The City as Subject: Public Art and Urban Discourse in Berlin 9781350258600, 9781350258631, 9781350258617

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
1 Introduction: Public Art and the Affirmation of the City
An Overview of Themes
Berlin Background
The Aim and Description of This Book
2 West Berlin Walls, Street Art, and the Right to the City
The Murals and Their West Berlin Context
The Right to the City: A New Paradigm for Public Art
Street Art and the Right to the City
3 City Spaces: Contemporary Public Sculpture in Berlin
New Monuments
Networks
Voids
Ground Planes
Conflicts
Sculpture Reclaiming the Urban Realm
4 The Memorial Landscape of the Berlin Wall
Where Was the Wall?
Toward Memorialization
The Memorial Landscape
The Afterlife of the Memorial Landscape
The Persistence of Forgetting
The Memorial and the City
5 Conclusion: Public Art within an Urban Discourse
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The City as Subject

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The City as Subject Public Art and Urban Discourse in Berlin Carolyn S. Loeb

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Carolyn S. Loeb, 2022 Carolyn S. Loeb has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Preface and Acknowledgments on pp. xv–xviii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover images: (front) Paul Aguirre / EyeEm via Getty; (back) Werner Brunner, Das Wandbild am ehemaligen besetzten Regenbogenhaus (1980), übermalt 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

HB: 978-1-3502-5860-0 ePDF: 978-1-3502-5861-7 eBook: 978-1-3502-5862-4

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For Dick—again and always

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Contents List of Illustrations  Preface and Acknowledgments 1

2

3

4

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Introduction: Public Art and the Affirmation of the City An Overview of Themes Berlin Background The Aim and Description of This Book

viii xv 1 3 11 13

West Berlin Walls, Street Art, and the Right to the City The Murals and Their West Berlin Context The Right to the City: A New Paradigm for Public Art Street Art and the Right to the City

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City Spaces: Contemporary Public Sculpture in Berlin New Monuments Networks Voids Ground Planes Conflicts Sculpture Reclaiming the Urban Realm

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24 39 45

73 82 89 97 105 113

The Memorial Landscape of the Berlin Wall Where Was the Wall? Toward Memorialization The Memorial Landscape The Afterlife of the Memorial Landscape The Persistence of Forgetting The Memorial and the City

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Conclusion: Public Art within an Urban Discourse

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Bibliography Index

134 147 154 171 175 181

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Illustrations Plates Ben Wagin, Weltbaum—Grün ist Leben (World Tree I—Green Is Life), 1975. (Author, 2012) 2 Christian Rothmann, Jürgen Wäldrich, Annegret Hauffe, HansChristian Kuhnow, Stefan Halbscheffel, Wo ist die Admiralstrasse geblieben? (What’s left of Admiralstrasse?), 1986. (Author, 2012) 3 Ratgeb Artists Group (Werner Brunner, Paul Blankenburg, Werner Steinbrecher, Nil Ausländer, and Bernd Micka), Muskauer Strasse, 1982. (Author, 2012) 4 Building residents, Waldemarstrasse 81, 1975. (Author, 2012) 5 Gert Neuhaus, Zipper, 1979. (Author, 2012) 6 Irene Niepel, Tempelhofer Ufer, 1981. (Courtesy of Jutta Lüderitz, 2019) 7 Ratgeb Artists Group (Werner Brunner, Paul Blankenburg, Werner Steinbrecher, Nil Ausländer, and Bernd Micka), The Civilizationdamaged Tree of Redevelopment Breaks through Moabit’s Historical Landscape, 1979. (Courtesy of Jutta Lüderitz, 2019) 8 Akbar Behkalam, 1980. (Author, 2012) 9 Fabian Fritz, 1987. (Author, 2019) 10 Spekulanten Raus (Speculators Get Out). (Author, 2012) 11 Félix González-Torres, Es ist nur eine Frage der Zeit (It’s just a matter of time), 2002. (Author, 2012) 12 Giggling figure in doorway. (Author, 2012) 13 Blu, Hourglass, 2010. (Author, 2012) 14 On the left, a monster menaces a city. (Author, 2012) 15 Os Gemeos, Yellow Man, 2005, for the second Backjumps Live Issue exhibition. (Author, 2012) 16 Wolf Vostell, Two Concrete Cadillacs in the Form of the Naked Maja, 1987. (Author, 2006) 17 Brigitte and Martin Matschinsky-Denninghoff, Berlin, 1987. (Author, 2006) 1

Illustrations

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19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

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Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Orte des Erinnerns (Places of Remembrance), 1994. The label depicted on the plaque on the left blends in with ordinary street signage. (Author, 2006) Orte des Schreckens (Places of Terror), Wittenbergplatz, 1967. (Author, 2006) Peter Herbrich, Jürgen Wenzel, and Theseus Bappert, Memorial on Levetzowstrasse, 1988. (Author, 2006) Gerhard Marcks, Der Rufer (The Caller), 1967, installed in the Tiergarten in 1989. (Author, 2019) Christian Boltanski, The Missing House, 1990. (Author, 2006) Footprint of the former Bohemian church on Bethlehemkirchplatz, 1994; Claes Oldenburg and Coosji van Bruggen, Houseball. (Author, 2006) Double cobblestones marking the path of the West-facing Wall, beginning 1997. (Author, 2006) Karla Sachse, Kaninchenfeld (Rabbit Field), 1999. (Author, 2006) Gabriele Basch, Wahre Geschichte (Genuine History), 1999. (Author, 2006) Christine Gersch and Igor Jerschov, Pocketpark, 2005. (Author, 2019) Wolfgang Rüppel, June 17, 1953 Memorial, 2000. (Author, 2006) A viewing platform with visitors looking from West Berlin into the East, as seen in a photograph from 1965 posted on a Berlin Wall Memorial information stele. It shows the Wall at Schwedter Strasse, where it turned north from Bernauer Strasse. The building at the right would be torn down to build the concrete slabs of the Wall, exposing the firewall seen in Plates 42, 43, and 44. (Author, 2017) Ernst-Reuter-Siedlung, Wedding, 1954. (Author, 2016) Juxtaposition of Cor-ten steel rods with the exposed steel reinforcement bars of a deteriorated surviving section of the Wall along Bernauer Strasse. Remains of pre-Wall paving at the fronts of destroyed buildings can be seen at intervals at the foot of the Wall. (Author, 2017) Within the Berlin Wall Memorial, the width of the Wall zone is most apparent at the west end, at the beginning of Area A. This view from the site of the Wall, where it would have run along Bernauer Strasse, looks across no-man’s land at closed-off Bergstrasse, to remains of a rear East-facing Wall. Information

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39 40 41 42

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steles can be seen at rear left, and the firewall photo-mural at Gartenstrasse is visible in the distance on the right. (Author, 2017) Plan, Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse. Evidence of the different postwar urban histories of the once-unified neighborhood can be seen in the contrasting pattern of building footprints on the Wedding side, above, and the Mitte side, below. (Courtesy of Weidner Händle Atelier) Broad areas of glazing and Cor-ten steel sheathing connect the Visitor’s Center to the open-air Memorial across Bernauer Strasse to the right in this view. (Author, 2011) The Berlin Wall Memorial Documentation Center and Reconciliation Church parish (1965 with later additions) and the observation tower can be seen across Bernauer Strasse. In front of that, four walls are seen in juxtaposition: a surviving section of the Berlin Wall, the Memorial’s Cor-ten steel rods, a reconstructed segment of the Sophien parish cemetery brick wall, and the Cor-ten steel exterior of the 1998 Monument. (Author, 2017) An overview of part of Area A that shows, within the expansive lawn, the edge of the Sophien parish cemetery, the storage area for slabs of the Wall removed without authorization by the Sophien Church parish, the Window of Remembrance, and a section of the remaining Berlin Wall along Bernauer Strasse. Closing off the view at the upper right is the bounding wall of the 1998 Monument. (Author, 2014) The Window of Remembrance commemorates those who died at the Bernauer Strasse section of the Wall; a reading of their names can be heard on the audio stele nearby. (Author, 2011) Archaeological excavation of remains of a house along Bernauer Strasse. Documentation of families who lived along the street supplements traces of basement and first floor spaces. (Author, 2012) The paths of underground escape tunnels are marked with Cor-ten bars. (Author, 2012) One of the two remaining sites where private property owners maintain their claim to land where the patrol path runs. (Author, 2017) The patrol path that has been reduced to a “tunnel” by private redevelopment in Area D. (Author, 2015) Local advertising on a firewall at Schwedter Strasse. The following two Plates show a succession of firewall treatments at this site that

Illustrations

43 44

45

46

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indicates transformations of its relationship to its urban context. (Author, 1999) A mural celebrating the Berlin-hosted 2006 World Cup matches on the firewall at Schwedter Strasse. (Author, 2011) A photo-mural now integrates the same firewall at Schwedter Strasse into the Berlin Wall Memorial, which ends at this point. It depicts crowds surging through the Wall in 1989; this firewall in its deteriorated condition at that time is visible on the far right in the image. (Author, 2016) This 2017 view from the end of Schwedter Strasse can be compared to the wider angle on this site from 1965 that is seen in Plate 29. (Author, 2017) An ice cream café encroaches on the patrol path in Area D. (Author, 2016)

Figures 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2

3.3 3.4

3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10

Robert Montgomery, Kreuzberg (Author, 2012) Figure performing a handstand on a street sign (Author, 2019) Richard Serra, Berlin Junction, 1987 (Author, 2006) Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Orte des Erinnerns (Places of Remembrance), 1994. The reverse side of the plaque seen in Plate 18 bears the abbreviated text of the law restricting Jewish life that the image refers to (Author, 2006) Ralf Schüler and Ursulina Schüler-Witte, Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg, 1987 (Author, 2006) City Palace portal from which Karl Liebknecht spoke on November 9, 1918, on the façade of the former Council of State building (Author, 2006) Hans Haacke, Denkzeichen Rosa Luxemburg, 2006 (Author, 2018) Zvi Hecker, Micha Ullman, and Eyal Weizman, Blatt (Leaf), 1994–6 (Author, 2006) Micha Ullman, Library, 1995 (Author, 2006) Micha Ullman, Library at night, 1995 (Author, 2006) Wolfgang Göschel, Joachim von Rosenberg, and Hans-Norbert Burkert, Spiegelwand (Mirror Wall), 1992–5 (Author, 2006) Rainer Görss, Reflexum, 2000 (Author, 2006)

50 53 77

79 83

84 86 88 92 93 95 95

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3.11 Gunter Demnig, Stolperstein (Stumbling Stone), ongoing since 1995. The Stone on the right is located along Bernauer Strasse (Author, 2006, 2015) 3.12 Alfred Reichel, pedestal relief of Bohemian refugees on the base of a statue of Frederick William I, 1912, in Rixsdorf (Author, 2006) 3.13 Karl Biedermann, Der verlassene Raum (The Abandoned Room), 1988–96 (Author, 2006) 3.14 Jürgen Raue, Herbert Baum Memorial Stone, 1981/2000 (Author, 2006) 4.1 Amusement rides within the Berlin Wall zone at Bernauer Strasse (Author, 2002) 4.2 The “wild” landscape of the Bernauer Strasse no-man’s land in 1999 (Author, 1999) 4.3 View of courtyards in a nineteenth-century Mietskaserne, or “rental barracks,” in Rosenthaler Vorstadt (Author, 2016). In 1929, Franz Hessel described the “city’s worth of people” who lived in such tenements, “all sorts of professions are represented… Apostle Ministry, pumpernickel factory, ladies’ and children’s ready-towear clothing, metalworking, leather stamping, a bathing facility, clothing press, butcher… and so on, and so many dressmakers, seamstresses, and coalmen living in the endless back and side buildings” (Walking in Berlin, 203) 4.4 An overview of the Wedding (lower) and Rosenthaler Vorstadt (upper) building fabrics on either side of the Wall emplacements can be seen in a 1984 photo in Area D of the Berlin Wall Memorial. In this part of the site where Memorial elements are less prominent, graffiti is more apparent (Author, 2017) 4.5 Postwar shops, Wedding side of Bernauer Strasse. Photographs from the 1980s show many neighborhood shops to have been boarded up (Author, 2016) 4.6 The Berlin Wall Memorial Documentation Center and Reconciliation Church parish and community center, 1965, with later extensions, including the observation tower at the right (Author, 2017) 4.7 Schokoladen, an activist base in Rosenthaler Vorstadt (Author, 2016) 4.8 A renovated façade in Rosenthaler Vorstadt that ironically takes note of the previous division of the city by proclaiming that “this

98 101 103 112 130 131

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4.9

4.10

4.11 4.12

4.13

4.14

4.15

4.16

building stood earlier in another country.” It may refer as well to the period following reunification, before the neighborhood’s physical and social transformation intensified (Author, 2016) This Berlin Wall Memorial information stele commemorates Rudolf Urban, whose attempt to flee resulted in his death. The photo on the stele shows the original memorial erected to him in 1962 (Author, 2014) This marker commemorating Rudolf Urban lies at the foot of the stele shown in Figure 4.9. It reproduces a marker that was in place here during the period of the Wall (Author, 2017) The footprint of the destroyed Church of Reconciliation is visible in front of the Chapel of Reconciliation (Author, 2011) The orientation map at Brunnenstrasse; Cor-ten steel unifies many features of the Memorial. The former brewery that would be redeveloped as The Factory is in the distance on the left. To its right, farther in the distance, is the first privately developed structure in the Wall zone, built c. 2002. Beyond the Cor-ten steel posts marking the path of the Wall can be seen a “tamed” section of remaining “wild” vegetation (Author, 2012) A variety of markers commemorate individuals or events at sites significant to them. The pavement disc in front of the surviving Wall section marks the spot where two people escaped to the West in 1962; the inset marker memorializes five people who escaped in 1961. Every disc is keyed to a detailed online description. The boundary wall of the 1998 Monument is visible at the upper left (Author, 2011, 2015) Archeological “windows” preserve and exhibit in situ remains of original Wall emplacements. Signage often includes documentation of the intact object as it looked in its original setting. Here, remains of border light structures have been excavated (Author, 2011) Josefina de Vasconcello’s sculpture, Reconciliation, and the rye field in front of the Chapel of Reconciliation. The new housing “village” is visible on the right (Author, 2017) For a number of years, this protest sign calling for restitution of property seized by the GDR regime stood in the Wall zone. Pictured on the sign is the building that was destroyed to make way for the Wall (Author, 2002)

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149 152

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4.17 Signage that explains the interruption in the patrol path shown in Plate 40 (Author, 2016) 4.18 Putting practice is among the activities seen at the Berlin Wall Memorial (Author, 2015)

170 185

Preface and Acknowledgments This project has been long in the making. I am grateful to the many colleagues and friends who so generously lent me their listening ears, probing eyes, and sharp intellects, who helped to sustain the journey and enabled me to set this book finally before you. A seven-month stay in Berlin in 1999 first provoked the preliminary questions that developed into a sketchy, evolving outline of this project. I had visited the city several times during the decade following reunification, and was fortunate to have spent a brief time before that in West Berlin in 1983, when I also visited East Berlin. By 1999, I was determined to explore and document the city beyond the center, which was dominated then by spectacular and much-publicized new construction, such as Potsdamer Platz. The city was engaged in massive reconstruction in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and self-consciously promoted and celebrated the dynamism of the moment, even as it restored and reinterpreted aspects of its architectural past. The showcases of their two systems that both halves of the city had represented during the period of division were being forcefully reshaped as a showplace of reunification. The speed of this transformation led to minimizing or ignoring many tensions, losses, and alternatives to the dominant urban plans as well as to the dominant decisionmaking voices. Forays to outlying neighborhoods, on the other hand, offered more intimate, abundant, and often more complex perspectives on the city’s architecture and urban space; they deepened my growing sense of Berlin’s layered past as it can be seen on the ground. As I learned to read the city’s history in brick and concrete, I saw that others—particularly artists—were adding a new layer to the urban fabric that drew their viewers’ attention to this very feature: that the city’s history was tangibly present in its urban infrastructure and spatial relationships when more solid structures no longer survived as witnesses. At the same time, I used these explorations and rambles to trace the path of the former Berlin Wall through these outer neighborhoods, looking for evidence in built form of how or whether the two halves of the city were being re-knit. I began to sense that a critique of contemporary approaches to reconstruction was also embedded in the city’s brick and concrete.

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As I continued to travel to Berlin and then made a second home there, my annual visits enabled me to document familiar—but often swiftly changing— sites, and to keep discovering ones that were new to me. I supplemented this work on the ground by studying historical accounts of the city’s urban development, reading the growing mass of scholarly research on postwar and post-reunification Berlin, as well as reviewing press reports and other documentation. Throughout the book, I acknowledge the many ways in which these scholars and observers contributed to my thinking about and ways of looking at the city. While I pursued these research streams I had opportunities to share my experiences and analyses and explore new conceptual frameworks with my students and colleagues at the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University, beginning in 2007. Through iterations of courses I taught, such as Art and Public Life, and my contributions to our early interdisciplinary plenaries for the core course, Transcultural Relations through the Ages, as well as in an informal faculty colloquium, I benefited from conversations with students and colleagues that sharpened my ideas and intentions. I am also grateful for the support and interest that the dean of the college and good friend, Steve Esquith, offered as I worked on this project. I owe a debt of gratitude, too, to welcoming and responsive colleagues at institutions where I was able to present kernels of some of this book’s themes. I was able to clarify some of my ideas about the relationship between public sculpture in Berlin and the city’s history as it impressed itself on urban spaces and structures in a short paper I presented at the Institutes of Cultural Analysis and of Art History at the University of Amsterdam at a 2006 conference, Art and the City: A Conference on Postwar Interactions with the Urban Realm. I thank my colleagues in the Art Department at Central Michigan University and Dean Sue Ann Martin for granting me the sabbatical time to work on this initial piece in a concentrated way as well as for providing funds for travel. A somewhat longer version of this paper appeared as an article, “The City as Subject: Contemporary Public Sculpture in Berlin,” in the September 2009 issue of the Journal of Urban History, for which I thank editor David Goldfield and Professor Alan Lessoff for his succeeding comments. My preliminary work on murals in West Berlin appeared as an article, “West Berlin Walls: Public Art and the Right to the City,” in the Spring 2014 special murals issue of Public Art Dialogue, edited by Sarah Schrank and Sally Webster. Since the summer of 2014, when I presented a version of this in a paper, “Reimagining the City: West Berlin Murals and the Right to the City,” at the first international conference of the Street Art

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and Urban Creativity Research Group at the University of Lisbon’s Faculty of Fine Arts, I have been inspired by the intense and lively work of these scholars, especially Professors Ulrich Blanché and Ilaria Hoppe. I also benefited from a stimulating and insightful discussion of my presentation, “The Memorial to the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Strasse and Its Context,” to an interdisciplinary group of long-time Berliners at a meeting of American Voices Abroad (AVA) in Berlin in 2018. I am grateful to have had opportunities to learn, reflect on, and discuss the wider history and urban development of Berlin in a number of contexts that enriched the texture of this book without necessarily bearing on its central themes. Primary among these has been the collaborative relationship I have enjoyed over the years with architect and professor of architecture and environmental design at Bowling Green State University, Andreas Luescher. Through our work on a co-written book chapter, a co-edited book, and two cochaired conference sessions for the College Art Association and the Society of Architectural Historians, we have shared numerous discussions and exchanged countless stories about Berlin. I am grateful for the fellowship that sustained these projects and created the basis for our friendship. Participation in two Fulbright Commission German Studies seminars also provided wider lenses through which to consider the Berlin themes I focus on here. Both seminars, Urban Planning in Germany (2001) and Berlin: Where Cultures Meet and Challenges Abound (2013), provided insights into relevant contemporary contexts and issues that added new dimensions to the themes I was studying. These experiences and my ability to pursue research in German benefited from a 2000 Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) grant to study at the Goethe Institute in Murnau. I was fortunate to be befriended by a number of Berliners eager to pass on their knowledge of the city. The late Wolfgang Schneider and his wife Marianne Schneider of Berlin-Mahlsdorf were unsurpassed amateur cicerones for a number of years, beginning in 1999. They led my husband and me on Abenteuers throughout Berlin and beyond with unfailing and overflowing generosity, enthusiasm, and persistence. They shared their knowledge, experiences, and views, helping me to gain a greater sensitivity to the underlying and often unstated complexities and tensions within recent Berlin history. I am grateful to other friends in Berlin who similarly shared their experiences and knowledge, including architect Karin Koven and Andreas Koven of Berlin-Marzahn, photographer and artist-at-large Ursula Kamischke of Berlin-Neukölln, and

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Renate Semler and Jörn Gündel of Berlin-Schöneberg. I hope that this book honors in some small measure the histories that each of them lived in postwar and post-reunification Berlin. My endeavor to write about Berlin, even in the tightly focused ways in which I engage the city in this book, has always seemed to me to be somewhat presumptuous. I am aware that although I have learned much about the city, there is more to be known; there will always be connotations, references, and lore that escape me. Compounding these inevitable lacunae and Berlin’s complex history and urban development, the city’s past and present are marked by an unrelenting pace of change that adds to its slipperiness in one’s grasp. While such change becomes part of the story I tell here, the process of change cannot be contained; the story will continue to evolve. Along with this caveat, I must add that despite the wealth of insights others shared with me, I take sole responsibility for the views and conclusions that I offer here. I thank Frances Arnold, April Peake, Yvonne Thouroude, and the staff at Bloomsbury, Emma Caddy, and Vishnu Muruganandham and the production team at Integra, for their work in shepherding this book to completion. I would also like to thank anonymous readers and, especially, de-anonymized Professor Joseph Perry, for their close, astute, and sensitive readings of my manuscript. Last but by no means least, for their sustaining comradeship over the years it has taken for this book to appear, I thank Christine von Mickwitz, Eckhard Schwiemann, and the late Peter Rose of Berlin, Francesca Nesi and Aspro Betro of New York, Linda Stanford, emerita professor of art history at Michigan State University, and Marjorie Thau of Belfast, Maine. And finally, words fail me when I try to capture how essential the spirit of exploration, the shared laughter and tears of frustration, the conversations, and the unwavering companionship of my life partner, Richard Peterson, have been on all the journeys. I dedicate this book to him.

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Introduction: Public Art and the Affirmation of the City Berlin is a walker’s (and bicyclist’s) city. Its flatness is conducive to getting out and about in its famous, invigorating Berliner Luft (Berlin air). Thus the scholar or visitor can take breaks from perusing the numerous volumes that have been written about the city’s past to search out, in situ, layers of this past that remain in its structures and street patterns. From traces of its medieval roots to the glittering ensembles of the New Berlin, Berlin’s history is discernible in its cityscape. And within this constellation of historical traces, the observant walker also encounters an array of public artworks that reinforce and draw attention to this feature. Whether or not these public artworks take specific historical events as their theme, the materials and forms that they deploy point to how the city’s walls, pavements, streets, and other infrastructural elements preserve and articulate its layered past. The specific bodies of public art that this book examines—murals painted in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, street art and public sculpture from the post-reunification period, the official Memorial to the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Strasse—sometimes take episodes from the city’s history as their themes. But they are distinctive and significant because elements of the city’s infrastructure lie at the heart of their creation. By honing architectural and spatial vocabularies derived from daily urban experience, these public artworks not only alert us to ways in which Berlin’s past is embedded in the present. They also challenge mainstream urban development practices and engage with a wider civic discourse that is concerned with the question of how to understand what a city is. These are not concerns that we usually associate with public works of art. In the past, public art often addressed national political or cultural identities; today, such works are often used to brand corporate spaces carved from the public domain. But the murals and sculptures whose stories we focus on here rely on very different origins, agents, means, audiences, and commitments from either of these. We begin by looking at West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s,

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where artists seized upon blank, exposed firewalls to paint numerous legal and illegal murals. By recuperating abandoned infrastructure and neglected spaces, these murals contributed to a wider contemporary discourse among critical urban professionals, citizen-activists, and others, concerning the direction that urban redevelopment should take. This urban discourse cultivated widespread awareness of these issues in Berlin, which persisted beyond the fall of the Wall in 1989. During the following decade, other forms of public art emerged that drew on the continuing sensitivity of this audience to urban concerns. Both street art and new forms of public sculpture that arose following reunification also grounded themselves in the infrastructure of the city; their uses of architectural and spatial materials and forms argued for the significance of urban elements as repositories of history and of the character of the city. As market-driven speculation and property redevelopment intensified in the 1990s, these forms of public art continued to articulate and contribute to the ongoing oppositional discourse that urged wider citizen participation in shaping the city; the works by public artists whose stories we tell here engaged moments of liberatory possibilities to challenge mainstream redevelopment practices and to claim citizens’ right to the city. We will see ways in which these artists, in collaboration with activist allies, helped shift aspects of urban redevelopment policy. And yet it is necessary to acknowledge, too, that mainstream practices dominated the period; this is evident not only in the growing presence of corporate-sponsored public art. We see it as well in a major public design intervention made with municipal support, the Memorial to the Berlin Wall and its Victims and to the Division of the City at Bernauer Strasse, completed two-and-a-half decades after the fall of the Wall. This extensive open-air installation reflects the impact of more one-dimensional, less inclusive approaches to public art, even as it adopts in many important ways the urban-oriented vocabularies established by the earlier works of public art that we examine. The Berlin Wall Memorial does not seize the opportunity offered by its themes to examine the impact of the Wall on its wider neighborhood setting and the urban implications of that impact. Although many of the architectural and spatial materials and forms introduced by the earlier public artworks are evident here, their force is subverted. We see instead how the absence or avoidance of connections with the wider grassroots discourse—here, this would especially entail broader attention as well to the views of former East Berliners—can limit full and searching interrogations of the history and nature of the city. Such instructive limitations, however, as we find at the Berlin Wall Memorial, reflect its distinctive historical context. Each of the bodies of public art that we

Introduction

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explore here is affected by its time. The city itself and its institutions changed over the course of the years between the 1970s and the early years of the new millennium. Successive changes posed new questions, as well as created new possibilities and new constraints, for the artists whose works we are examining. Throughout this period, however, discussion and debate about the nature of Berlin’s urban development never abated; specific issues and how they were framed changed, but public focus on and interest in how Berlin is shaped as a city and who shapes it remained constant. This created a nourishing environment and a knowing audience for the public artworks that concern us here. One further preliminary word about change is necessary. The city that we encounter today is no longer the city in which many of the works of public art that we consider here were created. This is especially true for the murals from 1970s and 1980s West Berlin. Their surroundings included many remaining gaps in the streetscape created by wartime bombings, makeshift kiosks and storefronts filling in damaged lots, scarred and shabby building façades, and few sidewalk trees or other amenities. These and other features marked a city that was still recovering from the massive destruction of the war, and that was both economically constrained and in a precarious geopolitical position. Although it is a cliché to say that Berlin is “always becoming,” this was a period in which that was indeed true; full restoration of the cityscape lay decades ahead in the future.

An Overview of Themes The public artworks that are the focus of this book—murals painted in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, street art and public sculpture from the postreunification period, and the recently completed official Memorial to the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Strasse—anchor its story. They are the primary documents, whose materials, settings, methods and means of creation, and other features form the basis for analysis. Such scrutiny is informed by theoretical perspectives that enable us to situate these works of public art within their broader social and historical contexts and to assess their impact and significance. The lens that we bring to bear on our examination of these public artworks widens, in other words, to reveal their connections to the larger environment of struggles over the direction of urban development in Berlin. We begin to see clearly and forcefully the central themes and arguments of this study in the examination of the murals that were painted on exposed firewalls in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, the subject of the next chapter. Both illegal

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The City as Subject

and officially sponsored murals used the walls bordering lots that had been rendered vacant by Second World War bombings, as well as other surfaces, to reclaim and reintegrate neighborhood spaces. In the face of the dominant urban renewal discourse of the times that promoted demolition of older structures, the murals ratified oppositional citizen-activism, both legal and illegal, that proposed alternative conceptions of urban redevelopment. Muralists revalued the salvageable infrastructure of the city in a way that paralleled the actions and initiatives of political protestors, and thematically their murals depicted a range of imagery that included vignettes of the city’s history as well as fantastical urban visions. These murals contributed to the counter-claims of local residents to preserve the built forms, spaces, and scale of their neighborhoods instead of destroying them. The significance of the interconnections here between activist local residents and murals that represent in a complementary medium citizens’ challenges to mainstream means of urban redevelopment is illuminated by Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city.1 This urban theorist’s complex work drew on a multiplicity of experiences and intellectual encounters, including involvement with the events of May 1968 in Paris, awareness of Surrealist practices, and contact with the ideas and actions of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. In opposition to the increasing domination of technocratic urban practices and to capitalism’s relentless pursuit of spatial hierarchy and social homogeneity, Lefebvre argued for the city as a site of heterogeneity, layered time, and new possibilities; for the primacy of use-value over exchange-value; and for the need for citizens to engage in social struggle to achieve their place in and their vision of urban life. Although West Berlin muralists were responding to some of the same inspirations, especially the political, urban, and visual sensibility of 1968 Paris, it was not until the 1990s that urban artists and their supporters in Berlin made explicit reference to the idea of the right to the city. Nevertheless, this concept articulates the range of innovative thinking and contestational practices pioneered during the earlier period of mural-making. Nor were the West Berlin muralists isolated examples of urban artists in this period who represented by means of paintings on walls the struggles of overlooked or disenfranchised people for control over their neighborhoods’ evolution. West Berlin muralists were aware of contemporaneous mural movements elsewhere in Europe, in the United States, and in Latin America, that were engaged in similar efforts. Recognition of these links opens the door to reconsideration of the art-historical periodization of muralism, and suggests that the precedents that West Berlin muralists acknowledged in Mexico and New

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Deal America from the first half of the twentieth century represent a different phenomenon from what developed beginning in the 1960s. Whereas the murals of Los Tres Grandes in Mexico and the Works Progress Administration in the United States addressed the project of nation-building, those painted within the international muralist community in the later twentieth century gave voice to citizens’ claims to the right to the city. West Berlin murals from the 1970s and 1980s, then, contributed to local residents’ efforts, as well as to those of the wider, international urban muralist movement, to counter dominant urban planning paradigms. And these efforts could be effective. Within West Berlin, opposition to the practice of urban renewal by demolition in favor of the preservation of existing older structures, ensembles, and streetscapes led to the creation of a new planning policy, the 12 Principles of City Renewal (12 Grundsätze der Stadterneuerung), approved by the municipal administration in 1983. Referred to by the umbrella term, “cautious urban renewal,” the new policy emphasized preservation, included citizen participation, and stressed the goal of maintaining existing neighborhood social mixes. Later in the decade, West Berlin hosted an International Building Exhibition that showcased such preservationist practices as well as innovative new construction. Although not realizing the right to the city—and, indeed, perhaps better understood as evidence of cooptation of this political thrust— these events nevertheless attest to the influence of the movement of critical citizen-activists, of which the West Berlin muralists were a part, on urban redevelopment decisions. The change in urban planning policy to which West Berlin muralists contributed, as part of the larger struggle over redevelopment, had repercussions that affected public art in the 1990s and beyond. The revaluation of Berlin’s traditional buildings and streetscapes that this change institutionalized provided a new lens through which people looked at often-derelict, neglected old residential and industrial sites. With the unexpected fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of the city, the rich architectural legacy of the past, especially in East Berlin—unfamiliar territory to West Berliners, West Germans, and many others from all over the world—was rediscovered. At first, pioneered by artists, students, and those eager for spaces in which to initiate alternative cultural and political projects, this was a moment of emancipatory possibilities. Street art that supported and was an expression of these endeavors flourished. By the turn of the millennium, however, property speculators and a real estate-driven economy recognized the desirability and profitability of gentrified neighborhoods made up of restored traditional structures and spaces; they began to wrest from former

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The City as Subject

East Berlin residents and the “urban pioneers” the cityscape that the latter had begun to transform. Struggles over displacement, building occupations, and redevelopment schemes ensued, some of which continue to the present day. The perspective offered by critical urban theory provides clarity about these interactions between works created by public artists, their urban significance, the city’s infrastructural redevelopment, and the agents of economic and social change. Informed by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the work of Henri Lefebvre, as well as by Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism, critical urban theory examines the urban effects of postwar state economic supports and their increasing erosion through the growing hegemony of neoliberal policies. These policies favor, instead, private-sector control and the imposition of austerities on those groups previously bolstered by state programs, such as workers, the poor, students, and immigrants. Against this backdrop, critical urban theory “emphasizes the politically and ideologically mediated, socially contested and therefore malleable character of urban space—that is, its continual (re)construction as a site, medium and outcome of historically specific relations of social power.”2 Critical urban theory recognizes both the operations of control that social, political, and economic institutions exercise, and the openings for liberatory initiatives and democratic alternatives in the urban arena that are “latent within the present, due to the contradictions of existing social relations.”3 These insights are particularly valuable for understanding changes in the representation of urban possibilities by public artists over the course of the first twenty years following reunification. We see such change, for example, in the case of street art’s shift from an emancipatory beacon guiding innovative cultural, urban, and social projects, to a property- and citymarketing mechanism. As critical urban theorist Neil Brenner has written, “the nature of the structural constraints on emancipatory forms of social change, and the associated imagination of alternatives to capitalism, have been qualitatively transformed through the acceleration of geoeconomic integration, the intensified financialization of capital, the crisis of the postwar model of welfare state intervention, the still ongoing neoliberalization of state forms and the deepening of planetary ecological crises.”4 All of these forces are at work in Berlin. Berlin’s municipal administration responded to this complex of trends by competing for recognition as a “global city,” which required the encouragement of intensified corporate development. New, signature corporate headquarters buildings and their sculptural embellishments yielded internationally familiar, placeless, urbanistically homogenizing forms. At the same time, however, the

Introduction

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city administration sponsored the creation of numerous works of public art that proposed an entirely different, heterogeneous, and participatory conception of the city. This distinctive body of public sculpture, created from the late 1980s through the early years of the new millennium, uses the everyday infrastructure of the city to heighten awareness of the ways in which history is embedded in urban structure, to bring that history into daily life, and to engage viewers in reflection on these themes. The climate of critical urban awareness that prevailed in the 1970s and 1980s continued to provide a foundation and an audience for these new sculptural endeavors. The city itself is usually not the explicit subject of these sculptures. Rather, such sculptures signal the role of the city as a repository of historical witness through their reliance on the spaces, stairs, walls, signs, pavements, and other ordinary features of the urban environment as armatures for their construction. These sculptures rely on such urban infrastructure of their sites to instigate awareness of the city as custodian of historical meaning and memory. Taking the city as their inherent subject, then, these sculptures challenge corporate-shaped models of the city and argue instead for the placeand history-centered self-consciousness of Berlin’s public artists. Many significant material structures of Berlin’s past no longer survive; these new public sculptures employ existing infrastructural elements to evoke their presence through acknowledgment of their absence. They rely on what architect and theorist Aldo Rossi called “permanences,” which include a city’s layout and street plan as well as its monuments, to reveal the city as a historical text.5 Through these sculptures’ appeal to the “collective imagination,” the city as a “repository of history” is “affirmed by the continuities that exist in the deepest layers of the urban structure.”6 Along with other authors of the 1960s, such as Jane Jacobs, who offered analyses of the significance of the city that contested those of mainstream urban practitioners, Rossi’s ideas were influential within the wider discourse of critical urban awareness in Berlin. His concepts continue to resonate in our considerations of post-reunification public sculptures. The identification of many of the sculptures discussed in this book as memorials raises the question of why they are considered under the rubric of public art. I use the term public art here to refer to art situated in public spaces and accessible to the public. Some works of public art are commissioned by and funded through municipal programs, others may be paid for from private sources, but all exist within the public realm. Some kinds of memorials may not have been created with the intention of functioning as public art—a tomb in a cemetery, for example. And yet they may in practice become sites of commemorative public art, as have numerous tombs in the cemetery of the

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The City as Subject

Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichswerder parishes, site of the much-visited graves of playwright Berthold Brecht, philosophers G.W.F. Hegel and Herbert Marcuse, writer Anna Seghers, and many other renowned Berliners. Certainly not all works of public art function as memorials, but most memorials do function as works of public art. A similar terminological question arises regarding use of the words memorial and monument. German does not distinguish the two, using the word Denkmal for both, but there are various compounds of this word, and the associated words Erinnerung (memory) and Mahnmal (an admonitory memorial), that can provide shades of meaning. I take note of these particular meanings when they arise, but generally I use the word memorial to refer to the sculptures and installations discussed here that have commemorative functions.7 Monumentality, on the other hand, is the more salient and contested concept that serves as a telling foil for the public artworks we look at here. This term conventionally refers to representational or ceremonial public art that tends to employ “static fixedness, bombast, self-certainty, and authoritarian didacticism.”8 The traditional portrait statuary of Prussian generals and German cultural figures that can be found throughout the acreage of Berlin’s central park, the Tiergarten, are examples of such monumentality; they are designed to impress upon the viewer the goals of building the nation and defining a culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, modernist artists such as Auguste Rodin mounted critiques of such monumentality by, for example, removing high plinths, depicting ordinary people, and spurning representation of the trappings of rank and status. A hundred years later, artists such as Maya Lin deepened that critique by reconceptualizing the idea of monumentality, drawing on insights introduced by Minimalist, Conceptual, Installation, and Performance artists, and thereby changing the nature of public art.9 The works of public art that we are concerned with embody and extend many of the newer approaches to art in public space that followed, including site-specificity and, in some cases, a commitment to community-based or socially engaged practices.10 By their use of the everyday environment and non-traditional materials drawn from the urban context, these public sculptures in Berlin often take viewers unawares, interrupting daily routines or creating unexpected encounters. They solicit the viewer’s engagement to reflect more closely on their physical surroundings and the emotional effects these create, and to make conceptual, architectural, spatial, and historical connections. These strategies subvert traditional forms, extend recent innovations to new forms, materials, functions, and contexts, as well as engage this body of public art with a wider discourse concerning

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urban redevelopment. In these ways, these works of public art propose a new understanding of monumentality. The term monument also figures in this study specifically in connection with the work of Austrian art historian Alois Riegl. In his 1903 article, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” Riegl analyzed the values inherent in artifacts of the past, which helped provide a basis for promoting practices of historic preservation, among other influences.11 Riegl distinguished between intentional monuments, examples of which would be the sculptures we examine from the post-reunification period, and unintentional or historical monuments. The latter are not originally created with the status or meanings of historical objects in mind, but rather they may gain such significance over time. This offers a useful way to think about the Berlin Wall and the Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse, the official site for remembrance of the Wall, of the division of the city, and of the Wall’s victims. With the end of the period of division, the Berlin Wall lost its historical functions, which had been described in different ways by those on each side of it, and became an unintentional monument. Its new status—as defunct yet materially pregnant with symbolic meanings—was ratified by the activities of “wall-peckers” (entrepreneurs who chiseled off pieces of the Wall for sale, as well as individual souvenir-hunters) and the dispersal of individual Wall slabs to sites throughout the world. As part of the extensive open-air Berlin Wall Memorial, remains of the Wall and of other apparatuses of the former no-man’s land that had become unintentional monuments were integrated into a new, intentional monument designed to represent the period of division. These concepts are valuable as we consider how each of the examples of public art in our study relates to its urban context and to the idea of the city. By transforming exposed firewalls into intentional monuments, West Berlin murals of the 1970s and 1980s drew attention to the historic, unintentional monumentality of traditional streetscapes, leading to the preservation of their neighborhoods’ structures and spaces. The street art scene of the postreunification period similarly drew attention to the historic value of unintentional monuments, especially in former East Berlin. The sculptural intentional monuments that we consider, which were created from the late 1980s into the 2000s, marshalled infrastructural armatures and rhizomatic connections to the history and character of the city to focus attention on unintentional urban monuments. They pointedly draw a connection between Riegl’s two types of monuments in a way that challenges the isolation and placelessness of the international, corporate sculptural initiatives that threaten to replace them.

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The City as Subject

A similar integration of the intentional monument of the Berlin Wall Memorial with the historic monument of its urban environment remains only latent. Although its mandate includes explication of the division of the city, the Memorial takes a narrow approach to accomplishing this. As we examine the history of the neighborhood that the Wall divided and of its subsequent transformation into two neighborhoods, it becomes apparent that the story of the division is a broader one than that which the Memorial relates, and that it stretches beyond the Wall’s existence. The opportunity offered by its site to explore the full range of changes in a complex urban history that includes developments prior to the Wall, as well as the construction of the Memorial itself and the ongoing evolution of its surrounding neighborhoods, has yet to be fulfilled. One reason for this lies in the failure of the Memorial to incorporate East Berliners’ diverse perspectives and to introduce more complex understandings of the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Indeed, at some points this extensive Memorial blurs the distinction between the GDR (1949–90) and the Nazi (1933–45) regimes. There have been similar instances of disputed readings in the past, such as when conflict arose over how the post-reunification memorial purpose of the Neue Wache should be described in its dedication text.12 Aspects of the Berlin Wall Memorial reflect continuing tensions regarding representation of the GDR and of East Berliners’ experiences. In February 2018, the moment was reached at which the Berlin Wall as a functioning and intact frontier had become a memory for as long as it had once existed. After more than a decade following its fall, the Berlin Senate approved a city-wide plan for Wall memorials and designated the site at Bernauer Strasse as their anchor. This responded to growing curiosity about the Wall’s site and history, as well as to questionable private memorials that were erected to sate that curiosity, and to insistence by victims’ organizations that were dissatisfied with the treatment of existing Wall sites. Completed in 2014, the Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse has become one of the most popular touristic sites in the city. It is an extensive open-air exhibition that includes two large pedagogic structures, a chapel, and an earlier memorial. The story of the Wall, its victims, and the division of the city scrolls across displays presented through a wide range of two- and three-dimensional, original and reconstructed, visual and aural media. Central among these media are elements of urban infrastructure that are familiar from our considerations of West Berlin murals and post-reunification sculptures; the end walls of truncated buildings, the void of no-man’s land, and the ground plane as a charged spatial entity are some of the means used

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to carry the narrative of the Wall’s history. The Memorial’s reliance on these indicates that the inspiration that muralists had in the 1970s to seize upon exposed firewalls as their canvases continues to influence the visual vocabulary of public art in Berlin.

Berlin Background Significant trends that we can identify in Berlin’s development as a city lend support to the proposition that forms of public art that take the city as their subject began to emerge there in the 1970s. A brief overview of this history that begins in the somewhat more distant past suggests that Berlin’s self-awareness as a city arose in response to two crucial factors: its relatively late and very rapid growth resulting from the speed and intensity of its industrialization, and its designation as the capital city of the newly consolidated German nation in 1871.13 Both of these circumstances brought the city abruptly into the modern age, a period referred to as the Grunderzeit (foundation) or Wilhelmine era, with its accompanying new opportunities and challenges. The city’s administrative absorption of nearby villages and towns, in 1920, catapulted it into the ranks of a metropolis, Großstadt Berlin, at the beginning of the period of the Weimar Republic. Berlin embraced this ongoing growth by underwriting new infrastructure and sleek Modernist architectural designs, both of which were intended to live up to and celebrate its new identity. Despised as Berlin was by Hitler, under his regime the city nevertheless became a focus for his megalomaniacal imagination, which intended to transform it into the monstrous new capital of the Third Reich, Germania. That remained a warped vision for the most part, but Berlin was indeed transformed by Allied bombardments during the Second World War: 70 percent of the central city, as well as extensive areas throughout the metropolitan area, was destroyed. The need to rebuild and the city’s postwar division were the fundamental conditions that significantly shaped Berlin’s urban self-conception during the second half of the twentieth century. Almost as soon as the war ended, plans were proposed for rebuilding the city. In 1949, however, while rubble was still being cleared, the city was divided between the sector of Soviet occupation, which became East Berlin, the capital of the GDR, and the American, British, and French sectors that became West Berlin. Throughout the decades that followed, major reconstruction took place as finances allowed and according to changing conceptions of redevelopment

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The City as Subject

in both parts of the city. Many specific aspects of this history form integral backdrops to the analyses of public art in the following chapters and are discussed there. However, three overarching features of this capsule history of Berlin’s urban past held significant implications for the course that that postwar redevelopment would take. First, wartime bombardments destroyed many areas in which one would have found instances of Berlin’s oldest urban fabric; this dated back to the eighteenth century in the central city and from much earlier in relation to street patterns and to the village cores traditionally anchored by churches. Although some major structures were reconstructed, the scale of the destruction left large tracts of the city vacant. It also reduced the visibility of older architectural and spatial paradigms. This affected the second notable general feature of Berlin’s urban history, which is that the structures that survived (and in some cases were damaged but rebuilt) threw into relief the relative wealth of built form from the two modern periods of Berlin’s development, the Wilhelmine and the Modernist. These would often become touchstones for post-reunification redevelopment strategies that sought urban continuity or legitimacy through links to the past.14 Finally, the division of the city transformed each half into a geopolitical showcase as well as a frontline of the Cold War. Tensions between the two opposed systems coalesced in Berlin, culminating in construction of the Wall in 1961. But in addition, both parts of the city played representational roles; they were expected to demonstrate the success and benefits of their respective systems whenever they appeared in the glare of the international spotlight. This spurred redevelopment, and it also encouraged competition between the two in their redevelopment projects. While city maps produced in both East and West Berlin tended to ignore the presence of the other half, both city administrations maintained a keen eye on what was taking place on the other side of the frontier; in time, the unrelenting competitive drive occasionally shaded into forms of mutual influence and quiet interaction. Compressed into the mere span of little more than a century, this sweep of Berlin’s social and urbanistic history was exceptionally dynamic. It drove home an awareness of the ground on which one stood, both literally and figuratively. It also confronted Berliners with the forces of evanescence and change, and with the constructed nature of their surroundings. The postwar generation was the first to apply these insights to penetrate the history of the years of Nazi domination and of the city that had been laid waste. Coupled with the explosion of radical and alternative politics in the 1960s, these developments led to new initiatives for activist engagement in civic and urban life. Allied with

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and stemming from these were the artistic interventions in public space that are discussed in the succeeding chapters on wall-paintings and sculptures. The official Memorial to the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Strasse, the topic of the fourth chapter, registers this history somewhat differently, but also, of course, reflects the impact of the city’s past. Just as significant as this earlier history is for the works of public art created after 1989 were several contemporary developments: the process of reunification, the move of the capital of united Germany to Berlin, and the evolution of what is often referred to as the New Berlin, a term that masks many dissatisfactions, especially with urban-economic decisions. We have already briefly encountered some of the features of these changes, including the “discovery” of East Berlin, property speculation, the increased impact of corporate redevelopment strategies, and gentrification. The physical transformation of the central city—its traditional core lay in the former East Berlin—became a focal planning project almost immediately after 1989, as well as a site of cultural–political conflict. The 1990s seethed with debates and discussions over architectural, urban planning, and commemorative initiatives, from changes in street names to the razing of structures of significance to East Berliners, most notably the Palast der Republik. The topics and actors were different, but we recognize, from earlier times in West Berlin, the passionate, widespread level of engagement with issues concerning the future of the urban environment and the definition of the city; the lively discourse concerning the city, in which public artists shared, persisted. The works of public art on which this book focuses concretize in more-orless lasting materials Berlin’s history as one that is manifested through its urban infrastructure; such infrastructure must be sustained, they assert, for history’s and the city’s meanings to continue to resonate. Amid sometimes-roiling changes and conflicts, many of these artworks represent moments of possibility regarding the shape of the city and who determines it. The works of public art discussed here effectively draw attention to their engagement with these themes by embracing the city as their subject.

