identify the letters, which spell the words “Mess Punkt” or maybe “Verm Punkt” and you also notice a precisely machined dimple in the exact center of the disc. With your foot you give it a little nudge; the thing holds fast and you guess that it is spiked into the sidewalk.

You may register this first encounter as an oddity, merely another errant distraction among many which has stuttered your walks through the city, possibly giving cause for a snapshot or at least a closer look. However, the next day you spot another one of these strange metal discs in the sidewalk, and maybe this one is slightly larger or smaller, made of aluminum rather than steel or brass, and maybe there are some markings and numbers sprayed around the disc on the paving there as well. One Mess Punkt is an anomaly, but two (then 3 and 4 and 5…) Mess Punkte suggests a typology. But a typology of what?

“Punkt” is easy: “point.” Your dictionary shows you that “Mess” is shorthand for “measuring,” and “Verm” is an abbreviation for “Vermessung,” meaning “measurement.” Measuring, or measurement, point. Measuring points spiked into the sidewalk obviously used for measuring what? Utilities infrastructure buried underground? Lot lines? Building setbacks? You guess that the dimple in the Mess Punkt must be for coupling with some other instrument, a stake or a plumb line or a surveyor’s sighting device. But you’ve never seen one in action.

You become obsessed with the Mess Punkte. As you walk, your eyes scan the ground from left to right and back in search of other Mess Punkte, perhaps never-before-seen types to add to your typology. Your eyes are tired and strained, your forehead aches. The intensity with which you search for these miniscule points is blinding you to the world above the plane of the sidewalk. Your thoughts are filled with abstract representations which plot a new map of Berlin according to the network of all the Mess Punkte in the city. In your imagination you move from point to point making any number of precise measurements and calculations in search of some new hermetic understanding of the city. Your theories devolve into some vast cryptic code capable of creating a magnum opus text of the city with which initiates descend upon Berlin, measuring tapes and notebooks in hand, plotting points of intersection and curvature, climbing through windows and running across courtyards in search of direct lines between adjacent Mess Punkte. Are you going insane?

Posted by Jeremy at 12:32 on July 11, 2005

U-Bahn Selves

You are being watched, but you can watch yourself being watched, or watch others being watched, or watch others waiting, not watching. There are two versions of you down there. One is flat, or in profile, seen from the front, from slightly above. One is pixellated slightly, a bit off-color, or maybe just right. One is contiguous, soft, fleeting, roundish. One is fixed on magnetic tape, and then summarily erased. One is remembered. One is partial.

One is wandering. One is bolted to the platform and covered in stainless steel. One is shuffling between people and benches and fragments of conversations in a language barely understood. One sees. One is seen. One is among so many, bumping into another one, or hoping to at least. One is standing on an empty platform and waiting.

Posted by Jeremy at 18:28 on July 6, 2005