Place In Place Of: Berlin

Niederschlags- wahrscheinlichkeit

Language is tricky - I was curious about this word for weeks before I bothered to ask a friend to define it.

Her response is as follows:

Well, it is not so absurd as it looks:
+ niederschlag - all what comes down from the skies, usually one would connect it to rain though.
You can break it down still to:
+ nieder - old german word for ‘down’ or ‘under’ (in austria it still exists as such)
+ schlag - literally it means bash, beat, knock, punch.. (in austria it is whipped cream)
and then
+ wahrscheinlichkeit- probability
it is built out of
+ wahrscheinlich - likely, or probable, or supposable..
this you can break down also -
+ wahr - true
+ schein - appearance, but also bogus..
+ lich - ending for adjective
and + keit - this is one of the possible german endings when transforming an adjective into a noun.. so actually it is very simple

In the end - Niederschlagswahrscheinlichkeit = a chance of rain.

Posted by Meredith at 11:36 on August 26, 2005

Women and War

Today we visited Gedenkstätte Plötzensee, the site of the prison where many victims of National Socialism were murdered. I also finished Albert Speers Memoir. Then I saw a blip about Cindy Sheehan on CNN. Last, I started slowly into some reading on my ever unfinished thesis. These four moments culminated in the start of some ideas about women and war. I have not come to any great revelations, so I will just post a few disparate quotes and images that are only now starting to gel into something solid.

1. A trip to Gedenkstätte Plötzensee today to deposit an usPunkt reveal to me a significant number of women involved in acts of resistance during WWII. Knowing that, of course, they existed, I was pleased to see them represented at the memorial.

2. Albert Speer (Hitler’s Architect and then Minister of Armaments) writes about his argument against foreign labor (prisoners from the occupied territories) to increase Germany’s armament production during WWII. He suggests German woman as a viable source of labor, following in the footsteps of the Americans (and Germany’s previous actions during WWI). But his argument in favor of German women working in the armaments factories was put down by a Goering - Sauckel combo: “Sauckel laid great weight on the danger that factory work might inflict moral harm upon German womanhood; not only might their “psychic and emotional” life be affected, but also their ability to bear.” [from: “Inside the Third Reich”]

3. Cindy Sheehan, who’s son was killed in Iraq, is camped out at the Bush Ranch in Crawford, Texas. She is the first person the U.S. in a long time to successfully draw attention to the Iraq War with and anti-war stance. I am well aware of the media’s roll in this process, but I think it is worth noting that her pain as a mother is what is most often used to legitimize her argument.

4. From “Spinster: An Evolving Stereotype Revealed Through Film” by Deborah J. Mustard

After WWII, there was an overwhelming resurgence of family values – the world needed the naturally gentle mothering of women after all it had been through (O’Brien, 1973).  In the United States, the pressure was on for women to marry, raise families, and fulfill the American dream.  After all, these were the values that we were fighting for in the war.  Because women had assumed employment in various occupations to help the war effort, it was now acceptable for single women to work.  But it still wasn’t acceptable that that ultimately these women might not marry (O’Brien, 1973).   It was expected that most women would leave their jobs, now that the men were returning home and rejoining the workforce, and go back home where they belonged in their domestic role of wife and mother.  Margaret Meade surmised that in the 1950’s unmarried women became virtually non-existent because society couldn’t afford to tolerate them (O’Brien, 1973).  But this wouldn’t last for long.

image credit

Posted by Meredith at 23:08 on August 18, 2005

Tram

There is something so different about the tram—different from the bus, the train and certainly the car. In Berlin the trams were developed primarily by the East, and the PT divide is still quite tangible. The tram gives you the luxury of being immersed in the city—similar to the car, but it is physically connected to the space. This connection is what separates it from the bus—which can be effected by detours, traffic jams, accidents etc. The tram is its own shared bubble gliding through the city. But I am also drawn to the newness of this experience that makes it feel somewhat exotic. The whirring noise of the acceleration, its absolute regularity and its lovely glow as it sweeps through the city on a dark night—it is a mobile Edward Hopper.

The tram’s existence in the East and near disappearance in the West seems right on considering how street cars disappeared in the U.S. And since the U.S. was friendly with the West it would be obvious for them to follow in our unsustainable and dull, bus-like existence. Seems that GM single-handedly put the Trolley industry out of business all across America, buying them up and installing new GM buses (they were convicted in the U.S. Supreme Court). But there are alternative theories about the demise of the Streetcar like this Berkley’s Institute for Transportation Studies piece that argues America’s trolley lines were doomed to be eliminated. GM just accelerated the process.

Few trolleys remain in the U.S., although Philadelphia (my soon to be home) boasts a single line from the west into center city (though the Girard Avenue Line may have started running again this summer). My suspicion is that Philadelphia was in the fortunate position of being too poor to destroy the actual tracks so the infrastructure is still there and I think is being considered for redevelopment. I am determined to live near one of these lines in an attempt to find some pleasure in getting around.

New trolley systems in the U.S. are more often “light rail” systems (not sure if there is anything really different except for the fancy name). Champaign-Urbana (where I just left and had lived for the last three years) also had a very successful trolley to connect the two towns to one another and the surrounding communities. But of course that is long gone, though there has been talk of light rail in the past few years. You can see it is often met by abrupt and anonymous opposition (C-U image below). Perhaps Champaign-Urbana will reconsider under the influence of this weeks surging oil prices.