The Aim and Description of This Book To explore public art and its urban character in Berlin, I have drawn on the rich body of work on Berlin’s history and urban environment by scholars in a diversity of fields. Brian Ladd’s seminal work from 1999, reissued in 2018, laid the groundwork for looking at interconnections between the two.15 Janet

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The City as Subject

Ward’s compendium extended that story into the new millennium.16 Important themes stemming from this conjuncture include memory culture, identity, and representations of the Nazi past, the Holocaust, the GDR regime, and the divided city (see, for example, Till, Jordan, the collection of essays edited by Fuchs, James-Chakraborty, and Shortt, Jaskot, Young, Saunders, Verheyen, and Pugh).17 Claire Colomb’s work on place marketing and Daniela Sandler’s study of the significance of “the appropriation of decay” in Berlin since 1989 are further examples of the creative work that is emanating from diverse perspectives, many more of which are cited throughout this book.18 All of these authors have informed this study of Berlin, although my focus is distinctive. My starting point has been intent concentration on the works of public art as they exist and function on the ground. Close analysis of these bodies of artwork provided the basis for exploring questions of authorship and audience, the artworks’ urban implications, and the context of social, cultural, political, and economic practices and policies that helped shape these works and that they, in turn, can also be seen as sometimes having affected. That these works of public art address, challenge, and advocate for particular positions within the wider discourse of urban redevelopment in Berlin emerges from these considerations. The narrative of Chapter 2 begins by examining the character and the context of the outpouring of more than 250 murals that were painted on West Berlin walls prior to 1989. Animated by opposition to mainstream decisions regarding urban and environmental development, as well as other issues, and working in solidarity with grassroots activists, artists created both legal and illegal murals in West Berlin. Anchored in the city’s infrastructure of exposed firewalls and other derelict surfaces, their works address the idea of the city in a variety of ways, taking historical, fanciful, and visionary approaches. Post-reunification street artists relied on and transformed similarly interstitial, informal, or neglected infrastructural supports; the early years of the street art scene represent a collective effort to realize new urban possibilities latent in an unstable, but potentially emancipatory, moment, similar to that which had transpired earlier in West Berlin. As the real estate-driven economy became more dominant, however, this chapter considers how street art unwittingly abetted speculative property development, and the consequences of this for the street art scene and its venues. Both West Berlin muralists and artists working within the postreunification street art scene were linked to larger local and international social, cultural, and political discourses, networks, and movements that organized and agitated for alternative conceptions of urban redevelopment; through their

Introduction

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practices and their alliances, artists working in Berlin contributed to these calls for citizens’ right to the city. Time itself separated these two moments of possibility less than the hinge of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the rush to reunification that followed it. The impact of those events on urban art and its context, and the connections between these public art forms across that divide are both important aspects of this chapter’s narrative.19 Chapter 3 focuses on a body of public sculptures from the late 1980s to the early years of the new millennium that draws attention to how history and meaning are embedded in ordinary features of urban structure. Three motifs characterize the infrastructural elements that are the mediums for these works, the network, the void, and the ground plane. By examining individual sculptures in these terms, we see how, independent of their explicit subjects, this body of work promotes an alternative conception of the city. While these sculptures rely on the climate of urban awareness among Berliners that had been cultivated in West Berlin since the 1960s, they are nevertheless subject to countervailing forces in the 1990s that we examine as well; we also look at works that provoked telling conflicts. In the main, however, these public sculptures forged their identity as intentional works in relation to the historic character of their surroundings, and our analysis of this follows and expands upon Alois Riegl’s conceptualization of the nature of monuments within a city and how they function. The practices that these sculptures employ to connect with their urban contexts challenge traditional notions of sculptural monumentality and direct our attention to the actively constructed nature of the urban environment.20 Chapter 4 examines the complex history of the creation of the official Memorial to the Berlin Wall and its Victims and to the Division of the City at Bernauer Strasse and its extensive open-air ensemble of structures and design elements within its urban environment. The concept for the Memorial received approval a decade and a half after the fall of the Wall. By this time, it was obvious that interest in the site and history of the Wall was increasing, while surviving slabs were deteriorating, memory of where the Wall had run was fading, and younger people were more and more unaware of the extent and functions of the zone it controlled. Almost another decade passed before its completion in 2014. The Memorial’s mandate to address the division of the city that the Wall enforced invites us to look beyond the standard rhetoric of East/West division to consider the broader urban implications of this division and how, or whether, the Memorial acknowledges them. Thus, we consider more deeply the character and history of the surrounding neighborhood here along Bernauer Strasse at the time of the Wall’s construction, how the Wall affected urban development on

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The City as Subject

each side during the twenty-eight years of its existence, and how the two resulting neighborhoods that evolved during the time that the Wall stood continue to register, as well as have an impact on, the Memorial’s presence at their border. While many of the design and spatial elements of the Memorial will be familiar from the analyses of public art in the previous chapters, it becomes clear that their range of reference is restricted to a narrower scope. Rather than situate the Wall’s history in relation to the entire period of division, whose story becomes evident in our discussion of the evolution of its surrounding neighborhood, the smaller frame of the Cold War period dominates the Memorial’s perspective. This also results in a truncated presentation of the views of the GDR and of East Berliners’ experiences. Rather than allow for a polyphonic, heterogeneous approach to the history that the Memorial recounts, a triumphalist view of Western success dominates; this view materializes literally for visitors as they emerge from the Memorial to encounter the built forms of the adjacent gentrified neighborhood. Chapter 5 probes these analyses of bodies of public art to identify the implications of the distinctive ways in which they take the city as their subject. Through the infrastructural forms and materials that they employ, all of them have become “permanences,” in Aldo Rossi’s sense of becoming embedded in the city’s fabric. They signal the city’s role as a “repository of history” and instigate further exploration of its capacity to embody the past. This is true, too, of the Berlin Wall Memorial, whose achievement in this regard is nevertheless limited by the narrowed discourse that has shaped the story it tells. In this chapter, we consider features of the Memorial that may allow it in the future to reconfigure its approach to the history of the city’s division by embracing more diverse perspectives and enlarging the scope of its inquiry into the place of the Wall zone within the city. The moments of liberatory possibilities to which the other bodies of public art responded and contributed were relatively brief and often embattled. Some of the artworks that were produced were ephemeral; others have been menaced or destroyed by inimical urban policies favoring corporate and speculative development. Nevertheless, the remaining works and their histories constitute permanences—they are embedded in and address themselves to the infrastructure of the city—that attest to the broader urban discourses of which they were a part. The claim to the right to the city mounted by West Berlin muralists and post-reunification street artists and cultural workers, in association with wider grassroots activists, allied them with efforts undertaken internationally to incorporate local agents and audiences into projects aimed at determining the shape of their cities. These efforts represented attempts to realize on the ground

Introduction

17

Henry Lefebvre’s theorizations: to create diverse, multi-vocal, use-value-based community collaborations in the interests of heterogeneous urban development. The body of public sculpture that we are looking at drew from past challenges to traditional forms of monumentality to forge from new materials and sites an insistently urban, place-based, and historically aware visual network across the city. Their presence as permanences persists in the face of encroachment by corporate-sponsored public artworks that evade ties to local audiences and concerns. As part of a larger, activist public discourse concerning urban development, then, these bodies of public art—West Berlin murals, post-reunification street art, and public sculptures—have seized upon moments of emancipatory possibilities. This enabled them to connect with local citizens to represent contestational conceptions of the city. Through innovative visual, architectural, and spatial means, they offered the city as their subject and as the scaffolding for its ongoing construction.

Notes All translations are by the author unless otherwise indicated. 1 Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. and eds. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996). See also Christian Schmid, “Henri Lefebvre, the Right to the City, and the New Metropolitan Mainstream,” in Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse, and Margit Mayer, eds. Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2012), 42–62. 2 Neil Brenner, "What Is Critical Urban Theory?" in Neil Brenner, Peter Marcuse, and Margit Mayer, eds. Cities for People, Not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2012), 11. 3 Ibid., 14. 4 Ibid., 20. For wider implications of corporate development, see Pedro Fiori Arantes, The Rent of Form: Architecture and Labor in the Digital Age, trans. Adriana Kauffmann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). 5 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman (1966; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 59. 6 Ibid., 128. 7 James E. Young, perhaps the most prominent scholar to have written on memorials, distinguishes monuments as fixed objects, sculptures, or installations, that make up a subset of memorials, which can include more intangible creations, such as

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The City as Subject

events and holidays. April 9, 2018 lecture, “The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between,” Michigan State University. See also The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 4. 8 James E. Young, The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 6. 9 For early statements of scholarly interest in these developments, see the issue of Art Journal, edited by Harriet Senie and Sally Webster, “Critical Issues in Public Art,” 48, number 4 (Winter 1989). 10 On the development of public art, see Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995); Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002); Tom Finkelpearl, Dialogues in Public Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001); Harriet F. Senie and Sally Webster, eds. Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1998); Cher Krause Knight and Harriet F. Senie, eds. A Companion to Public Art (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016); Cameron Cartiere and Martin Zebracki, eds. The Everyday Practice of Public Art: Art, Space and Social Inclusion (Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016). 11 Aloïs Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 21–51. 12 Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997; reissued 2018), 217–24. 13 Many works have been written about the developments sketched here. For further elaboration, see for example Harald Bodenschatz, Berlin Urban Design: A Brief History (Berlin: DOM publishers, 2010); Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin; Janet Ward, Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 14 The rich tradition of classicizing buildings in Berlin exercised relatively little influence (although the exceptions, such as Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery or the buildings of Stalinallee in East Berlin, were significant) due to the association by the end of the Second World War of classicism with the imprint of fascism on architecture. 15 Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin. 16 Ward, Post-Wall Berlin. 17 Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Jennifer Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Anne Fuchs, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, and Linda Shortt, Debating German Cultural Identity since 1989 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011);

Introduction

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Paul B. Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012; James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Anna Saunders, Memorializing the GDR: Monuments and Memory after 1989 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2018); Dirk Verheyen, United City, Divided Memories?: Cold War Legacies in Contemporary Berlin (Lanham, MD and Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books, 2008); Emily Pugh, Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). 18 Claire Colomb, Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post-1989 (Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK and New York: Routledge, 2012); Daniela Sandler, Counterpreservation: Architectural Decay in Berlin since 1989 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016). 19 This chapter developed from a much briefer overview and analysis of murals in West Berlin, “West Berlin Walls: Public Art and the Right to the City,” published in Public Art Dialogue 4 no. 1 (Spring 2014): 100–20, a version of which, “Reimagining the City: West Berlin Murals and the Right to the City,” was delivered at the International Conference on Street Art and Urban Creativity, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon, July 2014. 20 Chapter 3 is a much-expanded and rewritten elaboration of a preliminary exploration of the topic presented as “The City as Subject: Contemporary Public Sculpture in Berlin” at the Art and the City: A Conference on Postwar Interactions with the Urban Realm, Institutes of Cultural Analysis and of Art History, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, May 2006, a version of which was published as “The City as Subject: Contemporary Public Sculpture in Berlin,” Journal of Urban History 35 no. 6 (September 2009): 853–78.

20

2

West Berlin Walls, Street Art, and the Right to the City Graffiti and street murals are among the signal forms of public art that identify Berlin’s recent urban culture. They were preceded, however, by another period of mural production that is less well-known: West Berlin walls were sites for hundreds of paintings in the 1970s and 1980s. Forerunners rather than influences, these murals nevertheless propose ways to look at the conjunction of public art with a broader civic discourse on urban redevelopment that illuminates both the continuities and contextual contrasts between these two periods. In 1989, before the Berlin Wall fell, it was reported that almost 250 murals could be found in West Berlin.1 Beginning in the mid-1970s, the walls of West Berlin residential neighborhoods became enticing surfaces ripe for paintings. Still scarred from bombardments and street fighting at the end of the Second World War, the cityscape’s exposed firewalls next to vacant lots offered accessible and highly visible canvases for painters. On a smaller scale, parts of façades or courtyard walls created similar opportunities. These works were not merely cosmetic or decorative designs, however. They addressed a wide range of subjects, from direct political expression to images of fantastic alternative worlds. Some were painted illegally and in the face of the threat of imprisonment, while others were created with the support of new municipal programs. Some were created by community activists unskilled in the visual arts, while others were designed by trained artists who had researched the techniques and materials best suited to making lasting wall art. What unified the majority of the murals painted in the 1970s and 1980s in West Berlin was their relationship to the fabric of the city. Through both the topics that they addressed and their infrastructural sites, these murals responded to and stimulated an awareness of the role that built forms play in shaping communities. Their subjects ranged from responses to immediate issues affecting the quality and direction of life in the city, to conjuring new possibilities for urban organization that might be latent in Berlin’s social and

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physical structures. Complementing and deepening these themes were the murals’ sites, the unsightly wall-planes of exposed firewalls that were never intended to be seen or façades of older apartment buildings that had been stripped of their former applied ornamentation in bombardments or through attempts at modernization. Painting these surfaces with murals lent them a new value and reintegrated them into newly appreciated neighborhood ensembles of surviving older residential structures and the reclaimed vacant lots adjacent to them. Spaces that had been rendered fallow by destruction and neglect were, in many cases, reinvigorated as playgrounds or green areas. Building façades were rejuvenated by bearing murals, adding new energy and color to streetscapes. Through these means, wall-planes and the spaces they bounded reasserted themselves as integral elements in the cityscape, and drew attention in very immediate, physical ways to the formative role that city structure plays in defining urban life. Renewed value accrued to older buildings, streetscapes, and street patterns as a result, in part, of the muralists’ interventions. This reevaluation both reflected and reinforced contemporaneous challenges to the prevailing model for West Berlin’s postwar urban redevelopment that itself often called for the destruction of traditional neighborhoods. As we look more closely in this chapter at the origins and nature of those challenges, we see that West Berlin’s murals played a role in articulating and championing a specific vision of the city as a repository of history in material form and in asserting citizens’ right to the city. West Berlin’s murals were by no means monolithic, but as we recover and examine their context, themes, and the practices employed to create them, patterns emerge that underscore the centrality of the city as their subject. This becomes apparent through their imagery as well as through the sites and means they deployed and the context of citizen engagement with urban development issues to which they responded. Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the “right to the city,” to which we turn in the second section of this chapter, identifies the stance toward neighborhood particularity, participation, and solidarity that characterizes the works produced by West Berlin muralists. These murals are not well known outside of the former West Berlin. Instead, the Berlin Wall has become the iconic mural surface in the city. Following an “upgrade” in which relatively smooth and wide prefabricated concrete slabs were installed in the mid-1970s, the appearance of graffiti and wall paintings on its West-facing side added a layer of spectacle to its already-dense web of significance.2 After reunification, when these images were dispersed or destroyed along with most of the Wall itself, the East Side Gallery of murals painted on

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a remaining length of the Berlin Wall replaced them as icons of the period of division. There was also an explosion of imagery in public spaces generally that took the form of graffiti, stencils, stickers, and wall paintings often created by internationally celebrated designers. Both of these developments established Berlin as a capital of street art.3 Yet the murals from the 1970s and 1980s do not share in this identity; they are little recognized and, just as significantly, they were grounded in a very different context. This chapter’s consideration of the history of West Berlin wall paintings, the new mural practices that they embodied, their ties to the modern mural tradition, and the nature of the international mural context of that period provides a standpoint from which to sketch their relationship to more recent, post-reunification interventions and the corresponding interstitial spaces where they have been deployed. Such discussion of the West Berlin murals provides insight into the distinctive character of the moment they represent. That is to say, despite the complexities and conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s, my claim is that it is possible to see the murals of that period as contributing to, articulating, and integrated within a larger project that yielded effective social and urban change. It is true that this moment was brief, and that it entailed compromises in processes and results. But especially when, as today, art is all too often a handmaiden to corporate dominance—a role that, indeed, we can see as emerging in the period under discussion here—it seems worthwhile to highlight historical instances in which one of the major ways to state and enact social ideals as a democratic initiative was through the agency of public art. The aim here is to recover that moment of liberatory possibilities in West Berlin and to examine it free of the veil of our contemporary knowledge of how history played out, which tends to obscure counter-narratives. What we learn about West Berlin murals from the 1970s and 1980s also adds dimension to considerations of later developments in urban art practices familiarly referred to as street art. The fall of the Wall and the subsequent reunification of the city created a very different urban environment. Fraught with both uncertainty and new possibilities, this unexpected change shifted the center of gravity within the city to the east as a site for discovery (especially by those from the former West), experimentation, and urban redevelopment. Neighborhoods in both the East and the West that had been peripheral during the years of division now became part of the central city. Local residents faced new possibilities but also fresh anxieties as the pace of change swept new populations and urban practices into their neighborhoods. Graffiti and street art both contributed to and reflected the transformations that the city experienced in the

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roughly decade-and-a-half following the Wende (literally, the turn). The street art, cultural production, and activist scenes were drawn especially to vulnerable sites—older buildings of all types, including residential and industrial ones—that often, after forty-five years, still bore traces of damage from the Second World War. Physical deterioration seemed to embody not only the neglect of the built environment but also the precarity of the historical moment; the past was all too quickly being supplanted, while social, economic, political, and environmental upheavals reshaped the city in seemingly ineluctable ways. Through their works and actions, street artists articulated some of the complexities of this moment as part of a wider effort to lodge the right to the city in local agents. Their interventions built upon the existing climate supporting grassroots decisionmakers’ right to the city that West Berlin muralists had helped to create. And yet the changes in attitude toward traditional architectural and spatial patterns that were pioneered by West Berlin muralists and the larger movement of which they were a part—and that were institutionalized within municipal planning policy in 1983—also prepared the ground for post-reunification gentrification and its accompanying urban transformations. Market-based real estate developers and speculators seized upon the spatial reconfigurations that followed upon the heels of street artists’ forays into and validation of fallow and neglected neighborhoods, to the detriment of local residents’, cultural producers’, and activists’ claims to the right to the city. These links and their impact will emerge as we examine these public art movements along with their practices and their urban and historical contexts. In the section that follows, we turn to representative examples of West Berlin murals from the 1970s and 1980s and to the sustaining climate of urban awareness and activism to which they contributed. How these articulate the concept of the right to the city, and how this concept helps redefine our understanding of the development of public art in the later twentieth century, is the subject of the succeeding section. The final section reflects on post-reunification street art as the most recent moment in which public art takes the city as its subject.

The Murals and Their West Berlin Context Ben Wagin’s 1975 Weltbaum—Grün ist Leben (World Tree I—Green Is Life) is recognized as having been the first mural painted in West Berlin4 (Plate 1). A Polish-born freelance artist, gallerist, and environmentalist who settled in Berlin in 1955 when he was twenty-five, Wagin was assisted here by four other artists;

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they had the support of the city administrator for building and housing along with permission to paint the wall from the building owner, who could not afford to restore it otherwise. The painting depicts a massive exhaust pipe on the right, which expels gases that force a shriek of pain from the tree that dominates the image on the left. A steamship closes the composition at the top, firmly echoing the wall’s horizontal roof-line as it plies the seas to deliver new trees from afar, suggesting an endless cycle of destruction and wasted resources. The mural was visible for decades, increasingly in a deteriorated and faded condition, but in 2018 the vacant lot in front of it became a building site. Despite protests and attempts to make other arrangements, the mural will become invisible behind a new structure. Young street artists, working with Wagin, have repainted it on a less prominent wall in a different neighborhood, an homage that cannot, however, preserve its former eminence.5 Among the features of this mural that mark its commonalities with others in West Berlin in this period is the nature of its site. Vacant lots that resulted from war damage were still widespread throughout the city. As in other cases, here Wagin used the surface of a typically dreary firewall that had been exposed during Allied bombardments and that flanked an empty lot. More exceptional, however, is the prominence of this site. Located around the corner from Wagin’s gallery, it faced a rapid-transit (S-Bahn) station that serves as a major entrance to the central city park, the Tiergarten, and was adjacent to the site of a large weekly flea market. It also marked the western edge of a neighborhood that had been rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s following its almost total destruction during the war; the nearby internationally renowned Hansaviertel housing development from that period is an outstanding feature of the neighborhood. In short, Wagin’s mural was hard to miss. Situated at an urban junction of popular culture, recreation, and high-art urban design, it reclaimed a fallow space to create a hinge among these elements. It also embodied a vivid statement—what one contemporary writer called an “environmental protection demonstration as eye-catcher”—and, as such, stood “on the not always sharply-defined boundary between city politics and active opposition.”6 The lot that Wagin’s mural overlooked has only recently been built upon, but other murals were obscured by subsequent construction not long after their creation. Eduardo Paolozzi’s 1976 abstract, black and white mural, at the heart of what was then downtown West Berlin, suffered this fate when a new bank building was constructed on its adjacent lot in 1985. The mural, whose commission grew out of a Berlin Senate competition, became partially but only temporarily visible again in 2018, when the bank was torn down. The image will

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The City as Subject

disappear once more when the building currently under construction on that site is completed.7 There is a further cautionary tale regarding the ephemerality of murals. In 1972, one of the muralists whose work we will encounter, Werner Brunner, co-founder of the Ratgeb Artists Group, noticed a mural on a courtyard wall that had been exposed during the demolition of the front part of the building.8 The badly deteriorated mural dated from the turn-of-the-century Wilhelmine period. Brunner began to search out other extant examples of this previously unknown design practice, a back-story to contemporary wall painting that had disappeared from both the written record and oral lore. He located twenty-five murals in various Berlin districts, but by the time he published Verblichene Idyllen (Faded Idylls), a comprehensive study of decorative building arts in the period, only ten remained. Usually painted in courtyards—spaces that were not publicly visible—they often depicted romantic landscapes, perhaps providing a bit of an escape into nature within the hectically modernizing city. It is ironic that these hidden images had been painted on the sort of courtyard walls that would later become exposed and offer themselves to those seeking fresh mural surfaces in the 1970s and 1980s. The ephemerality of murals from this more recent period stems from a number of causes. Some have been lost due to overpainting, burying images under new coats of plaster. Some remaining murals are very faded, as Wagin’s was, while others have been preserved through repainting, signaling the high regard in which they are held in their neighborhoods or by building owners and residents. But the greatest threat to most murals derives from the tendency of post-reunification redevelopment schemes to promote the construction of new buildings or the replacement of older, smaller infill structures in the vacant spaces adjacent to the firewalls on which West Berlin murals were painted, as well as demolition of buildings on whose walls they appeared. This pattern can be seen in every Berlin district and neighborhood. As the availability of larger redevelopment sites shrinks, developers have sought to build on smaller parcels that are often interstitially woven into their neighborhoods. This result of a real estate-driven urban economy not only destroys extant wall paintings, which usually have no independent protection, it also affects contemporary street art, as we will see in the last section of this chapter. And it threatens the historic urban fabric that murals once helped to foreground and bolster. The historic development of the city is one of the recurring themes depicted on West Berlin walls. This can be seen, for example, in images that incorporate street plans of the past and both past and contemporary city and

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architectural views. Historic street plans were especially important instruments in neighborhood preservation struggles. A 1986 mural in Charlottenburg, for example, addressed protests over a current urban renewal project by depicting citizens and nature bursting through an illusionistic schematic drawing of the neighborhood.9 Similarly, Gisela Schlicht’s 1981 mural of part of the plan for the no-longer extant Luisenstadt Canal was painted at a time when this site was embattled: protesters had succeeded in blocking the construction of a highway and interchange there, but there was ongoing contention over how to preserve the Kreuzberg park space that the canal had become.10 Other images of the past include early-nineteenth-century district views, illusionistic depictions of former neighborhood shops, a view of a Baroque estate that had once occupied the site of the building on which the mural is painted, and specific historical events.11 Through their depictions of subjects such as these, muralists situated contemporary communities within the narrative of Berlin’s urban development. On Admiralstrasse in Kreuzberg, artists Christian Rothmann and Jürgen Wäldrich, working with three others, used a variety of visual vocabularies in their 1986 mural, which was commissioned on the basis of a district competition. At street level, they painted an illusionistic shop-front from an earlier period, complete with a window display, signage, and passersby. The mural incorporates surviving architectural elements, including a jagged piece of broken wall, a token of the formerly adjacent building (Plate 2). Above, spilling across the wall of the façade, the intact building of the past is represented by exploding fragments. The mural continues on the firewall that was exposed by the adjacent building’s destruction, where it presents figures isolated in abstract, room-like compartments, engaged in disparate activities, dominated by a large TV set. Entitled Wo ist die Admiralstrasse geblieben? (What’s left of Admiral Street?), the mural alludes not only to past physical destruction but also to social and urban changes such as the passing of old shops that once made up the streetscape, contributing to neighborhood life, and the anomie of an increasingly mediaoriented culture. All of these works are examples of legal, officially sanctioned murals. Many other West Berlin murals, however, were painted by activist groups working unofficially, outside the frameworks of municipal administration and institutional support. They were allied, instead, with protest movements that focused on such issues as ecology, energy production—especially opposition to nuclear energy—housing provision, anti-militarism, the rights of women, and urban redevelopment, including opposition to highway construction. By the mid-1970s, protestors added the creation of community murals to

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demonstrations, leafleting, street festivals, building occupations, and other activities, as another aspect of their political practice. Risking police harassment and arrest for painting on walls illegally, activists yet hoped that “more people and/ or groups decide to pick up brushes and colors to paint their fears, despair, and utopias on the gray walls” and extend this activity as a means of struggle.12 As integral, influential, and numerous as activist murals were, they too were often ephemeral, though not necessarily by choice. Some disappeared when new buildings were constructed on their adjacent vacant lots. Working with fewer financial resources, the materials at the artists’ disposal were often of poor quality and therefore subject to relatively rapid deterioration. Unofficial murals were also more vulnerable to destruction by police and building owners. They were often produced in response to immediate situations by participants with little training who had only a sketchy sense of mural-painting practices and, because they were illicit, were frequently painted in haste. All of these factors contributed to their short lifespan. Their disappearance skews the historical record; as early as 1983, when the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek at the Berlin Central Library, in Kreuzberg, exhibited photographs of contemporary Berlin wall paintings, few spontaneous activist murals were in good enough condition to be documented.13 A few examples of activist murals from the 1970s and early 1980s that were painted on the façades of occupied buildings can provide a sense of the varied histories found in this arena of public art. These examples consist of largescale works designed to endure; two are extant today. But first we look at one that did not survive, whose checkered existence reflects the contentiousness of the period. By 1978, activist artists had painted two massive firewalls on the Kreuzberg Art and Cultural Center, known as KuKuCK, an abbreviation of its name in German (Kunst- und Kultur-Centrum Kreuzberg). As a center of the squatters’ movement—the Center itself illegally occupied a commercial building at Anhalter Bahnhof that had stood empty (today it is absorbed into a hotel complex)—this institution was considered “a thorn in the eye of the [West Berlin] Senate.”14 KuKuCK was evicted from the building in 1984 and the following year the walls were painted over and replastered, eradicating the murals.15 To protest this destruction, images inspired by one of the destroyed murals were integrated into a new wall painting at the district’s House for Runaway Youth (TommyWeißbecker-Haus). The title of the KuKuCK mural was “German Model” (Modell Deutschland), a reference to the 1976 election slogan of the SPD (Socialist Party) urging a policy for Germany’s economy that would promote increasing market orientation at the expense of union autonomy and workers’ wages.16 The mural targeted the social

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costs of this program, depicting destruction of the environment, the ticking time bomb of nuclear power, and inhumane housing conditions. The imagery was colorful and included gently expressionist exaggerations and distortions of form. One of the surviving murals was also painted for a public service organization. In 1982, the Ratgeb Artists Group executed a mural that stretches along the ground floor and frames the door and former shop-window openings of a workers’ training center in Kreuzberg (Plate 3). A painted legend states that the center was founded in 1979 “to realize self-directed work and shared living in this building.” The mural, it notes, was painted following occupation of the building. Using a style influenced by 1930s social-realist murals, it depicts workers in the carpentry, electrical, and heating and sanitation installation trades. Men and women work together in all three, reading schematics, developing plans, and dynamically interacting in active poses within metal and wood grids painted to define various work spaces. The mural adds layers of spatial illusionism to the bland streetscape, playing off areas of three-dimensionality against the planar, rectilinear choreography of pipes and lumber that echo elements of the building’s physical façade. The activist Ratgeb Artists Group, including founders Werner Brunner, Paul Blankenburg, and Werner Steinbrecher, as well as Nil Ausländer and Bernd Micka, created a number of murals in Berlin between 1977 and 1985. They took their name from the sixteenth-century painter Jerg Ratgeb, whose murals in the Frankfurt Carmelite monastery were the largest at the time to be painted north of the Alps; only fragments survived bombardments of the city in 1944. Jerg Ratgeb was publicly executed as a traitor in 1526 for his diplomatic and political work on behalf of peasants during the Peasants’ War. For the Berlin muralists, Jerg Ratgeb represented a model for the union of wall painting and social engagement and for presenting a critical perspective in visual media. The Ratgeb Artists Group collaborated with and shared their knowledge of mural painting with independent creators, including building occupiers, children, youth, and the incarcerated.17 The other surviving mural provides an example of non-professional involvement in these endeavors. Located on an apartment building façade, it is much simpler and less skillfully painted than either of the other two; it was completed in three hours by the residents themselves, working from sketches and leaning out windows to complete each segment. A bold tree form with bright green, spreading foliage covers the building’s façade, anchored by a reddish-brown central trunk (Plate 4). The colors are now faded, but the yellow banner above the second floor windows is still visible, bearing the slogan, “we’re staying put;”

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originally, this was accompanied by the words “we have sunk roots” in the middle of the tree’s trunk. Also located in the district of Kreuzberg, this building was in an area slated for widespread demolition. When their lease expired in early 1975, the people living there decided to fight eviction and the razing of the building that would follow. Their first act was to paint the mural in order to create awareness of their intentions throughout the neighborhood. “Urban tattoos,” as some squatters called murals like this, created “a stark contrast to the emotionally vacuous visual landscapes of normal urban life.”18 Not long after this one was painted, the building was sold to someone who honored the community form of living the squatters had established; it was saved from destruction, while many buildings around it were demolished. As one participant noted, “one kept a finger, but forgot to take the whole hand.”19 Challenges to mainstream urban housing solutions and manifestations of oppositional visions of redevelopment were engines in the fight against eviction and demolition. Both embodied some of the broad-based concerns about the conditions under which people should be able to live in the city that mobilized activist muralists. Legal muralists as well embraced such perspectives. In light of the ephemerality that faced West Berlin murals, it is important to recognize that those that survive do not only memorialize the history of an individual site. They also represent the contemporaneous rise in West Berlin of an unusually animated and widespread urban planning culture to which they responded and that they helped fortify. This culture arose against a distinctive backdrop: a third of the buildings in West Berlin’s districts had been destroyed or severely damaged by the end of the Second World War. As the pace of rebuilding quickened in the 1960s, mainstream planners targeted the demolition of 10,000 remaining older structures in favor of large-scale new construction and highway development, following the model for urban renewal that was widely promoted at the time in West Germany, Western Europe, and the United States.20 By the early 1970s, however, a shift in wider social and political attitudes had occurred that affected how the built environment was viewed, prompting challenges to the prevailing planning model. This shift took place at the same time that the younger, postwar generation began, in the late 1960s, to break the silence that surrounded the Nazi past. Their inquiries involved not only opening frank discussions about that past with their elders, but also tracing history’s material remains in the streetscapes and structures of the city.21 Young architects, planners, historians, and citizen activists organized workshops and study groups to research the physical forms that embodied the past. The experience that they gained from these investigations and, more importantly, their concomitant recognition that

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remaining urban forms help tell the story of the past fed a growing resistance to dominant urban renewal schemes that would raze material traces of that past. As one observer noted, it was not until a younger generation “saw urban development with critical eyes,” that voices rose to express dissatisfaction with prevailing practices and plans for the cityscape.22 Their activism manifested the kind of engagement with their everyday environments that Walter Benjamin had promoted in his radio broadcasts about the city over the years 1927–33. Through these, Benjamin hoped that his “listeners would emerge as critics and, ultimately, as effective instigators and producers” of the culture of the city and of their futures within it.23 This vision bore fruit decades later and in a changed context. One of its earliest realizations took place in 1968, when students and faculty at the Technical University, organized as Aktion 507, devised a manifesto and exhibition that critiqued contemporary technically oriented city planning in favor of a deeper appreciation for and engagement with the quality of daily urban life.24 Activist citizens and students as well as critical architects and planners began to challenge demolition in favor of the preservation and renovation of existing older buildings, street patterns, public spaces, and neighborhoods. Such challenges to mainstream planning schemes and the development of alternative proposals took two, often overlapping, forms. Building occupations occurred when landlords neglected structures that were slated for demolition. The three activist murals discussed above were painted to affirm the opposition of building occupiers to such destruction. Occupiers contested the hegemonic power of property relations through their own active use and physical reclamation of buildings. Occupations were also often part of larger programs for social and political change. These included introducing experimental living arrangements, such as those practiced by the collective that was responsible for the surviving illegally created mural discussed above. They also fostered alternative educational models and demonstrated against nuclear power locally and oppressive regimes elsewhere in the world, such as in Chile and Iran. Whether it was due to their threat to property relations alone, or to the multifaceted package of unconventional and oppositional ideas that squatters represented, these occupations frequently met with harsh police actions. Occupations occurred in many West Berlin districts, but the most intense site of activity and the one with which the squatters’ movement became most identified was Kreuzberg, a center for both alternative and dissident culture.25 During the peak years of 1979–84, 265 sites throughout West Berlin were occupied.26 Citizens’ initiatives constituted the other form of opposition to dominant planning practices. These political interventions challenged existing plans for

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particular neighborhoods by formulating alternative proposals. Often growing out of or supplementing occupations and street protests, citizens’ initiatives drew from historical and architectural studies and analyses of their neighborhoods that had been developed by local residents, critical planners and architects, and scholars. Their work was informed by a range of local and international sources that offered alternatives to the mainstream urban redevelopment model. These included earlier texts that addressed the loss of urban culture, such as Wolf Jobst Siedler’s Die gemordete Stadt, and critiques of the impact of contemporary planning ideas, including Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City and Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities,27 as well as a few models for preservation offered by projects undertaken in East Berlin neighborhoods.28 Citizens’ initiatives successfully blocked new highway construction; they championed features of local spatial and architectural design that defined particular neighborhoods and encouraged social interaction. These kinds of interventions led to the preservation and renovation of areas such as Klausener Platz in Charlottenburg and Chamissoplatz in Kreuzberg.29 A glimpse of how illegal and legal actions worked together to preserve a neighborhood can be seen from the experiences of one building’s occupiers in the Klausener Platz area. Bordering on the early-eighteenth-century Charlottenburg Palace, the neighborhood’s buildings date primarily from the years 1875–1924, with a few significant structures and street patterns originating in earlier periods. Though not badly damaged during the Second World War, the neighborhood was targeted for building demolitions, to be followed by high-rise and highway construction, by the first municipal urban renewal plan in 1963. In response, in the 1970s, residents both occupied threatened buildings and embarked on architectural and spatial studies of the neighborhood’s urban structure. This culminated in a citizens’ initiative proposing the end of demolition in favor of preservation and renovation. These combined actions successfully achieved the goal of maintaining the neighborhood. A 1981 mural on one prominently located corner apartment building portrays the solidarity and determination of the local occupation movement. Painted in association with the Ratgeb Artists’ Group (experienced activist muralists whose work we encountered earlier), it depicted the building’s community of occupiers.30 Individuals hold a banner aloft that bears the slogan, “Better to occupy and renovate than to own a wreck” (Lieber Instandbesetzen als kaputt besitzen); this highlighted the squatters’ claim that the continuing active functioning of a building outweighs the authority of ownership. Such privileging of use value over exchange value is a theme to which we will return. In a telling coda, when in 1988 the building’s exterior was

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resurfaced following the area’s preservation victory, state and district authorities blocked the repainting of the mural. After disappearing under a new coat of plaster, it was eventually replaced by a new mural; this preserved the memory of a mural that had supported the occupiers’ struggle, though it did not replicate it. City-wide, the success of the arguments for neighborhood preservation to which the Klausener Platz protestors contributed led to municipal adoption of preservation practices that came to be called “cautious urban renewal.”31 These practices were also promoted by the 1980s International Building Exhibition that showcased local architectural traditions through both preservation models and new construction throughout West Berlin.32 The shift in perspective regarding the character of the built environment that this new policy embodied and the validation of the historic cityscape that it endorsed reflect the effectiveness of the oppositional community of which muralists were a part. This policy would also have repercussions for the nature of post-reunification urban redevelopment, as we will see in the last section of this chapter, as well as on the neighborhoods bordering the Berlin Wall Memorial that we will look at in Chapter 4. While building occupations took place in the first instance within a context of social conflict, in the 1980s and into the 1990s they often led to the legal transfer of property ownership to squatters. Residents often could then continue the renovation of their buildings that they had typically already begun, as in the above example of the Klausener Platz community. Citizens’ initiatives also transformed aspects of the city’s urban planning practices and thus affected the direction and character of future redevelopment. Scholars Andrej Holm and Armin Kuhn observe that “squatters, citizens’ action groups and a critical section of the public attacked in equal measure, if not always as one voice, the planned demolition of whole streets.” They argue further that, by rehabilitating occupied spaces, squatters created “a kind of experimental laboratory in which new instruments of urban renewal were trialled,” instruments that augured “the end of the authoritarian urban-renewal regime” of mainstream planning and introduced “participatory principles” and the idea of “self-empowerment” to urban redevelopment practices.33 These movements, in other words, were effective in changing local discourse about urban form as it affected practices, policies, and visible material structures, and they did this in part by introducing new participants—citizens from local neighborhoods—into the arenas of urban development discussion and decision-making. The intense activity of muralists was thus integral to the combination of illegal and parliamentary methods of contestation through which West Berliners avidly engaged with urban development issues in the 1970s and 1980s. Muralists

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participated in the same framework of discourse in which citizens struggled to define the character of the city. The identification by muralists of the plentiful firewalls that pocked the city as appealing surfaces for their works had the effect of revaluing the walls and reintegrating them into their social, spatial, and architectural sites, transforming these from dreary, blighted pockets into neighborhood landmarks. This paralleled the achievements of citizen activists in winning support for policies that encouraged preservation and renovation. Municipally backed programs, competitions, and exhibitions that were created to support the development of wall painting recognized and endorsed the contributions that community-based murals made to strengthening local identity as well as to promoting more conventionally administrative goals such as marketing the city.34 No doubt the diverse participants in mural projects, from the direct action of painters who worked without legal sanction to the promotional interests of city marketers, had widely disparate goals. But the range of works as a whole added a strong visual component to the dynamism of contemporary discourse about the city. The spectrum of interests that murals served is illustrated by a widely esteemed mural that also achieved a special renown when it was used for marketing purposes; in addition to its local acclaim, Gert Neuhaus’s 1979 Zipper appeared on posters created to promote the city, accompanied by the slogan “Berlin feels good”35 (Plate 5). Neuhaus, a Berliner born in 1939, studied at the fine arts university and was working as a freelance artist, exhibition designer, and gallerist when he began to paint large-scale murals in 1976. Commissioned by the building owner, this piece in the district of Charlottenburg underwent a significant design modification at its conceptual stage in order to keep costs down. As originally conceived, the entire wall was covered with an illusionistic painting of a late-nineteenth-century Wilhelmine building façade; the zipper running down the center would have opened to reveal a small section of the actual raw firewall behind it.36 To avoid the cost of painting the whole wall, Neuhaus’s wife and frequent collaborator, Christianne Neuhaus, suggested reversing the images: now, the expanse of the unpainted firewall is bisected by the painted zipper that opens to reveal a glimpse of an illusionistic Wilhelmine building beyond it. Fortuitous though this change was, it prefigured the edge that fantasy or depiction of an alternative reality would often have over literal representation in Berlin murals during this period. While both conceptions of the Neuhaus mural playfully manipulate illusions, the first would have frankly uncovered the firewall that actually exists behind the painted illusion. As executed, that actual firewall incredibly opens to expose the pristine, elaborate façade that it

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seemingly hides, the secret reality and, indeed, time-shrouded architectural history, obscured by the mundane. Neuhaus, a prolific muralist, painted twentysix walls in a twelve-year period, most of which embody a fanciful, illusionistic approach that plays with the theme of Berlin architecture.37 A similarly Magritte-like sense of surreal architectural transformation characterizes Irene Niepel’s 1981 mural on the firewall of a teachers’ residence in Kreuzberg (Plate 6). Niepel was still a student at the fine arts university in West Berlin when she won a district competition with this design. Her painting continues the street façade of the building along its side firewall, but here the façade takes the form of an illusionistic curtain seen hanging from a rod; the curtain opens at the other end of the wall to reveal a green landscape against an intense blue sky. Playfully multiplying levels of illusion, this mural may also suggest the opening to the unbounded world that education represents. The mural remains intact despite the restoration of the building, although trees have grown up in front of it and obscure its view except in winter. Niepel’s and Neuhaus’s works exemplify the most numerous category of West Berlin murals: fantastic, visionary, or utopian images that usually focus on architectural or urban elements. In these images, illusionistic depictions dissolve walls to create alternative worlds. Often the wall is explicitly shown as split, shattered, or broken to reveal the visionary world that lies beyond it. In a city that was itself enclosed by the Wall, it is tempting to understand such scenes as referring not only to the potential to remake the urban environment but also to the dream of ending the division of the city.38 In this connection, the desire that was expressed by building owners who commissioned murals to see representations of “an intact world” suggests that their goal was not merely beautification in a cosmetic sense but rather to gesture toward a profound reconstitution of the city, both physically and socially.39 Commentators noted at the time that in order to conceive of alternatives to existing functionalist architecture, people needed spaces that would allow for the play of imagination that murals of fantastic cityscapes offered.40 Illegal, activist murals were not featured in municipal promotional campaigns as legally sanctioned ones such as Neuhaus’s Zipper were, but there were other differences between them as well. Official murals either received municipal support channeled through district governments, or they were commissioned by the building owner, residents, or a local business, or they won a local competition. Programs to underwrite artwork by making use of a dedicated percentage of building costs had existed in Germany since the 1920s, but in 1973 the city of Bremen introduced a broader program to sponsor art

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in public spaces; it was not limited to new construction and it promoted what was seen as a more democratic selection process.41 This was widely influential; even the [West] German Association of Cities recognized at this time a need to create livable cities and connections between citizens and their city by involving the creative arts in city planning proposals.42 The West Berlin Senate adopted a similar program, Art in Urban Space (Kunst im Stadtraum), in the mid-1970s, and a program entitled Color in the Cityscape (Farbe im Stadtbild), aimed specifically to support mural painting; it also sponsored publication of a handbook for building owners in 1979.43 Artists’ and architects’ professional organizations, the local newspaper Morgenpost, and other city institutions collaborated with the Senate in their encouragement of mural exhibitions and competitions. One writer described such support in this period as initiating a “colorful wave” throughout the city.44 Although the financial and legal standing of the two arenas of mural production—official and unofficial—were different, they drew on similar creative inspirations. West Berlin muralists often referred to contemporary murals elsewhere that functioned as a means of direct political expression, in other German cities such as Bremen, but also internationally, as in Bologna, Sardinia, Portugal, Mexico, and Chile.45 There was, too, widespread awareness of the mural traditions of Mexico and the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. A telling and important, if subtle, indicator of the cultural ties between West Berlin and the United States at the time was an exhibition held as early as 1974 at Amerika Haus Berlin. The US State Department’s cultural center within the occupied city hosted a show entitled Street Art: Public Wall-painting in the USA (Street Art: Öffentliche Wandmalereien in den USA). An exhibition of images by photographer Horst Schmidt-Brümmer, it displayed mostly murals in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Venice (California), San Francisco, and Berkeley, but Detroit, New York, and Chicago were represented as well. All had been painted since 1967. The exhibition divided the images into four sections: Advertising as Wall Cosmetics: Examples of New Advertising Paintings (twentyfour images, including murals developed in the main for shops and public services); Individual Wall Paintings: The Extension of Architecture through Fantasy (twenty-one images); Public Painting Projects at Schools: Sign of Active Art Education (nineteen images); and Political Wall Paintings: Collective Wall Paintings in City Districts of Political Minorities (thirty images).46 All of these emphases were resonant for West Berlin muralists; we have already encountered strong examples of fantastic, visionary, or utopian images of the city and of murals painted on the walls of public service organizations.

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The theme that we find represented in Berlin more than in the catalogue of US examples, however, is the one with which we began when we looked at Wagin’s mural, namely environmental concerns. This theme was especially stressed in work created by activist groups; many spontaneous murals were painted in association with anti-nuclear power protests, but these images no longer survive. Other murals elaborate on these more simplified spontaneous murals by depicting, in a sharply critical vein, the depredations stemming from contemporary indifference to nature and the threats posed by public policies that underwrite reliance on nuclear energy. Some environmentally themed murals represent vistas of bucolic or wooded landscapes, often painted as imaginative illusions.47 One unusual extant piece on Admiralstrasse in Kreuzberg—not a wall painting, but a relief construction that uses an existing wall as its support— provides a poetic meditation on environmental loss and persistence. In 1985, ceramic sculptor Karl-Dieter Horn installed along the lower part of an exposed firewall, near the sidewalk, a fragmentary brick construction that appears to be the ruins of a former building. Along its brick ledges, Horn placed ceramic containers with plants, creating ecological niches for new life within the ruins of civilization to which the fragments of wall allude.48 Themes often intermingle as muralists address, interrogate, and envision the city in all of its complexity and intersectionality. The municipally commissioned mural painted in 1979 by the Ratgeb Artists Group, The Civilization-damaged Tree of Redevelopment Breaks through Moabit’s Historical Landscape, exemplifies the layering of thematic material found in many works (Plate 7). Painted on the exposed firewall of a renovated apartment building, the mural presents at street level luxuriant fronds that break through an illusionistically depicted canvas and become transformed into a tree. The tree’s distorted limbs tower over a placid, bucolic historical view of the area in the Moabit district that is the site of the mural. Bonds and cables fetter the tree; others seem to hold the canvas in place. Despite the calm topographic view, the mural presents a turbulent image. Perhaps its tensions grow out of the looming presence of the Moabit Hall of Justice and prison, located only a block away. The depiction of this institution is dwarfed within the painting by the tree, but the restrictive, deforming cables that are given more emphasis seem to allude to practices of bondage or curtailment that distort organic growth of all sorts. Urban history and redevelopment, environmental depredation, judicial rehabilitation, and even the renovation that is represented by mural painting seem to be equally implicated in the imposition of constraints on human and natural development.

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A Kreuzberg mural painted by Iranian-born artist Akbar Behkalam conveys a very different mood through its gentle, poetic portrayal of nature’s evocative power. Muralists from Chile and Iran as well as German-Turkish painters were among the many artists who contributed murals to West Berlin’s cityscape in the 1970s and 1980s. Behkalam studied in Tabriz and Istanbul and, after working in several European capitals and a stay in Iran, settled in Berlin in 1976. His 1980 city-sponsored mural in Kreuzberg asymmetrically juxtaposes a loose crowd of delicately painted figures with a lone tree (Plate 8). It is accompanied by a poem by the modern communist Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet that reads, To live alone and free like a tree and brotherly as a forest is our longing.49

Despite the different visual character and cultural references of this work, Behkalam’s focus on the poles of the individual and human solidarity, and of nature and human longing, connect his work to the social and environmental themes that mark many other murals in this period. The interplay of individuality and unity that he evokes through his imagery is also conveyed by his use of the wall-plane. His mural unifies the broad, blank section of wall of a projecting building wing with the perpendicular window-bearing wall that parallels the street. The left edge of the mural encompasses a row of apartment windows, drawing attention to its irregularly shaped border that shifts and spreads like an organic form. This strategy softens the sharp corner of the wall and makes the mural visible from several directions along the street, thus enhancing its presence. As we recover West Berlin’s murals here or on walks through the city, it is important to remember the changes that today’s streetscapes present in comparison to the period in which they were painted. Restored and colorful buildings, taller trees and more plantings, and new infill structures create very different impressions than we would have registered in the 1970s and 1980s, when war damage and makeshift postwar structures were more in evidence. An outpost of the West still, in an uncertain geopolitical stand-off with the Soviet bloc, the future shape of the city was a topic open for discussion, debate, and contestation. Building occupations and citizens’ initiatives proposed alternative understandings and approaches to the kind of urban development that had been charted by mainstream municipal planners.

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Muralists of the period tangibly put into practice on the walls some of the convictions that urban activists articulated through protests, alternative studies, and dissident proposals. The murals’ predominant imagery drew attention to the idea of the city through depictions of past or present features and of imaginative realms that stimulated thinking in new ways about urban possibilities. The sites of the murals also enacted care for the structures of the city, revaluing fallow spaces and neglected walls in order to reintegrate them into the urban fabric. As creations that grew out of and fostered discussion and interaction to promote mutual understanding and neighborhood support, the murals helped represent citizens’ claims to the right to the city.50 The following section develops the idea of this right further and explores the wider historical and international contexts it opens for thinking about these murals.

The Right to the City: A New Paradigm for Public Art The concept of the right to the city derives from the work of French urban theorist Henri Lefebvre, who argued that “the city is an oeuvre—a work in which all its citizens participate.”51 This concept identifies and articulates challenges to the prevailing trend in which, as geographer Don Mitchell observes, increasingly “the spaces of the modern city are being produced for us rather than by us.”52 David Harvey, an urban geographer and social theorist whose work draws on Lefebvre’s thought, notes that “the right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.”53 Lefebvre studied the active construction of space; the processes of its production and the nature of the created space, he argued, yield new possibilities or constraints for social life. In modern times, abstract space prevails, a space shaped by and in turn organizing the universalizing, homogenizing social relations of capitalism. Such space is defined by its exchange value, its character as a commodity operating within the market of property relations, rather than by its use value, which squatters, as we read above, and most residents, privileged. The dominance of market relations today is reflected, for example, in the way that the interests of developers and multinational corporations impose their imprint on the form that cities take. This accounts for the experience of placelessness and interchangeability that characterizes many urban developments. It also speaks to the construction of the buildings that block Wagin’s, Paolozzi’s, and other artists’ murals, as we noted above; these structures impose specific regimes of work and order that replace the kinds of serendipitous encounters offered by the murals’

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more provocative or unexpected visual images. Such differentiated space, as Lefebvre called it, recognizes and is a product of particularity and heterogeneity and can only be created by social struggle. Particular, heterogeneous needs and desires are made known through their representation, which occurs in and thereby creates public space. Understood in this way, West Berlin murals articulated alternative urban visions, and thus reactivated what had been fallow walls and spaces so that they became public spaces that could be used in any number of locally determined ways. Lefebvre saw the city, then, as a shifting embodiment of the play of such dialectical encounters through which people struggle for their human right to the city or, in Harvey’s terms, to “the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves.”54 In their themes and physical presence, West Berlin murals supported people’s right to the city through their collaborations with the efforts of building occupiers, activist protestors, and citizens’ initiatives. All of these endeavors expanded the arena of discourse concerning urban development to include a broader range of participants. Even a relatively modest mural, such as a Wilmersdorf district example from 1987 by Fabian Fritz, working with his friend Markus Beer, contributes to many of these aspects of wall painting in this period through its honoring of the tasks of building construction, its relationship to its site, and its awareness of visual precedent (Plate 9). A witty, self-referential mural, it depicts six stories of illusionistic scaffolding bearing workers who are engaged in the familiar task of re-plastering the blank wall on which the mural is painted.55 There is a pendant mural to Fritz’s, painted at an earlier date and by an unknown artist, on a building across Mehlitzstrasse. It depicts scenes of city-building, perhaps inspired by the contribution of the street’s namesake to urban development in this area of the city. Flanking the opening to residential Mehlitzstrasse from the busier commercial artery of Berliner Strasse, the two murals add a somewhat gate-like formality to the otherwise mundane cityscape. In its depiction of scaffolding and the laborers it supports, Fritz’s wall painting recalls Diego Rivera’s 1931 mural for the San Francisco Art Institute, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City. The Berlin mural is less ambitious and much simplified; Rivera depicts many vignettes of city-building, using the structure of the scaffold to provide spatially independent compartments for the activities of various building trades, while painters engage in depicting a colossal figure of a worker in the central panel. On the other hand, Fritz focused on the flat building wall and those suspended on the scaffold who plaster it. Like Rivera, however, Fritz includes a self-portrait seated on the scaffold (though Rivera notoriously presents his rear to the viewer as he is depicted contemplating

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the mural painting underway before him) and a portrait of the patron of the commission. The suggestion of references to Rivera in Fritz’s mural is not far-fetched; texts of the period—essays accompanying the 1983 Gemalte Illusionen exhibition at the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek and the 1974 Amerika Haus exhibition on contemporary murals in the United States, as well as articles in the 1979 collection of writings and photographs concerning wall painting in West Berlin, among others—refer to the precedents offered by both the Mexican muralists and Works Progress Administration program (WPA) murals in the United States of the 1930s.56 We may ask, however, whether this acknowledgment of the practices of earlier mural art signals continuity between West Berlin muralists and their modern forerunners forty years earlier. Or, as we consider the question of the place of West Berlin murals in the history of this art form in the twentieth century, may we identify new features of these West Berlin murals that mark a distinctive transformation in the role and meaning of wall painting in this period? The popular character of modern murals typically originated in their subject matter and location; their subjects addressed non-elite viewers and their locations ensured contact with this new audience. As epitomized by the masterworks of Mexico’s Los Tres Grandes, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Jose Clemente Orozco, and by the multitudinous murals funded by New Deal programs in the United States in the 1930s,57 modern murals depicted historical events as they affected the wide range of the nation’s citizens, whose experiences had usually been left out of the history texts, and local stories that celebrated regional contributions to national identity. They were located predominantly in buildings erected by the state to serve its citizens, from the Ministry of Education in Mexico City to post offices in small towns throughout the United States. The crux of the project of 1930s murals that were created in Mexico and the United States can be described as asserting the claim of the populace to the state. Muralists in both countries depicted the broad masses of their societies, including the oppressed and still-disenfranchised, as citizens whose stories contributed to establishing the full picture of the construction of the nation’s history and identity. The murals themselves and the sites where they were painted were claimed and celebrated as “public property,”58 belonging, as did the state itself, to those depicted on these walls. The circumstances characterizing murals created in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s were very different in a number of ways, including the impetus for their

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creation, their sites, the nature of the artists who created them, their contexts, and their themes. The initiative for their creation often came from residents of neighborhoods in which the murals were to be located, and their sites were local, predominantly residential and sometimes school or social services buildings.59 They used as their support and thus drew a new kind of attention to structural building elements—firewalls exposed by wartime bombs or older buildings’ façades—that on their own told a story about the city’s history or asserted a vision of the city’s material integrity. There was also a range of levels of local participation, of skill levels, and of professionalization that contributed to their production. The degree of involvement by local government also varied, but even when municipal programs underwrote murals, they were often responding to a project that had already been initiated within a local community. The difference between traditional modern murals and those created in West Berlin registers in subject matter as well. Here, too, there is a wide range, but the vast majority of murals created in Berlin address the quality of urban life, often by protesting specific urban or environmental changes or by projecting alternative cityscapes. This shift in mural art to neighborhood locations, popular participation, and themes addressing specifically urban issues of concern to local residents suggests that a new role for public art and a new position for murals in relation to public space had been constructed. In this context, murals became one among several vehicles for citizens to contribute to the wider discourse on urban development by challenging mainstream practices, creating solidarity, redefining citizens’ place in the urban community, and reimagining the design and experience of the city. Using urban structures to intervene in processes that were defining urban experience added to the array of ways in which the broader community claimed a role in shaping the city. As specific urban constituencies faced new social, political, and urban challenges, they seized the walls for commentary as a way to assert their ideas about as well as embody their vision of new urban practices. Rather than affirming peoples’ identity as citizens of the nation, as had the works by the modern muralists, West Berlin murals participated in the creation of a new muralist paradigm by asserting citizens’ claim to the right to the city. In supporting citizens’ claim to the right to the city, West Berlin murals were not unique. Attuned as they were to local urban conditions and actors, the work of the muralists also evidenced awareness of how their counterparts elsewhere were responding to their own contexts. Contemporary articles on West Berlin murals in the local press noted comparable movements elsewhere, such as in Chile, Mexico, and Portugal. In Paris, where the events of 1968 were influenced by and in turn inspired Henri Lefebvre, such contemporary slogans as “Under

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the paving stones, the beach” and “Beauty is in the streets” similarly situated social struggle in contested urban space.60 The former slogan appears in a photograph of a West Berlin wall (Unterm Pflaster liegt der Strand!) in the 1979 Wandmalereien collection of documents.61 The contemporary murals that seem to have received the widest dissem­ ination in Berlin were those from the United States. We have seen that a photo exhibition at Amerika Haus in 1974 showcased the US urban mural movement. In her catalogue essay for this exhibition, Helga Retzer champions what she refers to as the “Renaissance in wall painting in the USA” that demonstrates, she argues, the fulfillment of artist and WPA-supporter George Biddle’s claim made to President Roosevelt decades earlier that young American painters wanted to realize in permanent form their awareness of social revolution.62 The distinctive features of the environment for contemporary US murals that Retzer emphasizes include the fertile heterogeneity of contemporary society in the United States, the omnipresence of visual media—especially large-scale vehicles such as billboards—and the collective nature of wall painting projects in the urban ghettos of ethnic minorities, where churches and schools helped to support these efforts; all of these fed the production of a rich contemporary mural culture in the United States. Indeed, in the US artists addressed similar issues as those with which West Berliners were concerned. Retzer notes especially the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad’s creative appropriation of public space for their surreal visions of alternative realities. She also highlights an iconic Chicago mural, The Wall of Respect, which was much embattled; a local participant in its creation described the conflicts it aroused and observed that community residents’ “demonstrations to save the Wall [of Respect in Chicago, painted in 1967] held back Urban Renewal in that area for three years.”63 John Weber, one of its creators, asserted that the role of the public artist was “to speak as a citizen in society.”64 Recognizing that social struggle is bound up with and shapes the space in which it occurs, the editor of the 1973 Mural Manual, an innovative and influential movement document that Retzer refers to, observes that contemporary murals “are not merely painted on walls, but speak of the walls, of the community, and its people, and demand justice and human dignity.”65 In retrospect, then, we can identify a new, international paradigm for public art in the late twentieth century that, while inspired by earlier precedents, shifted the discourse from nation-building to an urban focus.66 This is epitomized by the breadth of the West Berlin mural movement in the 1970s and 1980s and its consistency in articulating, in various ways, the right of diverse neighborhood

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residents to the city. Over a roughly fifteen-year period, both unofficial, activist murals and official projects that received support from the local administration and building owners were created in residential areas. Despite the differences we have noted, murals executed in both arenas addressed significant social and political issues, very frequently posing them in relation to the built environment. Moreover, mural painting contributed, as we have seen, to wider movements for social change that transformed urban development practices; occupations were in some cases legitimized, saving traditional neighborhood structures and leading to building renovations, and citizens’ initiatives influenced the development of the municipal policy of cautious urban renewal that achieved the same ends. These murals informed the broader context of “anti-authoritarian revolt” that, as scholar Alexander Vasudevan observes, characterized this period, through their ability to re-imagine and “re-animate” the city as a space of “autonomy, resistance and self-determination.”67 By representing the critical positions of heterogeneous communities through their wall paintings, West Berlin muralists produced differentiated, social, public spaces that supported people’s ongoing efforts to shape the city and their lives within it. To pose the achievements of the West Berlin murals in this way is not to ignore the conflicts, tensions, and frustrations that muralists—especially activists—experienced. In addition to the threats faced by muralists who painted illegally, the goals of official, municipal programs were sometimes at odds with those of local residents, urban activists, and muralists alike, whose work these programs were seen as constraining. In this regard, the city’s creation of a manual for mural-making, for example, can be understood as a means to regularize and thus control the scope of murals, channeling them through defined procedures toward outcomes that would more suitably align with administrative city-marketing strategies. Juggling the multiple, diverse interests of district authorities, who controlled funding, and building users, with the muralists’ ideas could also prove cumbersome and dispiriting; the Ratgeb Artist’s Group recounts the failure of a project in the Charlottenburg district, in which its plans to collaborate with district authorities, students, and teachers on a mural on a large apartment building’s firewalls that faced a school ended in frustration.68 And yet within Berlin’s larger historical panorama, West Berlin murals as a whole represent a significant moment of liberatory possibility in an ongoing process of urban awareness and social and spatial change. Whether the dramatic shift in that process that occurred beginning in 1989 enabled mural-making to continue to represent contestational urban ideas and activism is a question we take up in the next section.

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Street Art and the Right to the City The concept of the right to the city has been more often invoked in Berlin in discussions of the significance of the explosion of street art following reunification than in reference to developments in the 1970s and 1980s; by the early years of the new millennium, Berlin had earned a reputation as an international center of street art. The roots of street art in Berlin lie in the graffiti movement that spread from 1970s New York City to Berlin, and specifically to the West side of the Berlin Wall, by the 1980s. The term street art refers collectively to images and texts placed on walls and other surfaces in public space using a number of techniques, including stencils, cut-outs, stickers, posters, markers, and murals; it also extends to knitted wrappings of both constructed (e.g., benches) and natural (e.g., trees) urban infrastructural objects and other three-dimensional interventions. The international character of the graffiti movement—disseminated by early-1980s films such as Wild Style and Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper’s classic photographs in their book, Subway Art—and the “nomadic and global” nature of street art, especially following the rise of social media beginning around 2003, produced not only a dynamic visual scene but also considerable discussion about these urban phenomena by fans and scholars alike.69 The fall of the Wall offered the heretofore unmarked territory of formerly East Berlin as a unique canvas upon which this scene unscrolled. The question we want to address here is whether these contemporary developments in public urban art continue or extend the kind of interventions into the course of urban change with which, we argued, West Berlin muralists were engaged. To answer this, we must examine their relationship to their audience and to the fabric and history of the city, as well as consider their wider context, which affects both of these. Do more recent works of public urban art implicitly take the city as their subject as part of a larger social project aimed at opening up decision-making about urban development to the city’s citizens? To put this another way, does the paradigm for conceptualizing the role of latetwentieth-century mural art that we argued for in the previous section continue to inflect the murals and other forms of popular urban art that have played such a large role in shaping Berlin’s cultural identity since reunification? The fall of the Wall and the Wende—a term meaning “turn,” which refers to the succeeding time of transition and massive change—ushered in a period of disorganization and reorganization, especially in the former East. On the one hand, the West Berlin urban art practices that we have sketched—spontaneous activist wall painting and large-scale mural painting on reclaimed walls and

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façades—found a wide-open field of possibilities in the newly discovered (by Westerners) and available urban infrastructure of East Berlin. On the other hand, the intensity of change in this period, registered socially, politically, and economically, as well as culturally, transformed these practices and took them in new directions, many of which could not, in 1990, have been foreseen. For East Berlin youth, students, artists, and dissidents, the end of the GDR regime meant, among many other things, access to a public and open realm of activity. One of the forms this took was housing occupations; this affected a minority, but nevertheless it epitomizes the changing environment in the former East. GDR housing policy emphasized new construction of huge housing estates on the fringes of the city and entailed the systematic neglect of older buildings in more central neighborhoods; Chapter 4 elaborates on these policies and some of their ramifications. According to one source, 25,000 housing units in East Berlin were vacant at the time the Wall fell; 1989 and 1990 saw the occupation of 120 buildings.70 There had been some squatting in East Berlin during the 1980s, a practice known as schwarzwohnen (illegal residence), but in the face of severe penalties, it was conducted surreptitiously, as quietly and invisibly as possible. In the early 1990s, this was no longer the case. As Andrej Holm and Armin Kuhn write, “the political power vacuum of the Wende period, and the massive loss of authority on the part of the police and municipality facilitated the large-scale occupation of vacant old buildings in the inner city.”71 As a result of this access to bases of operation, experimental initiatives of many kinds flourished in the former East during the period of transition. The early East Berlin and East German squatters were soon joined by students and artists from West Berlin, West Germany, and beyond. Although collaboration often became strained as individuals strove to work together across these different backgrounds and the unfamiliar social and political assumptions they entailed, participants shared some common overarching aims. These bore a strong resemblance to the goals of many West Berlin occupiers in the 1970s and 1980s: beyond establishing living quarters, squatters sought to create spaces for self-realization, self-determination, and collective living. They were “motivated by a desire to assemble a radical infrastructure that linked pressing local issues to wider articulations of autonomy and self-determination.”72 Here, too, squatters renovated their occupied houses and collective spaces for making art and staging exhibitions and events; one group explained its desire “to re-function the ruins of a vulnerable world and to create, in the process of living and working, our own culture.”73 Other groups focused on building their neighborhood’s infrastructure, establishing children’s spaces, cinemas,

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and other social and creative facilities. The formation of citizens’ action groups complemented these activities, mobilizing to prevent demolition and to urge the restoration of derelict buildings.74 The process of renovation itself can be seen as emblematizing “a makeshift urbanism that offered an alternative understanding of city life in a period of rapid social and economic change.”75 Rejecting the previous regime’s dominant policy of neglect, residents who favored renovation valued the historic urban fabric, much as those in West Berlin had earlier. Instead of confronting a systematic policy of demolition that West Berlin urban planning schemes had promoted, however, they faced a powerful constellation of neoliberal forces that embraced renovation, which was just as menacing. In pursuit of the desirable rehabilitated structures that experimental communities had pioneered, contemporary speculation-driven real estate developers promoted the “subversion of subversion;” they undermined challenging social, political, and cultural initiatives to present their own market-based vision of the kind of urban existence a reclaimed environment could foster.76 These developments took place against the backdrop of fast-moving and decisive political changes that followed the fall of the Wall. In a matter of months, the governing GDR party stepped down, debate raged over reunification, East Germany held parliamentary elections, the five East German states were absorbed by the Federal Republic, and the decision was made to return the Federal capital to Berlin. Along with a sense of relief offered by the release from past repressive institutions, such as the Stasi (state security apparatus), and the expansive sense of new possibilities, people in the former East felt enormous uncertainty and anxiety about the future. This was not unwarranted. Even in the case of house occupations—the lens that provides a preliminary look at this period—squatters faced changed circumstances; as early as July 1990, the police began to implement evictions. These actions led to street battles and escalating violent confrontations. As one statement in a squatters’ brochure from that summer stated, “we cannot accept, without resistance, the actions of Western speculators who tear homes from our grasp only to turn them into marketable commodities.”77 Indeed, in contrast to public funding and public redevelopment agencies that had facilitated earlier West Berlin urban redevelopment plans, the post-reunification urban renewal regime “now drew on private investments of professional property developers.”78 In practice, this resulted in three-quarters of the squatters individually negotiating legal status and continuing to renovate their structures. But even this solution became “the first clear sign” of the widespread gentrification—market-based renovation, without local involvement or visionary social projects—to come.79

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A revaluing of older buildings had already taken place in West Berlin, as we have seen, partly as a result of the housing activism there that led to the creation of the policy of cautious urban renewal. A consequence of this shift was that, at the Wende, there was immediate interest, from both urbanistic and speculative perspectives, in the large stock of traditional residential and industrial structures languishing in the former East Berlin. (Closer consideration of the impact this would have on neighborhoods adjacent to the Berlin Wall Memorial is taken up in Chapter 4.) Artists, youth, and students were drawn to the unfamiliar, inexpensive, and newly accessible areas of formerly East Berlin. Whether as squatters or renters, and alongside property speculators, they vied with existing residents for control of what had now become the center of the city. While renovation and maintenance of their homes and reinvigoration of their neighborhoods animated East Berliners, they were quickly confronted by alternative urban projects. Some of those were established by youth, artists, and students who gravitated toward interstitial, often abandoned structures. And others were initiated by the succeeding wave of gentrifiers, speculators, and property developers who over the next decade changed the demographic and urbanistic character of these areas. The latter group of urban actors continues to exercise a contested power in the city (Plate 10). Districts that had been in the East, such as Mitte and Friedrichshain, and those in the West that had been marginalized by their proximity to the Wall, such as Kreuzberg, were the areas that experienced most of the impact of these developments. Graffiti and street art flourished in all of them. In addition to occupied sites, neglected and available surfaces on many residential as well as formerly industrial structures were plentiful. In contrast to the relatively focused interventions of West Berlin muralists, street artists’ works in the 1990s took numerous forms, from individual tagging to political statements to more complex images that expressed a wide range of ideas from social critique to personal statements. For some observers, the profusion and openendedness of graffiti and street art meant that “the city itself becomes a narrative and everyone moving through it, a reader.”80 For others, the chance and potentially fleeting encounters with street art could heighten a viewer’s awareness of the environment of the city, as scholar Peter Bengtsen maintains when he writes, If an artwork is perceived as unsanctioned and ephemeral, as something that should not really be there and might be gone soon, an unexpected encounter with such work can serve as an interruption that has the potential to pull the viewer out of the everyday and increase their awareness of their surroundings.

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In this way a street artwork can turn the everyday environment into a site of exploration and make people question how they see and use the city.81

In this passage we hear echoes of urban theorist and Situationist Guy Debord, whose work exercised an important influence on Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of city space. The proliferation of graffiti and street art transforms urban space to yield the city as a stage for unexpected encounters that can provoke new ways of thinking about and acting in society to counter the domination of capital and commodification. Dada and Fluxus, twentieth-century art movements whose anti-institutional and irreverent characters ally them with Situationism, are also cited as precedents by many street artists.82 Encounters with graffiti and street art in Berlin, then, are inherently fortuitous. In addition, the images themselves are not only widespread but also highly variable and often ephemeral. While the field is too vast to allow for a simple overview, and too multiple to admit of easy generalizations, it is possible to note that in addition to privileging walls and other infrastructural elements, street art includes images that directly address the concept of the city and the question of who does and should shape it. Some observers argue that by using the walls of the city, street artists demonstrate “the will not only to co-design urban space, but also to reclaim it from globally active companies and corporations whose advertising, logos and enticements to consume have virtually taken it over.”83 The scale of corporate advertising, especially by means of billboards, has influenced numerous artists working in both gallery-based painting media and outdoor site installations over the past half-century. For street artists, though, it is the purchase of urban space itself—public space—and the concomitant appropriation of people’s attention through imposed imagery that provoke the street artist’s response in form, if not always in content. Similarly, the reduction of identity to ubiquitous logos that on their own can increase the cost and status of the objects they label both inspired tagging and elicited critical visual responses, both of which are freely, if often illegally, provided by street artists. At the very least, then, street art challenges people to think about how both public space and psychological access to individuals are treated as commodities capable of being bought and sold. British artist Robert Montgomery’s poetic and sometimes confrontational text installations on ad billboards provide one example of the substitution of individual expression for corporate seduction (Figure 2.1). Montgomery began to make street art in 2004; he crafts densely packed blocks of white text in declamatory capital letters, based on a version of the sans serif typeface Ventura,

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set against a black ground.84 In these works, he deploys a range of voices to convey a variety of sentiments, from the political to the romantic. Many express his own views, but sometimes his texts have conveyed, he has said, “what everyone was feeling.”85 His work contributes to the blurring of boundaries between fine art and street art, as he works in both realms and sees them as mutually nourishing. This view supports the claim of other street art commentators that this art form creates a “musealization from below,” transforming neighborhoods into galleries.86 Such an elision of street art with elite institutions has elicited criticism from some observers. But it also aligns with observations by early graffiti viewers, one of whom wrote that a New York writer had transformed his neighborhood “into one of the city’s most spectacular exhibits of public art.”87 Street art offers viewers the opportunity to consider new perspectives and experiences with no strings attached and interrupts corporate domination of public space. Beginning in 2013, it became possible to consider how a museum may in fact intervene in and affect the nature of street art, and whether institutionalization becomes another route—if a less rapacious one than corporate redevelopment— toward the co-optation of street art. A new museum, Urban Nation, that describes itself as dedicated to urban contemporary art, was founded in that

Figure 2.1  Robert Montgomery, Kreuzberg (Author, 2012).

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year in a small storefront on the northern edge of the district of Schöneberg.88 It was one of the first projects organized by Gewobag, the property company owned by the State of Berlin, through a foundation it established in the same year to support cultural development in Berlin neighborhoods. In addition to its exhibitions and bookshop offerings, from the start Urban Nation established a presence on the street through its One Wall program. This ongoing project involves inviting both internationally recognized and emerging artists to paint murals, sometimes on a monumental scale, on building façades and firewalls. Although densely clustered in the blocks near the museum itself, its commissions can be found throughout the city; there is a strong emphasis on connecting with neighborhoods by means of these murals, although it is not clear how much either the design or the construction of a mural entails interaction with local residents. In 2017, the museum established itself more formally when it moved to a nearby renovated building. Here it was able to offer a home for the Martha Cooper Library, whose store of archival street art materials available for perusal by scholars and aficionados is built around a core of donations from Cooper, a photojournalist who captured the early years of graffiti art and co-authored the now-classic 1984 book, Subway Art. The tone of Urban Nation’s statements tends to be celebratory and enthusiastic, matching the eclectic and all-embracing composition of its exhibitions. The murals it sponsors enliven their neighborhoods, which usually are not ones identified with the street art scene. The museum champions urban art as “a democratic, low-threshold art form that is interactive and accessible to everyone;” its intent seems to be to encourage new audiences for new kinds of museum experiences although, beyond its focus on street art, the nature of their unconventionality is not clear. It seems, rather, that all the edges associated with street art have been smoothed. That exhibitions and mural commissions are curated is a recurring emphasis. This contemporary cliché, which reassures viewers that presented materials are knowledgeably selected and supervised, is matched by another in the stated goal for the One Wall project’s impact: “The face of the city is changed sustainably through urban art.” This not only avoids all sense of conflict; it reduces the temperature further by folding what were once seen as upstart interventions by street artists, activists, and dissidents, into a vision of controlled urban evolution guided by the stabilizing effects of cultural expression. Urban Nation’s approach to street art does not actively undermine the urban infrastructure it depends on nor remove cultural workers and others from reclaimed and newly desirable buildings, as do property speculators and developers. Instead, Urban Nation seems to deploy a decentralized network

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of murals as a way to support, by cultural means, municipal management of Berlin’s neighborhoods. An edgier billboard-like work that exemplifies the overlap between the museum and the street and resonates with the changes the city has been undergoing is Félix González-Torres’ Es ist nur eine Frage der Zeit (It’s just a matter of time) (Plate 11). González-Torres created this work while he was in Berlin in 1992 on a DAAD fellowship; it was first mounted in Hamburg in conjunction with the Kunstverein exhibition Gegendarstellung—Ethics/Aesthetics in Times of AIDS. The instance of the work we see here was placed in Berlin and in numerous other sites globally in 2002, by his New York gallery, in response to the internationally significant 9/11 attacks (González-Torres died in 1996). The piece reflects “a non-homogeneous point of view;”89 its meaning shifts not only in relation to its location but also in response to new historical moments. The text’s original allusion to the loss created by the AIDS crisis gave way in 2002 to an expression of anxiety about terrorism and the injustices in the world that feed it. Sited in a gentrified neighborhood in Berlin’s Mitte district for almost two decades, it has also come to suggest the instability of the urban environment as redevelopment changes the physical and social structure of neighborhoods. In its Berlin incarnation, its use of Gothic lettering recalls the weight of the Nazi past, a network of whose traces is found throughout the city. Other examples of street art draw on or refer directly to elements of the city that construct urban life. Some use the infrastructure of buildings in a playful or witty way, as in a giggling figure that is depicted watching passersby from inside a building’s doorway in Friedrichshain (Plate 12). Similarly, unexpected encounters with small, dynamic figures sited on lamp-posts encourage closer observation of the urban environment and its infrastructure (Figure 2.2). Some images recall tropes similar to those used by West Berlin’s muralists in the 1970s and 1980s, such as idealized scenes of the city or of nature greening the city; the poem by Nazim Hikmet that inspired a Kreuzberg mural mentioned earlier recurs on a renovated façade elsewhere in the district.90 More explicitly ecological themes recur as well, as in Italian artist Blu’s well-known 2010 image of an hourglass, in which a melting iceberg on top gradually inundates the city depicted in the lower bulb (Plate 13). In other images, the city is depicted as menaced in a wide variety of ways—by generic monsters, by yuppies, and by speculators (Plate 14). Indeed, street art reflects the tensions between the scene’s ability to showcase the energy of the city, with its possibilities for democratizing and liberatory forms of living, working, creating, and socializing, and the prevailing view of urban

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Figure 2.2  Figure performing a handstand on a street sign (Author, 2019).

space as a “landscape of enterprise” and a “stage for cultural highlights.”91 As a number of scholars have observed, the very qualities of street art that challenged conventional views of the city as oppressive and as a site of surveillance and control—its creative energy, nonconformity, and “subversive de-alienation”— attracted its “commercial hijacking” by city marketers and private property developers, the “subversion of subversion” mentioned above.92 In the 1990s, graffiti writers were subject to harassment, fines, and jail time for illegally marking urban walls; even photographic archives of graffiti were confiscated by the police.93 By the mid-2000s, however, street art, along with other markers of creative urban culture, became an element in marketing strategies for Berlin,

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and a talisman for desirable neighborhoods ripe for redevelopment. Whereas in the early post-reunification years, those in the street art scene had worked to reclaim urban spaces for innovative and imaginative uses, by the early years of the new millennium the focus shifted toward framing the city as itself an event under the imprint of corporate culture.94 The pursuit of renovation, thus, yielded not only neighborhood preservation, along with the strengthening of local citizens’ involvement in shaping the city that this requires—a goal that was shared with earlier West Berlin activists. The model offered by these early postreunification initiatives led, as well, to their supersession by intensified, marketdriven gentrification and its accompanying displacement of long-time residents and recent squatters alike. The success of the drive to re-purpose obsolete structures, indeed, inadvertently reinforced these trends by adding momentum to speculative redevelopment. The paradox of this play of contradictions is that private property developers were placed in a stronger position to redefine the character of the city, to replace upstart street art interventions with start-ups. We can gain a more concrete understanding of the course of these events by looking at three specific sites of significance to street art and the larger scene of which it is a part: the eastern edge of the district of Kreuzberg, Art House Tacheles, and the RAW area. Each of these sites, in its distinctive way, evolved through stages of squatting and autonomous initiatives to co-optation as part of Berlin’s marketing campaigns. Strategies to sell the city highlighted Berlin’s distinctive urban character as an engine of creativity, but their success led to the absorption of creative infrastructure into the speculative development market through either radical transformation or destruction.95 We encountered the West Berlin district of Kreuzberg earlier in relation to squatter, autonomous, and anarchist groups’ cultural, social, and political projects, including activist wall painting and larger-scale murals created in the neighborhood in the 1970s and 1980s. Once the Wall fell, the district regained its central city position; along with its diverse neighborhoods, many bordering on canals or the Spree river, its ongoing reputation as a nurturing environment for radical and alternative experimentalism drew new settlers as well as tourists to its multifarious scenes. While local cultural, social, and political projects continued to thrive, they increasingly co-existed in tension with pressures for change from local speculators and international corporate developers. The district’s identity as a creative and lively hub of the city derived in part from the wealth of graffiti and street art that accumulated on its walls, some of which we discussed above. A center for this subculture, by the early 2000s the district became an urban gallery. Backjumps, a magazine that had been founded in 1994

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to promote the graffiti movement, had by then become an “authoritative forum” for “the developments, different facets and interdisciplinary crossovers of street art” and a leading source for reports on “urban communication and aesthetics.”96 In 2003, Backjumps initiated a series of street art exhibitions that grew over the next four years to attract internationally renowned artists and huge attendance at both its indoor and outdoor venues (Plate 15). With city and corporate support, and spurred by publicity from both online media and on-site walking tours, the exhibitions and the many enduring murals by acclaimed artists that remained on Kreuzberg walls further consolidated the district’s reputation— especially that of its northern section, SO 36—as a showcase for street art. While property developers have capitalized on this, new construction paradoxically threatens existing artworks that have epitomized the creative freedom upon which development projects relied. For example, when the removal of a tent community of squatting gentrification protesters and homeless people on Cuvrystrasse portended imminent new development, the internationally acclaimed Italian street artist Blu painted over one of his celebrated images. This depicted two figures, representing East and West Berlin, gingerly getting to know one another, set against the stark phrase, “RECLAIM YOUR CITY.” As Luke Henke, a collaborator on this erasure, observed, Blu’s images captured the “‘dreams of society’ … the imaginary Berlin … a city full of wasteland offering plenty of space for affordable living and creative experimentation among the ruins of its recent history.” Henke went on to note that the artists themselves, who unwittingly abetted both marketing campaigns and gentrification, became “their own biggest enemies, contributing to their own displacement.” Since art needed to remain an attraction, however, it was necessary for developers to “artificially reanimate the creativity” in an act of “zombification.”97 The erasure of Blu’s murals signaled his rejection of the falsity and hypocrisy of the Potemkinlike street art environment constructed by property developers. Such conflict between the street art scene’s use of derelict spaces for creative and alternative explorations, and market-driven property developers who wish to both capitalize on and sanitize such creativity, has characterized a number of sites. Near the Kreuzberg location of Blu’s removed murals, one of these struggles centered on the Media Spree development project. In addition to the many visual artists, musicians, performance artists, and others who found welcoming work spaces and audiences in Kreuzberg’s old industrial and commercial structures bordering the river, elements of the corporate culture industry created similar bases in the district; Universal Music Germany, in 2001, and MTV Central Europe, in 2004, for example, established headquarters on

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the east side of the Spree. With these serving as anchors, a marketing company began to promote further development on both sides of the river, under the rubric of Media Spree. In 2005, a group of property developers, landowners, and businesses formed an association to work with the Berlin Senate’s land-use plan for the renovation and redevelopment of vacant buildings in the area. Their projects threatened the loss of local access to the river and of a number of popular riverside bars and entertainment venues. To confront this challenge, a coalition of neighborhood alternative and leftist activists, figures from the club and art scenes, cultural entrepreneurs, and middle-class as well as more “marginalized” citizens, formed in 2008 under the banner of Media Spree versenken (Sink Media Spree) to fight redevelopment.98 Their petition drive rapidly signed up enough supporters to force the district to hold a non-binding referendum; 87 percent of the voters approved blocking development within 50 meters of the river and establishing other controls on aspects of the new plans. This had the effect of forestalling further large-scale development on the Kreuzberg side of the river, but incremental incursions that have been made into this tempting real estate market since then suggest that, as Félix González-Torres’ mural in Mitte puts it, “it’s just a matter of time” (Plate 11). While Kreuzberg murals and the civic actions undertaken there in 2008 to preserve local control and institutions might recall West Berlin murals of the 1970s and 1980s and their context, there are significant differences between the two. The West Berlin experience involved neither external artists and touristic viewers nor internet and social media publicity, all of which added a level of public attention during the early years of the new millennium that could easily distract from and minimize ties to neighborhood concerns and interests. The tenuous coalition that both nurtured street art and fought against redevelopment in the form of Media Spree was, as its dissolution following the referendum indicates, unstable. Indeed, a number of the local institutions, from galleries to clubs, whose preservation was at issue, were at least as much directed toward touristic and international audiences as to local ones. In addition, commercial goals and relationships played a much larger role in Kreuzberg, and they await their next opportunity to be set in motion. Indeed, other popular, locally defined cultural venues elsewhere in the city that were targeted by developers eventually did succumb to their plans. One of the oldest of these venues was Kunsthaus Tacheles (Art House Tacheles, a Yiddish word meaning “straight talk”), perhaps the most renowned postreunification cultural space in the Mitte district in former East Berlin. Built in 1909 as a shopping arcade, the Friedrichstrassenpassage, the building served

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many purposes until its almost-total destruction during Second World War bombardments; several damaged parts of the building were subsequently torn down, leaving one standing as a ruin. It was “discovered” and occupied after the Wall fell by artists and others who transformed it into a maze of free-form, unconventional spaces that served as artists’ studios—housing, at its peak, almost 100 cultural workers from over thirty countries—as well as galleries, a sculpture court, a cinema, a theater, a bar, and event spaces. It was open roundthe-clock and visitors were drawn not only to performances but to the space itself, whose walls were a canvas for both two- and three-dimensional visual expression. As one observer noted, the artists at Tacheles created “a vast vision of anarchist Dada dissent” in opposition to Berlin’s “relentless march of economic rationalization.”99 Squatted from 1990 until 1998, the building early on achieved historic preservation status. The city sold it in 1998, but its new owner leased it to the Tacheles artists for a token amount equivalent to 50 cents per year. This lease came to an end in 2009 and the tenants became squatters once again, until they were removed, following protests and attempts to prolong their occupancy, by the police in 2012. The building was sold once more in 2014, for more than fifty times its previous price, to an asset management firm. In September 2019, the cornerstone was laid for the Am Tacheles project, whose master plan by the internationally celebrated architectural firm of Herzog and de Meuron fills “one of the last gap sites in the city center” with ten new buildings devoted to offices, residences, gastronomy, and cultural uses. If part of the former Tacheles building is renovated, as the firm’s website proposes, the bare outline of its history will be preserved at the expense of the living culture it once housed and inspired.100 RAW is another repurposed site where local residents actively redefined abandoned urban spaces to create a self-organized cultural center. Built as a railway repair works in 1867, the Reichsbahnausbesserungswerk (RAW), as it became known in 1918 when 1,200 workers were employed there, occupied an extensive site at the southwestern edge of the Friedrichshain district. Almost 80 percent of the area was destroyed in bombardments in 1944, but the works were rebuilt and were in use into the 1990s, when reunification made them redundant and they were gradually shut down.101 Supported by a contract between German Rail and the district council, an association of Friedrichshain residents created RAW-Tempel in 1998 to develop spaces in four buildings in collaboration with artists and other cultural workers; eventually their activities spread to buildings throughout the complex. Working with as many as sixty co-participants and project partners, RAW grew to encompass bars, clubs, restaurants, Biergartens,

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food trucks, an open-air cinema, a bookstore, a climbing wall, an indoor skating rink, a summertime swimming pool, a Sunday flea market, artists’ workshops and galleries, a circus school, concert spaces, recording studios, and other facilities and projects. A site for graffiti and large-scale wall paintings as well, RAW’s credo has been hochwertige Kultur niedrigsschwellig bereitzustellen, which translates as something close to “high quality culture easily available.”102 In 2007, the property was sold to a private investor, and in 2015 it was sold once more to property developers who wish to maintain what they refer to as “the DNA” of RAW.103 Many of the occupants’ rental agreements expired at the end of 2019. The same year saw the opening, however, of the largest, newly renovated hall as the House of Music, a hub for music industry businesses and services that reinforces the presence of this corporate sector in the district. As sites for cultural and social experimentation, both RAW and Tacheles demonstrate the tactics of what Daniela Sandler calls “counterpreservation,” which include “the appropriation of decay; the highlighting of rough features such as fragments, rust, missing parts, and multilayered surfaces; and the juxtaposition of posters, graffiti, sculptures, murals, and installations.”104 Reclamation of these structures means not only repurposing abandoned buildings and partially renovating them to meet new needs, but also maintaining the appearance of the layers of history they have absorbed that alludes to their past and to their present precarity. Despite renovations, they retain the memory of the neglected structures—now gentrified—that students, artists, and activists encountered when they first entered East Berlin following the fall of the Wall. As the slogan of the early Tacheles squatters put it, with some suggestive ambiguity, Die Ideale sind ruiniert—retten wir die Ruine! (Ideals are ruined, let’s save the ruin).105 Reclaiming these—for housing, for social and cultural projects—meant reintegrating them into the life of the city, putting them to use again, and thus asserting both the primacy of use value over exchange value and the basis for the right to the city that lies in the use rather than in the ownership of urban space. Sandler quotes Henri Lefebvre to explain that “exchange with its circulatory systems and networks may occupy space worldwide, but consumption occurs only in this or that particular place. A specific individual, with a specific daily schedule, seeks a particular satisfaction. Use value constitutes the only real wealth, and this fact helps to restore its ill-appreciated importance.”106 Reclaiming and repurposing abandoned and neglected structures, in this reading, in the first instance preserve material legacies of the city’s built forms in a way that recalls the revaluation of traditional structures that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s; this led to the creation of the policy of cautious urban renewal and paved

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the way aesthetically for post-reunification gentrification. In addition, however, such reclamation and repurposing of derelict structures extend earlier activists’ assertion of the integrity of communities on the ground. It is these local agents, who shape urban space through the uses they make of it, who continue to claim their right to the city. ---There is continuity, then, between the activists and muralists of West Berlin and post-reunification street artists and cultural producers in the way their works and activities recognize the value of existing urban structures, insist on the privileging of use value over exchange value, and emphasize local agency. These principles anchor the assertion that murals and street art produced in these periods contributed to and helped articulate the claim to the right to the city. And yet there are significant differences between the two moments. The provisional and precarious character of street art and its infrastructure, and its ramifications, is perhaps the most telling difference. The sites for interventions in West Berlin were abandoned or war-scarred older structures and vacant lots that were, as a result of the artistic and civic activism we have discussed, rehabilitated. Although the ensuing increased interest in, appreciation for, and policies to promote maintenance of traditional streetscapes led to eventual gentrification, the neoliberal market structures that would intensify this process were not firmly in place in Berlin before 1989. After reunification, two prospects increasingly confronted the neglected and derelict walls and other urban infrastructure that were the focus for street art and other cultural production. One alternative became their renovation, which led to that neighborhood’s gentrification as rising rents forced existing tenants to move. The other alternative saw property developers buying up older, deteriorated buildings and replacing them with new ones, which led to the same displacement. The material precarity of street art’s urban infrastructure, which was a source of much of its creative energy and an inspiration for its urban vision, found its counterpart in the original economic precarity of their neighborhoods. The value of those neighborhoods, increased by artists’ “creative chaos,” was subsequently exploited and brought under control through the “instrumentalization of subcultural capital” exercised by the hegemonic real estate market.107 With these developments, the nature of the city changes, the heterogeneity of the community—as seen in the broad coalition assembled to fight Media Spree, for example—is transformed, and street art and graffiti no longer promote protest as the daily “state of things” but, according to one observer, they come to embody an “aesthetic of administration.”108

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We will encounter these tensions between a heterogeneous vision of the city and the monoculture of global capitalism again as we look, in the next chapter, at distinctive public sculptures created in Berlin that offer a contrast to increasingly dominant corporate-art usurpations of urban space. Although the Berlin Wall Memorial, the subject of Chapter 4, may seem far removed from the topics we have examined here, the impact of market forces registers as well on its abutting neighborhoods, and the use there of photo-murals on exposed firewalls can be seen as rationalized versions of the often-extravagant images created by both West Berlin muralists and post-reunification street artists. All of these works engage features of the city’s infrastructure in ways that direct attention to the compelling historical role of built form. As we look next at sculptural production, we will consider additional ways in which public art in Berlin has taken the city as its subject.

Notes Norbert Martins, Giebelphantasien (Berlin: HetStein Verlag, 1989), 9. For an overview of the Berlin Wall, see Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), chapter 1. 3 There are numerous books documenting these; see, for example, Benjamin Wolbergs, Urban Illustration Berlin (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2007). 4 This seems to be an honorary recognition stemming from the prominence of the site and Wagin’s ongoing actions to keep peace and nature in the forefront of Berliners’ consciousnesses, as in his installation Parliament of Trees against War and Violence (originally 1990) in the government quarter. A handful of murals predate his World Tree. For a photograph of this work before it faded, see Norbert and Melanie Martins, Hauswände statt Leinwände (Berlin: Norbert Martins, 2012), 69. Aside from this source, which continues Norbert Martins’ documentation of murals, and my own exploration of extant murals in situ, I am relying on documents from the period, as cited in these notes, for information about and photographs of original murals. I have located no substantive subsequent research on them. Also see the photo at http://norbert-martins-wandbilder-berlin.de/b__ wagin.html 5 See https://www.rbb24.de/kultur/beitrag/2018/05/ben-wagin-weltbaumwandgemaelde-tiergarten-umzug-moabit.html 6 Wandmalereien und Texte (Berlin: Karin Kramer Verlag, 1979), 133. 7 See Philip Oltermann, “Why the Writing’s on the Wall for Berlin’s Murals,” The Guardian, April 2, 2018, at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/02/ eduardo-paolozzi-mural-uncovered-berlin-not-long 1 2

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Werner Brunner, Verblichene Idyllen (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1996), 13. See also Catherine Hickley, “Berlin Restores Murals Neglected for More Than a Century,” The Art Newspaper, July, 25, 2018. 9 Martins, Giebelphantasien, 61; see 26, 29 for other examples. 10 Ibid., 21. 11 Ibid., 20, 22, 31, 36, 41, 53, 54, 78, 79, 97, 107, 116. The Ratgeb Group mural in Rixdorf on the Bohemian settlement there that is mentioned in the next chapter also exemplifies this category. 12 “Bei jeder Aktion stehen ein paar Leute Schmiere,” Zitty 15: 1978, in Wandmalereien und Texte, 36. 13 Gritta Hesse, Gemalte Illusionen: Wandbilder in Berlin (Dortmund: Harenburg, 1983), 11. 14 Norbert and Martins, Hauswände, 33. 15 See Norbert and Martins, Hauswände, 33 for this history and photographs. Following reunification, the building was torn down. 16 Alexander Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 96. 17 Martins, Giebelphantasien, 10; Hesse, Gemalte Illusionen, 11. 18 Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations, 114. 19 Wandmalereien und Texte, 125; for an account and photos of this action, see 119–25. 20 See Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Andrej Holm and Armin Kuhn, “Squatting and Urban Renewal: The Interaction of Squatter Movements and Strategies of Urban Restructuring in Berlin,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35, no. 3 (May 2011): 653. 21 This applied to buried remains as well, as in the excavations that exposed the Topography of Terror. See Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 22 Hesse, Gemalte Illusionen, 9. 23 Alexander Eisenschmidt, “Walter Benjamin: Aufklärung für Kinder (und Erwachsene),” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69, no. 2 (June 2010): 264. 24 Alexander Vasudevan, “Reassembling the City: Makeshift Urbanisms and the Politics of Squatting in Berlin,” in The Autonomous City: A History of Urban Squatting (London and New York: Verso, 2017), 127. See Vasudevan’s 2015 book, cited above, especially chapter 3, for the wider context for political activity in the 1960s. 25 For the protest movement in Kreuzberg, see Roger Karapin, Protest Politics in Germany: Movements on the Left and Right since the 1960s (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2007), especially chapter 2; “Urban Renewal 8

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Conflicts in Hanover and West Berlin,” 61–116. Also see Vasudevan, Reassembling the City, 118–49. 26 Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations, 5. 27 Wolf Jobst Siedler, Die gemordete Stadt (The Murdered City, Stuttgart: Herbig Verlag, 1964); Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982, originally in Italian, 1966); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961). Alexander Mitscherlich’s Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte (The Inhospitableness of Our Cities, 1965) is another source, cited in Hauswände, 9. 28 See Chapter 3 for further discussion of these models. 29 See, for example, Josef Paul Kleiheus, Versuchsgebiet Charlottenburg (Berlin: Der Senator für Bau- und Wohnungswesen, 1973). 30 Martins, Giebelphantasien, 55. 31 For an introductory overview, see Herbert Schwenk, Lexikon der Berliner Stadtentwicklung (Berlin: Haude & Spener, 2002), 309–10. 32 See Hardt-Waltherr Hämer and Josef Paul Kleihues, eds. Idee, Prozess, Ergebnis: Die Reparatur und Rekonstruktion der Stadt (Berlin: Frölich und Kaufmann, 1984). 33 Holm and Kuhn, “Squatting and Urban Renewal,” 653. 34 On the marketing context in this period, see Claire Colomb, Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post-1989 (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 54–60. 35 Martins, Giebelphantasien, 11. For further elaboration of marketing practices in Berlin, see Colomb. 36 Norbert and Martins, Hauswände, 29. 37 Neuhaus, accompanied by his son, continues today to paint murals, predominantly illusionistic architectural details that extend existing ones or add details to façades from which they or similar ones were physically removed in the past. These wall paintings foreswear the element of fantasy, but by replacing or often wittily manipulating architectural features, they reinforce awareness of traditional elements that characterize the Berlin streetscape. 38 Martins, Giebelphantasien, 18, 19, 30, 42, 50, 52, 59, 109, 112, 120. 39 Wandmalereien und Texte, 137; the phrase that is used is die heile Welt. 40 Hesse, Gemalte Illusionen, 10. 41 Wandmalereien und Texte, 136. 42 Norbert and Martins, Hauswände, 9. 43 See further discussion in the following section on these regularizing devices as strategies to narrow the scope of murals. 44 Martins, Giebelphantasien, 7. For a critique of these official initiatives, see Stefanie Endlich and Rainer Hõynck, “Die Heile Welt …, ” in Wandmalereien und Texte, 134–7. 45 Norbert and Martins, Hauswände, 10; Wandmalereien und Texte, 37.

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46 Street Art: Öffentliche Wandmalereien in den USA (Berlin: Amerikahaus, 1974). 47 Martins, Giebelphantasien, 100, 105, 106, 111. 48 Ibid., 61. 49 The German and Turkish texts can be found in Martins, Giebelphantasien, 75. 50 Hesse, Gemalte Illusionen, 10–11. 51 Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: The Guilford Press, 2003), 17. See also Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. N. Donaldson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) and “The Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities, trans. E. Kofman and E. Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 147–59; Peter Marcuse, “From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City,” City 13, no. 2–3 (2009): 185–97. On everyday life as the locus for contemporary understandings of political and economic struggle, see Kanishka Goonewardena, “Urban Studies, Critical Theory, Radical Politics: Eight Theses for Peter Marcuse,” City 13, no. 2–3 (2009): 208–18. 52 Mitchell, The Right to the City, 18. 53 David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review, 53 (September/October 2008): 23. This article has been republished in slightly altered form in Rebel Cities (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 3–25. 54 Harvey, “The Right to the City,” 23. 55 Martins, Giebelphantasien, 104. 56 See Endlich and Höynck, “Die heile Welt …, ” 137; Helga Retzer, “Einleitung,” in Street Art, n.p; and Hesse, Gemalte Illusionen, 10. 57 The literature for both is extensive and continues to grow. See, for example, Alejandro Anreus, Robin Adèle Greeley, and Leonard Folgarait, eds. Mexican Muralism: A Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 58 “Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors” (1924), in Mexican Muralism: A Critical History, 320. 59 It is worth noting that West Berlin had district town halls, schools, theaters, etc., but no major civic buildings. These were concentrated in the old city center that was located in East Berlin. 60 See Johan Kugelberg and Philippe Vermès, eds. Beauty Is in the Street (London: Four Corner Books, 2011). 61 Wandmalereien und Texte, 44. On the last page of this volume, there is an ad for a forthcoming offering of a set of slides on political murals in the United States representing work by “black, Chinese, Puerto Rican, and Mexican Americans.” 62 Helga Retzer, “Einleitung,” in Street Art, n.p. 63 John Weber, “Murals as Peoples Art,” Liberation 16, no. 4 (Sep. 1971): 44. See also Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford, and Rebecca Zorach, eds. The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017). 64 Weber, “Murals as Peoples Art,” 45.

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65 Tim Drescher, “The U.S. Mural Movement,” in Mark Rogovin, Marie Burton, and Holly Highfill, Mural Manual (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 105. 66 For the struggle to recognize the evolution of the modern mural tradition, see Bruce Campbell, “An Unauthorized History of Post-Mexican School Muralism,” in Mexican Muralism: A Critical History, 263–79. 67 Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations, 98. 68 “Gruppe Ratgeb,” Wandmalereien, 113–18. 69 Charlie Ahearn, (dir.) Wild Style, First Run Features, 1983; Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper, Subway Art (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984, new ed. (New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 2016); Ulrich Blanché, “German Street Art 1970–2000,” in Edwige Comoy Fusaro, ed. Framing Graffiti & Street Art, Proceedings of the Nice Street Art Project International Conferences, 2017– 2018 (Lisbon: Urbancreativity.org, 2019), 38; https://www.urbancreativity.org/. Urbancreativity.org, its conferences, and its publications are key sites for the equally international group of scholars who study urban art in its varied forms. For a useful overview that focuses on graffiti, stickers, and stencils, see Julia Reinecke, Street-art: Eine Subkultur zwischen Kunst und Kommerz (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2012). 70 Holm and Kuhn, Squatting and Urban Renewal, 650. 71 Ibid., 649. On the early post-reunification years, see also Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), especially “Berlin, the Virtual Capital,” 173–218; Andrej Holm, “Urban Renewal and the End of Social Housing: The Roll Out of Neoliberalism in East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg,” Social Justice 33, no. 3 (2006): 114–28; Katrina Sark, “Cultural History of Post-Wall Berlin: From Utopian Longing to Nostalgia for Babylon,” in Karin Bauer and Jennifer Ruth Hosek, eds. Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 25–52. 72 Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations, 151. See also Holm and Kuhn, “Squatting and Urban Renewal,” 650. 73 Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations, 152. 74 Holm and Kuhn, “Squatting and Urban Renewal,” 650. Janet Ward, Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), chapter 6, refers to such derelict spaces as “alternative border zones.” For a positive view of the potential of repurposed vacant spaces and other examples, see Michael A. LaFond, “Experimentcity: Cultivating Sustainable Development in Berlin’s Freiräume,” in Jeffrey Hou, ed. Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (Abingdon, UK and New York: Routledge, 2010), 61–70. 75 Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations, 153. 76 Christian Schmidt, “Street Art—Symbolic Attacks on the Functionality of the City,” in Backjumps: The Live Issue #3 (Berlin: From Here to Fame Publishing, 2007), 308. 77 Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations, 152. 78 Holm and Kuhn, “Squatting and Urban Renewal,” 655.