Posted by Meredith at 10:14 on August 13, 2005

How did/do/will/should we remember?

Memorials provide an unending source of fascination. This is not only unique to Berlin, a city whose history is so contentious—in terms of its past conflicts as well as the interpretation of that past—but is evident in just about every place where people have ever lived (I imagine). For any culture, society, or community, there is always so much at stake with the memorials it creates, as if there was only one chance to mark the memory of the past with one grand gesture of finality: “This happened here, and this is how we remember it. Forever and ever.” Every memorial is bound to questions of representation and symbolism—who is represented? what is symbolized?—and ultimately to the question of authority—who decides how the past is represented and how a group’s values are symbolized? And then, an architect or an artist (or groups of these) is commissioned with the task of creating something which embodies all of these unfixed and imprecise ideas and psychologies of remembrance in one final gesture. Once you begin to look a bit deeper at a memorial and the process of its becoming, you can learn so much about a place and its citizens and its (contested) notion(s) of itself.

Berlin is a memorialized place. (How could it be otherwise?) A brief survey of some of its memorials begins to indicate the range of strategies / tactics (I’m thinking of de Certeau’s distinction here) for remembrance.

Soviet War Memorial (built 1946-1949) [more info]
This massive memorial and gravesite was built by the Soviets to honor the 20,000 Russian soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin of early 1945.

Neue Wache, Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism (1816-1993) [more info]
The Neue Wache (guard house) building was buildt by Karl Schinkel in 1816. In 1931, the Weimar Republic designated the building as a World War I memorial. The GDR restored the building after World War II as a war memorial and then it was rededicated after reunification in 1993 with a newly placed copy of a Kathe Kollwitz Pieta sculpture.

Berlin Wall Memorial at the Berliner Mauer Dokumentationszentrum (1998) [more info]
An entire section of the Wall (wall, death strip, patrol track, hinterland wall) on Bernauerstrasse was preserved and capped as a memorial at the Berliner Mauer Dokumentationszentrum, an institution which documents the history of the Wall with text, photography, audio, and film archives.

Berlin Wall marked by cobblestones near Potsdamer Platz (mid-1990s)
Several kilometers of the Wall are simply marked with a double row of cobblestones inset into the ground.

Stolpersteine (1992, project initiated in Köln) [more info]
These brass “stumble stones” can be found all over Berlin. They mark the residences of those who were deported by the Nazis to concentration camps—Jews, Gypsies, dissidents, and others deemed antithetical to German national identity—stamped into a single brass stone is the name, date of birth, name of the camp deported to, and, if known, what their ultimate fate was (usually murdered). Often you will see clusters of these as entire households were evacuated.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005) [more info]
Architect Peter Eisenman’s high-profile and maximalist memorial was recently opened in May 2005 on a site between Potsdamer Platz and Brandenburg Gate. (For an interesting counter proposal for this memorial and an example of a very different kind of tactic, see Stih and Schnock’s Bus Stop project, which proposes to the use the site in Berlin as a point of departure (deportment) for individual pilgrimages to the various cites in central Europe where the victims of Nazism were murdered, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and so on.)

Posted by Jeremy at 00:51 on August 25, 2005

Corbusierhaus

Berlin sponsored and hosted an international building exposition in 1957 (Interbau ‘57) which featured the construction of over 30 buildings designed by the All-Stars of modern architecture (Gropius, Aalto, Niemeyer, to name a few). Most of the buildings constructed were large-scale housing buildings which were sited in the war-damaged Hansa District in west Berlin. The planning and design of the district embodies the tenets of CIAM’s (Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) Athens Charter of 1933 (aka “The Functional City”): ample, high-rise apartment buildings surrounded by expanses of green space and strung together with vehicular / pedestrian arteries. Ostensibly, this program was developed as an antidote to the dark, chaotic, unsanitary mess which was the modern industrialized city.

Le Corbusier’s contribution to Interbau ‘57, a variation on his Unité d’habitation model, was so massive (it contains 557 units) and out of scale with both the Hansa master plan and the other proposed buildings that it was relocated further west to an area near the Olympic Stadium. Typical of Corbu’s predisposition towards architectural dogma, he found it necessary to explain the CIAM ideology to the residents of the building via a large bas relief which diagrams les conditions de nature and then explains how the inhabitants will live harmoniously with nature, thus fostering community and reaffirming individual liberty.

Posted by Jeremy at 10:38 on August 12, 2005

Memory, again

The memory of different cities asserts itself, wedging the spaces of the past into the places of the present. It’s always like this: you walk along a mundane street beside a mundane building and with a jolt you turn only to find the space warped and transformed with the overwhelming sense of some other place. And it’s always been like this: you move through layers of spatial cognition, some so-called real and present while others are less concrete but contextually integral nonetheless. And it’s always going to be like this: you are submerged in that perceptual cocktail mixed with memory, experience, and hope, and it pours over you like a deluge. The liquid flows over and around sidewalks, curbs, tram rails, cobblestones, lampposts, buildings, courtyards, through open doors and windows, down alleys and up stairwells. Truly the stuff is both contained by and containing the world before you. How can you know exactly where you are in such a state?

…even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
—Inivisible Cities, Italo Calvino

Posted by Jeremy at 11:48 on August 8, 2005

Ein Steingott über Berlin

Posted by Jeremy at 00:43 on August 7, 2005