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79 Ibid., 652. 80 Graffitimuseum, “Read More Graffiti,” Backjumps, 295. 81 Peter Bengtsen, “Street Art and the Nature of the City,” in Ulrich Blanché and Ilaria Hoppe, eds. Urban Art: Creating the Urban with Art, Proceedings of the International Conference at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 2016 (Lisbon: Urbancreativity.org, 2018), 103; see also Peter Bengtsen, The Street Art World (Lund: Almendros de Granada Press, 2014); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), originally published 1967. In a less Debordian, more controlled way, but with the same object of observing one’s surroundings in view, artist Jochen Gerz created a piece in which three ordinary streets in cities in the Ruhr were designated as on exhibition; see Jochen Gerz, “Concept for 2-3 Streets,” in Wilfried Wang, ed. Culture: City (Berlin: Akademie der Künste and Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2013), 178–9. 82 Reinecke, Street-Art, 160. 83 Wolbergs, Urban Illustration Berlin, 277. 84 “Robert Montgomery—It Turned Out This Way Cos You Dreamed It This Way,” Design Week, January 30, 2012, https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/ december-2011/robert-montgomery-it-turned-out-this-way-cos-you-dreamedit-this-way/. Jenny Holzer’s early paste-up word texts were important influences on Montgomery’s and other art-school-based street artists’ practices, just as the contemporaneous early graffiti scene remained a touchstone for the wider network of street artists. 85 Evan Pricco, “Robert Montgomery: 21st-Century Troubadour,” Juxtapoz.com, February (2017): 63. 86 Schmidt, “Street Art – Symbolic Attacks on the Functionality of the City,” 307. 87 Reinecke, Street-Art, quoting Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff, Spraycan Art (London, 1987), 31. 88 See https://urban-nation.com/ 89 http://www.andrearosengallery.com/exhibitions/2002_3_felix-gonzalez-torres. See also Saskia Trebing, “Ein Werk von Felix Gonzalez-Torres überdauert die Zeit,” Monopol, April 30, 2019, https://www.monopol-magazin.de/felix-gonzales-torresberlin-linienstrasse?slide=1 90 Also visible nearby in 2012 was a poster urging help to save the threatened alternative space in Mitte, Schokoladen, that is discussed in Chapter 3. 91 Schmidt, “Street Art—Symbolic Attacks on the Functionality of the City,” 306. 92 Ibid., 307, 308. 93 Jimmy aka Poet1, “The Backjumps Magazin [sic],” Backjumps, 14. 94 Schmidt, “Street Art—Symbolic Attacks on the Functionality of the City,” 306. 95 Following reunification, substantial numbers of properties in the former East devolved to city ownership. Until their official uses were determined, the spontaneous uses to which they were put were referred to as Zwischennutzungen

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The City as Subject (transitional uses). This administrative term designated permission for such purposes, or not, and also suggested that they entailed a built-in if indefinite date of expiration. See Simon Ward, “Reconfiguring the Spaces of the ‘Creative Class’ in Contemporary Berlin,” in Bauer and Hosek, 113–29. On gentrification, see Bruno Flierl and Peter Marcuse, “Urban Policy and Architecture for People, Not for Power,” City 13, no. 2–3 (2009): 264–77. Adrian Nabi, Willem Stratmann, Stéphane Bauer, and Don M. Zaza, “Preface,” Backjumps, 8, 9. Lutz Henke, “Why We Painted over Berlin’s Most Famous Graffiti,” The Guardian, December 19, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/19/ why-we-painted-over-berlin-graffiti-kreuzberg-murals. See also Paul Hockenos, Berlin Calling: A Story of Anarchy, Music, the Wall, and the Birth of the New Berlin (New York: The New Press, 2017), 295–6. For a more positive reading of sponsored events, see Caitlin Frances Bruce, Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019). On Media Spree and the opposition to it, see Johannes Novy and Claire Colomb, “Struggling for the Right to the (Creative) City in Berlin and Hamburg: New Urban Social Movements, New ‘Spaces of Hope’?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37, no. 5 (September 2013): 1816–38; Albert Scharenberg and Ingo Bader, “Berlin’s Waterfront Site Struggle,” City 13, no. 2-3 (2009): 325–35; Colomb, 292–5. Jonathan Jones, “The Closure of Berlin’s Tacheles Squat Is a Sad Day for Alternative Art,” The Guardian, September 5, 2012, https://www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/sep/05/closure-tacheles-berlin-sadalternative-art. On the history of Tacheles, see Janet Stewart, “The Kunsthaus Tacheles: The Berlin Architecture Debate of the 1990s in Micro-Historical Context,” in Stuart Taberner and Frank Finlay, eds. Recasting German Identity: Culture, Politics and Literature in the Berlin Republic (Rochester: Camden House, 2002), 51–66; Anke Fesel and Chris Keller, Berlin Wonderland: Wild Years Revisited 1990–1996 (Berlin: bobsairport), 2014. https://www.herzogdemeuron.com/index/projects/complete-works/426-450/439am-tacheles/image.html https://raw-gelaende.de/en/about-r-a-w/. For additional context, see Simon Ward, “Reconfiguring.” https://www.berlin.de/kultur-und-tickets/tipps/kunst/institutionen/38484722227531-raw-gelaende.html https://raw-gelaende.de/en/about-r-a-w/ Daniela Sandler, Counterpreservation: Architectural Decay in Berlin since 1989 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 125.

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105 Sandler, Counterpreservation, 126. 106 Ibid., 86–7, quoting Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 100. 107 Schmidt, “Street Art—Symbolic Attacks on the Functionality of the City,” 307; Ilaria Hoppe, “Urban Art: Creating the Urban with Art,” in Blanché and Hoppe, 11; Novy and Colomb. 108 Julia Tulke, “Aesthetics of Crisis. Street Art, Austerity Urbanism and the Right to the City,” in Pedro Soares Neves and Daniela V. De Freitas Simões, eds. Lisbon Street Art and Urban Creativity, International Conference Proceedings, July 2014 (Lisbon: Urbancreativity.org, 2014), 17; Jovanka Popova, “Where (Not) to Go? The General Intellect between the Precarious and Resistance,” in Blanché and Hoppe, 111.

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City Spaces: Contemporary Public Sculpture in Berlin A center of political dramas and social and cultural experimentation during the period of the Cold War, Berlin has been on exhibition as a city since the Wall began to be demolished in 1989 and the process of urban reunification got underway. Since then, aspects of its public art and its urban development, both exemplifying the city’s dynamism, have been cast in the spotlight by scholars and journalists. This study looks at less highlighted works of public art; in this chapter we shift our focus from murals and the street art scene to a distinctive body of public sculptural works produced in Berlin, mainly since reunification, which deploy contemporary sculptural forms and strategies to create a dialogue with the structure of the city and its history. Building on the climate of urban awareness established by earlier muralists and activists, but also extending it, the designers of these public sculptural works took the city as their subject. This was not their explicit subject; it emerges, rather, from their uses of urban elements as materials, sites, and armatures for sculpture. This chapter examines how such uses construct relationships among form, content, and the viewer that highlight and give new significance to the structure and history of the city.1 The works that we examine here fulfill a different function from that usually served by art in public spaces today, which often ornaments spaces whose identity is marked only by their corporate sponsorship. The sculptures and installations that are our focus take as their explicit subject the often-intense history of Berlin over the past century and more. But they use a wide array of urban forms and props of everyday life—absent and existing buildings, subway stairs, paving stones, street-light fixtures, walls—to evoke historical events and to provoke awareness of the past and of the city itself; they extend further the reliance on and foregrounding of urban infrastructure that we examined in the work of West Berlin muralists. In a city where so much of the physical past has been destroyed, the force of drawing on such urban features is to replenish the city not only as a site of memory of specific historical events, but as a site

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that integrally embodies aspects of the past. Thus, in the face of rapid change as a result of reconstruction—which has sometimes erased yet another layer of recent history—these sculptures argue for a conception of the city as an entity whose role, by definition, is to manifest the past in material form. The focus of this chapter can be described as “intentional” monuments to use Alois Riegl’s term. In the essay in which he formulates this idea, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origins” (1903), Riegl distinguishes between deliberate (gewolte) monuments and historical or unintentional (ungewolte) monuments. The latter were not created or initially desired to serve as monuments but become witnesses to history over time; these and the issues they give rise to are the main subject of his analysis.2 His framework has been revived and fruitfully applied in recent discussions of historic preservation; he developed the concept of the historical monument in order to clarify the nature of this discipline.3 The Berlin Wall, to which we turn in the next chapter, exemplifies such an unintentional monument that, subsequent to its supersession, has been deliberately memorialized. In a different register, the traditional streetscapes and street patterns that West Berlin activists and muralists championed also represent such historical monuments. When we reflect on Riegl’s pendant concept, the intentional monument, it seems that this too has returned to cultural discourse during the past several decades.4 In the context of the United States, beginning in 1965, Claes Oldenburg’s mostly unrealized proposals for often-satirical monuments reveal a precocious sensitivity to the interrelationship of sculpture and cityscape that reflects the awareness of an artist immersed in urban culture. Alexander Calder’s abstract modernist La Grande Vitesse (1967–9), created for the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, marked a watershed in the revival of the intentional monument; it was the first work to receive public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and thus to reestablish a postwar role for sculpture in public spaces. A decade later, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1980–2) on the Mall in Washington, DC, recast in contemporary terms the memorial function of intentional monuments. The renewed presence of public sculpture emblematized by these internationally influential works sparked much discussion about the role, character, and meaning of sculpture in public spaces and its relation to its audience. These considerations intensified in response to the crisis in the relationship between such sculpture and its audience that was signaled by opposition to Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981) in Federal Plaza, New York City; after legal proceedings, this 120-foot-long work was eventually destroyed (1989).

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Developments in public sculpture in Berlin over the same period shared some of these chronological and formal features, but issues that reflected a different cultural and historical context figured just as decisively to lay the groundwork for the more recent works that we examine here. History, memory, and the form of the modern city were explicit themes of two interrelated processes that created a climate for such new sculptural interventions in the city fabric. These processes, which we recall from earlier discussions, involved the recovery of long-suppressed aspects of the Nazi past, on the one hand, and activist initiatives aimed at reshaping urban planning and preservation theories and decisions, on the other. Beyond heightening awareness of the city, these processes entailed the formation of a wide-ranging civic constituency that was attuned to how urban history takes expressive spatial form. These developments both influenced and were reinforced by the works of West Berlin mural artists; we will see in the next chapter that these precedents also help us to understand urban changes in the neighborhoods surrounding the Berlin Wall along Bernauer Strasse during the period of division. While the public sculptures that we examine in this chapter were not directly associated with activist advocacy for the right to the city, the climate of urban awareness that the earlier activists and muralists established laid the groundwork for an attentive and responsive audience for these works. How this background affected ideas about public sculpture in the years following reunification will emerge as we look at individual works more closely. We have also seen that, in addition to fostering new understandings of city structure and development, and contributing to activists’ claims to the right to the city, West Berlin muralists’ works participated in a broader shift in the role of murals internationally. Late-twentieth-century muralists drew inspiration from earlier innovators, but they transcended their predecessors’ commitment to nation-building to work with and for local communities and their visions for the city. Identifying that constellation of circumstances through which the city became the subject of murals connects these murals both to more widely shared new responses to urban issues in West Berlin and to developments in mural practices internationally. Our emphasis on the city as the subject of the public sculpture that we examine here reveals similarly broad implications. Muralists, we saw, as advocates of citizens’ claim to the right to the city, endorsed visions of heterogeneous, nonhierarchical, locally determined urban environments. The artists who created the public sculptures that we focus on share those convictions, manifesting them in the sculptural choices they make: through the materials they deploy,

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the sites they inhabit, and the viewers whose responses they elicit. Through these means, they mount challenges to conventional conceptions of sculptural monumentality, a vocabulary of traditional forms that characterized didactic and bombastic sculptures implanted in urban spaces. Such challenges were first posed by modernists of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, such as Auguste Rodin. The examples of public sculptures cited above reflect the postwar continuation of these challenges, and suggest new initiatives introduced by later-twentieth-century sculptors. The first section of this chapter establishes the presence of these sculptural ideas in postwar West Berlin and sketches how they are transformed in the post-reunification period. The post-reunification works of public sculpture that are discussed in the three succeeding sections, then, share features with a wider international critique of traditional sculptural monumentality. The vocabulary through which they articulate this—their sites, materials, and relationships to the viewer—draws from and addresses urban forms that enable these sculptures to represent both a conception of what a city is and how a city manifests the past. To do this, the sculptures extend the range of urban forms that the artists we discussed in Chapter 2 relied on—wall planes and residual, neglected, or derelict spaces—to encompass a wider range of features, including pavements, areas below ground, and steps. Three motifs distinguish these infrastructural features—the network, the void, and the ground plane (the surface of the ground or pavement). We organize our discussions of the sculptures according to these motifs, bearing in mind that individual works often embody more than one and that the motifs thus often reinforce each other. Emphasizing these expressively resonant motifs calls attention to how these infrastructural features function simultaneously in sculptural, architectural, and urban terms. Despite the climate of urban awareness upon which public sculptors were able to draw for support for their work—and in some cases, as a result of such awareness—conflicts and debates over some public sculptural commissions and initiatives arose. Looking at some of these in the fifth section of this chapter casts further light on the complexities and nuances of sculptors’ environment and on ideas about the nature of the city in the post-reunification period. Nor were the interventions of public sculptures that took the city as their subject unchallenged by mainstream commissions that re-asserted more traditional notions of monumentality, often in the service of processes of corporate redevelopment. Discussion of examples of these in the final section highlights the distinctive ambitions of the post-reunification body of public sculpture and draws a parallel with our observations in the previous chapter

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concerning obstacles that the corporate, market-based real estate economy poses for the street art scene.

New Monuments At the same time that interest has grown in the creation and discussion of intentional monuments, the idea of monumentality itself has faced interrogation. If certain notions of scale, distance, permanence, and a singular reading of content are inherent to the idea of the monument, then the modernist and postwar works referred to above would not be characterized as convincingly monumental. French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s well-known critique of maintaining physical, psychological, and emotional distance between sculpture and viewer, in works such as the Burghers of Calais (1885–9), mounted one of the first challenges to such traditional conceptions of monumentality. Recent works continue to defy conventional expectations of what monumentality entails; some sculptures have been referred to as “counter-monuments” to underscore artists’ rejection of ideas of permanence or authority, as well as their questioning of the tendency to displace onto sculptural objects the memorial work that should be undertaken by the individual.5 Such skepticism echoes Robert Musil’s much-circulated observation from the 1920s that “there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.”6 That is to say, monuments tend to become obscured by the passage of time and by their environment; our attention slides over them. The wariness toward conventional, high-blown, and assertive sentiment that was felt by modernist visual artists in the interwar and postwar periods was expressed as well by modernist writers. Ernest Hemingway’s insistence on registering facts over conceptual abstractions, for example, is powerfully evoked in a passage lamenting the toll of war in A Farewell to Arms (1929): There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.7

This prefigures a similar reticence evidenced by post-reunification sculptors, as we shall see. Representing architects’ views on traditional monuments in the wake of the First World War and the end of the German and Austro-Hungarian

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empires, modernist historian Siegfried Giedion described such monuments as “clichés without emotional justification.”8 Modernist structures drew inspiration, in part at least, from vernacular, industrial constructions such as markets and factories that offered an alternative to what were felt to be the rhetorical excesses and deceits of traditional architectural forms. For sculptors, visual abstraction offered a way to avoid a similar falsity as they attempted to unite art with lived experience. Modernism in this sense was the dominant key in which rebuilding took place in West Berlin in the period following the Second World War.9 In the early years, dominated by removal of rubble, clearing of unsalvageable structures, and piecemeal reconstruction, there was little opportunity to commission monumental sculpture. However, in addition to reestablishing surviving Wilhelmine and early-twentieth-century sculpture, usually small-scale figurative pieces, in parks and public squares, a considerable number of small memorials were placed in neighborhood settings.10 The only monumental new sculpture was the Berlin Airlift Memorial (1951), a massive abstract work in concrete by Eduard Ludwig, erected at the entrance to Tempelhof Airport; it symbolizes the Allied flights bearing goods that enabled West Berliners to survive the Soviet blockade in 1948–9.11 In the following years, in addition to the ongoing creation of neighborhood memorials, construction of public buildings offered new possibilities as sites for monumental sculptures. The vocabulary continued to be that of modernist abstraction, as in Hans Uhlmann’s untitled steel piece in front of the German Opera (1961) and Bernhard Heiliger’s Flamme (Flame, 1963), a bronze work honoring Berlin’s first postwar Mayor, Ernst Reuter, placed in a plaza ringed by new high-rises that bears his name. The first large-scale commitment to public sculpture in West Berlin occurred in relation to the celebration of the city’s 750th anniversary in 1987. The municipal government’s Department for Culture sponsored a program entitled Sculpture Boulevard (Skulpturenboulevard), commissioning eight sculptors to install works along the median that runs down the center of the major retail, entertainment, and touristic avenue and its extension, the Kurfürstendamm and Tauentzienstrasse, on sites of their choosing. Several of these remain in place. Generally abstract and non-figurative, at least two of the pieces nevertheless resonated in significant ways with their time and place. Wolf Vostell, an artist and gallery-owner who was associated with the Fluxus movement, chose Rathenauplatz, a traffic circle at the far western end of the Kurfürstendamm, as the site for his latter-day “assisted ready-made,” Two

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Concrete Cadillacs in the Form of the Naked Maja12 (Plate 16). Two partially visible Cadillac automobiles dating from the 1970s emerge from massive, angular, irregular blocks of concrete, one set vertically and the other at a diagonal. The Cadillacs came from Vostell’s collection; he was both critical of and fascinated by consumer culture. These “embalmed” cars grow out of a series of works that Vostell had been engaged with over a number of years that incorporated references to women and sensuality, on the one hand, and to the bullfight and the role of bulls in myth, on the other. The site of this piece adds other layers of associations that locate this work within the modern metropolis. Set on an island in the middle of a congested traffic hub, the almost-buried, almost-petrified cars contrast with the constant flow of movement that encircles them. The reclining Maja here becomes the Golden Calf, the material temptation that lured the Israelites when Moses left them to receive the tablets of the Law. As cars rush on or off the nearby highway, drivers encounter a giant altar bearing new idols of consumer culture, now-powerless bulls wrenched from the Autobahn. Furthermore, one must circumnavigate the sculpture to see it as a whole, although making a complete circuit runs counter to the logic of the traffic circle. As in a Dance of Death, the traffic as a whole circles virtually endlessly around the inert idols on their fractured altar. Vostell described it as “a 24-hour ‘dance’ of the car driver around the ‘Golden Calf.’”13 Vostell’s sculpture was timely not only in its ironic celebration of consumerism, but also in its focus on car traffic near a highway. In the early postwar years, West Berlin city planners, like their counterparts throughout the West, emphasized traffic flow as a central aspect of urban reconstruction, frequently demolishing older structures or obliterating existing street patterns to widen streets and build highways. By the 1970s, opposition to this approach to planning arose that favored preservation and enhancement of the traditional urban fabric, as we saw in the previous chapter; planners’ initiatives were increasingly met in the 1970s and 1980s with stiff resistance by citizens. Thus, the social role of the automobile as well as its urban role were topics with which Berliners were very familiar when Vostell’s sculpture was erected. And although this tide did turn within the planning community, ensuring that today neighborhoods are not as likely to be threatened with destruction for highway construction (though they are by no means immune to this), and despite persistent pockets of criticism, the car is no less an idol than it was three decades ago; the SUV has merely replaced the Cadillac as fetish. Indeed, in spite of the additional contemporary critique of car culture on environmental grounds, Rathenauplatz remains a disjointed, uninviting urban space as a result of the dominance there of automobile traffic.

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A second work constructed for the 1987 exhibit that has remained in place addresses another aspect of Berlin’s urban history. Brigitte and Martin Matschinsky-Denninghoff ’s Berlin is an example of these artists’ use of large, grooved-steel, tube-like forms (Plate 17). Here, four of these elements rise roughly twenty feet vertically, not straight but through organic curves; two arch toward each other to intertwine before each twists back toward one of the other two parts. This creates the impression of two broken links arching over the median on Tauentzienstrasse. The sharply cut, geometrically defined upper ends of each element contrast with the gently meandering, tentative changes in their direction. The sculptors noted that they wanted “to convey something about the Berlin situation in a symbolic way.”14 Through its interplay of hard, industrial material and curvilinear, organic forms, the sculpture suggests trees, a gateway, a knot, but in its context it also evokes the severed yet still partial interconnectedness of the two halves of the city. The artists’ choice of location was deliberate in this regard. The sculpture is situated between the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church—recalling the roots of the division of Berlin and Germany in the Second World War and its aftermath—and the Wittenbergplatz U-Bahn station. Here one catches a subway that links the western and eastern parts of the city, although at the time the sculpture was created the line ended, of course, at the Wall. Now, with the city and the line reconnected, this sculpture takes on a new layer of meaning, commemorating the period of their division. Both Vostell’s and the Matschinsky-Denninghoffs’ pieces are monumental in scale; Vostell’s, set on a traffic island, maintains somewhat more physical independence from its environment, whereas people regularly meander through the Matschinsky-Denninghoffs’ sculpture as they stroll down the avenue’s planted median. Despite their abstraction, the conceptual relationships that they maintain with their sites enable them to elicit readings that reflect on the city and its history. Another work that combines these features is Richard Serra’s Berlin Junction15 (Figure 3.1). This piece first appeared in a 1987 exhibition at Berlin’s MartinGropius-Bau, The Unexhausted Look (Der unverbrauchte Blick), under the title Berlin Curves. It is not clear that Serra originally created this piece with Berlin in mind; nevertheless, its forms suggest some resonance between it and the city. Its two huge steel plates, separate but seen and felt in relation to each other, evoke the divided city and perhaps, through the shifting, constricted space between them, the city’s then-unknown future. Following the exhibition, the sculpture was bought by the city government under the Kunst im Stadtraum (Art in City Space) program. Serra chose the entry to Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonic Hall

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Figure 3.1  Richard Serra, Berlin Junction, 1987 (Author, 2006).

as the site for its installation, a building which he felt reflected shared formal concerns and a similar interest in the relationship between interior and exterior space. At the same time, the Berlin History Workshop had organized an exhibit at this site on the so-called “euthanasia” policies of the Nazis—extermination programs for mentally and physically disabled people. These programs had been directed from a building formerly located on this street, Tiergartenstrasse 4, one of the many elegant mansions that had bordered the park along this stretch. The Berlin History Workshop was one of many that evolved throughout Germany in the 1970s and 1980s to study local history, uncovering details of the Nazi regime that had been shrouded in silence during the postwar years; their slogan was “dig where you stand.”16 Working with other organizations such as the Chamber of Doctors (Aerztekammer), the Berlin History Workshop hoped to establish a memorial on this site. At first, they, along with Serra, agreed to place a plaque near his sculpture; Serra collaborated on its design. It took the form of seven bronze sheets laid into the pavement in a rectangular format; their dark patina linked them to the dark steel of Serra’s piece. Some years later, a more substantial memorial was constructed that includes the delineation on the pavement of the site of the Tiergartenstrasse house, whose footprint is overlapped by the present concert hall. The memorial also provides texts, documents, and biographies of

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perpetrators and victims that present information about the program formulated there for the systematic annihilation of physically and developmentally disabled people. Although the relationship between the sculpture and the site is ambiguous, Serra’s work is sometimes referred to as Aktion T4, in reference to the policies forged on the site during the Nazi era. Serra’s sculpture involves the viewer through its seemingly gravity-defying arrangement of massive, even menacing, materials and through the physicality of its elements that elicit corresponding sensations of weight, fragility, balance, openness, and constriction. These then evoke, by analogy, associations with the sculpture’s architectural environment or with the wider city and its historical experiences. The centrality of the viewer to the work’s physical, emotional, and intellectual elaboration is perhaps what underlies Serra’s remark that “a steel curve is not a monument.”17 His sculpture is experiential, not declamatory. In their openness to readings that reflect on the city and its history through the conceptual relationships they maintain to their sites, Vostell’s and the Matschinsky-Denninghoffs’ as well as Serra’s sculptures introduced a new challenge to conventional notions of monumentality. On this account, they became precedents for younger artists who explored site specificity and allusions to social, historical, and urbanistic issues in ways that determinedly problematized traditions of monumentality in the 1990s. This kind of challenge can be seen, for example, in Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock’s Orte des Erinnerns (Places of Remembrance, 1994), selected through a competition following a ten-year-long grassroots research project that began as a community exploration into the history of Jewish life in the district18 (Plate 18 and Figure 3.2). The site of this piece is a neighborhood in the district of Schöneberg called the Bayerische Viertel (Bavarian Quarter); its street-names refer to Bavarian towns and cities. Developed as an up-scale residential neighborhood beginning in 1898, with apartment buildings that included all the latest modern conveniences, many of the professionals, intellectuals, and business people who settled there were Jewish. Locally, the area was referred to as “Jewish Switzerland.” In 1963, the first official city memorial to the extermination of Jewish life in Berlin was erected in this neighborhood at the site of a synagogue destroyed by the Nazi regime. To develop their piece, Stih and Schnock reviewed the extensive documentation that the community had amassed and previously exhibited, and talked with and interviewed local residents, especially older people, about their memories of the Nazi period and of their Jewish neighbors. The sculpture that the artists produced consists of eighty enameled metal signs attached to lampposts throughout the neighborhood. Hung at the level of

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Figure 3.2  Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Orte des Erinnerns (Places of Remembrance), 1994. The reverse side of the plaque seen in Plate 18 bears the abbreviated text of the law restricting Jewish life that the image refers to (Author, 2006).

street-signs, parking regulations, and advertisements, their forms blend in with the cacophony of urban signage. When one’s distracted glance registers their contents, however, the viewer is arrested by extraordinary images and texts. One side of each sign bears a simple, colorful drawing of an ordinary object: a hat, a

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stick, a dog. The reverse contains a text taken from the sequence of increasingly restrictive laws issued by the Nazi regime governing Jewish life. The reverse side of a simplified image of a sports court, for example, reads: “Jews are thrown out of sports and gymnastic clubs. 25.4.1933.” The text on a colorful line-drawing of a clock reads: “After 8:00 in the evening (9:00 in summer) Jews are no longer allowed to leave their apartments. 1.9.1939.” On the back side of an image of a cat, the text reads: “Jews may no longer keep pets. 15.5.1942.” The image in Plate 18 depicts a blank label of the kind on which a resident’s name is posted at an apartment building’s entrance. Its reverse, seen in Figure 3.2, states, “Without explanation and without notice, Jews can be instructed to leave their apartments. They can be compelled to be sent to so-called ‘Jewish houses.’ 30.4.1939.” These texts reflect the deliberate and efficient step-by-step narrowing of Jewish life and presence in the community. The pictograms are presented in the stylized, stark, and eye-catching forms of commercial art from the 1930s, with strong black outlines, often bright colors, and objects set against flat grounds. The texts are shortened, pithier versions of the original laws and decrees, and are always stated in the present tense. There are also three information posters located at central sites within the area on which a contemporary map of the neighborhood is overlaid with one from 1933. These provide information about the locations of the signs, and also stimulate recollection of the past, especially for local residents who lived here during the Nazi era. The title of this work, Orte des Erinnerns, can mean “places of remembrance,” but the use of the verb form gives the phrase a more active cast and can also mean “reminder.” Indeed, the signs address viewers as reminders: they catch our attention to remind us of the past and they allude to the way that such laws were once posted in public to remind all citizens about the newest limits on Jewish life. This work brings momentous and almost ungraspable events of the past into the fissures of daily life in the present through its canny use of elements from graphic media, commercial culture, and urban structure. Like other works in Berlin that focus on everyday life as a site for sculptural intervention, it is unassuming; it approaches us at first under the radar, as it were, of our full attention. Scholars Karen Till and Julian Jonker refer to the layered histories of loss exposed by artistic interventions such as this as “memorial cartographies” that operate through time and space to “disrupt comfortable and established zones of social belonging.”19 Another observer, Elissa Rosenberg, stresses that here in the Bavarian Quarter the act of walking through the neighborhood and

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encountering the signs of the Orte des Errinerns triggers “the ethical dimension of remembering as an active, participatory practice.”20 Once we recognize what the signs present to us, there is a shock that, ideally, provokes reflection. Stih and Schnock’s use of signage recalls an earlier work that shares these features. At the subway station on Wittenbergplatz (near the sculpture by the Matschinsky-Denninghoffs), there is a painted list of destinations on plain wooden slats set in a metal frame, presumably indicating places accessible from this station21 (Plate 19). Only a second glance, or a double-take, reveals that these are Orte des Schreckens (Places of Terror) that “we should never forget”: it is a list of death camps. Set alongside a busy traffic hub amid Berlin’s major department stores, this signboard—an initiative of the International League for Human Rights dating from 1967—insinuates an awareness of the past into consciousnesses caught up in the mundane activities of the present. Works such as these introduce into the sculptural lexicon a conception of monumentality that does not depend on traditional ideas or means. Returning to Riegl’s concepts, although his schema analytically differentiates among categories of monuments and their associated values, it also provides a framework for considering how deliberately created sculptural forms such as those we consider in this chapter—intentional monuments—can be seen as related to architectural and spatial traces from a city’s past, that is, to historical monuments, the objects of preservation efforts. For example, the sculptures we have looked at invoke what Riegl calls the “historical value” of their sites by incorporating aspects of their urban infrastructure and context as documents within the works themselves for present and future viewers.22 These sculptures also reflect other values that he delineates for historic monuments, including what he refers to as “use-value”—the continuing use and therefore maintenance of a structure or element—and “relative art-value”—appreciation of works from the past. In other words, these sculptures restore an awareness of the past to physical spaces that are associated with particular histories. They are intentional monuments that are embedded in their surviving or absent urban contexts— the realm of historic monuments—and in this way they activate these spaces as elements in the layered networks of meaning that create the city as a whole. Bridging the gap created by Riegl’s conceptual distinction between intentional and historical monuments, these sculptures argue for an alternative to the museal preservation of urban forms whereby isolated structures or ensembles persist as deracinated stage-sets from the past. By looking to specific sites as the armatures for their works, sculptors active in Berlin in the post-reunification

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period pointed to ways in which the details of the city embody and express meaning. Street signage, pavements, blank firewalls, squares—the commonplace backdrops of everyday life—are shown to resonate with the history of the city, its people, and their neighborhoods. Moreover, their works argue that this is what a city is: forms that elicit layers and networks of meaning and memory. They insist on the dimension of time as constitutive of urban life. Building on modernist critiques of clichéd conventions and on the innovations that derived from these critiques, then, the sculptures we examine here counter traditional notions of monumentality by eliciting strong psychological, emotional, and intellectual reactions through their coexistence with the daily life of the viewer and their rootedness in the history of the city. Many recent sculptures in Berlin share these features and, on this basis, establish interconnections from one piece to another. The relationship between Places of Remembrance and Places of Terror is an example of such a linkage. Sometimes treating related themes, in other instances connected through similar formal devices, these linked sculptures create networks of meaning throughout the cityscape. It is to the motif of the network and sculptures that embody it that we next turn.

Networks The twin processes of recovery of long-suppressed knowledge of the past, exemplified by the work of the Berlin History Workshop and of the Bavarian Quarter community researchers mentioned above,23 and activism directed at urban planning and preservation issues, alluded to in the discussion of Vostell’s sculpture and presented more fully in Chapter 2, created a climate of openness to new sculptural interventions in the city fabric of the sort represented by Places of Remembrance. The postwar years were characterized by regimes of erasure, whether in terms of demolition of old buildings in the interests of reconstruction, or silence about the past in the effort to forge a new polity. After a period of evolution dating from the late 1960s, the two more recent processes of historical recovery and urban activism bore material fruit in West Berlin in the 1980s; they worked conceptually in tandem to make history present. On the one hand, the planning and architectural communities challenged earlier practices by adopting a framework for restoring remnants of the city’s traditional urban scale and preserving historic ensembles. This approach became official when the city government approved new guidelines for urban renewal

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in 1983 that incorporated the idea of “cautious” (behutsam) urban renewal.24 To put this in Riegl’s terms, this change in thinking turned a spotlight on historical monuments; more of Berlin’s nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century built environment—including residential, industrial, and commercial structures— became targets for preservation. On the other hand, and akin to the explorations of Berlin’s urban history that undergirded this new perspective on preservation, academic historians and citizen activists examined the traces of social history that, they found, were recoverable beneath the façades of the new city and within the interstices of everyday life. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s observation that “he who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging,”25 they demonstrated that history is grounded in the material remains of the lived experiences of an entire society. Sculpture was one very significant way in which history could be brought to the surface in the present. Another sculptural example from the late 1980s is the Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg (1987) by Ralf Schüler and Ursulina SchülerWitte26 (Figure 3.3). It is located in the Tiergarten, Berlin’s large central park, and was commissioned in association with the rebuilding of a nearby bridge

Figure 3.3  Ralf Schüler and Ursulina Schüler-Witte, Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg, 1987 (Author, 2006).

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and enlargement of the zoo. The Tiergarten contains many Wilhelmine-era sculptural portraits that honor Prussian military and political heroes as well as cultural figures. As in most parks and sculpture gardens, the relationship of these sculptures to their sites in the Tiergarten is, for the most part, arbitrary. The Luxemburg memorial is very different from these earlier works in conception, execution, and in its site specificity. Large, dark brown bars of steel that resemble lengthened and enlarged blocks of type, alluding to her political journalism, bear on their upper surfaces the letters that spell out her name. Located at the railing along a path that runs beside a waterway, the bars angle down into the water at the site where Luxemburg’s body was thrown into the canal after she was murdered on January 15, 1919. Spare in its imagery, strong as a result of the material used, its color, and its blocky, angular forms, and dramatic in its use of the space of its site, the sculpture reenacts the movement of her tossed body, reanimating the criminal act of the past for the viewer in the present. This sculpture has a pendant in a memorial to Karl Liebknecht by the same designers, located nearby at the site of his nearly contemporaneous murder. Since the fall of the Wall, it has also become more plausible to be put in mind, when standing here, of the memorial erected to Liebknecht in the historic center of the city by the GDR regime (Figure 3.4). This consists of one portal section from the Hohernzollern Palace that includes the balcony from which Liebknecht declared the Free Socialist Republic on November 9, 1918. The

Figure 3.4  City Palace portal from which Karl Liebknecht spoke on November 9, 1918, on the façade of the former Council of State building (Author, 2006).

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war-damaged Palace was demolished in 1950, but this portal was salvaged as a link to this historical forefather of the East German socialist regime and it was later installed on the façade of the Council of State building (1962–4), erected next to the site on which the Palace had stood.27 During the period of the city’s division, annual ceremonies honored both Luxemburg and Liebknecht as founders of the German Communist Party at the symbolic site of their graves, the Memorial for Socialists (Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten) in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde; this continues to serve as a site of official commemoration.28 Luxemburg, however, was also something of a renegade who challenged Lenin’s vision of the Party; she remains a popular figure, embraced by followers with disparate political leanings. This has led to the creation of two more recent representations of Luxemburg and her theoretical work that join this sculptural network.29 In 1999, a portrait in bronze by Rolf Biebl appeared spontaneously in front of PDS headquarters (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus, Party of Democratic Socialism, now called Die Linke, the Left), the successor party to that of the GDR’s central leadership. It was removed by the party’s executive committee and placed instead in front of the offices of their cultural and research body, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, in the less central district of Friedrichshain.30 The second recent memorial to Luxemburg was commissioned in 2002, following intense debate, by the Berlin Senate, under the red–red coalition of Social Democrats and the PDS. Located in the former East Berlin on RosaLuxemburg-Platz, a historic site for left-wing rallies and demonstrations and the site of Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, PDS headquarters, Hans Haacke’s “thoughtprovoking sign” (Denkzeichen) was completed in 2006 (Figure 3.5). This memorial uses the ground plane of the plaza as a site for numerous metal bars set in the pavement that bear quotations from Luxemburg’s texts. Breaking from conventional memorial forms in the former East, which tended to be figurative, this work presents the viewer with a multiplicity of political ideas, which some critics point out are in some cases contradictory and ambiguous.31 There is no direction or order; the bars are set at different angles, they run over curbs, and they are irregularly spaced. Whether the randomness of the viewer’s encounter with these ideas provokes further thought or political exploration, or becomes absorbed into the buzz of this busy plaza, is left undetermined. The piece does suggest, however, the richness of Luxemburg’s theoretical legacy and the unavoidably political character of daily life that we may not always be aware of. In a later section we will see how other recent sculptors have also used the ground plane to catch the viewer’s otherwise distracted attention.

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Figure 3.5  Hans Haacke, Denkzeichen Rosa Luxemburg, 2006 (Author, 2018).

This network of sculptures is dense not only in the number and variety of memorials it includes, but also in the moments in the lives of these figures and in the history of the city that it memorializes. A similar density, as well as an ability to stimulate recollection of memorials or sculptures in other parts of the city and of sites that complement the one where the viewer is presently located, can also be seen in memorials to destroyed synagogues. These are explicit aspects of the memorial on Levetzowstrasse (1988), which is a multi-part work by sculptor Peter Herbrich and architects Juergen Wenzel and Theseus Bappert32 (Plate 20). The synagogue complex on this site was one of the largest in Berlin, including a school and housing. Dedicated in 1914, it was damaged in the 1938 pogrom and in the bombings of 1944–5, and was torn down in 1956. In 1941, it began to be used as a collection point for Jews before they were deported to camps. Using steel and marble, the memorial registers this history. Set on tracks laid into the sidewalk is the rectangular mass of a boxcar filled with marble blocks that abstractly render the convolutions of compacted human forms. A ramp leads to the boxcar on one side and on the other rises into the air to the height of the original synagogue. Seen silhouetted against the sky, one observes that this vertical steel sheet is perforated with text that records the names of the death camps and the dates of deportation from this site. On the horizontal section bridging the ramp and this vertical sheet there is an etched grid containing

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pictures and information about all the synagogues that existed in Berlin, the vast majority of which were destroyed. The siting of this memorial heightens its impact. The tracks and boxcar assertively occupy a large part of the public sidewalk, forcing confrontation by passersby. This insertion of the past within the context of everyday life is another feature of many contemporary sculptures in Berlin that we have seen in Places of Remembrance and that we will return to in discussions of other works, where it often occurs in more subtle, insinuating ways. In addition, this sculpture is centered at the entrance to a neighborhood playground. The contrast is shocking; the viewer’s inability to reconcile the innocence of children with the history of the site restages the irresolvability of that history. Three blocks away, another memorial asserts its presence on the sidewalk but is less confrontational in its form. Memory (1986), by Georg Seibert, at Siegmunds Hof, relates the history of another large synagogue.33 It is constructed of Corten steel in the angular shape of a stylized menorah and is set on a low granite base. Its surfaces bear texts in German and Hebrew that record the history of the synagogue’s community. The suggestive abstraction of this piece, its recounting of the history of the site, and its insertion within the contemporary streetscape are characteristic of the many memorials to lost synagogues created since the 1960s in Berlin’s neighborhoods. A more recent synagogue memorial was constructed following reunification in association with redevelopment in the formerly Eastern part of the city. Blatt (Leaf, 1994–6; also referred to as Places of Remembrance; Figure 3.6), by Zvi Hecker, Micha Ullman, and Eyal Weizman, is located inside the publicly accessible courtyard of a new office building (1990–3) on Axel-Springer-Street; it is now part of a complex that includes the adjacent, restored early-twentiethcentury building that was returned, following the fall of the Wall, to the health insurance company that had owned the property beginning in 1932.34 The synagogue that stood formerly on this site, built in 1891, was desecrated in 1938 and demolished in 1956. The memorial, the result of a competition initiated by the property owner, consists of the placement of simple concrete benches inside the courtyard. Their layout corresponds to the original seating arrangement inside the synagogue, but they are also positioned like lines of text on a page, or leaf, in a Jewish prayer book. Set amid grass and slender birch trees that will overgrow the benches—and that provide another kind of leaf—the courtyard has the atmosphere of a park-like cemetery or ruin, evoking the destruction of the synagogue. It is a place of stillness, contemplation, and memory set within but apart from the humdrum world of commerce that surrounds it.

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Figure 3.6  Zvi Hecker, Micha Ullman, and Eyal Weizman, Blatt (Leaf), 1994–6 (Author, 2006).

Thus, a notional network can be found among synagogues that are no longer extant in Berlin. The memorial on Levetzowstrasse presents in graphic form the large number that formerly existed. But through sculptural memorialization, a web of actual nodes is created that brings both individual Jewish communities and the larger society in which they were active into spatial relationship as part of the excavated history of the city. The idea of a similar network was a central generative formal aspect and remains a strong visual component of architect Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum (1999), often thought to be the most successful architectural achievement of Berlin’s manic post-reunification redevelopment period. The architect worked with an imaginary network of homes, meeting-places, and lives traversed by prominent Jews and non-Jews in the city’s past, to create the zig-zagging ground-plan of the museum.35 The idea of a notional network also appears in the irregular distribution of linear slits and cross-shaped intersections that puncture the museum’s exterior and serve as its windows. For Libeskind, the evocation of the past as an urban network, embodying the density of interactions and crossed paths of a destroyed social and cultural world, is the foundation for Berlin’s future. He presents this network, however, in a necessarily abstract, suggestive form, as a sign embedded in a complex construction project. It is significant, therefore, that one of the effects of encouraging the creation of public sculpture, in a climate in which the city’s history had already been strongly engaged, was

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a kind of complementary physical realization of Libeskind’s idea through the disposition of sculpture across the urban landscape. Moreover, the tendency of recent sculptures in Berlin to address each other in this way is not limited to memorials to synagogues but extends as well to other moments in Berlin’s history. It can be seen in the relationship of Places of Remembrance to the deathcamp signboard, in the series of memorials to Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and we will encounter it in later discussions in relation to other works on different themes.

Voids Another defining feature of Libeskind’s Jewish Museum is the series of physical voids that pierce the building. These are enclosed spaces that run the height of the building into which one may look but only one of which can be entered. These voids make the idea of the absence of Jewish life in Berlin present in a powerful way; Libeskind refers to them as the building’s central structure and as “the embodiment of absence.”36 The notion of the void is also a strong element that appears in a number of different ways and in connection with a variety of themes in contemporary public sculpture in Berlin. An early example is Gerhard Marcks’s Der Rufer (The Caller, Plate 21), originally created in 1967 for Radio Bremen. Neither designed for the specific context of Berlin nor for its particular site, it nevertheless charges its surroundings with spatial significance and activates a void to create a notional network of relationships. This standing figure’s original inspiration was the herald, Stentor, whose voice was cited by Homer in the Iliad as being as loud as that of fifty men; in the sculpture’s original context, this figure served as a fitting image to suggest the force of a free media.37 The version that stands in Berlin’s Tiergarten in the Strasse des 17. Juni median across from the Soviet War Memorial, looking toward the Brandenburg Gate, was erected in May 1989. Sponsored by the head of the Deutsche Bank at the time, who raised private funds to acquire it, The Caller activated the space intervening between the sculpture and the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate.38 Through its placement, it powerfully drew attention to both the physical void separating the two halves of the city and the geopolitical distance between them. It also recalled times in the past when friends and relatives had reached out to one another over the barrier of the Wall. The fall of the Wall a few months after its installation altered its immediate spatial significance. However, the words of Petrarch inscribed at its base—“I go through the world and I call, ‘Peace,

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peace, peace’”—affirm the sculpture’s ongoing relevance. The Caller stands at a confluence of urban structures that represent many chapters of the city’s bellicose past: the Brandenburg Gate through which Napoleon’s army marched into Berlin; in the opposite direction, the Victory Column commemorating Prussia’s military successes that culminated in German national unification; the park’s numerous sculptures honoring Prussian generals; the adjacent 1945 Soviet War Memorial, with its flanking tanks, that commemorates Red Army soldiers who died in the battle for Berlin; memorials to victims of the Nazis; as well as memorials to those who died attempting to flee from East Berlin. All of these are either visible from the statue or within a short walk’s distance from it. Across the charged spatial void that its call for peace conjures, Der Rufer encourages viewers to acknowledge and reflect upon this nearby network of memorials to past military strife and to the tolls taken by both fascism and authoritarianism. Perhaps the starkest example of the presence of the void in contemporary sculpture is seen in Christian Boltanski’s The Missing House (1990, Plate 22).39 This piece takes as its subject and space the gaping hole remaining in the streetscape of Grosse Hamburger Strasse caused by bombardments that hit an apartment building there in 1945. On the exposed walls of the two neighboring surviving buildings, Boltanski attached plaques at the level of each apartment in the destroyed building with the name, dates of occupation, and trade of the tenant of each dwelling. The documents accumulated in the course of researching the building’s inhabitants were originally exhibited in a separate installation as part of The Finitude of Freedom (Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit), the exhibition for which the work was created, and are now in a local archive. The plaques allow Boltanski to “embody” the void as shape and as lived experience. The space where an apartment building once stood is marked out and becomes visible, singled out but also connected to the large number of such sites that could still be found throughout the city, especially in some parts of its eastern half, even in 1990. Shape and weight are restored to the emptiness; it becomes charged with meaning and history. In addition, the information about the building’s tenants, which is both specific and incomplete, embodies the complexity of the world called forth by the space. Formerly described as “Tolerance Street” in acknowledgment of the mix of Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic institutions and inhabitants situated along it, the site and the destruction of the building alone cannot reveal the destinies of the people who lived there. Whether a terminal date of 1942 means that that person was deported; whether 1945 means that that person died in the bombing or found refuge elsewhere: we enter through our imaginations into the labyrinth of historical possibilities

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and, as in experience while it is still being lived, there is no resolution. The past reemerges, in short, as something to be discovered, instead of as statistics that are tallied and can be filed away. In the course of the 1990s, redevelopment and gentrification changed the environment surrounding The Missing House. The kind of vacant space that Boltanski frames used to be much more common in Berlin. As a result of the bombings at the end of the Second World War, of clearances of older buildings in the postwar period, and of the erection of the Wall, empty lots and the exposed firewalls of nearby buildings were characteristic features of the cityscape in both West and East Berlin. In West Berlin, these were the sites for many of the wall paintings from the 1970s and 1980s that the previous chapter focuses on. By the time the Wall fell, there were many fewer in the West, but some areas of the Eastern part of the city, where Boltanski’s work is located, were pocked with such voids. This has changed since reunification; the steady pace of redevelopment not only resulted in the reconstruction of expanses of land at such celebrated commercial sites as Potsdamer Platz and Friedrichstrasse, but also penetrated residential neighborhoods, where even single lots enticed developers. As this trend continues, Boltanski’s piece accumulates another layer of meaning by preserving and drawing our attention to a specific kind of physical void and the urban landscape of which it is a part, both of which were once commonplace features of the city but are now rapidly vanishing. The impact of gentrification is also evident. In 1990, the buildings surrounding The Missing House and many others throughout this neighborhood were deteriorating; the site itself was simply a vacant concrete lot. Since then, nearby buildings have been renovated and the lot is gated, enclosing a landscaped private courtyard. These changes reinforce the value of Boltanski’s work for preserving contact with the past in a context in which new developments are sweeping it away. But there is also a sense of this sculpture’s increasing isolation, as if the space it defines were being protected as a specimen under a bell-jar. The void that Boltanski frames resonates with the spaces of absence that Libeskind created. Another sculpture that uses such a space is the Library (Bibliothek, 1995, Figures 3.7 and 3.8) designed by Israeli artist Micha Ullman and selected through a competition organized to create a memorial on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the Nazi book-burning.40 It is located on the plaza in front of the former Royal Library, on the site where students burned roughly 20,000 books by anti-fascist, pacifist, and Jewish authors in May 1933. From a distance, it is not visible at all during the day—at night its illumination attracts attention—because it uses the plane of the ground as its basis, another

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feature of contemporary works that we will return to in the next section. Here, a glass plate is laid flush with the pavement, through which one can see into an underground room lined with empty white concrete bookshelves that provide space for the books that were burned. The glass plate is flanked a short distance away by explanatory plaques that include a quotation from nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine that reads, “Whoever burns books will eventually burn people” (1820).41 The strength of this memorial lies in the economical manner in which it combines the commemoration of a specific event that culminated in the Holocaust with censorship’s voiding of knowledge in a way that suggests the continuing relevance of both. This sculpture also interacts with its architectural setting, charging it with renewed significance. It was here that Frederick the Great most fully expressed his Enlightenment ideals in built form. Bebelplatz, the square in which Ullman’s piece is located, leads from the boulevard of Unter den Linden to the Forum Fridericianum, a complex of buildings conceived by this ruler when he came to power in 1740.42 On the east side of the square, the Palladian opera house (1741–3), designed by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, represents freedom of artistic expression. To the south, the domed, central-plan St. Hedwig’s Cathedral (1747),

Figure 3.7  Micha Ullman, Library, 1995 (Author, 2006).

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Figure 3.8  Micha Ullman, Library at night, 1995 (Author, 2006).

the city’s first Catholic church, was modeled on the Roman Pantheon; it proclaims Frederick’s policy of religious tolerance. The former library (1774–80), now part of Humboldt University, whose main building stands across Unter den Linden, closes the square on the west. It was inspired architecturally by the High Baroque dynamism of Fischer von Erlach’s Michaeler wing of the Habsburg palace in Vienna, and it symbolizes freedom of inquiry. An equestrian statue of Frederick the Great stands nearby in the middle of Unter den Linden, between the former Royal Library and Humboldt University. The latter was founded in 1809, after Frederick’s death, but has been housed since then in a palace built for Frederick’s brother in 1748–53 to complete the Forum Fridericianum. The statue by Christian Daniel Rauch dates from 1851 and presents the king as a philosopher, carrying a cane and wearing a cocked hat. Portraits and names of noteworthy contemporaries such as Immanuel Kant and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing are included in reliefs on the pedestal, underscoring the Enlightenment allegiances of the king and the philosophical roots of this urban complex. The statue links the northern and southern sides of the complex over the broad boulevard, and it provides a visual marker along the east–west axis of Unter den Linden. Together, these sculptural representations and the

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architectural ensemble they accent ground the Forum Fridericianum in the twin pillars of the state on the one hand and humanistic and scientific culture on the other. The Nazi inversion of the Enlightenment ideals that this complex embodies is aptly represented by the Library’s sunken, catacomb-like space enclosed by ghostly, barren bookshelves. This doubles the contradiction of normalcy: the library is both underground and empty. The void of the subterranean sculpture echoes the void in German culture that the book-burning wished to create, as well as the void in German culture created by the extermination of people. In this way, Ullman’s sculpture participates, too, in the notional network overlaying the city that points to and recalls absences. Light is also an important element in this work. Though illuminated by natural light during the day, the sculpture emits a permanent artificial light that provides what Ullman calls “eternal light.” Through reflections and shadows on the glass that become visually integrated with the space below, the viewer becomes part of the work. For Ullman, “the work is concentrated light squared. Einstein calculated that energy is mass times the square of the speed of light, or reversed—mass (books) in connection with light (fire) are converted into energy. Bound energy is set free. All that remains is the spirit of books and men; they meet in heaven (reflection).”43 Another memorial that draws in the viewer through the use of reflection is Spiegelwand (Mirror Wall, 1992–5, Figure 3.9), located at Hermann-EhlersPlatz in the district of Steglitz, designed by Wolfgang Göschel, Joachim von Rosenberg, and Hans-Norbert Burkert.44 Memorializing both the nearby site of a former synagogue and neighborhood Jews who were deported by the Nazis, this work consists of a highly polished steel wall onto which names, photos, and other documentation have been etched. It stands on a small but busy square that is a route to a transportation hub and the site of a popular market three times a week. All of this activity, along with the surrounding streetscape that is its backdrop, appears in the “mirror wall” of the memorial. Through this device, the viewer is incorporated into the histories that the texts recount, and the histories are re-embedded within the urban fabric of the neighborhood. The space of the city swells, doubled by its reflection to embrace the past, but also to signal the absence of the city of the past and its inhabitants from the mirrored view. The multi-part sculptural work at Hausvogteiplatz by Rainer Görss, Reflexum (2000, Figure 3.10), marks the absence of an entire commercial quarter that could have been one of the nodes of the network of interchanges that Libeskind traced on the façades of the Jewish Museum.45 It draws attention to features of

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Figure 3.9  Wolfgang Göschel, Joachim von Rosenberg, and Hans-Norbert Burkert, Spiegelwand (Mirror Wall), 1992–5 (Author, 2006).

Figure 3.10  Rainer Görss, Reflexum, 2000 (Author, 2006).

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urban development and urban history by disrupting passersby’s expectations about the spaces of the city. The square itself preserves memories of its older history through its shape and name. Its irregular form derives from the shape of the Hunter’s Bastion (Jaegerbastion) that had stood here as part of the seventeenth-century city wall until its demolition in 1740. This fortification took its name from a nearby hunting lodge that, beginning in 1750, housed the Royal Court and Prison (Hausvogtei). A century later, however, the area saw the establishment of textile companies, a trend that grew and transformed it into the center of Berlin’s fashion and clothing industry. It is to this nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury character of the site that Görss’s sculpture explicitly refers. Walking along the square, one sees a group of three mirrored vertical panels canted like mirrors in a clothing store and positioned loosely in the form of an obelisk in alignment with the sides of the square. They surround pavement texts about the history of the square as the site of headquarters for prominent fashion firms, recounting the leading role of Jewish businesses in the clothing industry and the industry’s dissolution following the Nazi regime’s expropriation of firms from Jewish owners. The texts are organized in a counter-clockwise sequence, underscoring the act of retrieval, of returning to the past. The panels are positioned to reflect and reveal their surroundings, allowing viewers to see buildings that survive from this earlier period as well as the absence of what would have been a bustling commercial hub. Between the panels there is a void, nothing but the documentation that records this absence. The second part of the work is seen when approaching the square from below as one mounts the stairs from the nearby subway. Here one encounters what seem to be ubiquitous Berlin commercial advertisements placed on every riser, sure to capture the wary climber’s eye. Instead of these, however, one reads on the dark, cast-aluminum plaques the names of formerly prominent clothing industry establishments and their dates of operation that terminated, when this information could be found, during the Nazi regime. Some plaques are left blank to indicate firms that cannot be traced. The plaque on the top riser reads, “From the directory of Berlin’s clothing industry.” In this section of the piece, Görss embeds the past in familiar urban commercial practices that catch us off-guard as we register the unfamiliarity of these absent, destroyed businesses. Mirrors set on the side walls at the staircase landing link this part of the installation to the part that is aboveground; they reflect us, integrating us into the piece. The void, then, has become a powerful sculptural as well as architectural form through which to embody loss and provoke contemplation of Berlin’s history and

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its course and structure as a city. As a form, the void is inherently both sculptural and architectural. Given positive shape, as in the voids that punctuate the Jewish Museum or in Boltanski’s, Ullman’s, and Görss’s pieces, it takes on the weight of a sculptural solid, even as it challenges our expectations for architectural permanence. It also calls into play relationships with architectural elements that underwrite its solidity, such as the neighboring firewalls in The Missing House, and with its wider architectural context, as when this piece draws attention to the recurrence of such gaps in the urban fabric throughout the city. The reflective wall erected for the Spiegelwand elicits a void that intervenes between the history the wall documents and the reflected present, seemingly overlaid but in reality impossibly distant. The definitive material contrast that a void provides to built form renders the concept of loss in physical terms, literalizes it in a sense, as a route toward engaging the viewer more deeply in the contemplation of that loss and its ramifications. The sculptural void, finally, urges the viewer to read the spaces of the city just as assiduously as one studies its weightier constructions.

Ground Planes The use of the ground plane in Ullman’s Library introduces another significant and resonant feature of many contemporary sculptures in Berlin. The ground plane or pavement, like the void, may seem to be a quintessentially anti-sculptural element, but both stem from Minimalist and Conceptual artists’ insights in the 1960s and 1970s about the heightened sense of physicality that such forms yield. Both forms also gain power from their ability to slip over the boundary between sculpture and non-sculpture, art and the viewer’s world. These qualities can be seen in a very succinct way in Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones, Figure 3.11).46 Beginning in 1995, Demnig laid small, 10 cm x 10 cm bronze plaques into sidewalks throughout Berlin and also in other cities inside and outside of Germany. Each one bears the name, dates, and place of death of an individual killed or exiled by the Nazis, and each is set in the pavement in front of the last address occupied by that person. Often there is a group of plaques, sometimes indicating entire families who were murdered. Anyone can sponsor a plaque for a nominal fee; research to memorialize local residents in this way has been undertaken by school classes, neighborhood groups, building residents, and other groups. This diffuse memorial brings the brutality of the Nazi regime to doorsteps that one otherwise passes by without noticing them. Flush with the pavement, the

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Figure 3.11  Gunter Demnig, Stolperstein (Stumbling Stone), ongoing since 1995. The Stone on the right is located along Bernauer Strasse (Author, 2006, 2015).

plaques are not physical but mental stumbling blocks that insinuate awareness of the weight of past crimes into everyday life, perhaps bringing it to one’s own street or front door.47 They are modest versions of the kinds of plaques placed on building walls to note the former residence of a past cultural or political figure of interest. Unlike these, however, the use of the ground plane for Demnig’s plaques also suggests a grave marker, and the resulting sense of hallowed ground creates a spiritual stumbling block, altering one’s perception of the sidewalk; these individuals once walked along the same streets, following their daily routines, where we now walk. By acknowledging these individual lives, the plaques bring the past into the present and bring attention to a network of shared fates spread over the urban landscape. In contrast to the retrieval of individuality represented by the Stumbling Stones, Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe deploys an extensive field of unmarked steles.48 Such a large-scale memorial was first proposed before the Wall fell, but once the decision was made to move the federal government to Berlin, the idea evolved, in the course of much discussion and controversy, into the official national monument honoring Jewish victims of Nazism. Following several competitions and much debate, Eisenman’s design, accompanied by a documentation center, was selected. It occupies a site at the center of the city where the Ministerial Gardens were once located, near the

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highly representational spaces of Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate. The prominence and high visibility of the site, which is linked to renewed structures of national self-definition, are intended to attest to the significance of this memorial as part of the national project of the unified Federal Republic. The memorial is sited, in other words, in relation to the urban expression of national character: ever mindful of crimes of the past, committed to preventing their recurrence, and intended to counter past grandiose, exclusionary urban visions of the state. Yet whether the monumental scale of this work reflects the ambitions of the state or whether by making claims to such a space Eisenman successfully suggests the scope of the experience he wishes viewers to contemplate are questions that this Memorial continues to provoke. Within the Memorial, the ground plane becomes progressively lower and undulates to provide an experience of a shifting, unstable terrain, declining toward the center where the view and sounds of the city become entirely closed off by increasingly tall steles. Seen from a distance, this work recalls a cemetery, but as one walks through the piece it becomes more abstract, exercising its force through physical sensations such as uncertainty, isolation, enclosure, and descent. This recalls another part of Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, the Garden of Exile, a much smaller arrangement of tall pillars outside the main building that remarkably provides an arduous, disorienting experience as one walks through it. Instead of placing mundane, firm ground beneath the viewer’s feet, these works use altered ground planes to create physical unease that suggests encounters with a radically transformed, unexpected reality. Not all of the works that make use of the ground plane or recall absence are dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust, the destruction of Jewish culture, or the history of Nazism. The site of the former Bohemian community church, a couple of blocks from Checkpoint Charlie, offers another kind of example of the retrieval of aspects of Berlin’s urban history and the notional links that sculpture can create between geographically separated parts of the city. Immigrants from Bohemia settled in Berlin beginning in the early eighteenth century, invited by Frederick William I as part of his policy of encouraging skilled foreigners to populate the city and help build its wealth and prestige. The Bohemian settlers were spinners and weavers, and they established a community in the district of Friedrichstadt. Their church was designed and built in 1735–7 by Friedrich Wilhelm Dieterichs; it suffered severe damage during the Second World War and was demolished in 1954. Following the fall of the Wall, the area surrounding the former church site, around the corner from the commercial axis along Friedrichstrasse and not far from the Wall, became one of the major

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centers of urban redevelopment. In 1994, the foundations of the church were traced and dark-colored paving stones were installed to mark their outline on the triangular wedge of sidewalk that forms Bethlehemkirchplatz (so named in honor of the church in 1999; Plate 23). Here, the ground plane bears the ground plan of the former church, explaining the history of this unbuilt corner, aided by an information kiosk nearby. Despite the insubstantiality of this record of the church, tracing its footprint restores a notional sense of former urban density and introduces a historical counter-weight to the functions and designs of the structures found in the area today. In today’s fraught political climate, it is also a reminder of Berlin’s past encouragement of immigration and the cosmopolitanism that past newcomers contributed to the city. The rest of this block is the site of a 1990s office building designed by Philip Johnson (Quartier 200, or Philip-Johnson-Haus, 1994–7). In front of one of its entrances there is a large sculpture, Houseball, by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen49 (Plate 23). It presents over-life-size, spongy-looking household objects that are tied to the surface of planet Earth by thick cords, much as uprooted people, or simply people on the move, strap their few belongings to carts or car roofs. As an image that refers to the movements of peoples, it relates to the nearby church site for immigrant Bohemians, but it also recalls myriad displacements and resettlements for which Berlin has often been and still is a fulcrum. Animated by playful, outsized scale and bright colors, the mood suggested by the sculpture is not dark, despite its evocation of the worldwide extent of such movements. Rather, the sense of the Earth itself as house allows for an optimistic reading of this process, for which the experience of the Bohemians three centuries ago might serve as a model. The site of the Bohemian community church itself recalls the almost contemporaneous settlement of Protestant refugees from Bohemia in the southern outskirts of the city in 1737–8. They established a Bohemian village in Rixsdorf, one of the founding cores of the Neukölln district, also under the sponsorship of Frederick William I. The Bohemian church that still stands in Rixsdorf now contains one of the original bells from the demolished Friedrichstadt church. The Ratgeb Artists Group, whose work we encountered in the previous chapter, painted a large mural, The History of the Bohemians and Rixdorf, in the neighborhood in 1980, and Frederick William I’s welcome is commemorated by a bronze statue of the king by Alfred Reichel (1912), located at the heart of the old community.50 Reliefs on the sculpture’s base depict the trek of the refugees, who pull carts bearing their possessions to Berlin (Figure 3.12) The visual language and mood expressed here are very different from those of

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Figure 3.12  Alfred Reichel, pedestal relief of Bohemian refugees on the base of a statue of Frederick William I, 1912, in Rixsdorf (Author, 2006).

Houseball, but the sculptures are strongly linked thematically. The force of the linkage is to draw into relationship two distant city spaces, one near the center and one in an outer district, in a way that makes apparent each one’s distinctive character as well as their connected urban history. This linkage also draws attention to the spatial and temporal layering of a city in which much of the historical fabric that would otherwise preserve and evoke memory of the past has been destroyed. The most extensive marker of the existence and emplacement of the Berlin Wall also makes use of the ground plane (Plate 24). Much of the 26-mile former border between East and West Berlin has been traced, starting in 1997, by a continuous double row of cobblestones punctuated at intervals with a narrow bronze plaque reading “Berliner Mauer 1961-1989.”51 Sometimes running along sidewalks, more often near the edge of the street, this marks the course of the West-facing Wall. Redevelopment is rapidly filling in the former no-man’s land between this and the East-facing Wall, and administrative reorganization has eliminated from current street-maps some of the district boundaries along which the Wall ran. As a result, aside from the remains preserved within the Berlin Wall memorial landscape that is discussed in the next chapter, the double row of cobblestones embedded in the ground plane bears the imaginative weight

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of conjuring the site, mass, and depth of the zone that divided Berlin for twentyeight years. Other markers of the East–West frontier use the ground plane as sculptural armature and urban reference point. Karla Sachse’s Kaninchenfeld (Rabbit Field, 1999, Plate 25) is one of seven selected by the municipal Department of City Development to indicate and memorialize inner-city border crossings.52 This project as a whole marked points at which the meeting between East and West was most intense, as a way to acknowledge the difficult process of reestablishing relationships and, indeed, of reunification. Sachse’s piece is located at Chausseestrasse, once a major Wall crossing point for West Berliners. It originally consisted of 120 brass silhouettes of rabbits set into the pavement along the streets and sidewalks in the area, although many have disappeared due to construction work and changes in the area over the intervening years.53 Roughly life-size, the rabbits are shown in various positions, such as running or sitting, and are both scattered and clustered in groups at man-hole covers or bus shelters. Often identified with the city, these rabbits recall the satisfactory habitat that rabbits indeed found within the Wall strip, where they once remarkably flourished. Visible to residents on both sides of the Wall, they also were able to transgress its bounds. Sachse referred to them as “peaceful inhabitants of noman’s land.”54 They represented a kind of freedom that could not be blocked by the Wall. As with other sculptures previously discussed, here too the impact of the piece derives in part from its insertion of unfamiliar and unexpected imagery into what is now an unremarkable streetscape, thus provoking inquiry and reflection on a site that had once been fraught with tension. Gabriele Basch’s no longer extant Wahre Geschichte (Genuine History, 1999, Plate 26) marked another border crossing by deploying an abstract image embedded with suggestive imagery on the sidewalks of the bridge on Invalidenstrasse.55 Built of small tiles in numerous shades of somber gray, it resonates with the typical tones of the city’s ground plane as well as with the mood of the crossing point. A nearby sculpture also focuses on a transition. French landscape architect Christophe Girot’s sculpture is located in a park that, once fallen into disuse because of its proximity to the Wall, he restored in 1997. In the center of a pool of water that replaces the former green space, Girot set a Sinking Wall, as it is titled.56 A large, dour concrete slab juts from the pool diagonally, as if it is sinking into the water. Water flows into the pool from the highest point of the slab. The imagery is stark and clear: the obdurate concrete wall succumbs to the gentle but steady, life-giving element of water. Through its theme, Girot’s work recalls sculptures elsewhere in the city that signal sites from

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this chapter in Berlin’s history, especially those that include surviving sections of the Wall. Unlike these, however, Sinking Wall naturalizes and renders apolitical the complex history of the Berlin Wall and its eventual destruction. Two final examples of the use of the ground plane evoke domestic rooms exteriorized within public spaces. In a sculpture entitled Der verlassene Raum (The Abandoned Room, 1988–96, Figure 3.13), the artist, Karl Biedermann, works with the imagery of fire that is implicit in both The Missing House and the Library, along with the theme of absence.57 Originally the winning entry in a competition established by the East Berlin city government to memorialize, for the first time in GDR history, the Night of the Pogrom (Kristallnacht) on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, the sculpture was not realized until after the fall of the Wall. Biedermann stated that it is “an acknowledgement of all Jewish citizens who, over seven centuries, lived and worked in Berlin.”58 A cast bronze piece, it consists of a base set flush with the ground, on which are placed somewhat over-life-size representations of a table and two chairs, one of which has been knocked over. The lathe-turned table-legs and descriptive textures of the fish-scale parquet floor and leather upholstery provide enough detail to

Figure 3.13  Karl Biedermann, Der verlassene Raum (The Abandoned Room), 1988–96 (Author, 2006).

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suggest a typical, old-fashioned, middle-class interior. A text from a poem by Nelly Sachs, published in 1947, runs along the edges of the base: O the habitations of death Invitingly appointed For the host who used to be a guest O you fingers Laying the threshold Like a knife between life and death– O you chimneys, O you fingers And Israel’s body as smoke through the air!59

Sachs herself succeeded in fleeing to Sweden in 1940; the sculpture conjures up the sudden departure of both those who fled and those seized abruptly for expulsion to camps. In contrast to the anguish of the poem, the situation and the setting itself are established in the sculpture through understatement and economy of means. To the spare bronze elements one can add the viewer’s movement around the sculpture to read the text, reinforcing the physical boundaries of the room. The sense of domestic enclosure is echoed in the scale of Koppenplatz, the square in which the sculpture is placed, which is fronted by generally even street walls of residential buildings.60 But there is ultimately no sanctuary here, only the void left by the absence of the room’s occupants. Farther from the city center, Pocketpark, installed by Christine Gersch and Igor Jerschov in 2005 in the Flora neighborhood in the district of Pankow, was commissioned for the district by the Kunst im Stadtraum (Art in City Space) program of the State of Berlin; it won the Gustav-Meyer-Sonderpreis awarded by the Senate that year (Plate 27). Occupying a small precinct immediately adjacent to the sidewalk, Pocketpark traces the floor plan of an apartment built in 1895. Within this marked space, Gersch and Jerschov set out concrete embodiments of over-sized, simplified pieces of furniture that recognizably identify each of its four small rooms. Originally constructed next to an 1892 villa that was later torn down, the sculpture’s community support ensured preservation of the installation itself. Pocketpark, locally referred to as the “Gute Stube” (parlor), provides a doll-house-like setting where neighborhood children and adults alike congregate. Squeezed into the small quarters defined by the plan, the furniture’s colorful and shimmering mosaic surfaces, made of Murano glass, pieces of French and Italian ceramics, marble, and other natural stones, evoke the pleasures that home can provide in spite of its spatial

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constraints. The ground plane here resonates not only with the history of local housing but with each individual visitor’s experiences of spaces in which they have dwelt.61 A parity is drawn between public and private space that renders the ground plane of public space just as much a site of belonging as one’s own home. By connecting, then, with residual spaces and elements of urban infrastructure—exposed walls and adjacent vacant spaces, pavements and areas beneath them, stairs—this body of public sculptures argues for the rootedness of their impact and of the experiences and events they allude to in the material construct of the city itself. Few of these sculptures were created in association with community activism of the sort with which West Berlin muralists were allied. But these sculptures responded to and helped sustain the climate of urban awareness that had been established by activists in the earlier period, a continuity they shared with the contemporaneous street art scene. Often relying on seemingly insubstantial means, from spatial voids to one-dimensional ground planes, upon closer examination these representative sculptures reveal how the use of such quotidian features can make manifest both the physical solidity and conceptual weight of the city. Through the repetition of these features in diverse works and through thematic echoes, these sculptures establish networks of meanings that reinforce the complex but integral fabric of the city.

Conflicts The processes leading to the creation of these sculptures have not always gone entirely smoothly. In 1987, for example, there were protests by West Berlin citizens over Skulpturenboulevard, especially by some residents near Vostell’s Two Concrete Cadillacs. They would have preferred a fountain in the center of Rathenauplatz in the form of a water-spouting Berlin bear, the city’s mascot.62 The reflective steel wall on Hermann-Ehlers-Platz in Steglitz was only erected after the city government overruled the district council’s attempts to alter and then cancel the project.63 Debates over the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe concerning its necessity, its significance, its location, and its form, both before and after the selection of Eisenman’s proposal, continued for more than a decade.64 At some point it began to seem to some observers, either out of frustration or with a sense of unintended aptness, that the debate itself could serve as the memorial; rather than the sort of permanent monument that, as Musil noted, would eventually cease to be noticed, debate over the memorial

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seemed to have the advantage of provoking ongoing consideration of issues of meaning and memory. Such debates are characteristic of the culture of public discussion about sculpture and the built environment that exists in Berlin. There is widespread recognition of the importance of the subjects that public sculptures are asked to address, and citizens’ concerns about what is created are registered through letters in newspapers, surveys, attendance at exhibitions and public forums, and sometimes the formation of citizens’ initiatives and protest groups. We encounter some of these examples of public engagement in the next chapter. There may not be total transparency in the course of commissioning a public sculpture, but many citizens pay keen attention to the process, which often includes public presentations of competition entries. An example of the complexity of the issues evoked by many recent sculptures and the conflicts they can give rise to can be seen in the process of selecting a work to commemorate the events of June 17, 1953. This date refers to workers’ protests in the GDR that began the previous day when an increase in production norms led construction workers at building sites on Stalinallee (now Karl-Marx-Allee) to go on strike. Their ranks swelled, and thousands of demonstrators marched toward the House of the Ministries (today the Finance Ministry), shouting protests against demands for increased production, against Soviet domination, and in favor of free elections. More massed the following day, and the protests spread throughout East Germany, but the government remained unresponsive to discussions, convinced that an uncontrollable revolution was in danger of unfolding. Instead, Soviet tanks and the GDR police force suppressed the demonstrations, beating, arresting, and shooting the protestors. Following summary trials later, more protestors were executed or imprisoned. In the Cold War climate that then prevailed, this debacle was seized on in the West as a symbol of workers’ repudiation of communism in the GDR. Virtually overnight, a major boulevard—described by one critic as Speer’s “via triumphalis”65—that runs westward from the Brandenburg Gate, standing at the East–West boundary, was renamed Strasse des 17. Juni (June 17th Street) and other memorials were soon created in the West. Following reunification, the events of June 17th were seen by some as foundational, foreshadowing the successful defeat of the GDR decades later. Now streets in cities throughout former East Germany have had their names changed to Strasse des 17. Juni. But other, more complex views of the protests on that day existed, especially in the former East.

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In Berlin, the city government decided in 1994 to memorialize these events. Following a 1996 symposium during which historians, art historians, artists, and witnesses to the events aired their views on intentions for the memorial, its form, and its location, a competition was initiated in 1997. The thirteen-member jury found none of the fifty-two entries to be satisfactory, leading to a second jury that considered twelve proposals. This jury awarded a first prize that was strongly criticized, especially by veterans of the events, whereupon it was set aside. City officials brought the process to an end by selecting, “against all objections,” the second prize-winning proposal for construction.66 As one of the second jury panelists observed, “the 17th of June is still explosive.”67 Debates persisted over the nature of the events; given the context of reunification and the diverse perspectives on how it was pursued, the final decision regarding the sculptural installation was seen as political. Many East Berliners considered that their views and history were not recognized during the process of reunification, which had taken on the coloration of a victory of the West over the East rather than a merger of the two societies; Chapter 4 discusses these tensions more fully. Streets in the former East were renamed and GDR memorials were razed. That the cries of protest that had brought the Wall down—“We are the people”—were so quickly transposed into absorption into the West, represented by the slogan “We are one people,” resonated with the equally complex, unresolved historical reading of the June 17th events. Had the June 17th events represented the repudiation of communism and a call for freedom and German unity, or an attempt by workers to achieve a stronger voice in the process of building a new society? Those who opposed the decision about the memorial thought that these questions needed to be acknowledged, not avoided.68 The first-prize proposal presented this history as still problematic and ambiguous. In a text conveyed by lights that were to be embedded across the expanse of Leipziger Platz, Katharina Karrenberg challenged the viewer to address these questions. It would have read: “Who am I that I could say that this was a heroic act” (Wer bin ich, dass ich sagen koennte, eine heroische Tat). This confrontational stance accords with critic Bojana Pejic’s assessment of Karrenberg’s early installations and other works, when Pejic observes that “she makes visible the invisible conflicts and tensions that constitute everyday experience. But she proffers neither their reconciliation nor their sublation in her work.”69 The memorial by second-prize-winner Wolfgang Rüppel that was in fact constructed was dedicated in 2000 and is located at the entrance to a government

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ministry at the corner of Leipzigerstrasse and Wilhelmstrasse70 (Plate 28). It presents an enlarged, digitalized, black-and-white news-photo-based image of the 1953 demonstrators etched onto the underside of a glass surface placed just below the level of the surrounding pavement; the grainy forms of figures are seen as if under water, an effect heightened by the slightly greenish tinge of the ink. A thin stone band separates the image from the pavement, like a frame or the edge of a gravesite. The site is central to the history of the June 17th events and also has strong connections to both the past and ongoing histories of Germany’s regimes. The present building replaces one that housed the Prussian War Ministry; it was constructed in 1934–6 for the Nazi Aviation Ministry, headed by Hermann Goering. The architect who designed it, Ernst Sagebiel, had been modernist architect Erich Mendelsohn’s office supervisor; he took over the firm after Mendelsohn emigrated in 1933 and he went on to design many structures for the Nazis, including Tempelhof Airport (1936–41). Under its stone façade, the steel and concrete structure of the Ministry was reinforced to withstand bombing, and the building indeed survived the war. The GDR was officially founded in its banquet hall on October 7, 1949, and it served as the House of the Ministries during the following period; a GDR-era mural has been preserved on the rear wall of the portico that overlooks the June 17, 1953 memorial. In this Meissen porcelain mural by Max Lingner (1952), entitled Building the Republic, idealized representations of segments of the new socialist society, including industrial workers, farmers, construction workers, Young Pioneers and other youth groups, and marching workers and students, scroll horizontally across the surface; there is little that connects them to each other beyond their close proximity on the picture plane and the broad smiles visible on many faces that seem to welcome the viewer into their space. Rüppel’s image is aligned with the portico and has the same dimensions as this mural, a parallel that suggests an intended confrontation between ideology and reality as represented by the mural on the one hand and the photo-based work on the other. Yet such an opposition reduces the complexity of actual social struggle as it affected both the workers in 1953 and each of the artists. While the nature of the conflict surrounding Rüppel’s work was quite different, Lingner himself had encountered opposition to his early proposals for the mural and even with significant changes it elicited criticism after it was hung. Originally entitled The Importance of Peace for the Cultural Development of Humanity and the Need to Fight for It, Lingner’s focus had been on the strength and contributions of families to the construction of a new life. East German Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl and other Party and government

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officials, who were suspicious of the strength of Lingner’s commitment to the GDR after the decades he had spent in Paris, preferred a depiction with broader political implications, which Lingner worked to accommodate in the mural as it appears today.71 After reunification, from 1990 to 1994, this building housed the offices of the Treuhand, the institution created to administer and privatize property that had been state-owned during the GDR period; following the murder of the Treuhand’s President, Detlev Rohwedder, it was renamed in his memory. In 1994 it was designated as the seat of the Finance Ministry of the reunified federal government upon its move to Berlin. In addition, this site had figured directly in the events of 1953; it was the destination of the worker’s march, where they presented their demands to the government; it was one of several key sites of the uprising that artists could choose for their proposed memorial. But the history and aptness of the site were for many years not immediately apparent to the viewer; these have been reinforced more recently by renaming the space the Plaza of the Uprising (Platz des Aufstandes) and by placing documentation placards along the edge of the area. The impact that Rüppel’s memorial and Karrenberg’s proposal achieve by their use of the ground plane is similar to that found in other sculptural installations. In both, the incorporation of this feature affirms the embeddedness of the June 17th events within the fabric of the city’s history and in the tapestry of its stones. In a less charged context, the chosen work might also suggest the kind of almostarchaeological project—of the sort noted by Benjamin and that underpinned the efforts of citizen-historians in the 1970s and 1980s—that is involved in such commemorations: both the social and individual psychological processes of recovery of historical memory depend on breaking the hardened crust of received wisdom and examining the darker, submerged veins of human development. Created at a moment when related questions of a people’s relationship to their government were simmering, however, this memorial seemed to many to be another obstacle to such examinations. It seemed to validate dominant views rather than to provoke reflection. As one scholar concluded, “a decentralized memorial landscape in which different perspectives and diverse interests are represented is perhaps preferable, for it is the ‘unsatisfactory’ nature of many monuments and the debates which surround them that constitute their real essence.”72 We will see in the next chapter that this viewpoint remains pertinent in relation to the Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse. In a similar spirit, there were attempts earlier in the post-Wall period to create a climate in which shared investigations might have yielded more mutually

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satisfactory solutions. In 1990, for example, art history students in East and West Berlin joined together in an association called the Initiative for Political Memorials of the GDR (Initiative politische Denkmäler der DDR).73 They argued for the creation by the city government of an independent commission to examine monuments in both East and West Berlin. As part of the process of discovery, they organized an exhibition on GDR monuments. Entitled Save, Destroy, Change? GDR Memorials in East Berlin: A Documentary Exhibition (Erhalten, Zerstören, Verändern? Denkmäler der DDR in Ost-Berlin: Eine dokumentarische Ausstellung), the memorials were presented as historical documents to counter the prevailing tendency to dismiss GDR cultural productions on artistic grounds.74 These efforts were not successful in forestalling the destruction of East Berlin monuments, however. One of the major sculptures to be lost, for example, was the Lenin monument, an over-life-size red granite heroic figure by Moscow sculptor Nikolai Tomsky that was installed in the center of Leninplatz and dedicated in 1970, on the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth. After a vote in favor of its removal by the district representative assembly, followed by protests against its removal by local citizens, and despite the protection of the transitional law (Überleitungsgesetz), the statue was demolished in 1991.75 The square was renamed in honor of the United Nations. Similarly, a plaque—and another layer of history—was removed from the former Royal Library on Bebelplatz, where Ullman’s Library was later installed; it had noted that Lenin had worked there during his exile. Although a commission to consider monuments was established in 1992, it examined only those in East Berlin, where West Berlin city administrators found it necessary to remove artifacts of the defeated regime. As of 2017, on the other hand, the federal government began to follow through with the proposal its representatives and others first introduced in 1998 to commemorate the peaceful reunification of Germany. Approved in 2007 following public hearings, development of the National Monument to Freedom and Unity has seen many stops and starts and has been much debated and criticized. The winning entry in the design competition’s second round, Citizens in Movement (Bürger in Bewegung), was created by the Stuttgart architectural firm Milla and Partners in collaboration with choreographer Sasha Waltz. A kinetic structure, the designers describe the monument as “a social sculpture. It comes to life when people gather, communicate and move together. It´s an invitation to participation and an image of genuine democracy.”76 Set above the ground plane, its connections to the city may reflect greater ambiguity than other public sculptures we have examined. It seems to honor

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the key terms in considerations of the downfall of the Wall that historian Konrad Jarausch captured when he wrote, “Rich in memorable moments, the dramatic events, from the Leipzig demonstrations to the fall of the Wall, have created new recollections of popular empowerment that form a liberationist memory of protest and self-determination, suggesting involvement rather than compliance.”77 Yet the monument’s inscription, “Wir sind das Volk. Wir sind ein Volk” (We are the people. We are one people) collapses different moments in the course of events, eliding their significance and leveling the distinctive choices regarding overcoming division that each encapsulated. Its site, too, may contribute to its ambiguous character. The monument will be set on the base on which the Kaiser Wilhelm I Memorial once stood, on the west side of the City Palace, located in the heart of the historic city center; both were destroyed by the GDR regime. A new cultural center, the Humboldt Forum, which recreates some of the palace façades and courtyards and replaces the razed Palast der Republik— itself a highly controversial act of removal—has been constructed on the site of the former palace and it will become the new monument’s backdrop. Instead of locating the monument at the Brandenburg Gate or on Alexanderplatz—sites that have traditionally been identified with popular demonstrations—as some have urged, this site relates to the seats of power of the Hohenzellerns and of the GDR, as well as to contemporary federal ministries nearby. How the sculpture is read may come to depend in part on how the Humboldt Forum negotiates its architectural and spatial allegiances to the past and the new roles it is expected to play in the cultural life of the city. Few places in Berlin embody a more controversial historical layering of meanings than this site, for which modernist architect Bruno Taut’s observation from the early 1920s seems apt, when he wrote that “the image of history is also a product of fantasy, and indeed it is often a very dangerous one, since it appears in ‘layers,’ which in and of themselves may be genuine, but whose selection and meaning depend entirely on the immediate standpoint.”78 An individual sculptural memorial that explicitly reflects such conflictual layering documents recontextualization as an alternate strategy to destruction for dealing with works dating from the former GDR regime. The Herbert-BaumGedenkstein (Herbert Baum Memorial Stone, Figure 3.14), by Jürgen Raue, was commissioned by the East Berlin city council in 1981.79 It commemorates a group of thirty-four Communist Party members who challenged anti-Communist Nazi propaganda by attempting to burn down an exhibition, “Soviet Paradise,” held in the Lustgarten, the site of the memorial, in 1942. The participants were imprisoned and executed. The cube-shaped stone sculpture, located on the

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Figure 3.14  Jürgen Raue, Herbert Baum Memorial Stone, 1981/2000 (Author, 2006).

southeast corner of the Lustgarten, bears two texts, each repeated on two faces. One reads, “The courageous acts and steadfastness of the antifascist resistance group led by the young communist Herbert Baum are not forgotten.” The other declares, “Always bound in friendship with the Soviet Union.” Following reunification, in 2000, clear plastic overlays that provide additional information were attached to two of the four faces. One lists the names of the thirty-four members of the resistance group. The other adds material about the group’s activities and its fate which, it notes, was not included in the original texts, and details about the creation of the memorial. It concludes by stating that “this memorial thus documents the brave act of resistance in 1942, the conception of history in 1981, and our continuous remembrance of resistance to the Nazis.” The applied text from 2000 is not explicit about what is problematic about the memorial, except to note that it does not explain exactly what this resistance group did. Understood, however, is a sense of discomfort with the original memorial’s emphasis on the Communist ties of the group and with its statement asserting a strong relationship between the GDR and the Soviet Union, which now needs at least indirect explication as “the conception of history in 1981.” The new text validates the commemoration of resistance against the Nazis

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while it repudiates, without explaining it, the relationship between the GDR and the USSR. Historicizing the Herbert Baum Memorial Stone by adding new information to the original texts bears out Taut’s observation, for the assumptions of the Western, post-reunification standpoint now constitute a new historical layer that intervenes between the viewer and the past. Recontextualization adds to this memorial both clarification and a new layer of opacity that requires its own de-coding.80 Contemporary sculptures that are the focus of this chapter reflect their creators’ awareness of the complexity of the issue of meaning in sculptures placed in the public realm; often this is presented in ways that are both more direct and more nuanced than we find in the expressions of government committees and other administrative bodies. These sculptures are designed to involve the viewer in processes of discovery, reflection, and discussion. In this way, their works rely on but also bolster that “larger public sphere that values debate” about shared public issues, which scholar Michael North, following Jürgen Habermas, has singled out as public sculpture’s essential environment if it is to avoid becoming merely ornamental.81

Sculpture Reclaiming the Urban Realm Indeed, Berlin offers, too, numerous examples of ornamental public sculptures, many installed since reunification and thus contemporaneous with the body of work this chapter analyzes. Considering instances of such mainstream sculptural production in this section throws into relief the unique character of the body of public art whose facets we have identified. The contrast with conventional contemporary sculpture strengthens the claim we make that this body of public art proposes new relationships between public art and the city. The massive redevelopment of Berlin has been multi-faceted, involving complex infrastructural changes as well as extensive renovation and new building. The wholesale establishment of a new quarter for the federal government is but one such undertaking required during the post-reunification period. But as in many cities today that compete with each other to attract finance capital, corporate branches, and tourists, many development decisions in Berlin were shaped by just these kinds of goals. While housing renovation and neighborhood development have not been overlooked, the focus has been on the central city, on commercial projects, on representational spaces, and on spectacle in the form of shopping and entertainment complexes.

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Much contemporary sculpture adapts to these forms of urbanism. Jeff Koons’s reflective, electric blue Balloon Flower (2000; owner: Daimler-Chrysler) in front of the theater and casino at Marlene-Dietrich-Platz; John Chamberlain’s pillar of smashed car bodies, Tower of Klythie, and Joel Shapiro’s characteristic, untitled man-on-the-go stick figure (1995 and 1994 respectively; owner: TishmanSpeyer Properties) installed at Quartier 205, a Friedrichstrasse shopping arcade; Jonathan Borofsky’s three-figured Molecule Man (1999; owner: Allianz Versicherungs-AG) rising out of the Spree River near an insurance tower—these and other sculptures endorse their sites as part of the global circuit of corporate culture. These pieces by internationally recognized artists are admired as local examples of acclaimed artists’ works; while this is a reasonable rationale for their presence, the trend that it legitimizes also reflects the impact on redevelopment in Berlin in the 1990s of what Andreas Huyssen calls the “image discourse.”82 “To increase revenue from mass tourism, conventions, and office or commercial rents,” he writes, developers and politicians choose tactics that appeal to people passing through Berlin or relocating from other “global cities.” Whether for architecture or sculpture, the “brand name” is what is seen to matter; the interchangeability of such works is part of their attraction, as they have become the currency of the “triumphalism of the free market in the age of corporate globalization” and the guarantee that a city has arrived.83 Thus, sculptures are paired with often-dazzling architectural projects that echo those in other global cities; together, they construct “scripted spaces” whose prestige these works of art reaffirm.84 Such sculptures encourage the self-referentiality of their sites. They may be ironical, as Chamberlain’s tower of crushed cars that embellishes a shrine to consumerism seems to be. Spurning Klythie’s love, Helios, the sun god, turned her into the heliotrope, the sun-tracking flower; her love is then endlessly renewed as she gazes on him, but she can never approach any closer to him. In Chamberlain’s Tower of Klythie, the futility of Klythie’s love is echoed in damaged, discarded objects, part of the cycle of endless stimulation of consumers’ neversated desires. The force of such a commentary, however, is contained within, and perhaps even undercut by, the social and ideological world of commerce in which this sculpture and others are located. In her analysis of sculptural site specificity, Miwon Kwon notes that we can distinguish between “the cultivation of art and places and their appropriation for the promotion of cities as cultural commodities.”85 The contemporary sculptures we have been considering in this chapter support and operate within a model of urbanism that represents the former of Kwon’s types, one that cultivates distinctive, heterogeneous places; this is a model of urbanism that aligns with

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Henri Lefebvre’s perspective, too. Such sculptures are interstitial rather than scenic. They reject ornamenting a panoramic view in favor of drawing the viewer’s attention to the concrete spaces and structures of their sites. Even when situated in formal spaces in the central city, as Ullman’s Library is, these sculptures resist the glancing view from a distance by requiring the viewer’s presence and enticing the viewer’s attention. Ullman achieves this by inverting expectations about sculptural space, implanting his work underground, which requires the viewer to become part of the piece—to stand on the glass plane and be reflected in it—before it reveals itself. Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe may offer the most audacious counter to the pressures of corporate redevelopment. Set between Pariser Platz and Potsdamer Platz, two of the most extensive and expensive central-city rebuilding projects, it unfurls its undulating carpet of steles upon some of the most valuable and desirable real estate in Berlin.86 It may still figure as cultural capital, and even as moral capital, but it occupies rather than ornaments terrain that otherwise would have been the object of high-stakes schemes by real estate developers and speculators. The decade-long debate that preceded its construction attests to the wide-ranging if disputatious constituency for whom public space is a site of significant social and urban expression. Sculptures linked to corporate endeavors, on the other hand, generally come into existence independent of any form of civic advocacy. The recurrence of the motifs of the network, the void, and the ground-plane in the body of contemporary public sculptures that we have been considering attests to the ties between these works and the structure and history of the city of Berlin; these motifs link the sculptural dimension with the urban, and both to everyday life. That these connections are not arbitrary, moreover, is suggested by the climate cultivating awareness, reflection, and discussion about the city that was created by the parallel endeavors of historical investigation and urban preservation in the 1970s and 1980s. Incubated in the climate in which activist citizens, scholars, architects, and planners recovered social and urban histories and championed the preservation of urban forms, the sculptures that are the focus of this chapter take the city as their implicit subject instead of abetting the subjection of the city to the forces of corporate globalization. The urbanism that they support is one that engages and stimulates the imagination to trace interconnections among layers and networks of meaning and memory embedded in urban infrastructure. They argue, in other words, for the city as the sort of locus of encounters that such urban critics as Siegfried Kracauer and Guy Debord valued.87 In this regard, they complement interventions by muralists and

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street artists that we examined in Chapter 2. Interruptions in the unconscious flow of daily life by the unexpected and the unfamiliar that these sculptures introduce allow for the evocation of historical memory and encourage a critical distance from the present, both of which stimulate reflection and create spaces for new intellectual, emotional, and social possibilities. The memories that many of these sculptures seek to evoke are not, for most viewers, actual memories of events they experienced. Instead, these works support the insights of early-twentieth-century French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, who maintained that memory is social and that it unfolds in space; the cues offered by urban forms help “us to piece together small, scattered, and indistinct bits of the past.”88 This view seems to have been shared by Alois Riegl as well, for whom “memory-value” was an aspect of the preservation of historical artifacts, while the aim of intentional monuments, he wrote, is “to preserve a moment in the consciousness of later generations, and therefore to remain alive and present in perpetuity.”89 By taking the viewer unawares and interrupting quotidian rhythms and expectations, the contemporary sculptors we have highlighted here strive to create an intense, personal, and reflective experience that might have the power and duration of memory. The presence of a network of sculptures that links memory to the constructed history of the city and raises this to viewers’ conscious awareness allows public art to “reoccupy lost cultural spaces and propose historical counter-memories.”90 In doing so, these sculptures also create the possibility of cultivating an ongoing sensitivity to alternative spatial and temporal readings of the city. Riegl’s concepts also point us toward consideration of another way in which these public sculptures achieve this effect. By fusing Riegl’s categories of intentional objects (the deliberate creation of new works) and historical monuments (the urban infrastructure that serves as the sculptures’ mediums, their sites, and sometimes their explicit subjects), these sculptures foreground features of the city that unintentionally bear historic meaning. Their strategy of adding a new layer of witness to the cityscape by enabling already-existing urban elements to testify to the past that they embody underscores the capacity of the city to preserve and articulate that past as an available resource for the continuing construction of the urban realm. This is a very different approach from that found in conventional examples of public monuments of the sort that modernist sculptors rejected. The project of redefining modernist monumental sculpture in a wider sense, or even of locating a split within its history, is a large one and one that I am not attempting to undertake here. I am interested, rather, in highlighting a negative aspect of

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this project by arguing that the body of public art from the post-reunification period that this chapter analyzes extends and articulates modernism’s critique of monumentality. The sculptures we have been considering continue to reject traditional forms of monumentality in a way that recalls the modernist manifesto that Hemingway articulated in A Farewell to Arms, cited earlier, in which he spurns bombastic appeals to abstract ideals. The markers that ground Hemingway’s commitment to reality—“the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates”—have their equivalents in these sculptures’ site specificity; their use of many familiar, vernacular features of their environments; their incorporation of diverse materials, many of which are non-traditional and relate to the urban infrastructure of their sites; and their interplay of two- and three-dimensional media through the inclusion of texts, graphics, or documentation. All of these features demarcate the historical and spatial particularity of each piece.91 Like the modernist model, too, these sculptures avoid rhetorical appeals to conventional abstract qualities—“glory, honor, courage, or hallow”—in favor of instigating conceptual interconnections. They entice the viewer’s engagement and participation through unexpected contrasts or canny uses of the spaces and props of daily urban life; the psychological and intellectual power and felt presence of space understood as a physical entity becomes a significant medium in these works. As this suggests, the means used by these sculptures go beyond the reliance on abstract forms of earlier visual modernists. The practices noted above indicate that contemporary sculptors working in Berlin absorbed insights and formal vocabularies that emerged over recent decades in connection with Conceptual, Environmental, Installation, and Performance art. The kind of monumentality that their works achieve, then, reflects this familiarity; it grows out of their works’ interactions with their vernacular surroundings, and it is informed by the way that both urban site and sculptural form become charged with meaning through such acute interplay. From this perspective, we can also say that these sculptures reinterpret the modernist goal of integrating architecture and the visual arts. These works shun picturesque relationships between sculptural objects and their settings that are associated with tradition, as well as the strictly formal relationships of earlier modernism. Instead, they provoke dialogues with their architectural and spatial environments that make them partners within an aesthetic totality, one which embraces their social and historical meanings. Thus, the looseness of composition that characterizes many of these works, for example, is often

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a response to features or qualities of the urban environment that are given expressive force in this way and that also serve as vehicles for the sculpture’s overall impact. Finally, as in Hemingway’s approach, these sculptures, too, require the viewer to assemble meaning from the entities at hand: the site, the materials, the forms, and their physical, emotional, and intellectual effects. This is an act of reflection but also of construction; it looks back to the process of construction of the sculpture itself and it also figures metaphorically for the modernist commitment to the (re)construction of the social world. The contemporary sculptures in Berlin on which this chapter focuses were created during a concentrated time period, from the last years of the divided city through the first dozen or so years following reunification. The pace of appearance of new works that share their character has slowed, if not stalled. No doubt this is due at least in part to much-curtailed funding as a result of municipal budgetary constraints. But aside from this, the question arises of whether such sculptures will continue to be produced. Do the conditions that fostered the creation of this distinctive approach to public sculpture continue to exist? It is possible that the momentum created by the fall of the Wall and reunification, the early euphoria that these evoked and the sense of new liberatory possibilities that they stimulated, was a crucial impetus for the development of sculptural forms that are so acutely attuned to the structure and history, and therefore a vision of the future, of the city. As scholar Barry Curtis has observed, “cities as a matrix of routes, junctions, and structures function as a compelling metaphor for memory.”92 Postreunification sculptures in Berlin seem distinctive for embodying this insight by working with urban features to create what Carl Schorske called “spatially dramatized memory.”93 And yet the past remains “embattled” in Berlin, a city that Konrad Jarausch describes as having an “insecure memory culture, full of taboos and given to controversy.”94 Others have emphasized the repeated destruction of evidence of the past, seen strikingly since reunification in the demolition of buildings and monuments from the period of the GDR regime. In contrast to the efforts to recover history that began in the 1960s, these acts are construed by some as reflecting the longing to manufacture a new history, an alternative past.95 The much-contested destruction of the Palast der Republik was as complex and expensive a project as were many concurrent construction projects; the decisive erasure of the past it represented and that its replacement by the Humboldt Forum signals may have cast a pall over initiatives dedicated to reflection on Berlin’s history. Desire for premature closure—as evidenced in the

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recontextualization of the Herbert Baum Memorial Stone and in the selection of the June 17, 1953 memorial—translates into rejection of nuanced considerations of the history of division; this is a concern that we will return to in the next chapter. In addition, such ascendant tendencies to suppress the recent past may be intensified by the desire to cultivate global capital that continues to characterize the market-driven urban redevelopment environment. Yet change is an open-ended process in Berlin; the end date for redevelopment is not fixed. Only as Berlin’s reconstruction continues will it be possible to assess whether and in what ways the sculptural reclamation of the urban realm remains a meaningful, ongoing project. As the drive waned to support the urbanfocused public sculptures that we have focused on here, however, the impetus to memorialize the Berlin Wall gained ground. In the next chapter, we consider how this new development, the official Memorial to the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Strasse, contributes to understandings of the city and its past.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6 7

I do not discuss here any of the numerous temporary sculptures constructed in Berlin in this period, of which Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Wrapped Reichstag” (1995) is the most well-known. Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origins,” K. Forster and D. Ghirardo, trans. Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 21–50; originally published 1903. See, for example, Francoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, Lauren M. O’Connell trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Rudy Koshar, Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the 20th Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). For an analysis of developments in the US context, see Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002). James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) and At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Robert Musil, “Monuments,” in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author (New York: Penguin, 1995), 61; originally published 1936. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner, 2003), 185, originally published in 1929.

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Siegfried Giedion, “The Need for a New Monumentality,” in Paul Zucker, ed. New Architecture and City Planning: A Symposium (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), 550. 9 For the period before reunification, this study focuses on developments in West Berlin. The traditions and roles of sculpture in the GDR follow a separate trajectory that is only touched on here. Due to its related context, I also exclude discussion of the Soviet War Memorial in the Tiergarten. 10 The most comprehensive compilation of sculptural memorials can be found in Eva-Maria Klother, Denkmalplastik nach 1945 bis 1989 in Ost- und West-Berlin, dissertation, Frei Universität am Fachbereich Geschichtswissenschaften, 1997. 11 I am excluding here the three Soviet War Memorials (Tiergarten, 1945; Treptower, 1949; Schönholzer Heide, 1949) since they were executed by Soviet designers within the more specific context of the Soviet program for Eastern Bloc memorials to Red Army soldiers. 12 Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Skulpturenboulevard Kurfürstendamm Tauentzien: Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Berlin 1987, Projekt- und Künstlerdarstellung (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1987), cited in succeeding notes as Skulpturenboulevard; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Berlin 1987: Skulpturenboulevard Kurfürstendamm Tauentzien, Diskussionsbeiträge (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1987); Hans Dickel and Uwe Fleckner, eds. Kunst in der Stadt: Skulpturen in Berlin 1980–2000 (Berlin: Nicolai, 2003). Vostell’s use of the term “assisted ready-made” pays homage to Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp. 13 Kunstverein, Skulpturenboulevard, 236. 14 Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 190; see also Kunstverein, Skulpturenboulevard. 15 See Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 39–41. 16 See Koshar, ch. 7, as well as the same author’s From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory 1870–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 238. 17 Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 41. 18 Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Orte des Errinerns (Berlin: Bezirksamt Schõneberg, 1998); Senatsverwaltung fuer Bau- und Wohnungswesen, Kunst im Stadtraum (Berlin: Städtebau und Architektur Bericht 1994), 29; Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 152–4; Elissa Rosenberg, “Walking in the City: Memory and Place,” The Journal of Architecture 17, no. 1 (2012): 131–49. See also Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Young, At Memory’s Edge. For a critical perspective, see Juliet Koss, “Coming to Terms with the Present,” Grey Room, Summer 2004: 116–31. 19 Karen E. Till and Julian Jonker, “Spectral Ground in New Cities: Memorial Cartographies in Cape Town and Berlin,” in Uta Staiger, Henriette Steiner, 8

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Andrew Webber, eds. Memorial Culture and the Contemporary City: Building Sites (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 88. 20 Rosenberg, “Walking in the City,” 134. 21 Berlinische Galerie, Gedenken und Denkmal exh. cat (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1988). This intentional monument is related to similar signboards that were originally functional but that became memorials as a result of historical change, such as directional signs in West Berlin posting cities that were in the DDR, USSR, or Poland, as recorded in photos in Ewan Butler, City Divided: Berlin 1955 (New York: Praeger, 1955), n.p. A monument identical to the one on Wittenbergplatz can be found on Kaiser-Wilhelm-Platz. 22 Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” 34. See Paul Stangl, “The Vernacular and the Monumental: Memory and Landscape in Post-War Berlin,” GeoJournal 73 (2008): 245–53, for an earlier consideration of the blurred boundaries between the two. 23 Perhaps the best-known example is the excavation and exhibition of the “Topography of Terror.” See Till, The New Berlin. 24 See, for example, Hardt-Waltherr Hämer, Idee, Prozess, Ergebnis: Die Reparatur und Rekonstruktion der Stadt (Berlin: Senator für Bau- und Wohnungswesen, 1984). 25 Koshar, Germany’s Transient Pasts, 310. 26 See Klother. Ralf Schüler and Ursulina Schüler-Witte were the architects of the International Congress Center (1973–9). 27 Another link in this network is the pedestal for an unrealized statue of Liebknecht that is situated at Potsdamer Platz. 28 Destroyed by the Nazis, new gravestones were put in place in 1951. 29 On these, see Barbara Könczöl, “Reinventing a Socialist Heroine: Commemorating Rose Luxemburg after Unification,” in David Clarke and Ute Wölfel, eds. Remembering the German Democratic Republic: Divided Memory in a United Germany (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 77–87, and Riccardo Bavaj, “Memorializing Socialist Contradictions: A ‘Think-Mark’ for Rosa Luxemburg in the New Berlin,” in Bill Niven and Chloe Paver, eds. Memorialization in Germany since 1945 (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 287–97. 30 Könczöl, “Reinventing a Socialist Heroine,” 85. 31 See Bavaj, Memorializing Socialist Contradictions.” 32 See Helmut Caspar, Marmor, Stein und Bronze: Berliner Denkmalgeschichten (Berlin: Berlin Edition, 2003). 33 Stefanie Endlich and Bernd Wurlitzer, Skulpturen und Denkmäler in Berlin (Berlin: Stapp Verlag, 1990), 165. 34 Sabine Kaldemorgen, Berliner Gedenkorte (Erfurt: Sutton Verlag, 2005), 16–17. 35 Daniel Libeskind, The Space of Encounter (New York: Universe, 2000) and “Global Building Sites—Between Past and Future,” in Staiger et al., 69–81. See also Janet Ward, Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space and Identity (Houndmills, Basingstoke

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and Hampshire, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 260–76; Paul B. Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), ch. 4. 36 Libeskind, The Space of Encounter, 23–9. 37 Radio Bremen, “Neuer Standort für Rufer-Bronze-Statue vor dem Funkhaus,” November 23, 2007, https://www.radiobremen.de/unternehmen/presse/ unternehmen/pressemitteilung5522.html 38 “Friedensrufer nach Osten,” Der Tagesspiegel, May 2, 2008, https://www. tagesspiegel.de/berlin/friedensrufer-nach-osten/1224382.html 39 Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 112–14. See also the rich discussion in John Czaplinka, “History, Aesthetics, and Contemporary Commemorative Practice in Berlin,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 155–87. 40 Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, KunstStadtRaum: 21 Kunstprojekte im Berliner Stadtraum (Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, 2002); Kunst im Stadtraum; Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 51–63. 41 Translation from Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 274. 42 On the Enlightenment history and significance of the site, see Horst Bredekamp, Berlin am Mittelmeer (Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 2018), 45–57, 134–6. 43 Kunst im Stadtraum, 46. 44 Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 149–51. 45 KunstStadtRaum; Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 56–7. 46 Sabine Kaldemorgan, Berliner Gedenkorte (Erfurt: Sutton Verlag, 2005), 50–1; Stumbling Stones in Berlin (Berlin: Aktives Museum Faschismus und Widerstand in Berlin, Koordinierungsstelle Stolpersteine Berlin, Kulturprojekte Berlin, 2014); Michael Imort, “Stumbling Blocks: A Decentralized Memorial to Holocaust Victims,” in Niven and Chloe Paver, eds. Memorialization in Germany Since 1945 (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 233–43. Most sidewalks in Berlin are partially cobblestoned, the word for which is Kopfsteine. This ongoing work recalls Jan Dibbets’s Arago-Meridien (1994), in which he embedded 135 bronze plaques in Paris pavements to create an imaginary line that memorializes French astronomer Francois Arago and the meridian he traced through Paris; see Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). 47 Imort, “Stumbling Blocks,” 234. 48 See Till, The New Berlin; Ward, Post-Wall Berlin, 239–59. 49 “Houseball” was originally created for Oldenburg’s and van Bruggen’s 1995 retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Its history goes back another decade, however, to their performance at the Arsenal in Venice in connection with another work, “Knife/Ship.” “Houseball” incorporates the

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belongings of “Georgia Sandbag,” van Bruggen’s character in the performance piece, who represented Georges Sand reincarnated as an itinerant travel agent. See Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995). Norbert Martins, Giebelphantasien: Berliner Wandbilder (Berlin: HetStein, 1989), 97; Andreas Conrad, “Dokumentar der verschwindenden Stadt,” Tagespiegel, April 11, 2018, https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/fassadenmalerei-in-berlindokumentar-der-verschwindenden-stadt/21160500.html. The mural is on a rear wall at Richardstrasse 99. KunstStadtRaum, 30. Representing the placement of the West-facing Wall, and marked by inscriptions that are meant to be read from the West side, the cobblestones reflect the “typical Western perspective,” as Thomas Flierl observed, quoted in Anna Saunders, Memorializing the GDR: Monuments and Memory after 1989 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2018), 200. This is discussed more fully in Chapter 4. KunstStadtRaum, 18–19; Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 100–1; Saunders, Memorializing the GDR, 201–7. As Saunders notes (2018, 206), the absorption of these figures at new construction sites makes manifest the unification process itself, at least in terms of physical urban development. For more on this theme, see Chapter 4. Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 101. KunstStadtRaum, 20–1. Basch’s work is no longer extant. Kaldemorgen, 100–1. KunstStadtRaum; Kunst im Stadtraum; Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 108–9. Kunst im Stadtraum. Nelly Sachs, O the Chimneys (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), this poem translated by Michael Roloff. Koppenplatz was the site of a cemetery for the poor c. 1700–1850, following which it became a square surrounded by housing. See the artists’ website at https://christine-gersch.de/oeffentlicher_raum/ oeffentlicher_raum_pocketpark.html as well as local reportage such as “Weiße Schrankwand für die „Gute Stube“?” Pankower Allgemeine Zeitung, November 17, 2014, https://www.pankower-allgemeine-zeitung.de/weise-schrankwand-fur-diegute-stube/ Kunst im Stadtraum, 3. See also Karin Schittenhelm, Zeichen, die Anstosserregen: Mobilisierungsformen zu Mahnmalen und zeitgenoessischen Aussenskulpturen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996). The sculpture has achieved acceptance more recently for its now-retro appeal. Brian Ladd, “Center and Periphery in the New Berlin: Architecture, Public Art, and the Search for Identity,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 22, no. 2 (2000): 18.

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64 See Ute Heimrod, Günter Schlusche, and Horst Seferens, eds. Der Denkmalstreit - das Denkmal? Die Debatte um das Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Berlin: Philo, 1999). 65 Hiltrud Ebert, “Ereignisse und Opfer,” in Neuen Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Verlorene Inhalte, Verordnetes Denkmal: Beiträge zum Wettbewerb 17. Juni 1953 (Berlin: NGBK, 2000), 35. 66 Ibid., 8. On this memorial, see also Anna Saunders, “Challenging or Concretizing Cold War Narratives? Berlin’s Memorial to the Victims of June 17, 1953,” in Niven and Chloe Paver, eds. Memorialization in Germany Since 1945 (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 298–307, as well as Chapter 4, “June 17, 1953 Uprisings: Remembering a Failed Revolution,” in Anna Saunders, Memorializing the GDR: Monuments and Memory after 1989 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2018), 159–74. 67 Ebert, 35. On the multiple memories and meanings of June 17, 1953, see Richard Millington, “Remembering the Uprising of June 17, 1953,” in David Clarke and Ute Wölfel, eds. Remembering the German Democratic Republic: Divided Memory in a United Germany (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 157–66. 68 On this response see also Wolfgang Kil, “Der 17. Juni - ein Erinnerungsdiktat?” in Gründerparadiese: Vom Bauen in Zeiten des Übergangs (Berlin: Verlag Bauwesen, 2000), 112–17. 69 Bojana Pejic, “Katharina Karrenberg: Galerie Barbara Weiss, NGBK,” Artforum (April 1993), https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/199304/katharinakarrenberg-56148 70 KunstStadtRaum; Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 45–7. 71 https://walled-in-berlin.com/j-elke-ertle/story-behind-max-lingner-wall-mural/; http://www.max-lingner-stiftung.de/leben-und-werk. Max Lingner had been a founding member of the exile organization, Kollektiv deutscher Künstler (Collective of German Artists), in Paris in 1935, and was active organizing exhibitions; see Keith Holz, “Scenes from Exile in Western Europe: The Politics of Individual and Collective Endeavor among German Artists,” in Stephanie Barron, ed. Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997), 45, 391. 72 Saunders, “Challenging,” 306. 73 Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), ch. 3. 74 Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Erhalten, Zerstören, Verändern? Denkmäler der DDR in Ost-Berlin (Berlin: Aktives Museum Faschismus und Widerstand, 1990). The most well-known instance of this has been the treatment of the Palast der Republik. 75 It was hard to avoid the political basis of this decision; the decision-makers—the mayor and the senator responsible for protection of monuments—were members

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of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, which had taken a stand in favor of demolishing the Lenin monument. See Gamboni, ch. 3; Mia Lee, “GDR Monuments in Unified Germany,” in Niven and Paver, 308–17. 76 Milla and Partners, “Bürger in Bewegung,” http://www.milla.de/projekte/dasnationale-freiheits-und-einheitsdenkmal; also see http://www.freiheits-undeinheitsdenkmal.de; http://www.dw.com/en/bundestag-gives-green-light-tocontroversial-german-reunification-monument/a-39093773. Also see Saunders, Memorializing the GDR, 251–68. 77 Konrad H. Jarausch, “Living with Broken Memories: Some Narratological Comments,” in Christoph Klessmann, ed. The Divided Past: Rewriting Post-war German History (New York: Berg, 2001), 182. 78 Quoted in Koshar, Germany’s Transient Pasts, 130–1. 79 Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst; Mary Fulbrook, “Historical Tourism: Reading Berlin’s Doubly Dictatorial Past,” in Staiger et al. Another much-debated recontextualization took place at the Neue Wache. 80 Taut’s observation about the danger of memorial layering is more pointed than Owen J. Dwyer and Derek H. Alderman’s neutral description of memorials as “palimpsests” susceptible to “over-writing, embellishment, and erasure;” see “Memorial Landscapes: Analytic Questions and Metaphors,” GeoJournal 73 (2008): 169. 81 Michael North, “The Public as Sculpture: From Heavenly City to Mass Ornament,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed. Art and the Public Sphere (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 28. For the enlarged construal of the public sphere that is referred to here, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Nancy Fraser, ed. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1977), 69–98. 82 Andreas Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 58. 83 Ibid., 71. On marketing Berlin, see Claire Colomb, Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post-1989 (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). 84 Leslie Sklar, The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities, and Capitalist Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 229. 85 Kwon, One Place after Another, 179. 86 This land had been the site of the Ministerial Gardens; hence, it belongs to the state. It lay within the leveled strip of the Wall zone during the GDR regime. 87 Henrik Reeh, Ornaments of the Metropolis: Siegfried Kracauer and Modern Urban Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994). 88 Mary Douglas, “Introduction,” in Maurice Halbwachs, ed. The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper and Row, 1980),

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The City as Subject 5; Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). On memory and history, see also M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) and Young, The Texture of Memory. Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” 38. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 197. In an example from the literature of urban peregrination, Eric Hazan strikingly memorializes long-gone heroes, streets, and local establishments of Old Paris by listing them in a similarly unrhetorical way. Eric Hazan, The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps, trans. David Fernbach (London, New York: Verso, 2010); see, for example, 292–3; Eric Hazan, A Walk through Paris: A Radical Exploration, trans. David Fernbach (London and New York: Verso, 2018), 13–14. Another striking parallel is found in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 2001; originally 1941), 10, where James Agee describes what he would have preferred to accompany collaborator Walker Evans’ photographs: “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement.” Barry Curtis, “That Place Where: Some Thoughts on Memory and the City,” in I. Borden, J. Kerr, J. Rendell, and A. Pivaro, eds. The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 62. Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Culture and Politics (New York: Random House, 1980), 65. Jarausch, “Living with Broken Memories,” 188–9. Philipp Oswalt, Berlin, Stadt Ohne Form: Strategien einer anderen Architektur (Munich: Prestel, 2000), 56.

4

The Memorial Landscape of the Berlin Wall More than most cities, Berlin is densely skeined with both intentional and unintentional monuments and memorial landscapes that materially articulate its layered past. They plot a memory cityscape, which not only provides nodes of historical information about the city’s past, but also points to how aspects of that history are embedded within the city’s urban structure and built form.1 Beyond the textbook figures and events that such monuments typically represent, the history that Berlin’s memory cityscape traces is often that of its citizens, everyday Berliners whose daily lives were shaped, and sometimes interrupted, by the larger forces of public life. This chapter focuses on one specific memorial landscape’s contribution to the network of sites within Berlin’s memory cityscape that specifically commemorate in diverse ways the history of the city’s division between 1949 and 1989. The Memorial to the Berlin Wall and Its Victims and to the Division of the City at Bernauer Strasse is the official Berlin and federal German site dedicated to recognition of the Wall’s history and victims. Completed in 2014, it runs for 1.4 kilometers within a residential area outside the central city. Other sites are designated for remembering and recounting Cold War confrontations across the border, spy exchanges, the processes that were required for visitors coming to the East or going to the West, and other Wall protocols that shaped movement and reflected the border’s geopolitical significance. The Bernauer Strasse Memorial is dedicated to providing the history of the Wall’s construction, evolution, and peaceful destruction; a sense of no-man’s land and its regime of surveillance; traces of challenges to the Wall’s impenetrability; insights into the Wall’s impact on the city’s urban structure; as well as collective and individual memorials to those whose lives were lost at the Wall. There are many reasons to look more closely at this memorial landscape now that it is finished, although, as we will see, in some respects its forms and surroundings continue to evolve. It is a complex and ambitious ensemble of architectural, sculptural, spatial, and graphic elements that incorporates relics

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of the Wall zone, markers for razed Wall emplacements, previous memorial structures, new memorials to victims of the Wall, information steles, and many other features. This chapter examines, through close analysis of the memorial landscape, how all of these work to create a meaningful experience of the space and what understandings of the history of the Wall they yield. The idea of memorializing the Wall underwent a long period of gestation before it was conceptualized finally as an “open-air exhibition” along Bernauer Strasse. From the moment of reunification, there had been a few voices championing the value of maintaining the material record of the Wall for its unique ability to document Berlin’s chapter within the history of the Cold War. According to one report, even one week before the Wall fell, a group of citizen-scholars in West Berlin called for vigilance to preserve the Wall whenever the city’s division might end.2 On October 2, 1990, the day before unification, the East Berlin City Council voted to protect the sections of the Wall along Bernauer Strasse.3 In 1991, on the heels of the destruction of the Wall, the Frankfurt Architecture Museum held an exhibition to explore how to address the Wall’s absence through treatments of the zone where it once stood. There were proposals by a score of architects, but the late Zaha Hadid’s was the most prescient regarding retention of the Wall’s spatial remains. She recommended that the zone be preserved, arguing that “to prevent it from being covered by homogenous commercial development” it “should remain retrievable as a field across the city, which would allow reinterpretation with a new public programme …. It is delicate, vulnerable and witness to Berlin’s separation. To establish the 19th-century Berlin block over this ribbon of non-territory would erase all memory.”4 There were local voices, such as that of Sabine Weissler, the Berlin Green Party’s cultural spokesperson, who also favored retention, declaring that “the Wall did not just divide Berlin, it also made it an island. The Wall is the key to understanding the past 30 years of the city.”5 Nevertheless, at this early point in the city’s dramatic process of transformation, in 1992, the Berlin Senate rejected the idea of developing any plan that would shape, and thus permanently inscribe, the border as a whole.6 It is well known now that the rapidity with which the Berlin Wall was removed led to a vivid sense of absence by the end of the 1990s. By then it was recognized that a material feature that had defined Berlin’s identity since 1961, and that had become the emblem of geopolitical tensions and the threat of nuclear war, whose status as icon was forged through its starring role in many novels and films, had all but disappeared. This was underscored by the first study of the remains of

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border installations by Polly Feversham and Leo Schmidt that was published in 1999.7 A few hundred meters of Wall stood isolated in several spots of the city, but the course the Wall had run, and the shape and elements of its emplacement, had become unclear to many, especially to local youth, newcomers, and visitors to the city. This chapter recounts some of the debates and initiatives during the 1990s concerning the fate of the Wall and how recognition of renewed interest in its remains led to a new concept for Wall memorialization. There were multiple constituencies with interests in the project of Wall memorialization. These included the spectrum of federal and municipal political parties, neighborhood activists, district leaders, and Wall victims’ organizations, among others. Some of these emerge as significant for understanding decisions about how the Bernauer Strasse memorial landscape was realized. The influence of conservative political views and victims’ associations becomes especially evident when we look at how the memorial landscape sustains a Western angle of view on the history of the Wall, to the detriment of incorporating more complex Eastern experiences and perspectives. In addition to addressing the history of the Wall and memorializing its victims, the mandate of the Bernauer Strasse memorial landscape was to speak to the division of the city. The site’s location outside the city center, in a residential neighborhood, may raise questions about its selection for the placement of such a consequential memorial; indeed, dissenting voices were raised when this site was designated. Some considered other sites, such as the Brandenburg Gate, more appropriate exactly on account of its central location and particular relationship to the Wall. The viewing platform on the west side of the Brandenburg Gate, for example, which allowed visitors to look over the Wall to this iconic but off-limits structure and past it into the no-man’s land of Berlin’s once-grand Pariser Platz, had been a standard photo-op for dignitaries coming to West Berlin and for ordinary tourists alike. The scale and significance of the remains at Bernauer Strasse, however, ensured that it was a stronger contender as the principal site for this memorial. In addition to the presence there of the longest extant run of the Wall and of locations along the street where many had lost their lives trying to defy its regime of separation, this site spoke most directly to the division of the city; the Wall was more deeply integrated there into the daily lives of ordinary Berliners whose neighborhood it had fractured. There was also considerable drama that played out at the Wall along Bernauer Strasse, taking multiple forms, many of which could be presented through the stories of individual people. Unlike suspenseful spy exchanges that took place elsewhere and gained notoriety through film and fiction, events that transpired

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at Bernauer Strasse lend themselves to a deeper consideration of the intertwined urban and human consequences of living in a divided city. When I began to visit Bernauer Strasse in 1999, during my first lengthy stay in Berlin, I was drawn by the question of how neighborhoods outside the center were recuperating from having been split by the Wall and how that affected reorganization of the city as a whole. While the enormous and expensive tasks of reconnecting infrastructure—streets, transportation, and utilities—dominated the city’s energies, each of the sites where the Wall had stood bore traces of its division differently, and reintegration proceeded along a different course and at a different pace at each one. Many, including Bernauer Strasse, were characterized by varieties of temporary uses amid wild, increasingly overgrown landscapes (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). Some had been targeted for redevelopment aimed at modernizing and normalizing neighborhoods by creating new identities for areas previously marginalized by their border situation; Potsdamer

Figure 4.1  Amusement rides within the Berlin Wall zone at Bernauer Strasse (Author, 2002).

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Figure 4.2  The “wild” landscape of the Bernauer Strasse no-man’s land in 1999 (Author, 1999).

Platz is a familiar and extravagant example of this, but other areas outside the center followed this pattern. At Bernauer Strasse, in addition to a long section of remaining Wall, there was already, almost a decade after reunification, a muchcriticized, isolated memorial structure, but no significant redevelopment had taken place there. The few thousand visitors who were drawn annually to the site also encountered typed sheets posted in an improvised way on fencing; these recounted the history of the Church of the Reconciliation that had once stood within no-man’s land, whose pastor was a fervent champion of memorialization of the past from his parish base across the street. The former Wall zone at Bernauer Strasse was otherwise undefined; it was neither an official park, nor a memorial, nor a bridge between the now very different neighborhoods on either side. It was, however, redolent with the sense of a rich history. The decision of the Berlin Senate in 2006 to create a network of Wallrelated memorials within which Bernauer Strasse would mark a principal node confirmed recognition that an official version of that history was needed. Completed roughly a decade later, one measure of its success has been the increasing thousands of visitors it has attracted each year; another was the award its designers received for the project’s first phase from the German Academy for Urban Development and Regional Planning, in recognition of the

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authenticity, expressive power, and sympathy for the victims that the memorial embodies.8 Among its other effects, the Memorial introduces public space of citywide— indeed, of national and international—significance into a residential setting. In a sense, the Wall endures here beyond its physical substance; just as this site drew outsiders to its viewing platforms on the West Berlin side during the period of division, so it remains a “sight,” an exceptional space subject to scrutiny by strangers (Plate 29). This includes not only the remnants of the Wall and the Wall zone, but their surroundings as well, the neighborhood that they divided. What that neighborhood was like, what happened to it when the Wall was erected, and how it has been affected by the fall of the Wall are themes that this chapter also addresses. Close study of Bernauer Strasse’s historical urban and social context deepens both temporal and spatial understandings of the Wall’s impact on its surrounding neighborhood. To begin at this point—planting our feet on the ground of the site and its history—provides a foundation for this chapter’s focus on the urban forms and social implications of the memorial landscape. This focus extends to the Bernauer Strasse memorial landscape’s relationship to the wider memorial cityscape. Charged to commemorate the division of the city, the Memorial’s Wall zone continues to perform that division, though not as harshly as it once did. But it is also part of an urban network of designated Wall memorials; how this memorial landscape connects thematically and formally to that network and to other objects within the memorial cityscape is addressed in this chapter in light of discussions in earlier chapters. Through both deliberate and perhaps more serendipitous means, the Bernauer Strasse memorial landscape contributes to a connective tissue of architectural, sculptural, and spatial forms throughout the city that constructs a memorial cityscape, performs the overcoming of the division of Berlin, and engages the dialogue on urban structure which previous public artworks initiated. It is arguable, finally, that the complex configuration of graphic, spatial, sculptural, and architectural features that comprise the Bernauer Strasse Memorial draws on the diverse vocabulary of visual forms that earlier artists, some of whose works we have examined, introduced into the realm of public art in Berlin. These earlier works provided permission, if not inspiration, to identify elements of urban and Wall infrastructure—exposed firewalls, embedded fixtures to support light-posts, the residual space of the Wall zone itself—as meaningful vehicles to convey both history and a sense of the physical experience of the Wall. While many elements of the Bernauer Strasse Memorial are didactic, we will recognize the re-appearance of motifs that embody both

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sculptural and architectural features—the network, the void, and the ground plane. Encountering metal bars inlaid in the lawn to denote the path of covert tunnels, for example, we will recall earlier sculptures that created precedents for the use of such a visual form, such as the double row of cobblestones or the Stolpersteine. Beyond the network of Wall-related memorials to which the Bernauer Strasse Memorial belongs, in other words, there is the network of public art that takes the city as its subject to which it relates as well, through its specific visual forms and through its mandate to address an important chapter in the history of the city. Finally, however, the analyses offered here suggest that the Memorial takes too narrow a view of this mandate to convey as rich a sense of the historical specificity inherent in urban structure as the other works of public art we have examined achieve. Through the extensive landscape of extant and excavated Wall features that the Memorial deploys, the Bernauer Strasse Memorial addresses the question not only of what the Wall was but of where it was. This chapter begins by examining the social and urban history of its site in the first section, “Where Was the Wall?” This grounds the following considerations of the Memorial itself in an awareness of larger patterns of neighborhood development of which the city’s division formed one part. Succeeding sections look at the serpentine route through debates and discussions that led to the memorial’s creation (second section, “Toward Memorialization”), the rich array of diverse exhibition strategies that the completed Memorial deploys (third section, “The Memorial Landscape”), and how Berlin’s ongoing redevelopment affects the shape of the Memorial (fourth section, “The Afterlife of the Memorial Landscape”). The fifth section, “The Persistence of Forgetting,” addresses the primarily Western perspective that the Memorial continues to promote. The final section, “The Memorial and the City,” returns to the scale of the city and considers how the memorial functions in relation to the larger themes of urban history and memory and the idea of the city that are the focus of this book. In February 2018, the date was passed that marked the point at which the Berlin Wall had been gone for as long a period as it had stood. In commemoration of the occasion, the exhibition at the German Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennial Architecture Exhibition, “Unbuilding Walls,” showcased and reflected on “developments in the former border space since the fall of the Wall,” and recognized the persistence of other walls throughout the world.9 This chapter extends the exhibition’s reflections on the German experience to consider more fully how memorialization of the Berlin Wall presents its history and that of the city.

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Where Was the Wall? The Berlin Wall divided the city spatially; yet, its impact was also temporal. When contiguous neighborhoods that had shared an urban history were sundered, they became subject to contrasting and changing urban development policies, resulting in different forms and timeframes of urban restructuring. To understand where the Wall was, and especially to grasp its implications for the division of the city, it is necessary to look beyond the border fortifications to the surrounding neighborhoods and at how their evolution was shaped over time by the Wall’s presence. The memorial landscape at Bernauer Strasse is set within neighborhood streetscapes that reflect both their more distant past and how historical forces continually reshaped them and their residents, before, during, and after the period of the Wall. This section investigates and situates the spatial setting of the Wall at Bernauer Strasse as it evolved in complex and diverse ways over time. The fact that the course of the Wall would run along Bernauer Strasse was determined in 1920 when numerous areas surrounding the historical core of central Berlin were amalgamated into what became known as Grossstadt Berlin, the metropolis of modern Berlin. As part of this process, twenty individual districts were created; Bernauer Strasse defined the border at this location between the districts of Wedding to the north and Mitte to the south.10 At the time, this division had no practical impact on the surrounding neighborhood, an eighteenth-century extension of the city called Rosenthaler Vorstadt.11 It did lay the groundwork, however, for the separation between the neighborhood’s northern and southern parts that occurred following the Second World War.12 The Soviet Union was the occupying power in Mitte, while Wedding was part of the French sphere of control. As relations among the Allies deteriorated, the division created by the border became more meaningful; beginning in 1949, different economic and social systems were in operation on either side of Bernauer Strasse, as Mitte to the south was part of East Berlin, Wedding to the north was a West Berlin district, and checkpoints between the two increasingly reinforced the distinction. The border became decisive, however, in 1961, with the construction of the Wall, which followed district boundaries. Divided by the Wall along Bernauer Strasse, the original neighborhood called Rosenthaler Vorstadt essentially ceased to exist. Rosenthaler Vorstadt had been laid out and settled in the 1750s by building craftsmen—masons and carpenters—from Saxony, who were invited by Friedrich II to develop a deforested tract outside the Rosenthaler Gate in the customs wall that

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surrounded the city center.13 It joined Berlin as an administrative area in 1808.14 Its growth spread northward to Bernauer Strasse, its working-class character reinforced through the development of factories specializing in machine building and ironworks beginning in the 1850s. These industries took advantage not only of the availability of local workers, but also of rail connections created by the construction of nearby Stettin Station in 1842. The neighborhood’s identity and ties to Berlin were strengthened by incorporation of the area north of Bernauer Strasse in 1861 and the elimination of the customs wall in 1867.15 In the Grunderzeit, or foundational years, following the creation of the German state in 1871, factory construction intensified, especially through the decision by AEG, the major, innovative electric company, to locate in the quarter north of Bernauer Strasse; its growth from the 1880s on resulted in a sprawling industrial complex that dominated the northwest quadrant of the neighborhood. Complementing these structures were apartment buildings and Mietskasernen, or rental barracks, the typical Berlin blocks built to house its expanding working-class population. Five-story apartment buildings constructed around courtyards, the largest Mietskasernen reached deep into city blocks through a series of courtyards that were often dark and cramped, allowing little light and air into the rooms overlooking them (Figure 4.3). Problems of overcrowding, poor sanitation, and minimal social infrastructure that characterized other working-class districts were also found here. The 1929 silent feature film, Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (Mother Krausen’s Journey to Happiness), was shot in Wedding and so preserves footage of this environment.16 In the same year, Franz Hessel published Walking in Berlin, in which he takes a walk “up Ackerstrasse to Wedding” and describes a “gigantic tenement building … an entire city’s worth of people … [a] textbook example of the residential dungeon of yesteryear.”17 He was walking along a major Rosenthaler Vorstadt axis and was probably referring to the Meyers Hof, a well-known apartment block comprising at least five courtyards and over 1,000 residents, along with trades and businesses of various sorts; modernist artist László Moholy-Nagy included images of it in his 1931 short film, Berliner Stilleben (Berlin Still Life).18 Those less fortunate, the indigent and the homeless, sheltered beneath a railroad bridge located a few blocks north of Bernauer Strasse, which was known locally as “Consumption Bridge” as recently as the postwar years.19 The population of the Rosenthaler Vorstadt had been drawn from a wide range of backgrounds, including immigrants from Central Europe as well as from other parts of Germany. There were Catholics, whose church, St. Sebastian (1893), was located a few blocks north of Bernauer Strasse, Jews, as well as

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Figure 4.3  View of courtyards in a nineteenth-century Mietskaserne, or “rental barracks,” in Rosenthaler Vorstadt (Author, 2016). In 1929, Franz Hessel described the “city’s worth of people” who lived in such tenements, “all sorts of professions are represented… Apostle Ministry, pumpernickel factory, ladies’ and children’s readyto-wear clothing, metalworking, leather stamping, a bathing facility, clothing press, butcher… and so on, and so many dressmakers, seamstresses, and coalmen living in the endless back and side buildings” (Walking in Berlin, 203).

Lutherans and other Protestant congregations. What united many of these diverse groups were their shared working-class experiences and activism; for example, the Communist Party’s newspaper, Die Rote Fahne, reported that in the area around the neighborhood’s Stettiner Bahnhof, “over 312 blocks and 14,615 tenants were known to be on strike in October 1932.”20 Most of the social amenities of the Rosenthaler Vorstadt were located in its southern half: a public bath (1888), a market hall (1888), a department store (1904), along with schools, churches, and a synagogue (1890s). A large hospital complex, founded in 1863, was situated on the north side of Bernauer Strasse; this remains an anchor in the area. The neighborhood also enjoyed a reputation as a site for convivial meals and entertainments. Vines had grown on the rise of the Weinberg, on its eastern side, for centuries, and sites for summertime outings along the Weinbergsweg were

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joined in the mid-nineteenth century by theaters and other amusements; these and others that dotted adjacent Brunnenstrasse were popular haunts among intellectuals and artists during the Weimar years of the 1920s.21 Destroyed during the war, in the following years the area was reconstructed by the GDR regime as a park, the Volkspark am Weinbergsweg. When the Second World War ended, 30 percent of the neighborhood had been destroyed; the toll was especially heavy north of Bernauer Strasse.22 Many residential buildings, the Stettin Station, some schools, some of the factory buildings, and the earliest church in the neighborhood, St. Elisabeth, built to designs by the renowned nineteenth-century architect, Friedrich Schinkel, were in ruins, and many other structures were severely damaged. Rubble was cleared, but rebuilding took place only slowly, especially south of Bernauer Strasse. The neighborhood north of Bernauer Strasse was increasingly referred to as Gesundbrunnen, distinguishing it from what continued to be called the Rosenthaler Vorstadt in Mitte. On the Mitte side of Bernauer Strasse, within the postwar Soviet sector, surviving factories were emptied of their equipment, which was claimed as reparations by the Soviet Union. The reduction in employment possibilities that such losses created induced some workers to seek jobs in West Berlin and, when commuting was not feasible, spurred the loss of population from the Soviet sector. Many damaged apartment blocks were razed. Hardly any new construction took place until the 1980s, and materials to repair and improve the old housing stock were not readily available, another impetus for movement to the West. The West Berlin section, part of postwar Wedding’s Gesundbrunnen neighborhood, was targeted for redevelopment from the early 1950s. Heinrich Suhr, a young city planner at the time, recounts that this neighborhood was infamous for its residents’ impoverishment and high rate of consumption and for its postwar high unemployment rate following the destruction or disassembly of factories. In 1954, the Ernst-Reuter-Siedlung, a “garden city” designed to promote residents’ “self-realization,” was dedicated23 (Plate 30). In place of an ironworks that had been destroyed in the war, the Ernst-Reuter-Siedlung transformed the site between Garten- and Ackerstrasse into a modern housing estate that was intended as a model for redevelopment throughout West Berlin.24 Cited as the largest reconstruction area in Europe at the time, it was seen as a counter-model to East Berlin’s residential rebuilding program along Stalinallee, elsewhere in the city.25 As a student of modernist architect Hans Scharoun, Suhr adopted his elder’s motto: “Where you live is not a commodity, but life itself ” (Wohnung ist nicht

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Ware, sondern das Leben selbst).26 This ideal treated housing as a support for life rather than either as an investment or as a drain on time, energy, and health. It spurred Suhr and other West Berlin planners to apply social and demographic analyses and up-to-date concepts of urban design to projects such as this, in order to determine and justify the ideal’s high standards. Designation of the area as a Sanierungsgebiet (renovation zone) meant that remaining Mietskasernen north of Bernauer Strasse were approved for demolition. The result was a new residential quarter of free-standing blocks surrounded by green spaces that brought light and fresh air into dwellings. Multi-storied apartment blocks of varied heights created irregular massing, while functional, floor-plan-driven patterns of irregularly sized windows and balconies set stark geometrical rhythms against asymmetrical, crisply unadorned wall planes. By the time the Wall was erected in 1961, then, the prewar character of the surrounding neighborhood had already been shattered and new patterns were slowly, and no doubt painfully, beginning to form (Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4  An overview of the Wedding (lower) and Rosenthaler Vorstadt (upper) building fabrics on either side of the Wall emplacements can be seen in a 1984 photo in Area D of the Berlin Wall Memorial. In this part of the site where Memorial elements are less prominent, graffiti is more apparent (Author, 2017).

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Following the district boundaries that had marked the separation between the Soviet and French sectors and that then became part of the border between East Berlin and West Berlin, the Wall ran for 1.4 kilometers—about seven blocks—along the length of Bernauer Strasse. It curved northward at both ends of the street, surrounding this area of Wedding on three sides. What made the situation of the Wall especially unusual along the stretch of Bernauer Strasse was the location of the boundary. Typically, it ran along the roadway. Here, however, the border was the building line, the edges or façades of the properties lining the southern side of the street. It was this peculiarity that drew international attention to Bernauer Strasse when the Wall was first erected in 1961. It was possible in the earliest days for people who wanted to leave East Berlin to climb or jump out of the windows of buildings on Bernauer Strasse to the sidewalk below, which was in West Berlin. Many people did just that. Danger increased when the East German authorities blocked the lower windows; people still made the leap to the Western pavement, but one woman, Ida Siekmann, died in her attempt, an event that captured headlines around the world. Shortly thereafter, 137 families were forced by East Berlin authorities to leave their apartments on Bernauer Strasse, the buildings were barricaded, and their windows were cemented over.27 The buildings themselves then became the Wall along this stretch of Bernauer Strasse; their lower façades served in this way until they were razed and replaced with a revised Wall structure in 1975. In the West Berlin neighborhood north of Bernauer Strasse, new construction continued into the early 1970s, with a late entry from 1974–7 designed by Josef Paul Kleihues for the site of a remaining, derelict Mietskasern located directly at the Wall. He replaced this with a perimeter block that echoed the earlier structure’s relationship to the street, but which opened at its canted corners to a large, green, communal courtyard within. The references to the past, orientation to the public street as well as to an accessible inner space, and clear, modernistderived geometrical ordering of elevations became hallmarks of Kleihues’s concept of “critical reconstruction.” This term would become more familiar as well as more contentious in the first decade after reunification, when it hardened into a formula for acceptable design in the city center. As the area north of Bernauer Strasse was rebuilt with housing, the neighborhood took on the character of a homogeneous “bedroom community,” offering little in the way of urban social infrastructure.28 Residents there had depended on facilities located mainly along the southern blocks of Brunnenstrasse, traditionally the commercial hub of the neighborhood, as well as elsewhere on the Mitte side; these were no longer accessible once the

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Wall went up. Similarly, the cemeteries of the St. Sophia and St. Elisabeth congregations, the first sites to extend Rosenthaler Vorstadt to reach as far north as Bernauer Strasse in the first half of the nineteenth century, were inaccessible to both East and West Berliners because parts of them lay within the Wall zone. Small shops dotted the new residential blocks, but even these fell into disuse over time, especially those along Bernauer Strasse that had served both East and West Berliners; in photographs from the 1980s, these can be seen to have been boarded up29 (Figure 4.5). The Lutheran Church of Reconciliation (1894), situated on the south side of Bernauer Strasse, also became off-limits to residents on both sides when the Wall was built, since it was located within the Wall zone; in 1985, it was razed. In 1962, a nearby site on the north side of Bernauer Strasse at Ackerstrasse was selected for construction of a new community house, where functions of the Church could continue to be met. This was near a local institution for support of the poor, the Schrippenkirch, which had moved to the area from Kreuzberg in 1902 and was razed in 1980.30 The new community center was designed by Harald Franke, a student of architects Wassili and Hans Luckhardt.

Figure 4.5  Postwar shops, Wedding side of Bernauer Strasse. Photographs from the 1980s show many neighborhood shops to have been boarded up (Author, 2016).

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It was strongly modernist, with asymmetrical façades and massing. When the Grunderzeit apartment buildings across the side street were razed in 1965 and replaced with new housing, the community center fit in visually with its contemporary Wedding neighbors31 (Figure 4.6). While these and other religious institutions continued to offer anchors to area residents, their congregations were diminished by the loss of East Berlin members caused by the barrier of the Wall. In addition, the new Church of Reconciliation parish community center, where services began to be held in 1965, lost half of its parishioners by the beginning of the 1970s as a result of population shifts that had been created by urban redevelopment in the area.32 Surrounded on three sides by the Wall, this West Berlin neighborhood became increasingly isolated. Over time, the specific urban vision that its residential blocks exemplified ironically deepened its marginalization. In the course of the 1980s, the practice of “redevelopment through demolition”33 was repudiated in West Berlin in favor of achieving urban renewal through the use of preservationist practices, or what became known as “careful urban renewal.” As a result, city planner Suhr observed, the “sense of ongoing indifference” to this neighborhood, where the now-rejected planning and design policy so thoroughly marked the area, became entrenched.34 The battles for preservation

Figure 4.6  The Berlin Wall Memorial Documentation Center and Reconciliation Church parish and community center, 1965, with later extensions, including the observation tower at the right (Author, 2017).

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that rescued and revived other West Berlin neighborhoods, as earlier chapters recount, resulted here in the devaluation of once-celebrated new construction that had replaced older, traditional structures. In contrast to the razing and rebuilding of housing stock that took place on the West Berlin side of the Wall at Bernauer Strasse during the years of division, on the East Berlin side war-scarred buildings, outside toilets, and empty lots were still visible when the Wall came down (Figure 4.4). Both regimes had embraced similar ideals for modern housing to showcase their desire and ability to provide good lives for their citizens in a new society, sometimes engaging in competitive building programs in pursuit of this goal, but their means had been different. In the face of severe economic constraints, it had been East German policy to devote resources to the construction of new housing estates at the margins of the city, with plans eventually to raze old, neglected residential buildings in central districts in order to transform the image of the city through new construction. By the 1970s, convinced that housing needs could not be met through new building alone, East Berlin planners turned their attention to stabilizing the older residential fabric by repairing roofs and chimneys, upgrading utilities, and adding new educational, recreational, and shopping facilities in older areas. A pilot project for the technical, financial, and social modernization of a traditional neighborhood began in 1972 at Arnimplatz, in outer Prenzlauer Berg; it was planned to incorporate 6,500 units and a population of 17,200, although it is estimated that only one-third of the projected units were completed.35 Nevertheless, the project’s successful combination of modernization with respect for the architectural ensemble of units scaled to the traditional streetscape did encourage the growing movement for housing preservation in West Berlin that eventually formulated the policy and practices of cautious urban renewal. The acclaim achieved by this effort in East Berlin led to reshaping the housing program there by imposing strict limits on the destruction of old buildings. While it was intended as a holding action until the ideal of demolition and construction of a new city could be achieved, in the meantime several other pockets within traditional neighborhoods were restored. In the short term, the combination of neglect and this later policy shift in East Berlin ensured the preservation of nineteenth-century buildings, such as those in Rosenthaler Vorstadt, even when this came in advance of the ability to modernize them.36 Thus, the two parts of the former Rosenthaler Vorstadt shared little in common by the time the Wall fell except for some street names.37 As one scholar notes, the promise of a better life in older neighborhoods was at first seen, in

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both East and West Berlin, to lie in radical rebuilding. Only in West Berlin, however, was such a reconstruction program achieved, although it often came at the cost of problematic changes in social structure, too.38 Unable to engage in a similar program of renewal by demolition, East Berlin, instead, led the way in preserving the urban fabric, both inadvertently and deliberately. As a result, even without the presence of the Wall, the two sides of Bernauer Strasse were visually differentiated. Mitte maintained its nineteenth-century streetscapes, while modern apartment blocks reconfigured Wedding’s. As Axel Klausmeier and Leo Schmidt observe, this significant contrast in urban design creates a continuing, legible trace of the border.39 Within the preserved but generally neglected built environment south of Bernauer Strasse, however, alternative cultures flourished in the period of growing dissent before the Wall fell. Zion Church, the second to have been built in the Rosenthaler Vorstadt, in the 1860s, was the foremost Lutheran church remaining, since St. Elisabeth had been badly damaged by wartime bombardments and the Church of Reconciliation was unusable due to its location within the Wall zone and then was destroyed in 1985. At Zion Church during the 1980s, Pastor Hans Simon demonstrated civic courage by providing space for members of the opposition movement in East Berlin to meet and organize. In 1986, activists established a library of materials, the Umwelt-Bibliothek, which challenged the regime’s environmental views, and published a bulletin to disseminate news that was not available through official media.40 Artists and cultural activists also found appealing spaces within which to work and some began to occupy vacant apartment buildings. After the Wall fell, this became more common and contributed to the second major wave of Berlin house occupations in 1989–90, when youth, artists, and activists who were engaged in alternative living and cultural projects were attracted to buildings in the neighborhood that were standing empty, a development addressed more fully in Chapter 2. One last hold-out of this alternative scene, Schokoladen, remains on Ackerstrasse41 (Figure 4.7). A number of apartment houses that were squatted were restored and renovated by their occupants, whose right to possession was often later normalized. Renovations through public funding began to be made in the early 1990s. In the view of at least one writer, the period after the fall of the Wall was the most “anarchistic yet creative phase” in the entire history of the Rosenthaler Vorstadt.42 In 1994, the Berlin Senate’s Building, Living, and Transportation Administration designated the central part of the Rosenthaler Vorstadt as a renovation zone (Sanierungsgebiet, the same term used when the neighborhood

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Figure 4.7  Schokoladen, an activist base in Rosenthaler Vorstadt (Author, 2016).

in Wedding was redeveloped in the 1950s). This city-wide program now aimed to upgrade housing, public spaces, and social and educational facilities in older neighborhoods while maintaining their traditional character and social and economic mix. Such goals exemplified the policy of careful urban renewal that had been pioneered by urban design and citizen activists in the 1970s in West Berlin and was adopted as official city planning policy in 1983. Intended to preserve the integrity of traditional urban forms and existing inhabitants, this policy replaced the earlier approach to redevelopment through wholesale destruction and rebuilding that had altered the character of neighborhoods such as the one north of Bernauer Strasse. Redevelopment projects within the Sanierungsgebiet program in the Rosenthaler Vorstadt got underway by 1999 and were completed in 2009. Due to its attractive urban structure, proximity to the center, and the accomplishments

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of the renovation projects, however, as well as changes in municipal support for housing subsidies, by 2004 it was clear that the social character of the neighborhood had indeed changed along with its infrastructural improvements. As a report that year stated, 80 percent of its population had moved to the neighborhood since 1994, three-quarters were university-educated, the percentage of apartment owners had risen in relation to renters, and the average income in the district was higher than that in the city as a whole.43 These changes in turn anchored ongoing private sector building renovations and infill development. This transformation of the neighborhood south of Bernauer Strasse reinforced the contrast between the formerly East and West sides even as it complicated the nature of this contrast (Figure 4.8). Added to the even more apparent distinctions in their urban design that the renovations in Rosenthaler Vorstadt underscored were now significant social and economic distinctions of a contemporary kind. Stemming only partially from different experiences during the years of division, these distinctions grew out of processes of gentrification and ongoing local and global inequalities. While a new and wealthier population outnumbered remaining former residents in the Rosenthaler Vorstadt, in the area north of Bernauer Strasse population displacement in the period of postwar redevelopment and marginalization within West Berlin created stresses of a different sort. The municipal program that addressed the perceived problems in the Brunnenviertel, as the neighborhood was now known, was called Quartiersmanagement (neighborhood management). Beginning in 1999, this program focused not on housing stock and other physical improvements, as the Rosenthaler Vorstadt’s renovation program had; instead, it targeted disadvantaged neighborhoods in order to strengthen “education, public space, and social and ethnic integration.”44 Viewed by some scholars as an effort to stabilize already marginal areas, in 2005 the program incorporated the neighborhood north of Bernauer Strasse, whose “population with an immigration background,” averaging more than 60 percent, was seen as an indicator of the area’s fragility.45 The immigrant and working-class character of the Brunnenviertel neighborhood had become stronger, while the forces of gentrification had built on the renovations in the Rosenthaler Vorstadt to elevate its social profile. By 2013, the significance of this split was acknowledged in a Brunnenviertel newsletter describing an upcoming event as an “intercultural dialogue” on “Old Borders, New Borders,” drawing attention to as well as attempting to address this new frontier along Bernauer Strasse that had replaced the Wall.46 A similar recent effort to blur this border is represented by the NiemandsLand (no-man’s land) community garden

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Figure 4.8  A renovated façade in Rosenthaler Vorstadt that ironically takes note of the previous division of the city by proclaiming that “this building stood earlier in another country.” It may refer as well to the period following reunification, before the neighborhood’s physical and social transformation intensified (Author, 2016).

behind the Reconciliation Chapel; sponsored by local parishes, it aims to bring together residents of both neighborhoods in the common project of making the former Wall zone “fertile.”47 By the time the Wall was erected, then, the neighborhoods around it had already undergone significant change. Wartime destruction, Allied occupation, and contrasting urban redevelopment policies emanating from two different social, political, and economic systems acted to sever the original neighborhood of Rosenthaler Vorstadt at Bernauer Strasse. These circumstances propelled the two resulting neighborhoods on different courses of urban development. In Wedding, the policy of razing traditional structures in order to replace them with new cityscapes of modernist apartment blocks—arrangements of clear geometric forms playing against green spaces—emblematized progressive social ideals; they were to provide healthy surroundings and contemporary amenities as backdrops for the construction of good lives. While the ideals were similar in the GDR, their impact was not evident on the Mitte side of Bernauer Strasse, where older structures remained in place with little or no improvement. Both neighborhoods experienced change during the period in which the Wall stood. However, this had more to do with shifts in attitude toward the character

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that each had already assumed than with new interventions, with the exception of the significant destruction of buildings at the Mitte border, the “urban scar” that resulted from construction and surveillance of the Wall zone itself.48 Repudiation of the wholesale policy of renewal through demolition in West Berlin compounded the geographic and social marginalization of the Wedding neighborhood with the added stigmatization of its built form, while a new commitment to East Berlin’s traditional building fabric ensured preservation of the neighborhood south of Bernauer Strasse, even if little was done to restore or renovate it. The Wall divided these two neighborhoods physically, of course, in decisive ways. It blocked formerly connecting streets and separated people on both sides from places of worship and commemoration of their dead, as well as from each other. However, consideration of the structural urban transformations of the historical Rosenthaler Vorstadt as it evolved over time places these circumstances in a complex context of social, political, and design developments that broadens our understanding of urban division. As the division of Berlin is one of the major themes that the Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse addresses, the next sections look at the winding process that led only circuitously to support for such a memorial and to definition of that memorial’s role.

Toward Memorialization From the time of Ida Siekmann’s death when she attempted to flee East Berlin by leaping from a Bernauer Strasse window onto the West Berlin pavement below, the Wall itself—on the West Berlin side—became a memorial site to those who were killed in their attempt to cross the Wall zone. Their deaths were acknowledged by flowers, wreaths, crosses, and other markers placed as close as possible to the site of their demise (Figures 4.9 and 4.10). When the Wall was breached in November 1989, setting in motion the process of reunifying the city, it lost its purpose, becoming an “unintentional monument,”49 and it immediately became the responsibility of the Institute for the Care of Monuments (Denkmalpflege) of the GDR.50 Yet there was no single vision for its disposition. At this early date, the German History Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum) favored preserving the stretch along Bernauer Strasse for development as “an open-air exhibition, a museum and a memorial.”51 In December 1989, the interim GDR government and the East Berlin administration voted unanimously to raze the Wall.52 Reunified

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Figure 4.9  This Berlin Wall Memorial information stele commemorates Rudolf Urban, whose attempt to flee resulted in his death. The photo on the stele shows the original memorial erected to him in 1962 (Author, 2014).

Berlin’s Monument Authority (Landesdenkmalamt Berlin) supported a minimal program that would simply preserve the sections of the Wall that remained after its destruction. By Spring 1990, when the Bernauer Strasse subway station reopened, reestablishing transit connections at the former border, a citizens’ initiative led by civil rights activists from the former GDR had formed to develop a concept for preserving the Wall at Bernauer Strasse as a memorial site.53 A commitment to memorialize those killed at the site informed early discussions, championed especially by Manfred Fischer, who had served as pastor for the Church of Reconciliation parish since 1975. This church, dating from 1894 and rebuilt in the 1950s after severe wartime damage, had been isolated within the Wall zone along Bernauerstrasse until 1985, when it was blown up. Photographs of its dramatic destruction circulated widely in the media at the time. In 1975, the remaining façades of apartment buildings along the street had been destroyed and replaced with the then-current standard concrete Wall structure; in 1990, a 212-meter-long segment of the Wall was fenced off for preservation, under the

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Figure 4.10  This marker commemorating Rudolf Urban lies at the foot of the stele shown in Figure 4.9. It reproduces a marker that was in place here during the period of the Wall (Author, 2017).

auspices of the German History Museum.54 Fischer, who continued his work in the parish from the new Reconciliation parish community center that had been built in 1965, led efforts to reclaim the site of the church for his congregation and to preserve and memorialize the Wall in this location. Beginning in August 1990, he urged “wall-peckers” to refrain from chipping away pieces of the Bernauer Strasse Wall so that it could become a Wall memorial.55 Fischer publicized the site and sought to educate those few who visited it during the 1990s about the history of the Wall at this site by posting texts and documents along the wire fence at its border. The working committee that Fischer led held discussions about the future of the site with local residents, parish members, other citizens, and with city and district administrators, some of whom were opposed to retention of the Wall at this early moment following its fall. The matron of the Lazarus Hospital nursing home across Bernauer Strasse from the Wall maintained that the Wall’s continuing presence caused distress to residents who had been forced to live with it for so many years.56 The district mayor saw it as an obstacle to a planned road

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linking new stadia nearby that was part of a developing bid for Berlin to host the 2000 Olympic games. And in 1991, members of the St. Sophia church parish, whose cemetery had been desecrated by the construction of the Wall, protested against preservation of the Wall and reclaimed ownership of their property.57 But on the thirtieth anniversary of the Wall’s erection, in August 1991, the Berlin Senate approved the concept of a memorial to the Wall and its victims at Bernauer Strasse, including preserving part of the Wall and reconstructing noman’s land, from which material objects had already been removed.58 The Senate created a body, the Berlin Wall Association (Verein Berliner Mauer), to consider the form such commemoration should take, although until 1997 it existed only on paper.59 The following year, the state of Berlin received title from the federal government to the property along Bernauer Strasse where the Wall remained, and in 1993 the Berlin Senate returned to the St. Sophia parish the portion of it that the St. Sophia community had owned. Both parties then approved the construction of a memorial to “the victims of the Wall and the Wall.”60 The federal government hosted a competition to design this Wall memorial in October 1994, which attracted 259 entries. No first prize was awarded; instead, three entries received second prizes. These varied in their extension along Bernauerstrasse, from 70 meters to 210 meters. After much debate, the shortest design, submitted by the firm of Kolhoff and Kolhoff, emerged as the least controversial, and was selected by the federal government in 1995.61 Nevertheless, the parish of St. Sophia and the Mitte district administration, acting on their own initiative, removed thirty-two Wall panels, claiming that they stood on mass graves for victims of Second World War bombardments.62 After this claim was refuted by a committee of experts, work on the memorial began; it was dedicated by the federal government and the state of Berlin in 1998. Dedicated to the commemoration of victims and of the division of the city, its inscription was amended to read “In Remembrance of the Division of the City from August 13, 1961 to November 9, 1989 and to Commemorate the Victims of Communist Dictatorship;” the last words were added in response to critics, especially relatives of Wall victims, for whom identification of the perpetrators was regarded as essential. This Monument (the term used on the Berlin Wall Memorial website to differentiate it from the later memorial landscape63) is located behind a preserved 70-meter length of the Wall; one enters it through an opening in a tall Cor-ten steel wall along Ackerstrasse, around the corner from Bernauer Strasse. Between this steel wall and its facing double, both of which offer somewhat reflective surfaces that are intended to extend the site visually, the visitor encounters a

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gravel area within which a segment of the Wall zone has been reconstructed behind another concrete wall. The patrol road, raked sand, anti-tank barriers, light posts, and a guard tower are reproduced. Except for the tall watch-tower, these are only visible, however, through narrow slits in the concrete wall that is intended as a version of the East-facing Wall, running parallel to the preserved original Wall segment. Contained within the bounding steel walls, this “slice” of no-man’s land is presented as if it had been visible in this way from the East. In fact, it would not have been; no one would have been allowed to approach this close to the Wall on the East Berlin side, and it would not have had openings through which to see into the zone between the two Walls. The Monument elicited a storm of criticism.64 It was variously seen as too abstract and formal, as removed from everyday life and from the emotions the Wall evoked, and as too geographically remote.65 Scholars Gerd Knischewski and Ulla Spittler also observed that “the concept of the memorial seems overall confused, half-hearted and void of any true East German perspective.”66 Rather than settling the matter of a memorial, the Monument drew attention to the inadequacy of creating an artful reconstruction of no-man’s land against the backdrop of the largest surviving section of remains of the Wall and its zone, and threw into relief issues of authenticity and representation that would figure in ongoing deliberations.67 In 1997, the Berlin Wall Association (later the Berlin Wall Foundation) was revived and charged with responsibility for a documentation center. The Association sought to anchor large-scale historical developments represented by the construction of the Wall in local, place-based events and to highlight how these had shaped local human destinies. Drawing on an experience-based conception of ways to encourage empathy and historical understanding, the Association emphasized the value of authenticity to ensure that a “place be made to speak.”68 Pastor Fischer made the suggestion to transform the building that his parish had been using since 1965, across the street from the 1998 Monument, into an information center about the history of the Wall along Bernauerstrasse, with an observation platform to allow for views into the Kolhoff monument from above.69 Such a Documentation Center was founded in the community house in 1998; it struggled for funding, but opened with a photographic exhibition, Grenzblicke (border glimpses), which was installed in the community room in November 1999 and underwritten by the state of Berlin. Its second exhibition, Berlin, 13. August 1961, received funds from both the state of Berlin and the federal government. Both exhibits presented Bernauer Strasse as an historical

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synecdoche, a single story that could represent the larger epic of the Wall.70 Following renovations, the venue reopened in 2003 with enlarged exhibition and documentation spaces. It contained as well an administrative office for the Berlin Wall Foundation and an office for the church community. The viewing platform was also constructed at this time71 (Figure 4.6). In addition to supplementing the difficult viewing perspective offered within the Monument, the platform recalls those that had been erected at the Wall on the West Berlin side to provide tourists and others with glimpses into and across no-man’s land (Plate 29). Some scholars emphasize the resulting impression that this feature “reinstates a Western view” of the division of the city.72 A second structure within the Wall zone, the Chapel of Reconciliation, was dedicated in 2000; it was built to replace the church by that name that had been demolished in 1985 (Figure 4.11). Constructed over what had been the east end of the former church, and preserving a few of its surviving elements, the chapel is a rammed-earth structure designed by Berlin architects Peter Sassenroth and Rudolf Reitermann. Its organic materials and simple oval form underscore its elemental presence as a meditation space that is open to all. The Berlin Senate, which had first approved a general concept for memorializing the Wall and its zone in 1991, began to provide further direction in 2001, when the Senate Department for Urban Development commissioned a study of what remained from the Wall and its fortifications.73 This was undertaken between 2001 and 2003 by Leo Schmidt and Axel Klausmaier,

Figure 4.11  The footprint of the destroyed Church of Reconciliation is visible in front of the Chapel of Reconciliation (Author, 2011).

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architectural conservationists at the Technical University in Cottbus. They conducted a thorough inventory that led to publication of their 2004 guidebook, Mauerreste—Mauerspuren (Wall Remains--Wall Traces).74 The new facilities at the Documentation Center improved viewers’ access and allowed them to gain a more dynamic relationship to the site and to the history it represents. This led to increased numbers of visitors to the 1998 Monument, and in response to this a new working group formed to rethink the project. It sought to integrate the memory of the victims of the Wall at Bernauer Strasse into the wider social memory of the site and to do so in a more expansive way.75 Chaired by Gabriele Camphausen, in 2005 the group made a number of suggestions, including that the memorial encompass more experiential spaces to heighten understanding of the site’s history, that it create a place for memorializing individual victims, that it provide an information pavilion as a portal to the site, and that it mount large images on nearby buildings’ existing exposed firewalls to enable visualization of the period during which the Wall stood. Again, the group identified experiential practices as key elements of their elaborated plan.76 These proposals were soon concretized in the Berlin Senate’s master plan for Berlin Wall memorialization. Thomas Flierl, PDS Senator for Culture under Mayor Klaus Wowereit and former head of the Department for Urban Development, led a Senate working group that, informed by Schmidt and Klausmaier’s study of Wall remains, was charged with developing an overall concept (Gesamtkonzept) for memorialization of the Berlin Wall, a “narrative” that would unify scattered remains, sites, and plaques.77 Flierl first presented the group’s report and recommendations to the Senate in 2005 to considerable opposition, but it gathered support as it wound its way through the informational and deliberative processes, and the Gesamtkonzept was adopted in 2006.78 Coming fifteen years after the Wall’s destruction, this document was a response to increased interest in the Wall. Some of this interest represented increased activism on behalf of memorialization by victims’ organizations and others as an expression of their critical stance toward the PDS (the successor party to East Germany’s SED) and its role in the then-current red–red municipal government coalition.79 The Gesamtkonzept also took a frontal approach to considering how to frame and manage what remained of the Wall. Its recommendations provided a way to gain control over these sites in the face of external pressures, on the one hand, and of spontaneous uses to which they were being put, on the other. Berlin’s local control was threatened first of all in 2004 and 2005 by two proposals to interpret the Wall in a national framework; these were formulated

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by a group of federal representatives from across the political spectrum.80 In addition, competition for local control was mounted by a private memorial initiative in 2004 that drew criticism especially from those with a growing concern to maintain the authenticity of Wall traces and their exhibition. The Freiheitsmahnmal (Freedom Memorial) was erected by Alexandra Hildebrandt, owner of the private museum at Checkpoint Charlie that had for decades been a major tourist center for those interested in the history of the Wall. A memorial to those who were killed at the Wall, it consisted of a field of 1065 wooden crosses, set against a backdrop of 120 whitewashed Wall slabs.81 Like the 1998 Monument at Bernauer Strasse, this memorial and the border emplacements at nearby Checkpoint Charlie were reconstructions that strayed considerably from their objects’ original configurations and sites. The popular, or at least touristic, success of this memorial, however, provided support to those who, while critical of this particular intervention, nevertheless saw the need to accommodate the mandate for a Wall memorial to provide for both emotional and experiential expression. Among Berliners themselves there was less enthusiasm for a new memorial; a November 2004 poll indicated that only 26 percent favored an expanded memorial, although this number increased to 39 percent for those under thirty years of age.82 Initiatives such as these, however, impelled the city to recognize the need to develop a plan to coordinate remaining structures, to construct meaningful and accurate narratives, and to rely on authentic material remains at their original sites to explicate the history of the Wall.83 The proliferation of existing memorials—Flierl’s 2005 text noted that there were more than 100 sites of various sorts that were dedicated to a Wall victim or to the erection or fall of the Wall—called for coordination and control.84

The Memorial Landscape The Gesamtkonzept recognized that continuing interest in the Wall and its topographical course stemmed from its role as the key “material witness” to Berlin’s postwar development, to the division of the city, of Germany, and of Europe, and to the end of this division.85 Critical of exhibitions, such as Hildebrandt’s at Checkpoint Charlie and implicitly the 1998 Monument, that simulated, reconstructed, or transposed what had transpired at the Wall, the Gesamtkonzept designated Bernauer Strasse as the site that could with authenticity represent the city-wide division carved by the Wall and its zone.86

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It defined the site at Bernauer Strasse as the central memorial to the Wall and its victims and set it within the context of other Berlin sites’ relationships to this history. It designated Checkpoint Charlie, for example, as the site most expressive of the world-political impact of the Wall, and the East Side Gallery as representing most fully the Wall as a site for art. Wall remains and relationships at Potsdamer Platz, Niederkirchnerstrasse, and the Palace of Tears next to the Friedrichstrasse train station, among other sites, were each similarly thematized. All are linked by the Berlin Wall Trail, with its documentation markers, and the double row of cobblestones that trace the circuit of the West-facing Wall. The Gesamtkonzept also stressed signage and multiple means of communication that should connect all sites and markers, including an internet portal.87 As the site to commemorate the Wall and its victims and the division of the city, the Wall zone along Bernauer Strasse had the advantage of containing relics of no-man’s land emplacements as well as the longest remaining continuous run of the Wall, the existing 1998 Monument to the victims of the Berlin Wall, the Reconciliation Chapel, and the Documentation Center with its observation platform. Among its unique qualities was its ability to expressively demonstrate the many ways in which the Wall and its zone affected the structure of the city and its people. The drama of the site, from harrowing escapes and tragic failures to blowing up the no longer accessible Church of Reconciliation, also meant that it could recount and visualize personal experiences as well as news events that had shocked and fascinated the world. Two significant Wall-related sites book-end the Bernauer Strasse location. Running north from Bernauer Strasse’s eastern end, the popular, linear Mauerpark (Wall Park) occupies the area of the former Wall zone. Spontaneously used as a park by local residents once the Wall fell, the first phase of its formal design by Hamburg landscape architect Gustav Lange opened in 1994. Following two expansion phases in 2005 and 2013, the park’s final extension, incorporating former industrial sites to the north, was completed in 2020.88 The second Wall-related site, the recommissioned Nordbahnhof S-Bahn station, lies at the western end of Bernauer Strasse. The transit line here had been closed to East Berliners by the erection of the Wall; it was reopened when the Wall fell, as part of the reintegration of Berlin’s fragmented infrastructure. During the period of division, this was a “ghost station;” West Berliners traveling on this line passed underground through this part of East Berlin without stopping until the line again reached West Berlin territory. In 2009, an exhibition that details this history, Border Stations and Ghost Stations in Divided Berlin, was installed in the Nordbahnhof station. This had been specified in the Gesamtkonzept, and

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it is considered to have been the first completed part of the new Berlin Wall Memorial project at Bernauer Strasse.89 The Gesamtkonzept detailed numerous elements that the Memorial should include. It specified the site of the future Visitor’s Center (Infopavillon) and its amenities, the integration of existing memorial structures, and the sequence of construction of new features. A map that provides an overview of these plans notes the Quartiersmanagement area on the Wedding side of Bernauer Strasse and the Sanierungsgebiet Rosenthaler Vorstadt on the Mitte side, although there is no further mention of these neighborhoods in this document.90 Each topographic area of the Memorial is defined and thematized, however, specifying the remains, their significance, and often indicating the form that memorialization should take. Guidelines are especially explicit for remembrance of Wall victims. The site’s authenticity is stressed, along with the requirement to clearly differentiate between historical remains and the materiality of the Wall on the one hand, and “museal presentations” or reconstructions on the other hand, to avoid the “fatal” appearance of a Wall theme-park.91 Following Senate approval of the Gesamtkonzept, the Senate Department for Urban Development and the Berlin Wall Association organized a series of onsite meetings and online dialogues among local residents, Berlin citizens, area property owners, and others, in June and July 2006. These solicited views on the extended plan for the Memorial at Bernauer Strasse and provided opportunities to learn more about the plan. Almost 10,000 people visited the internet site and 1,400 visited on-site. The results of these dialogues were discussed at a final meeting held at the Documentation Center in September 2006, which sixty people attended.92 According to the final report’s participants’ profile, the geographical origin of the majority (59 percent) was West Berlin or West Germany and, although the majority lived in the area around Bernauer Strasse, it appears that fewer from Gesundbrunnen, north of Bernauer Strasse, participated than from the Rosenthaler Vorstadt to the south.93 On the whole, the vision for the Memorial was endorsed by participants’ comments. A few contributions seem noteworthy here, however, including desires for a green and lively space, for spaces in which to express experiences of anxiety and violence created by the Wall, and to recognize connections with still-existing walls elsewhere in the world, from Korea to gated communities.94 Once the Gesamtkonzept clarified the role that the Bernauer Strasse site was to play in a city-wide choreography of Wall-related sites and the elements that would be emphasized there, the Berlin Senate proceeded, in 2007, to organize an open competition to redesign the area to represent the Memorial’s mission

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more coherently. The charge for the competition recognized the site’s centrality as an embodiment of the division of the city both physically and in the lives of its residents, as a representation of both successful and unsuccessful attempts to flee the East, and as a memorial site for those who lost their lives in this way.95 The charge emphasized the goal of bringing together the existing elements of the “memorial ensemble” to reveal their “authentic urban spatial relationships,” and described the future combination of old and new elements as an “open air exhibition.” The charge set deadlines for completion in relation to memorial dates; the site should be at least partially finished in time for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall on November 9th, 2009, and entirely completed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the construction of the Wall on August 13, 2011. The competition elicited forty-seven proposals. The winning entry was that of ON architektur and sinai, landscape architects, both young Berlin firms, working with Mola Winkelmüller Architekten, also in Berlin, and Stuttgart graphic designer Berthold Weidner. The numerous elements of their 1,500-meter-long memorial landscape are organized thematically, structurally, and visually to guide the visitor through the complex and multi-faceted site. Such an extensive site requires visual continuity. The principal element that marks the site along Bernauer Strasse, tying it together and signaling its purpose, is the bounding row of thin, irregularly spaced metal posts that substitutes for the Wall (Plate 31). Lighter than the unyielding thickness of concrete visible in the remaining sections of the Wall with which it aligns, transparent, and permeable—one can easily pass between most of the posts—this stand-in for the Wall keeps the site visually open and physically accessible while still indicating something of the scale of the original. Its syncopated rhythm is certainly more playful, and yet it still refers to the Wall’s infrastructural reinforcing bars, some of which are visible through the deteriorating concrete of the original slabs. In addition to marking the placement and extent of the Wall, the posts introduce the main material that also unifies most of the site’s elements, which is Cor-ten steel. The somber rust color of this material plays off and is highly visible against the dull gray of the original Wall sections and the green grass—or, in another season, snow—of the open spaces of the site. This material is repeated and connects ground-level markers with the three-dimensional features of the memorial landscape, with the visitor’s center across the street from the western entry to the site, and with the original 1998 Monument. Not only is this material technically suitable for an “open air exhibition”—its self-sealing surface oxidation prevents rust from penetrating its structure—but its recurrence in these several forms helps lead the visitor through the site.

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The choice of grass as the material for open spaces is also noteworthy. The second-place competition winner offers a useful comparison in this regard. This design, by landscape architects Kuhn Klapka and the architectural firm Rother Rother Designer, both of Berlin, deployed a uniform paving of gray gravel that recalls the barren, raked sand of no-man’s land.96 Maintaining this similarity while excluding, of course, the hazardous installations that were embedded in the sand, would perhaps have blurred the distinction between what is authentic and what is not in a way that the Gesamtkonzept opposed and that the clearly inauthentic grass avoids. Another constant within the memorial landscape is the former patrol road— in part reconstructed and marked as such—that runs as a concrete pathway from one end of the site to the other. Most of the site’s elements are found between Bernauer Strasse and the patrol road; the southern boundary of the exhibition site is irregular, conforming to shifting adjacent property lines. A major extant section of an East-facing Wall is found near the western beginning of the site (Plate 32). The Wall zone swells to its widest expanse in this area, where it cuts through the sites of the cemeteries, extending as deep as forty meters. The zone shrinks virtually to the width of the patrol road itself at the Memorial’s eastern end. As a relic, the patrol road contributes to the spatial understanding of noman’s land and how it functioned. Although visitors also explore the Memorial along the sidewalk and the lawns, the original and reconstructed sections of the patrol road serve as the main navigational route through it. The past and the present are here seamlessly overlaid. In addition, the continuity of the patrol road underscores the active relationship of the visitor to the experience of the Memorial; the elements of the Memorial are only discovered by moving through the site, usually by walking. Elissa Rosenberg has written about walking as a “commemorative practice” in which sites reveal themselves as “physical situations that are ambiguous and contested and experienced in the present.”97 A site’s dispersed features must be re-assimilated by each visitor, whose individual “act of interpretation” introduces an “ethical dimension of remembering as an active, participatory practice.”98 This is a suggestive way to think about how each visitor threads their own way through and connects the multiplicity of elements along each side of the patrol road that make up the Berlin Wall Memorial. Elements that repeat throughout the memorial landscape also serve to unify the site. These include models of the entire site that provide an overview and orientation; there is one at each end of the exhibition and another at Brunnenstrasse (Figure 4.12). The design of the didactic structures—theme

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Figure 4.12  The orientation map at Brunnenstrasse; Cor-ten steel unifies many features of the Memorial. The former brewery that would be redeveloped as The Factory is in the distance on the left. To its right, farther in the distance, is the first privately developed structure in the Wall zone, built c. 2002. Beyond the Cor-ten steel posts marking the path of the Wall can be seen a “tamed” section of remaining “wild” vegetation (Author, 2012).

stations, information steles, and plaques—that punctuate the length of the site at irregular intervals also tie it together, as do the numerous recurring disks on the ground, within the memorial landscape and on the pavement beyond it, that commemorate people who died, were arrested, or successfully escaped the East at that spot (Figure 4.13). The placement of all major elements that ran the length of the Wall zone, including the East-facing Wall and the signal wall, is marked by continuous strips set in the ground. All of these didactic elements are made of Cor-ten steel as well. A final repeated element is of a very different sort. The firewalls of buildings along the streets perpendicular to Bernauer Strasse at the southern edge of the site are used to display large photographic images (Plates 32 and 44). They signal that the exhibition extends across the gaps created by the streets, and they are billboard-like announcements of the nature of the exhibition. This role is reinforced by the selection of iconic historical photos that are familiar to many from their appearance in the mass media. As the Gesamtkonzept advised, including such photos allows moments that are lodged within collective memory to be re-situated within the actual spaces in which they occurred.99

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Figure 4.13  A variety of markers commemorate individuals or events at sites significant to them. The pavement disc in front of the surviving Wall section marks the spot where two people escaped to the West in 1962; the inset marker memorializes five people who escaped in 1961. Every disc is keyed to a detailed online description. The boundary wall of the 1998 Monument is visible at the upper left (Author, 2011, 2015).

Large, simple, bold, Helvetica-font type conveys the street location and date of each image, orienting the viewer in time and space. A few of these images are accompanied by smaller ones below that elaborate on the subject depicted in the photo-murals. Most Berliners and city visitors are familiar with wall murals as a form of contemporary street art with which the city has become identified, as Chapter 2 recounts. We are also now aware of the tradition of reintegrating the blank ends of buildings, exposed by Second World War bombardments, into the fabric of a neighborhood through painted wall murals that goes back, in West Berlin, to the late 1960s; decorative murals were also found in the East. The Memorial’s murals build on these related contexts and introduce a new approach by deploying historical photos that layer and contextualize the present view of the site that the visitor confronts with its appearance in the past.

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All of these unifying elements are important not only to provide continuity over the expanse of the site, but also to anchor the diversity of objects that visitors encounter as they proceed through the site. The character of these objects changes over the course of the exhibition, and the designers have reckoned with this by establishing four thematic areas, generally following the Gesamtkonzept’s guidelines (Plate 33). The densest areas are Area A, The Wall and the Death Strip, and Area B, The Destruction of the City, which together comprise only about two-fifths of the memorial as a whole, but encompass the most significant monuments, artifacts, and exhibits. Area C, Construction of the Wall, and Area D, Everyday Life at the Wall, rely somewhat less on artifacts that are present along their course. Area A, The Wall and the Death Strip, corresponds to the first phase of development of the Memorial and runs from the western end of the site at Gartenstrasse to Ackerstrasse. This section includes the pre-existing Monument from 1998 at Ackerstrasse and two structures across Bernauer Strasse from the memorial landscape that book-end this stretch. The new Visitor’s Center at Gartenstrasse presents broad glazing along its canted exterior of Cor-ten steel, which visually ties it into the memorial landscape across the street (Plate 34). The Documentation Center and its viewing platform are situated directly across Bernauer Strasse from the 1998 Monument; it shares the building originally dating from the 1960s that is also used by the Church of Reconciliation parish (Figure 4.6 and Plate 35). There is no formal entrance to the Memorial. Approached from the west, and passing the Nordbahnhof S-Bahn station and its exhibition, the Memorial’s opening is marked by the Visitor’s Center, a three-dimensional orientation model of the overall memorial landscape, the screen of irregular steel posts, and a large-format photograph on the exposed firewall of the apartment building on Gartenstrasse that abutted the Wall zone. This image presents the unpeopled wasteland of no-man’s land as it looked along Gartenstrasse in 1989–90 after the Wall had been breached (Plate 32). Although it dates from the period after the fall of the Wall, and to that extent both is celebratory and foreshadows the construction of the present Memorial, it is foremost a sobering introduction to the scope of the physical erasure of the urban fabric that constructing the complex emplacements of the Wall zone entailed. It signals, too, the profound difference between the Wall and no-man’s land as they existed and the memorial landscape that one is about to encounter, however “authentic” its site may be. The eerie emptiness of this view is countered in the last photo-mural of the Memorial, on Schwedter Strasse, that

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captures crowds of people surging down the street in 1989, unchecked by the Wall (Plate 44). The variety and pacing of the diverse kinds of artifacts and monuments presented in Area A respond, for the most part, to the site itself and its material remains. Prominent features of this area include a surviving section of part of the second East-facing Wall, a storage area holding the deteriorating segments of the Wall that were dismantled by the Sophien parish, and two substantial sections of the West-facing wall in situ along Bernauer Strasse (Plate 36). There are also four archaeological boxes, or “windows,” as the designers call them, which interrupt the verdant lawn to reveal the excavated terrain below (Figure 4.14). These disclose older layers of the border area at Bergstrasse, a street that was closed off and encased by the Wall zone, as well as remains of light-post emplacements and other archaeological traces of the Wall zone. Unlike other major elements, the archaeological boxes are not formed of Cor-ten steel; perhaps this distinction is meant to signal the in situ authenticity of their contents. Beyond further attesting to the “authenticity” of the site, the attention to relics reflects the value that is placed on such fragments of the past today. As scholar Mark Crinson has

Figure 4.14  Archeological “windows” preserve and exhibit in situ remains of original Wall emplacements. Signage often includes documentation of the intact object as it looked in its original setting. Here, remains of border light structures have been excavated (Author, 2011).

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observed, relics are “testimonies to the end of bad objects like the Berlin Wall.”100 Retrieved from a time securely marked as past, relics establish a site where memory can be constructed and emerge into the present and, following Walter Benjamin, they are seen as linked to “moments and discontinuities, plucked or dug out from the illimitable archive that is the city and joining with others to suggest fleeting but critical insights (which are also shocks) into the past as well as a sense of a lost continuity.”101 In Area A, near the through-line of the patrol road, visitors also encounter the first two documentation stations, each consisting of several Cor-ten steel steles. Here, the documentation stations’ videos, audio clips, photographs, and texts elaborate on the structure of the Wall and the border strip and on the closing of Bergstrasse (Plate 32). One of the original streets in the Rosenthaler Vorstadt, dating to 1752, Bergstrasse is the only street of the roughly 300 in Berlin that were broken by the Wall that remains blocked, now by the memorial landscape itself. In addition to introducing visitors to the memorial landscape as a whole by highlighting the elements that comprised the Wall, Area A focuses on features that are distinctive to this part of the memorial, including the cemeteries, parts of whose grounds were absorbed by the Wall zone. One documentation station is devoted to the history of the Wall’s intrusion into the Sophien parish cemetery, other markers represent former gravesites, and there is a segment of the cemetery wall along Bernauer Strasse that the Sophien community undertook to reconstruct at an earlier stage102 (Plate 35). The juxtaposition of the traditional red brickwork of this segment with original concrete Wall sections, the abstract steel posts that fill in the rest of the borderline, and the outer wall of the 1998 monument, creates a vivid visualization of historical layering. In keeping with the funerary dimension of this part of the site, one of the Memorial’s major new monuments has been constructed on these former cemetery grounds. This is the Window of Remembrance, a horizontal Cor-ten steel wall made up of 145 niches containing photographs and the names of 136 people who died at the Bernauer Strasse Wall site (Plate 37). Reminiscent of a columbarium and intended to restore the individuality of those who died, irregularly spaced open niches enable viewers to see through this monument to an original Wall remnant, rooting the figures it commemorates within the site of their deaths. Nearby, a plaque also lists the names of border soldiers who were killed at the site, and a documentation stele offers an audio reading of all the names of the dead.

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Since one of the principal purposes that this memorial landscape is intended to serve is remembrance of the victims of the Wall, there are also numerous small steel markers embedded in the Bernauer Strasse pavement and elsewhere within the site to mark points at which an individual died, was arrested, or, in rarer cases, succeeded in reaching the West. Other steles or plaques commemorate and provide additional information about such individuals (Figures 4.9, 4.10, and 4.13). The last element as one moves eastward through Area A is the 1998 Memorial to the Memory of the Division of the City and to the Victims of Communist Dictatorship. The Cor-ten steel wall of this monument blocks continuation through the site of the memorial landscape; visitors must exit to Bernauer Strasse and walk along the exterior of the preserved Wall section to Ackerstrasse, where the entrance to the monument—an opening in another Cor-ten steel wall—is located. The Documentation Center and its observation platform are directly across Bernauer Strasse from the monument (Plate 35). The 1998 Monument is now no longer isolated and free-standing, but an object within the larger open-air exhibition. How does this affect its meaning and visitors’ experiences? If the viewer proceeds through the memorial landscape from its start at Gartenstrasse, the 1998 Monument reassembles, as in a diorama, many of the dispersed elements that the visitor has already encountered, either intact, as remains, or through representations on the documentation steles. On a larger scale, the Monument encases a Wall zone scenario in a way that is similar to the encased relics presented in the archaeological “windows.” To the extent that, in these ways, the 1998 Monument becomes integrated into the ensemble, the authenticity of its parts and of the perspective it purports to reproduce may mistakenly be affirmed. If, however, the memorial landscape is perceived as unrolling as a crafted processional space with stops at significant artifacts representing the Wall’s history and presence—“stations,” as the documentation steles are titled— the 1998 Monument can be read as a constructed model of the death strip, a display format that summarizes what has come before. In short, while the ambiguities and distortions inherent in the 1998 Monument cannot be erased, they have been folded into the larger scheme of the memorial landscape in a way that gives viewers the means to decode them. Area B, The Destruction of the City, continues some of the themes of the first section and introduces new ones. The first half of the block between Ackerstrasse and Strelitzer Strasse includes the site of parts of the Elizabeth parish cemetery, whose surviving graves are located to the south of the memorial, and the site of

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the former Reconciliation Church that was enclosed within the Wall zone and demolished in 1985. The footprint of the Church is marked on the ground and, partially overlapping it, there is a new structure, the Chapel of Reconciliation, which was dedicated in 2000 (Figure 4.11). Like the 1998 Monument, the Chapel predates the Bernauer Strasse Memorial, and the two are the only large structures located within the former Wall zone. While the 1998 Monument provides a model of the debased landscape of no-man’s land, the Chapel culminates the visitor’s passage through the formerly consecrated spaces of Church and cemeteries with which the Memorial began. In both cases, instead of reproducing or restoring the past, these structures allude to and recall it. The Chapel of Reconciliation, designed by Berlin architects Peter Sassanroth and Rudolf Reitermann, fulfills this function explicitly, as it provides a meditative space that is open to all. The spareness and simplicity of its forms underscore its purpose and create an environment that is especially well-suited to reflection. Overlapping the east end of the former Church, its oval, apsidal shape links it to that building. Its door is located back from the opening, so that there is no visual block to entrance; it appears always to be welcoming visitors. The austere rammed-earth construction of the fluid capsule of the spiraling, single enclosing wall firmly links the Chapel to its site within the Wall’s no-man’s land, subtly recalling its once-raked sand. Vertical wooden strips serve as the only exterior ornamentation, fortuitously echoing the more syncopated verticals of the Cor-ten poles marking spaces where the Wall stood; perhaps the Chapel’s forms served as an inspiration for this visual and spatial solution. In 1999, to commemorate the opening of the rebuilt Parliament in Berlin, a cast of British sculptor Josefina da Vasconcellos’s Reconciliation was placed at this site (Figure 4.15). First commissioned by the peace studies faculty at Bradford University in 1977, casts were already located at Coventry Cathedral, Hiroshima Peace Park, and Belfast’s Stormont Castle.103 Near the sculpture are an installation of bells from the demolished Church and its spire cross, warped from the explosion that leveled it, and an “archaeological window” revealing remains of the Church foundation. A field of rye, originally planted in 2005 as an art installation, completes the elemental and contemplative composition of this part of the memorial landscape. A new theme on which Area B elaborates is the reimagining of the cityscape that was destroyed by the construction of the Wall. The photo-mural on the apartment building firewall on Ackerstrasse immediately introduces this by linking it with Area A’s information about the Wall itself and its construction. The photo-mural depicts the erection of the first, relatively improvised, brick

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Figure 4.15  Josefina de Vasconcello’s sculpture, Reconciliation, and the rye field in front of the Chapel of Reconciliation. The new housing “village” is visible on the right (Author, 2017).

and barbed wire Wall at this street in 1961. A nearby thematic station relates the history of Ackerstrasse, which was one of the first sites where the Wall rose, and one of the first where it was systematically razed in 1990. Closing the street represents the rupture to the city fabric that was also presented in Area A’s exhibits on the closure of Bergstrasse. Area B broadens recollection of the cityscape to consider the fate of the fifty apartment buildings along Bernauer Strasse and their roughly 1,000 apartments, whose residents were relocated.104 First the buildings themselves and then their façades served as the Wall, before they were torn down and replaced by concrete slabs. Cor-ten steel outlines on the ground now mark the footprints and house numbers of some of these destroyed apartment buildings. In addition, the basement of one apartment house has been excavated to provide evidence of daily life activities and their settings before the construction of the Wall (Plate 38). On the street side, a Cor-ten steel wall draws attention to this display. Covered by a shed roof, which lends the site the air of an active, ongoing archaeological dig, the exposed brick cellar spaces provide little clear information, nor do they

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easily promote imaginary reconstruction of the lived environment. They do, however, offer the sole opportunity within the memorial landscape to enter an historical space that once was inhabited; they are in this sense authentic, and the texts with stories of individuals who lived there attempt to personalize and heighten the experience of authenticity. The remains also recall another excavated memorial site that exposes brick basement spaces under shed-like roofs, namely the Topography of Terror at the site of the former Gestapo headquarters and prison in another part of the city. It is possible that the similar method used to display these two very different spaces contributes to the blurring for some visitors of historical distinctions between the Nazi and GDR pasts. A similar confusion has been noted at the Topography of Terror site itself, due to its proximity to a remaining section of the Berlin Wall.105 Historian Mary Fulbrook has observed, as well, that a disquieting equivalence tends to be presented through the “metanarratives of the two German dictatorships that are cumulatively produced by the selections, balance and juxtaposition of elements” at commemorative sites.106 In his analysis of other Berlin memorials, Henry Pickford refers to “a long line of surreptitious ideological identifications by West German politicians of East Germany and Nazi Germany” that were echoed in memorial inscriptions, suggesting that unspoken and perhaps still unacknowledged assumptions and predispositions can be all too readily tapped.107 The escapes and attempts to flee that these apartment buildings facilitated during the early days of the division of the city later were made by digging numerous tunnels under no-man’s land where these apartment blocks had stood; these routes are now marked on the ground by Cor-ten steel bars (Plate 39). This theme is highlighted in the photo-mural that concludes Area B, which presents a 1961 image of people fleeing from the East side of Bernauer Strasse. Smaller photos of flight and tunnel escapes accompany this dramatic scene, further memorializing them. By 2002, the first private apartment building had been constructed within the Wall zone along Strelitzer Strasse, two years after the dedication of the Chapel, four years before the Gesamtkonzept was developed, and five years before the competition for the Memorial design was launched (Figure 4.12). It interrupts the course of the patrol path as Area C begins, so that visitors must walk around it. Eventually, the retail space within it became a souvenir shop. In 2017, a privately commissioned painted mural on the Bernauer Strasse side of this building appeared; depicting an enormous slab of meat, it vividly, if without subtlety, presents the Wall as slicing through the flesh of Berlin. There is no

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official photo-mural at the beginning of Area C, but smaller photos depict views of this site during the period of division. Area B segues into Area C, Construction of the Wall, by way of a free-standing abstract Cor-ten steel structure at Strelitzer Strasse that represents a watchtower. The thematic stations in this section further elaborate upon aspects of topics introduced in previous areas; they present information about successive phases of Wall construction, how the GDR regime analyzed escape attempts to locate and shore up weaknesses in the frontier, and GDR surveillance of both West Berlin residents near the Wall and East Berlin Wall maintenance workers. Most elements in this section are familiar from previous ones, including further outlines of Bernauer Strasse houses in Cor-ten steel and some escape tunnels. There are also considerable in situ portions of the East-facing Wall. Areas of what is often called spontaneous vegetation that grew following the fall of the Wall have been preserved here between the line of steel posts and the sidewalk (Figure 4.12). The concluding photo-mural shows a much-reproduced image of a border guard leaping over barbed wire to reach the West; it is accompanied by smaller photos of the area as it looked when the Wall emplacements were intact. Another overview map seems to mark the end of the memorial exhibition space at Brunnenstrasse. The memorial landscape continues, however, through Area D, the last part to be completed and the longest, spanning four blocks from Brunnenstrasse to Schwedter Strasse and connecting the core areas of the Memorial to Mauerpark. The theme of this area, Everyday Life at the Wall, embraces a diversity of topics, including information about tunnel builders, escape helpers, and border soldiers, the Wall’s effect on West Berlin and its residents, how the federal and West Berlin governments addressed the Wall, how it figured in Cold War propaganda on both sides, and its destruction as this occurred on Schwedter Strasse. Along with the documentation stations, Area D includes remaining sections of the East-facing Wall, markers indicating where a tunnel was dug, and a few other scattered features, mainly in the first blocks of this section. Orientation models are located on both ends of this area; these and the documentation stations help tie this section into the larger memorial landscape. However, the character and experience of this section are very different from those of the others. One signal of this difference is the private spaces that interrupt the patrol path. In some instances, beginning soon after the fall of the Wall, owners of property prior to its construction reclaimed their rights to it. Many of these claims were settled, but others were disputed for years (Figure 4.16). In a few cases beginning in 2006, following the return of properties along

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Figure 4.16  For a number of years, this protest sign calling for restitution of property seized by the GDR regime stood in the Wall zone. Pictured on the sign is the building that was destroyed to make way for the Wall (Author, 2002).

the south edge of the Wall zone to their owners, the state of Berlin sought to buy them back. The owners of three parcels at first (as of 2017 there were two) opted out of negotiations to sell their property or reach other arrangements for the use of their roughly 60 meters of the patrol path. As a consequence, visitors encounter fenced-off areas of the path and must walk around these parcels108 (Plate 40 and Figure 4.17). While it is possible that these conflicts with the overall plan for the Memorial will be resolved in the future, privatization has made deeper and more lasting inroads in the last blocks of the Memorial. Here, new construction of apartment buildings on both sides, some including retail spaces, hems in the patrol path (Plate 41). There is no sense here of the Wall zone; instead, the memorial is reduced to the narrow band of the walkway. Local Rosenthaler Vorstadt citizen representatives had already, in May 2009, protested such incursion by private development in an open letter to Berlin’s mayor, in which they described the danger that the patrol path would become merely a “tunnel.”109 A design council had been created in 2008 that was intended to ensure architectural quality and a unified image of urban development in this area. Composed of architects and representatives of the district and the Senate Department for Urban Development, it convened as needed.110 Following 2011 and 2012 meetings with residents south of Bernauer Strasse, organized by the Senate Department for

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Figure 4.17  Signage that explains the interruption in the patrol path shown in Plate 40 (Author, 2016).

Urban Development, building heights and density were reduced.111 Some view the new construction in Area D as a reminder of the destruction of the historic streetscape that had been integral to building the Wall zone.112 Indeed, except for documentation steles, most of the elements of the Wall memorial landscape disappear at its eastern end. Instead of photo-murals, which do not reappear until the last corner at Schwedter Strasse, there are only smaller photo sequences at each street that document the appearance of the site while the Wall stood; in some cases there are graffiti or advertising billboards on the firewalls themselves, which are not seen at official locations (Figure 4.4). New construction and parcels in private hands along Bernauer Strasse have almost entirely eliminated the presence of the steel posts that mark the course of the Wall; spontaneous vegetation is their substitute for now at privately owned parcels that are as yet undeveloped. A small run of steel posts can be found at the side of one of the new buildings, and another small but significant section of posts marks the point at which the Wall changed course to leave Bernauer Strasse and follow the district boundary’s turn to the north. Markers commemorating those who died at the Wall, on the other hand, are present along the Bernauer

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Strasse sidewalk, similar to the familiar Stolpersteine (stumbling stones), which can also be found here113 (Figures 3.11 and 4.13). This overlap of pavement markers creates another opportunity for the distinction between the epochs of the GDR and the Nazi regime to become blurred. The concluding photo-mural on the firewall at Schwedter Strasse is celebratory, showing crowds of people streaming along the street following the breaching of the Wall in 1989. There has been a succession of images covering this firewall over the years (Plates 42, 43, and 44). The Memorial’s photo-mural suitably marks the end of the period of division, although the effect is perhaps somewhat less dramatic than it might have been. In Area D, visitors have been walking within a zone that already embodies the reconstructed post-Wall world; new structures and landscaping press in on the pathway, and neither West- nor East-facing Walls are to be seen (Plate 41). Stepping away from the former patrol road and confronting the liveliness and color of the Mauerpark, crowded cafes, and overflowing goods in the boutiques of Oderberger Strasse may have made more of an impact had it been possible to sustain the contrast between the Wall zone and post-Wall developments throughout the memorial landscape (Plates 44 and 45).

The Afterlife of the Memorial Landscape The Wall memorial landscape, then, is intimately connected to its environment, in relation to not only the remains of the Wall emplacements, but also developments in the surrounding neighborhoods. It has been shaped in part by the urban structure of these neighborhoods as the political, social, and economic forces discussed in an earlier section helped determine them, and in turn the Memorial has become one of these forces that acts on the evolution of urban form in its surroundings. The success of the Memorial as measured by numbers of visitors has been great. In 1999, 38,000 visitors found their way to the Wall sections, “wild” landscape, 1998 Monument, the Documentation Center, and the Reconciliation Chapel along Bernauer Strasse. By 2008, that figure had surged to 300,000; in 2014, there were 850,000 visitors to the Bernauer Strasse memorial landscape, and in 2016, 976,000 visitors.114 This vast increase is due in part to the ease of access that has overcome the relative remoteness of the site; complementing nearby rapid transit stations, a new tram line, under construction beginning in 2005, now connects Bernauer Strasse with major transportation hubs,

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including the main Berlin train station. This link benefits local Wedding and Rosenthaler Vorstadt residents as well as those in the adjacent upscale district of Prenzlauer Berg. It fulfills the Gesamtkonzept’s charge to establish transportation connections among the city-spanning Wall-related sites. In addition to ongoing up-grading of local building exteriors and the construction of the Visitor’s Center on the north side of Bernauer Strasse at the west end of the Memorial, the major change to the Wedding streetscape has been increased retail activity through the provision of tourist services. Two restaurants opened in 2012, the Mauercafé and the Ost-West Café. The Mauercafé, located in Haus Sonneneck, part of the Lazarus Hospital complex that was founded in the 1860s, employs workers with cognitive and physical impairments.115 Other developments include another renovation of the Documentation Center and observation platform, completed in 2014, that added an outdoor tourist information kiosk to the site. Further to the east along Bernauer Strasse, and potentially serving Rosenthaler Vorstadt and Prenzlauer Berg as well as Wedding residents, older freestanding retail spaces that had stood empty are returning to activity through businesses that focus more on neighborhood patronage; in 2017, one opened as a furniture store. With the exception of these amenities and significant parts of the Wall Memorial—the Documentation and Visitor’s Centers—the Wedding neighborhood presents to Bernauer Strasse a relatively closed and inwardturned, primarily residential streetscape of building façades. Its social and urban isolation continues, emblematized by the cul-de-sac at Ackerstrasse that cuts off the street from Bernauer Strasse on the northern side; creation of “a stronger linkage” with the Wall Memorial itself is seen by some observers as a possible route toward greater integration.116 Due to historical circumstances and contemporary socio-economic patterns, the Rosenthaler Vorstadt side of Bernauer Strasse presents a highly contrasting urban image to that on the north side of the street; it opens up to the Wall Memorial visually and to a certain extent structurally, especially at the eastern end, Area D, where the two blend together (Plate 41). To the south of the memorial’s Areas A, B, and C, there are no visual barriers between the Memorial and bordering urban forms, whether these are the cemeteries at the western end or the firewalls, rear façades, and patios of neighboring apartment buildings. The immersion of the memorial landscape within this cityscape of daily life on the one hand softens its impact; its lawns seem of a piece with the greenery of the cemeteries and the flower gardens of backyards. On the other hand,

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the juxtaposition underscores the brutality of the original Wall zone once it is reconstructed in imagination with the aid of the various forms of documentation provided by the Memorial. The only block within the Wall memorial landscape that was part of the 1999 Rosenthaler Vorstadt improvement zone was that which became Area C, running from Strelitzer Strasse to Brunnenstrasse. The improvement plan projected new housing along Bernauer Strasse and left in place an old brewery in the middle of the block. In time, these schemes were overturned. The Wall memorial landscape itself supplanted new housing, and the brewery was renovated, opening in 2014 as the Factory, a hub for the Berlin “ecosystem” of internet start-ups and established businesses such as Mozilla and Twitter (Figure 4.12). Described as a campus, in addition to the old brewery the Factory includes a newly constructed building that serves as both a base for startups and a residence for newcomers to the city, to enable them to get right to work without spending time apartmenthunting.117 The Factory website notes that the complex is “located right at the site of the former Berlin Wall,” a feature that presumably adds to the allure of the campus. Marketing the Wall in this way exemplifies the practice of embedding access to the “dark periods of Berlin’s history” within Berlin’s ‘creative city’ agenda” that Claire Colomb has observed, and signals the ongoing attraction of the Wall.118 The Factory is the only significant commercial space that backs up to the Memorial.119 Instead, housing dominates the area. A notable new initiative conspicuously abuts the Memorial near the archaeological site of former Bernauer Strasse apartment buildings in Area B. Here, there is a prize-winning cluster of rowhouses that is described as “a new island of sixteen individual living and studio houses … The inner street that connects the densely built houses is like the center of a village and is open to the public”120 (Figure 4.15). Indeed, the inner street is accessible directly from the Wall Memorial, which had not been completed when this project began. One owner/architect states that “every day I look out on the foundations of a house from which people jumped from the windows to escape to the West. The paving stones my kids run over in front of our house map the route of the tunnels that were dug by people desperate to leave the GDR. It is living history for me.”121 An architectural firm involved in designing a mixed-use structure along this street is quoted as stating that “the buildings of the small village protect each other from the weight of the history of the place. At the same time they fill a part of the scar of the face of the metropolis (marking the place, despite history) with new life.”122 In other words, this cluster

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contributes to reestablishing “the former no man’s land as a living quarter.”123 This reinforces the tendency toward integrating the memorial landscape into everyday life, especially toward its eastern end. As the same author notes, however, “the border to the neighboring district, Wedding, remains visible and noticeable.”124 This cluster of new buildings sits just beyond the edge of the Memorial, but other private construction has occurred within the memorial precinct at points where historical owners insisted on restitution of their property. The first new apartment building appeared on Strelitzer Strasse in 2002, before the present Memorial was conceived (Figure 4.12). It continues to stand in isolation within the Wall zone, and its retail space contains the only shop that is devoted to souvenirs within the memorial landscape. Other retail spaces include a couple of cafés that have been established farther to the east in existing buildings situated next to the Wall patrol road, while a convenience store, the Mauerkiosk, occupies a storefront in a new building (Plate 46). Businesses unconnected to tourism are filling other new street-level retail spaces. New construction has continued year by year, along with renovations to existing neighboring buildings. Gradually, the parcels along Bernauer Strasse have been filled in, although gaps remain and redevelopment is ongoing. The eastern end of the Memorial sees many fewer visitors than the western end; it is less obviously part of the Memorial, since signage there is reduced and the contemporary residential streetscape—or its rear landscaping—encroaches on and absorbs the Wall zone. It is in this section that the balance between no-man’s land and a “living quarter,” referred to above, tips decisively toward the latter. Here the Wall zone has become attenuated to little more than the width of the patrol path, as the citizens group in Rosenthaler Vorstadt warned against in 2009. Then this too ends, depositing the visitor onto a Prenzlauer Berg street crowded with boutiques, cafés, and restaurants. This street has been transformed from an area that was “once considered obsolete,” due to its proximity to the Wall, into one of the “cutting-edge frontiers of post-industrial consumption and production” of up-scale goods and services125 (Plate 45). It is not difficult to read this ending point of the memorial landscape as reinforcing the idea that the Wall zone and the historical struggles it embodied have been vanquished. As the Memorial fades off at Schwedter Strasse, one can gain the impression that the wealth and styles of living of the West have overcome and erased not only the division of the city that the Wall created, but the whole project that was attempted in the East, whose only representation in the Memorial is, in fact, the Wall.

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The Persistence of Forgetting Folding into the Bernauer Strasse Memorial the history of civic opposition in the GDR, of the democratic forces there that challenged the regime, their role in the fall of the Wall, and their goals and chances for effecting change within the GDR, would have added other layers of complexity to its charge. Even when the Gesamtkonzept was proposed fifteen years after the Wall came down, it may have been too soon for political perspectives still embedded in Cold War categories to loosen their hold when it came to shaping a project with as much symbolic significance as this Memorial. The Gesamtkonzept acknowledges that East Berliners’ achievement of the fall of the Wall represents the unique instance in German history of the success of a movement for democracy and freedom.126 That these ideals were nurtured within and not only in opposition to the GDR regime is not a theme that the Gesamtkonzept pursues beyond a passing reference in its first paragraph to civil disobedience and political resistance in the GDR.127 While the Memorial succeeds at shaping the historical physical remains of the Wall at Bernauer Strasse into an encompassing and intelligible zone scenario, it provides little access to the larger contexts and meanings of such movements for change. The Memorial’s emphasis encourages the viewer to think of the Wall as itself a historical force, rather than as an artifact created by complex interactions representing diverse social and political goals and possibilities. Instead, the Gesamtkonzept stresses the documentary importance of the Berlin Wall for exposing “the political suppression and structural weakness of the state socialist system” of the GDR.128 The Memorial objectifies this by building its displays around the physical remnants of the system of surveillance and control that are still to be found within the Wall zone. Representation of this perspective as well as of the inward-directedness of the Wall in order to hinder flight from the GDR, to which the Gesamtkonzept repeatedly refers, are necessary emphases; yet enforcing a controlled space was only one part of the history and meaning of the Wall. It also preserved a space for the creation of different social possibilities, for an economic system that contested the inevitability of following a capitalist path, and for oppositional forces that contested the authoritarianism of the regime. Indeed, the Gesamtkonzept promoted the view of the Wall as it was seen at the time of the Cold War; it describes the Wall as “the most visible sign of the Iron Curtain.”129 This restates the perspective famously articulated in 1981 by New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable when she wrote, “The wall is its own best monument.”130 Its memorialization reflects West German

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experience, the perspective adopted by the “memory establishment.”131 Frozen in the past, when the Wall was a defining feature of West Berlin’s identity, this view presents memorialization as a closed loop; according to Wall scholars Axel Klausmaier and Leo Schmidt, the Bernauer Strasse Memorial is itself an integral part of the process that was initiated by the erection of the Wall.132 And if that is the case, then through the completion of the Memorial that process has concluded; the division, and the cultural, social, and political distinctions it created, have, by this account, been overcome. But to pose the history of the division of the city as the history of the Wall, and thus to see the fall of the Wall as overcoming the division, collapses the complexity of the histories of both West and East. In the absence of an alternative to such a Cold War perspective, the Memorial celebrates the “happy ending;” scholar Alexander Tölle uses this image to identify the attraction for Berlin of replacing its focus on the Grunderzeit or Weimar periods as urban redevelopment models with the period of division.133 The Memorial presents powerful images that embody the Gesamtkonzept’s vision of a “showplace” for the overcoming of the Wall.134 One that has become iconic is the juxtaposition of the Memorial’s signature boundary of syncopated steel rods with rows of rusted rebar encased in the decayed remains of the last concrete-slab version of the Wall; the formerly monolithic, impenetrable frontier has been dematerialized to become a passageway, open to sight and movement (Plate 31). The concluding photo-mural at Schwedter Strasse, with its celebratory scene of crowds surging past the Wall in November 1989, is another icon of the theme of overcoming (Plate 44). Just as powerful and meaningful, though less intentional, is the way that the eastern end of the Bernauer Strasse Memorial becomes attenuated by new private development and then finally becomes absorbed within the totalizing consumerism of its present-day surroundings. The conclusion to which visitors are led recalls the still-cogent critique of Berlin’s urban imaging that Andreas Huyssen leveled two decades ago when he identified “the political triumphalism of the Free World in the Cold War now having been replaced by the triumphalism of the free market.”135 Contextualizing the period of division beyond reification of the Wall would allow for alternative, multi-vocal readings of its overcoming. That there were, and continue to be, such readings is attested by, for example, historian Robert Darnton’s encounters with East Berliners in November 1989, before unification became what many in the West saw as inevitable. Many East Berliners then were thinking about how to democratize the GDR in the wake of having overturned the dictatorship of the Party (SED); they clearly did not share

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the Gesamtkonzept’s assumption that “without the Wall, the GDR was not capable of existing.”136 Darnton recorded widespread discussion of the Wall as “a dike against dangerous influences from the capitalist world” and “against economic domination from the West,” but these remain disparaged viewpoints that are assumed to have been imposed by the regime.137 And yet, as soon as the Wall fell, a recent writer notes that “wall-peckers” turned it into “private productive capital—in the process ironically corroborating the lie used to legitimate it in the first place.”138 The Memorial offers a site at which to consider how the actions and ideology of the West, as well as those of the GDR regime, played a role in the construction of the Wall, but this potential is unfulfilled. Rather than reflecting on such complexities of the Wall’s history, the Gesamtkonzept’s critique of it is deeply rooted in Cold War rhetoric, and its corresponding assumptions remain active and fundamental for many.139 Such assumptions as these shaped, for example, the suspicion with which his fellow senators viewed Thomas Flierl’s first public presentation of the framework for the Berlin Wall Memorial, the Gedenkkonzept Berliner Mauer, to the Berlin Senate in April 2005. Although the document that Flierl presented emphasized the brutality of the GDR, conservative members nevertheless questioned his convictions. As a representative of the PDS, the successor party to East Germany’s ruling SED, serving as cultural senator within SPD Mayor Klaus Wowereit’s coalition government, the depth and sincerity of his critique of the GDR was seen as open to challenge at this fraught political moment.140 Scholars David Clarke and Ute Wölfel’s study of the politicization of memory of the GDR helps contextualize the intensity of such discord. In the 1990s, parliamentary commissions were funded to find “institutional mechanisms for promoting critical memory work.”141 When studies and surveys indicated that positive memories of the GDR were being passed down within families despite institutional attempts to underscore the authoritarian character of the regime, Clarke and Wölfel report that conservative politicians reacted with fear, suspicious of the presence of latent anti-democratic tendencies among former Easterners.142 In their analysis of this response, in which they reflect on contemporary studies of memory culture and bring a critical perspective to Jan Assmann’s and Aleida Assmann’s influential framework in particular, Clarke and Wölfel note that such interpersonal and intergenerational contacts exemplify what the Assmanns identify as “communicative memory.”143 The 2005 Sabrow Commission, a more academic forum for consideration of these questions, specifically encouraged such forms of popular memory and informal recollections of daily-life experiences in the GDR; this emphasis contributed

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to the conservative CDU government undercutting its influence.144 Other scholars’ studies of memorialization also attest to the general public absence of East Berliners’ memories and artifacts and the avoidance of taking into account their “need to remember.”145 Instead, conservative politicians vigorously insisted upon the emphasis that the Gesamtkonzept places on what Clarke and Wölfel refer to as “the need to remember the GDR as a dictatorship and to understand ‘everyday’ experiences in the context of that dictatorship.”146 The Bernauer Strasse Memorial embodies this perspective. For the Assmanns, a cultural artifact such as the Memorial is associated with another form of memory that they designate as “cultural memory.” Cultural memory is embedded in activities and artifacts that maintain, transfer, and animate “collective memory,” both of which forms are therefore more institutionally constructed than communicative memory.147 Citing Jan Assmann, the Gesamtkonzept emphasizes the opportunity that the authentic site of the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Strasse offers to shape German memory and social identity, especially through memory of those who died at the Wall. The Gesamtkonzept asserts that, combined with existing rituals of remembrance at the Chapel of Reconciliation, the new Memorial’s focus on individualizing the dead will strengthen the impact of their memory within German society.148 Clarke and Wölfel suggest that the term collective memory substitutes for what otherwise may be called “ideology;” both terms refer to one-dimensional viewpoints that avoid the “multiple perspectives, ambiguities, and complexities” characteristic of the pursuit of more profound historical understandings.149 Struggles over cultural memory, then, such as the plan for Berlin Wall memorialization formulated in the Gesamtkonzept, represent attempts to shape collective memory and the character of the social identity it supports. The Senate’s charge to stress the GDR as a dictatorship, minimizing memorial representation of everyday life or oppositional activities, exemplifies such an attempt. This seems to bear out Clarke and Wölfel’s conclusion that the state has “assumed an unprecedentedly active role in seeking to shape how the GDR will be remembered, and that memory has become highly politicized in the process.”150 Scholar Andreas Huyssen recognized interventions designed to shape collective memory in the 1990s, when he wrote about “the politics of willful forgetting” that characterized post-reunification alterations to the “communist city text,” including street name changes, dismantling monuments, and planning to raze the Palast der Republik.151 What he referred to as “a strategy of power and humiliation, a final burst of Cold War ideology,” has persisted as a feature

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of official memorialization of the period of division. The result is a loss of the contexts and textures of life experiences in their complexity within the GDR, and of the multiple ways its citizens thought about them, that would enable today’s Wall Memorial visitor to understand why an East Berliner in 1989 might have considered it to be a “protective wall against economic domination from the West.”152 By providing “little space for sympathetic depiction of ordinary carriers or supporters of more positive aspects of the GDR,” memorial sites that address the history of division offer what historian Mary Fulbrook refers to as “a rather simplistic narrative of constant widespread opposition to the East German state, with little sensitivity to changes over time.”153 At the Bernauer Strasse Memorial, focus on the emplacements of the Wall and their changing configurations within an unremitting regime of surveillance and control both contributes to such a singular view and promotes a limited reading of how the Wall divided the city. We have seen that the Wall was part of an encompassing process of division that had been taking place for a dozen years prior to its construction. While the Wall enforced separation in a way that had not existed prior to its existence, the process of urbanistic division of the city according to contrasting visions of city and social development had already been set in motion. Looking through the wider lens offered by the study of the city’s division may present the Wall as a symptom of significant social and political differences for which neither side provided a viable alternative that might have fostered co-existence. The Gesamtkonzept recognizes that ordinary people participated in tearing down the Wall.154 However, interest in their experiences is severely circumscribed by conflating GDR citizens with the Wall itself, variously described as the “‘uncomfortable heritage’ of the GDR,” “a physical reminder of a country that has long disappeared,” and a “crime scene.”155 By omitting popular memories, daily-life experiences except for ways in which these were affected by the Wall regime, and the complexity of views in the GDR, and by reading the division of the city as though it were defined solely by the Wall, those who defined the memorial project denied agency to East Berliners. Some observers have noted that in the development of Wall memorial projects, “it has not been the East Germans themselves running the process, but West German judges, lawyers and politicians.”156 The curators of Unbuilding Walls, Germany’s contribution to the 2018 Venice Architectural Biennale, recognize this; catalogue contributor Bruno Flierl argues that “after reunification in 1990, virtually none of the town planners in the GDR found work in urban design or town planning offices in the Federal

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Republic or West Berlin,” for they were regarded as being “too close to the GDR regime.”157 This “imbalance” is also reflected in the focus of discussions on “the life the regime had envisaged,” rather than exploring the daily lives of those living on the other side of the Wall and their critiques.158 As the frequently used trope of the Bastille as the revolutionary forerunner of the fall of the Wall attests, the attribution of agency in the destruction of the Wall is limited to a mass of the oppressed, whose experiences otherwise are undefined, and the subsequent process of reconstruction is placed in other hands.159 A key citizens’ constituency whose views the Gesamtkonzept did take into account was organizations such as the Union of Organizations for the Victims of Communist Dictatorship (UOKG, Union der Opferverbände Kommunistischer Gewaltherrschaft) and the Association of the Victims of Stalinism (VOS, Vereinigung der Opfer des Stalinismus). The strong focus on recognizing individual victims of the Wall and drawing on the emotional aspects of the Wall’s history at the Bernauer Strasse Memorial reflects, in part, their influence. This constituency opposed memorial proposals that would encourage an emphasis on everyday life that, they felt, would minimize memory of state repression.160 Instead, they believed “that the time has not yet come to confront GDR history dispassionately because the past is not entirely over.”161 The Bernauer Strasse Memorial accommodates their perspective through multiple iterations of individualized victim memorialization, including the monumental Window of Remembrance located within the funerary space of Area A, the nearby documentation station, and numerous pavement disks. Including these features does not have to preclude incorporating democratic voices from the GDR past that challenged authoritarian policies and practices. That there are other voices and other perspectives can be seen from the activities of the Robert Havemann Society, an organization founded in 1990 by citizens of the former GDR to document the history and experiences of the grassroots opposition and resistance movements there. This group created an open-air historical exhibition, Peaceful Revolution 1989/90, in Alexanderplatz, for the twentieth-anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Wall. Since 2016, this exhibition, reconfigured as Revolution and the Fall of the Wall, has been on view as a permanent installation in the courtyard of the former Stasi (GDR Ministry of State Security) headquarters building. The Robert Havemann Society maintains an archive and a website, produces publications and films, and, with the support of the federal government, has erected commemorative and informational markers at Berlin sites of significance to the GDR citizens’ movement. The strong emphasis that their materials place on individuals whose

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actions led to the fall of the regime parallels the attention to individual victims of the Wall that we find at the Bernauer Strasse Memorial.162 As we consider the overarching multiplicity of the Gesamtkonzept’s program for memorializing the Berlin Wall, and especially the ensemble of variegated installations at the Bernauer Strasse Memorial, we can identify contestable omissions and interpretations, including how the experiences of GDR citizens are represented. Historic preservationist Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper offers a suggestive concept that could be used to think about how to create a welcoming discursive space for memorials for which there is no consensus, either in whole or in part. She introduces the term “sites of dispute,” a complementary phrase to Pierre Nora’s influential concept of “sites of memory,” to “allow one to [differentiate] between consensual and dissensual situations and to accept a monument’s capacity to create dissensus—or to make it visible—as a positive quality, a social value.”163 This alternative approach to memorialization acknowledges the presence of conflict and, rather than suppressing one side and promoting or appeasing another, allows for their potentially fruitful engagement. As Bruno observes, “to achieve a new sense of unity, we need to recognize what separates us, what we thought and did separately.”164 This would take into account and allow the expression of multiple voices and viewpoints and thereby more fully represent the complexity of the past.

The Memorial and the City It may require a longer passage of time to achieve the inclusion of a broader array of voices at the Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse. Its present emphases have been shaped predominantly by the agendas of conservative politicians and organizations representing victims of the Wall, which provide little scope for the full range of experiences and views, especially those of East Berliners. These emphases affect as well how the Memorial tells the story of the division of the city, which is one of its mandates and the lens through which we are most interested in considering it. Here, too, we have seen that, while the regime imposed by the presence of the Wall was distinctive and one whose history needs to be made manifest, it existed within a continuum of changing urban, social, economic, and political relationships that also need to be represented. The division of the city is a larger story than that told by the Bernauer Strasse Memorial, one that encompasses the period of the Wall but is also evident in the years both preceding the erection of the Wall and following its destruction.

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The Berlin Wall Memorial fails, then, to take full advantage of its unique potential to tell the story of the division of the city. Nor does it propose an alternative reading of the city, as do many of the other works of public art that we have discussed; this would require assembling and responding to a heterogeneous array of voices that would contribute to the definition and interpretation of its installations. However, it is still relevant to consider whether the Memorial engages with the city as such in ways that are similar to those of previously examined public artworks. That is, does the Berlin Wall Memorial take the city as its subject in a way that would resonate with a broader discourse and allow for wider reflection on the city and on the role the past can play in conceptualizing its ongoing development? The lexicon of urban features that the Memorial employs to provide clear information about and vivid experiences of the former Wall zone does, indeed, offer striking continuities with the one we have identified in earlier public artworks. This lexicon includes such features as exposed firewalls, residual and vacant or neglected spaces, stairwells, pavements, and other elements of urban infrastructure. Their deployment enables the works of public art that are discussed in previous chapters to articulate opposition to dominant development schemes—urban renewal in the earlier years, global corporate capital’s needs, and those of the market-led real estate economy more recently. How this lexicon is used also enables them to assert the commitment to alternative conceptions of urban development maintained by their creators and the larger urban discourse to which they contribute. The Berlin Wall Memorial, in contrast, strips this lexicon of its critical content to offer it as an array of descriptive exhibition devices. Functioning in this way, this lexicon of everyday elements of urban infrastructure loses its provocative edge, as well as its ability to create a reflective distance between the viewer and their experience of the ostensible subject matter of the work of public art that would allow for considerations of the city as such. Such a circumscribed use of the vocabulary of infrastructural elements also suggests that it is not in this way that the Memorial engages with the idea of the city, fruitful though it was for other works of public art. Rather, we must turn to the motifs that, as we saw in the previous chapter, embrace and organize these urban infrastructural elements—the network, the ground plane, and the void—to pursue this question further. The relevance of the motif of the network to consideration of the Berlin Wall Memorial is most apparent, for the Gesamtkonzept makes explicit the Memorial’s role as part of the city-wide palette of Wall-related memorials and remains located throughout Berlin; this contrasts with the conception of the 1998 Monument as a singular object, functionally

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and programmatically isolated.165 The motif of the network, we recall, refers to the geographic dispersal of sculptures that are thematically or otherwise linked; tied to particular, telling sites, their connections are redrawn in imagination by the viewer to reconstruct meaningful relationships that are embedded in and that helped shape urban form and history. The network had also served as a significant generative trope for Daniel Libeskind’s design of the Jewish Museum. By tracing nodes of contact among the peripatetic intellectuals and artists of Berlin’s early-twentieth-century Jewish community, Libeskind established an urban network that provided a basis for his design’s interplay of fragmentary and continuous forms.166 The Bernauer Strasse Wall Memorial is intended as the anchor for a network of related sites that enable the viewer to reconstruct in imagination the physical extent and the regime of the Wall. An example of a network in this sense is that created by the Memorial’s commemorative structures, which connect it conceptually with sites elsewhere in the city that honor those who died at the Wall. The collective memorial at the Window of Remembrance and individual pavement markers, for example, recall such sites as the Parliament of Trees in the government quarter and the Memorial to Peter Fechner near Checkpoint Charlie. But this recollection returns us to the singularity of the Wall, rather than revealing new connections and historical linkages embedded in the fabric of the city. The network here is reiterative, an accumulation of sites that are meant to be individualized, referring to specific victims or activities associated with the Wall. In the end, however, the particularity of these sites becomes absorbed by and bracketed within the closed history and precinct of the Wall and its zone. The Bernauer Strasse memorial landscape also proposes a network across time. Its reclamation of the firewalls of adjoining buildings, which were exposed when neighboring structures were razed to create the open zone required for the emplacements of no-man’s land, recalls the salvage of such firewalls in West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s. At Bernauer Strasse, large photo-murals integrate the walls into the Memorial, repurposing without hiding the urban scars that the walls represent. In West Berlin, firewalls had often been exposed by Second World War bombardments, and transforming them through painted murals reclaimed for neighborhood use the vacant lots they defined. In both cases, the use of existing urban structures as supports for new construction—paintings or photos—retrieves these buildings from their abject state as truncated relics of past streetscapes, yet still preserves that past as a layer within urban form and history. However, the nature of the imagery that each bears testifies to their different functions. In contrast to the local and often urban-themed character of the West

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Berlin murals that linked them to a city-wide citizens’ effort to reclaim the city, the graphics at the Memorial take their cue as much from wall advertisements as from the earlier murals (Plates 42, 43, and 44). The graphics graft onto the conceptual innovations of the murals—that is, their reclamation and revaluing of residual spaces—a scale and heightened legibility that declares their function as signage. To the extent, too, that they direct attention exclusively to the Memorial and its Wall remains, the graphics thematically short-circuit consideration of wider urban connections. Finally, the conflation of the GDR and Nazi regimes that arises from the use of similar forms at the Bernauer Strasse Memorial and at memorials to Nazi victims, noted earlier, constructs a false network. The similarities between Memorial pavement markers and Gunter Demnig’s Stumbling Stones (Stolpersteine), and between the Memorial’s excavated Bernauer Strasse apartment building and the shed roofs over the Topography of Terror’s archaeological sites, have the unfortunate effect of blurring distinctions between the two regimes. In these cases, the affirmation of patterns of urbanistic public art practices asserts a misleading thematic commonality (Figures 3.11 and 4.13). The ground plane is another significant motif that recurs in public sculpture created in Berlin in the decade or so after reunification. Strong, familiar examples include Stumbling Stones, which mark the pavement in front of the last Berlin residence of a Jewish deportee or exile; Micha Ullman’s Library, a sculpture visible beneath the pavement of Bebelplatz in the historic center of the city, which memorializes the Nazi book-burning that took place there; and the double row of cobblestones that mark the course of the Wall between East and West Berlin (Figures 3.7, 3.11, and Plate 24). Informed by international sculptural explorations of the 1960s and 1970s, these works seize upon the power of the ground plane to shape and charge the space above it in order to instigate new relationships between viewers and their spatial environment. What had seemed unremarkable and empty is transformed into a resonant space of absence. One of the strongest ways in which the ground plane exercises an influence on visitors’ experiences of the Bernauer Strasse Memorial as a whole is through the decision to plant grass. The Memorial as a green space had been one of the suggestions that emerged from the 2006 community dialogues. As executed, this creates an informal, park-like environment, in contrast to other premiated design competition entries that envisioned the use of more austere earthen materials to approximate the severe, barren appearance of no-man’s land’s expanse of raked sand.167 Grass is well-suited to the former cemetery spaces and links the memorial visually to the surviving cemetery spaces outside it. Perhaps

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just as significant in relation to the residential surroundings of the Memorial is the “good-neighborliness” of the grassy space that, while not a recreational area—though sometimes it is used as one—nevertheless presents in this way a benign face to those going about their daily local activities (Figure 4.18). The supplanting of raked sand by grass also suggests the decisive overcoming of the brutal reality of the Wall despite the ongoing presence of its ghost that the memorial preserves. Grass as a ground material, finally, defines the space as an exhibition area, signaling that it is not a re-creation of the Wall zone. It is also the visually complementary backdrop for another significant ground plane element, namely the bars of Cor-ten steel that mark where major features of the zone, such as the East-facing wall and the signal fence, originally stood. Similar bars that trace the routes of escape tunnels and that mark the footprints of razed buildings also stand out against the field of grass. The impact of the use of the ground

Figure 4.18  Putting practice is among the activities seen at the Berlin Wall Memorial (Author, 2015).

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plane in these instances, however, is very different from that found in earlier public sculptures. The appropriation of the ground plane marker to powerfully memorialize absence, introduced in the Stumbling Stones, creates confusion here, as we have noted, regarding the different regimes responsible for losses of human life. Used to mark the sites of the East-facing wall and other Wall zone structures, moreover, the steel bars implanted in the ground plane point to absences that are deliberate and celebrated. Furthermore, instead of affirming the role that urban structures play in preserving history, as in earlier public sculptures that deployed the ground plane as their armature, here the ground plane supports signage that one-dimensionally labels destroyed emplacements whose meaning is tied to their singular site. The void is the third motif to consider as we assess how the Berlin Wall Memorial may engage with the idea of the city. The voids that are most profoundly and familiarly associated with Berlin today are those punctuating architect Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum (1999); unapproachable with one exception, they counter architecture’s project of constructing usable space by giving shape to absence. Libeskind’s voids are sealed, liminal spaces that invite reflection on how we can look back at the past but are inexorably severed from it. They point to the break in German and Jewish history in Berlin that the Nazi period represents, as well as to the absence of those who were murdered. The Jewish Museum’s void is a powerful form, materially and expressively; yet, it co-exists in Berlin with a multiplicity of voids. Many of the physical gaps in the city that were created during the Second World War and that persisted into the twenty-first century have now been filled in; as we have seen in Chapter 3, however, there are a number of public sculptures that deploy voids, such as Christian Boltanski’s Missing House (1990) and Micha Ullman’s Library (1995) (Plate 22 and Figure 3.7). By doing so, they preserve absences created by wartime bombardments, as well as the destruction wreaked by the Nazi regime, and fix these spaces as material entities within urban memory. While it persisted, the Wall zone itself was perhaps Berlin’s most resonant physical void. Cleared but not empty, it was a deadly space of militarized surveillance, deadening the spaces adjacent to it. Cutting through residential neighborhoods such as Rosenthaler Vorstadt, it emptied streets of social life while introducing into them a perverse kind of public space governed by oversight. The memorial landscape at Bernauer Strasse, as the site at which the largest expanse of the zone is preserved, cannot and does not recapture these realities; its raw materials could only offer the “shadow architecture” of the Wall.168 As preservationist Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper observed regarding what remained

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before the Bernauer Strasse Memorial was conceptualized, “the feeling of being in a no-man’s land, a dead land, used up in history, cut off from the space and life around, has faded. Visitors must imagine control and deadly threat in their own fantasy.”169 Now that the Memorial is completed, green grass, the bleeding of the Wall zone into its neighboring cityscape, and unrelated private construction within the zone itself challenge such fantasy. To counter these distractions, photographs and documentation attempt to stimulate the imagination to flesh out the “authentic places” of the site with the help of needed background materials.170 What may be lost at the Memorial is the void’s visceral power that is achieved through architecture and sculpture elsewhere in Berlin. At Bernauer Strasse, one enters the preserved void, and it has become a pedagogical space. Whereas other voids read as wholes, here a processional momentum leads the visitor sequentially from one feature to another. Movement through the site is occasionally punctuated by spaces that invite meditation, however, and it is perhaps here, especially at the elemental Chapel of Reconciliation and its adjacent rye field, that the visitor can best reflect on the significance of the site as a whole and the liminal quality of this border zone. The syncopated metal rods that mark the Wall’s peripheral path, and that themselves deploy a rhythm of voids, also suggestively allude to the liminal character of the site that is thoroughly of the present and yet allows for glimpses of insight into the past. This tenuousness of the relationship between the past and present that the memorial landscape mediates may be inherent in the Gesamtkonzept’s charge to honor the overcoming of the city’s division. By formalizing the remaining void of the Wall zone in order to memorialize the division, there is also the risk of maintaining, if not recreating, the fracture. The legacy of differential urban, social, and economic experiences in the two adjacent neighborhoods continues to mark these areas. The site of the memorial landscape may exaggerate this rift or, over time, circumstances and tastes may change, leading to a more egalitarian balance between the neighborhoods. In any case, the void within this residential setting replaces the surveillance regime of the past with the contemporary scrutiny of outsiders drawn to the site as “sight,” and so extends its life as an exceptional space. The fragility of the balance between past and present can also be seen in the way that the dynamism of ongoing redevelopment that fills in urban voids throughout Berlin presses on the memorial landscape at Bernauer Strasse. The arc of its narrative begins at its western end with the initiation of the void of the Wall zone through the seizure and then destruction of residential and religious

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structures. The narrative’s conclusion, however, stretches beyond the celebratory photo-mural of masses of people breaching the Wall in 1989, to encompass the Memorial’s own more vulnerable status as a void, challenged as it is by reclamation of private property and new construction at its eastern end. In this, it reflects and alludes to current urban practices throughout the city, where former Wall zone sites have become legible only by virtue of the contrast between new structures’ contemporary design compared to that of older surrounding buildings. This is a familiar pattern in Berlin; the similar post-reunification reconstruction of lots left vacant since wartime bombardments, which results in the erasure of those telling gaps, can confuse an attempt to understand the “visible accumulation of history” that characterizes Berlin’s cityscape: which past does a new structure supplant and allude to?171 This underlying fate—the pressure of commerce and the new to erase the history to which urban forms testify, the effects of which on murals we noted in Chapter 1—is inscribed in the intrusion of new structures that inhabit parts of the void within which the Memorial traces its story. The motifs of the network, the ground plane, and the void, and the elements of urban infrastructure that they encompass, are evident, then, among the numerous features of the Bernauer Strasse Wall Memorial. How they function there, however, is different from, and sometimes contrary to, the ways that other public artworks deploy them to assert alternative views of the city. Indeed, in relation to the city, the Wall Memorial’s role can be seen as a restorative one. The insistent self-referentiality of its elements that we have observed asserts the separation of the Wall’s history, which is presented as the history of division, from that of the city. By bracketing that history and foreclosing wider connections, the Memorial isolates the Wall from the ongoing course of the city’s evolution. As a result, that evolution becomes apparently seamless; post-Wall redevelopment catches the dropped stitch of early-twentieth-century city-building and proceeds according to its pattern. The Berlin Wall Memorial does suggest a vision of the city, then, but it is one that embodies continuity with a re-imagined past to guide the program of municipal redevelopment rather than exploration of new possibilities incorporating new agents. By defining a dispersed ensemble of city-wide Wall-related locations, of which the Bernauer Strasse Memorial was to be paradigmatic, the Gesamtkonzept created a series of distinctive though linked sites at which to learn about the past while ensuring that that past would not impinge on the character of the reunified city, whose reconstruction was and remains ongoing. Klaus Wowereit, then Mayor of Berlin, observed in 2006 that the Gesamtkonzept’s definition of linked commemorative Berlin Wall sites provided “a crucial plan for the city.”172

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The project at Bernauer Strasse integrated this area into the process that other scholars have described as a “renegotiation of the relationship between the center and the periphery” that reunification had initiated and that led to the “territorial re-ordering of the city.”173 The extension of the street-car line, like the re-opening of ghost transit stations such as Nordbahnhof, exemplifies this, forging the memorial site as a literal link in a chain of movement throughout the whole city that helps undermine differentiation between the former East and West. As an example of what one scholar has called “infrastructural space,” in this sense the Memorial relates to the scale of the city; the value of its neighborhood as raw material for redevelopment also became more easily accessible and subject to exploitation.174 In earlier years, as we saw in Chapter 2, local communities challenged mainstream infrastructural planning schemes to claim their right to shape urban development. By the time the Berlin Wall Memorial was conceived, however, the key agents determining the shape of development city-wide were private property developers, who promoted policy-led gentrification, and city marketers, whose target audiences were tourists and entrepreneurs, among others.175 We have seen the impact all of these have had on the Bernauer Strasse memorial landscape, but their presence is not explicit in the story that the Memorial tells. This is because, at least in part, the history of the Wall is presented as ending with the construction of the Memorial itself. Just as it emphasizes the Wall as marking the period of division, without considering more systematically the earlier evolution of this split, so too the Memorial’s narrative does not consider the value of problematizing the process of reunification and its effects on the development of the city as these are manifested at this key site. In relation to the history of the GDR, the Bernauer Strasse memorial landscape casts the Wall as a synecdoche, as the part that stands for the whole, as the shard from which the history and experience of the GDR can be—albeit inadequately—reconstructed. East Berlin is seen principally through the lens of the Wall and the surveillance regime it embodied. Presented in these terms, the fall of the Wall led ineluctably to the dissolution of East Berlin and the end of the division of the city. By looking at the more distant history of the neighborhood and how its division had occurred even before the Wall was erected, however, we gain a fuller sense of the route that led a once-unified neighborhood toward social and cultural, as well as architectural and urban, differentiation. That the distinctions between the two areas deepened during the years that the Wall stood can then be seen as extending trends that had already begun. The collapse of this significant history into the story of the Wall erases the past that pre-dates

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the Wall as well as the past of East Berlin, of which the Wall was one part. Such an erasure also favors the perspective of West Berlin, which remains the angle of view onto the memorial landscape and which triumphs over the division that fractured the city. In this way, the epoch of the Wall is presented as completed, as a cul-de-sac of history whose victims need to be remembered, but that otherwise is a closed case. The city’s presumed original unity has been restored. Despite the continuities we can see, then, with the vocabulary of infrastructural materials and their allied architectural and spatial practices that earlier bodies of public art established, the Memorial forecloses rather than opens to new ways to conceive of the city and its history. As we conclude our observations regarding how public art in Berlin seized and responded to moments of liberatory possibility in the following chapter, we will consider how, building on those continuities, the Memorial’s extensive and complex installation may make available in the future alternative interpretations of the Wall’s place in the history of the city.

Notes 1

2

3

4

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Dwyer and Alderman characterize the rich network of memorial spaces in Birmingham, AL as a memorial landscape, but its scope seems perhaps better described as a memorial cityscape. Their work helped me to clarify these categories in relation to Berlin’s memorials. See Owen J. Dwyer and Derek H. Alderman, “Memorial Landscapes: Analytic Questions and Metaphors,” GeoJournal 73 (2008): 165–78. Gabriele Camphausen and Manfred Fischer, “Die Bürgerschaftliche Durchsetzung der Gedenkstätte an der Bernauerstrasse,” in Klaus-Dietmar Henke, ed. Die Mauer. Errichtung, Überwindung, Erinnerung (München: Deutschen Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011), 355. See also Dirk Verheyen, United City, Divided Memories? Cold War Legacies in Contemporary Berlin (Lanham, MD and Plymouth, UK: Lexington Books), 221. Marianne Birthler, Lars Krückeberg, Wolfram Putz, and Thomas Willemeit, eds. Unbuilding Walls: From Death Strip to Freespace, catalogue of the German Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2018), 219. Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, Berlin Tomorrow (London: Academy Editions, 1991), 45. Designs by Norman Foster and Jean Nouvel also called for leaving the zone unbuilt. Frederick Baker, “The Berlin Wall,” in Paul Ganster and David E. Lorey, eds. Border and Border Politics in a Globalizing World (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 39.

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Alexander Tölle, “Urban Identity Politics in Berlin: From Critical Reconstruction to Reconstructing the Wall,” Cities 27 (2010): 351–2. 7 Polly Feversham and Leo Schmidt, Die Berliner Mauer heute/The Berlin Wall Today (Berlin: Verlag Bausesen), 1999. 8 http://www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/de/ pressemitteilungen-2010-733,43,16.html 9 Birthler et al., Unbuilding Walls, 9. 10 Slight adjustments were made under the Nazi regime in 1937; see Hans Wolfgang Hoffmann and Philipp Meuser, eds. Architekturführer: Berliner Mauer (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2013). 11 Around 1800, Rosenthaler Vorstadt became the official name of the area north of the Akzisemauer between the Rosenthaler and Hamburger Gates; the area was incorporated around 1830. After the Second World War, the area north of Bernauer Strasse became known as the Brunnenviertel. After the 2000 reorganization of Berlin administrative districts, it was absorbed into Gesundbrunnen, its contemporary name, and into the district of Mitte. In this text, I use the terms Rosenthaler Vorstadt and Wedding to maintain historical continuity. See HansJürgen Mende and Kurt Wernicke, eds. Berlin Mitte Das Lexikon (Berlin: Stapp Verlag, 2001), see the entries for Brunnenviertel, Gesundbrunnen, and Rosenthaler Vorstadt. 12 Wolfgang Feyerabend, Die Rosenthaler Vorstadt (Berlin: L & H Verlag, 2015), 49. My account of the history of Rosenthaler Vorstadt is greatly informed by this text. 13 Ibid., 11–12. 14 See Senatsverwaltung fuer Stadtentwicklung und Wohnen, “Erweiterung der Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer an der Bernauer Strasse,” section “Von den Anfängen im 19. Jahrhundert bis 1945,” at http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/planen/ staedtebau-projekte/bernauer_str/index.shtml; cited hereafter as “Erweiterung.” 15 Ibid. 16 Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück (1929), [Film] Dir. Phil Jutzi. 17 Franz Hessel, Walking in Berlin, trans. Amanda DeMarco (London: Scribe, 2016, originally published 1929), 203. 18 https://www.moma.org/multimedia/video/310/1554 19 Heinrich Suhr, “Stadterneuerung in West-Berlin am Beispiel Ackerstraße Nord,” in Günter Schlusche, Verena Pfeiffer-Kloss, Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper, and Axel Klausmeier, eds. Stadtentwicklung im doppelten Berlin: Zeitgenossenschaften und Errinerungsorte (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2014), 98. For the broader background to housing issues in Rosenthaler Vorstadt and working class districts in general, see Alexander Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015). 20 Ibid., 42. 21 Feyerabend, Die Rosenthaler Vorstadt, 37, 95.

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22 Therese Teutsch, Unverfugt: Lücken im Berliner Stadtraum (Berlin: Lukas Verlag), 2013, 88. 23 Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt, Der Wedding—hart an der Grenze: Weiterleben in Berlin nach dem Krieg (Berlin: Dirk Nishen Verlag, 1987), 217. 24 Suhr, “Stadterneuerung in West-Berlin am Beispiel Ackerstraße Nord,” 99. 25 “Erweiterung,” section “Der Altbaubestand im Westteil.” 26 Suhr, “Stadterneuerung in West-Berlin am Beispiel Ackerstraße Nord,” 99. 27 Feyerabend, Die Rosenthaler Vorstadt, 77. 28 Ibid., 80. 29 Untitled insert, Wolfgang R. Ritter photo series 1978–86, in Günter Schlusche et al., 231. 30 Christian Kloss, “Kommentar: Abschied und Neubeginn in der Ackerstrasse,” in Günter Schlusche et al., 124; “Erweiterung,” section “Von den Anfängen.” Franz Hessel still refers in passing, on a walk in Kreuzberg in 1929, to the “bread-roll church” (Schrippen were cheap Berlin breakfast rolls), where “beggars and the homeless receive 2 rolls, a cup of coffee, and a word for the soul,” 155. 31 Günter Schlusche, “Das Haus Bernauer Straße 111,” in Günter Schlusche et al., 308. 32 Günter Schlusche in Günter Schlusche et al., 308. 33 Harald Bodenschatz, Berlin Urban Design: A Brief History (Berlin: DOM publishers, 2010), 70. 34 Suhr, “Stadterneuerung in West-Berlin am Beispiel Ackerstraße Nord,” 109. 35 Manfred Zache, “Ein Blick aus dem Osten auf der Ackerstraße und die Baupolitik im geteilten Berlin,” in Günter Schlusche et al., 119; Florian Urban, Neo-historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic 1970–1990 (Farnham, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 35–6. 36 See ibid. 37 Feyerabend, Die Rosenthaler Vorstadt, 80. 38 Kloss, “Kommentar,” 124. 39 Axel Klausmaier and Leo Schmidt, Mauerreste—Mauerspuren: Der umfassende Führer zur Berliner Mauer (Berlin/Bonn: Westkreuz Verlag, 2004), 97. 40 Feyerabend, Die Rosenthaler Vorstadt, 123; Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations, 136. 41 See Daniela Sandler, Counterpreservation: Architectural Decay in Berlin since 1989 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 129–30, for more information about this; Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations. 42 Feyerabend, Die Rosenthaler Vorstadt, 83. 43 http://www.rosenthaler-vorstadt.de/pdf/spm67_fin.pdf; see also Matthias Bernt and Andrej Holm, “Exploring the Substance and Style of Gentrification: Berlin’s ‘Prenzlberg’,” in Matthias Bernt, Britta Gell, and Andrej Holm, eds. The Berlin Reader: A Compendium on Urban Change and Activism (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013), 107–25.

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44 https://www.quartiersmanagement-berlin.de/unser-programm/berlinerquartiersmanagement/ 45 Margit Meyer, “New Lines of Division in the New Berlin,” in Matthias Bernt et al., 105, https://www.quartiersmanagement-berlin.de/unser-programm/berlinerquartiersmanagement/ 46 http://www.brunnenviertel-ackerstrasse.de/node/401 47 https://www.versoehnungskapelle.de/fotos/2/119837/bildergalerien/der-garten-imniemandsland/ 48 “Erweiterung,” section “Der Altbaubestand im Westteil.” 49 See Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 21–50 and Thomas Flierl, ed. “Gesamtkonzept zur Erinnerung an die Berliner Mauer: Dokumentation, Information und Gedenken,” June 12, 2006, http://www.berlinermauer-gedenkstaette.de/de/uploads/allgemeine_dokumente/gesamtkonzept_ berliner_mauer.pdf, cited hereafter as Gesamtkonzept 2006. 50 Camphausen and Fischer, “Die Bürgerschaftliche Durchsetzung der Gedenkstätte an der Bernauerstrasse,” 355. 51 Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper, “The Berlin Wall: An Archaeological Site in Progress,” in Colleen M. Beck, W. G. Johnson, and J. Schofield, eds. Matériel Culture: The Archaeology of Twentieth Century Conflict (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 240; Gerd Knischewski and Ulla Spittler, “Remembering the Berlin Wall: The Wall Memorial Ensemble Bernauer Strasse,” German Life and Letters 59, no. 2 (April 2006): 282. 52 “Erweiterung,” section “Öffnung der Mauer.” 53 See Camphausen and Fischer; “Erweiterung,” section “Öffnung der Mauer;” and Gerd Knischewski and Ulla Spittler, “Competing Pasts: A Comparison of National Socialist and German Democratic Republic Remembrance in Two Berlin Memorial Sites,” in Louise Purbrick et al., eds. Contested Spaces: Sites, Representations and Histories of Conflict (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Günter Schlusche, “From the Fall of the Wall to the Berlin Wall Memorial: How an Urban Commemorative Space was Created,” in Axel Klausmeier, ed. The Berlin Wall (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2015), 164–74, for overviews of this history. 54 Tölle, “Urban Identity Politics in Berlin,” 353; see also Knischewski and Spittler, “Competing Pasts.” 55 Baker, “The Berlin Wall,” 40. 56 Ibid., 41. 57 Dolff-Bonekämper, “The Berlin Wall,” 240. 58 Camphausen and Fischer, “Die Bürgerschaftliche Durchsetzung der Gedenkstätte an der Bernauerstrasse,” 362. 59 Hope M. Harrison, “The Demise and Resurrection of the Berlin Wall: German Debates About the Wall as a Site of Memory,” in B. Hofmann et al., eds.

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69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

The City as Subject Diktaturüberwindung in Europa: Neue nationale und transnationale Perspektiven (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter), 2010, 201. Knischewski and Spittler, “Competing Pasts,” 172. See Camphausen and Fischer, “Die Bürgerschaftliche Durchsetzung der Gedenkstätte an der Bernauerstrasse.” See Knischewski and Spittler, “Competing Pasts”; “Erweiterung,” section “Entwicklung zur heutigen Mauergedenkstätte.” http://www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/en/monument-212.html See Sybille Frank, Wall Memorials and Heritage: The Heritage Industry of Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie, trans. Jessica Spengler (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 154–5, for a succinct summary of these. Maria Nooke, “The Berlin Wall Commemorative Center—Concept and Public Acceptance,” in Leo Schmidt and Henriette von Prueschen, eds. On Both Sides of the Wall: Preserving Monuments and Sites of the Cold War Era (Berlin and Bonn: Westkreuz Verlag, 2005), 49. Knischewski and Spittler, “Remembering the Berlin Wall,” 285. On the concept of authenticity, see Frank, chapter 7, especially 192–202. Camphausen and Fischer, “Die Bürgerschaftliche Durchsetzung der Gedenkstätte an der Bernauerstrasse,” 371. A number of scholars have noted the general influence of the experience of constructing memorials to victims of the Nazi regime on aspects of Wall memorial development, including funding availability, the perceived value of authentic sites, the focus on victims, and others. See Knischewski and Spittler, “Competing Pasts;” Harrison, “The Demise and Resurrection of the Berlin Wall,” 197–8; and Jenny Wüstenberg, “Transforming Berlin’s Memory: Non-State Actors and GDR Memorial Politics,” in David Clarke and Ute Wölfel, eds. Remembering the German Democratic Republic: Divided Memory in a United Germany (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 65–6. See Camphausen and Fischer”Die Bürgerschaftliche Durchsetzung der Gedenkstätte an der Bernauerstrasse.” Ibid., 373, where the phrase is als zeithistorisches pars pro toto. See Günter Schlusche, “Das Haus Bernauer Straße 111.” Knischewski and Spittler, “Competing Pasts,” 182. Harrison, “The Demise and Resurrection of the Berlin Wall,” 202. Axel Klausmaier and Leo Schmidt. From 2009, Klausmaier was director of the Berlin Wall Foundation. Camphausen and Fischer, “Die Bürgerschaftliche Durchsetzung der Gedenkstätte an der Bernauerstrasse,” 375. Ibid., 376. Rainer E. Klemke, “Das Gesdamtkonzept Berliner Mauer,” in Henke, 379; Thomas Flierl, “Gedenkkonzept Berliner Mauer: Bestandsaufnahme und

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78 79

80

81

82 83

84 85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92

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Handlungsempfehlungen,” Berlin, Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung und Wohnen, April 2005, cited hereafter as Gedenkkonzept 2005. Ibid., 386–9; Gesamtkonzept 2006. For the impact of political dynamics on the early history of Bernauer Strasse developments, see Anna Saunders, Memorializing the GDR: Monuments and Memory after 1989 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2018), 207–14. See Frank, Wall Memorials and Heritage, 231–3, for a summary of these discussions; Hope M. Harrison, “The Berlin Wall and Its Resurrection as a Site of Memory,” German Politics and Society 29, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 86. On the Freedom Memorial, see Harrison, “The Demise and Resurrection of the Berlin Wall,” 206; Harrison, “The Berlin Wall and Its Resurrection as a Site of Memory,” 86; Sandler, 223; Saunders, Memorializing the GDR, 224–31; Anna Saunders, “Remembering Cold War Division: Wall Remnants and Border Monuments in Berlin,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 17, no. 1 (April 2009): 15–17; as well as Frank. Christine Richter, “Berliner wollen keine weitere Mauer-Gedenkstätte,” Berliner Zeitung, November 20, 2004. Axel Klausmaier, “Interpretation as a Means of Preservation Policy, or Whose Heritage Is the Berlin Wall,” in Neil Forbes, Robin Page, and Guillermo Pérez, eds. Europe’s Deadly Century: Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Conflict Heritage (Swindon: English Heritage, 2009), 102. On the status and acknowledgment of Wall remains at this time see Janet Ward, Post-Wall Berlin: Berders, Space and Identity (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 95–117. Gedenkkonzept 2005, 15. Gesamtkonzept 2006, 4. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 57. Heimo Lattner and Judith Laub, “Die Mauerpark-Affäre,” vol. 1 Berlin Hefte zu Geschichte und Gegenwart der Stadt (June 2016). See also https://gruen-berlin.de/ en/projekt/mauerpark Gesamtkonzept 2006, 23. The latter is discussed in “Erweiterung,” section “Sanierungsgebiet Rosenthaler Vorstadt.” Gesamtkonzept 2006, 33. For all information on these meetings, see this project’s final report issued by Zebralog, the Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, and the Verein Berliner Mauer, “Dialog zur Erweiterung der Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer,” June 7, 2007, http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/planen/staedtebau-projekte/bernauer_str/ download/arbeitsbericht_mauerdialog.pdf

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93 Due to 2001 changes in how the city’s administrative units are defined, both neighborhoods are now in the district of Mitte. The report’s analysis does not list Gesundbrunnen as a sub-district; Zebralog, 44–5. 94 Zebralog, 7–8. 95 See https://www.competitionline.com/de/ergebnisse/8366 96 See https://www.competitionline.com/de/beitraege/15080 97 Elissa Rosenberg, “Walking in the City: Memory and Place,” The Journal of Architecture 17, no. 1 (2012): 131–2. 98 Ibid., 145–7. 99 Gesamtkonzept 2006, 34. 100 Mark Crinson, ed. Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), xix. 101 Ibid., xviii. 102 Dolff-Bonekämper, “The Berlin Wall,” 242. 103 Linda Clifford, Obituary for Josefina da Vasconcellos, The Guardian, July 21, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2005/jul/21/guardianobituaries. artsobituaries 104 Günter Schlusche, “Stadtentwicklung im Geteilten Berlin,” in Klaus-Dietmar Henke, ed. Die Mauer: Errichtung, Überwindung, Erinnerung (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2011), 417. 105 Saunders, “Remembering Cold War Division,” 12–13. The Gesamtkonzept 2006 seems to acknowledge this overlap, 16. On the Topography of Terror, see also Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 106 Mary Fulbrook, “Historical Tourism: Reading Berlin’s Doubly Dictatorial Past,” in Uta Staiger, Henriette Steiner, and Andrew Webber, eds. Memory Culture and the Contemporary City: Building Sites (Basinstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 127. 107 Henry Pickford, “Conflict and Commemoration: Two Berlin Memorials,” Modernism/Modernity 12, no. 1 (2005): 148. The unexplained inclusion of a photo of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe within Axel Klausmaier’s contribution to the catalogue to the 2018 German Pavilion exhibition at the Venice Biennial Architecture Exhibition, in which he provides an overview of Berlin Wall memorial sites, exemplifies this tendency to conflate the two periods; see Birthler et al., Unbuilding Walls, 36. 108 Thomas Rogalla, “Es fehlen noch 60 Meter Postenweg,” Berliner Zeitung, June 6, 2014, 17; “Erweiterung,” section “Wettbewerbsaufgabe.” See Dolff-Bonekämper, “The Berlin Wall,” 247, on the general disposition of these parcels. 109 http://www.rosenthaler-vorstadt.de/index.html 110 “Erweiterung,” section “Gestaltungsbeirat Bernauer Strasse.” 111 “Erweiterung,” section “Vermittlungsverfahren.” 112 “Erweiterung,” section “Wettbewerbsaufgabe.”

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113 Stolpersteine (stumbling blocks; literally, stumbling stones) are small bronze commemorative markers created by Gunter Demnig and placed in the pavement in front of the last place of residence of a victim of National Socialism. See https:// www.stolpersteine-berlin.de/en/node/1; http://www.stolpersteine.eu/en/home/. 114 Jana Richter and Michaela Hillmer, “Catalogue of Berlin’s Top Sights,” in Jana Richter, ed. The Tourist City Berlin (Salenstein, Switzerland: Braun Publishing, 2010), 173; Rogalla, Es fehlen noch 60 Meter Postenweg; for 2016 figure, http:// www.berliner-mauer-gedenkstaette.de/de/pressemitteilungen-2017-1625,222,16. html 115 http://www.mauercafe-berlin.de/deutsch/ueberuns.html 116 Christian Kloss, “Kommentar,” 127. 117 Jonas Rest, “Die Internet-Fabrik,” Berliner Zeitung, June 11, 2014, 9. 118 Claire Colomb, Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post-1989 (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 252; on “dark tourism,” see Frank, Wall Memorials and Heritage, 170–8. 119 http://factoryberlin.com/about/ 120 Kristien Ring and Franziska Eidner, Selfmade City (Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung und Umwelt and jovis Verlag, 2013), 80. Also “Erweiterung,” section “Bauvorhaben ‘Strelitzer Gärten’.” 121 Nick Amies, “Life without Walls,” The New York Times, September 12, 2013, D7. 122 Ring and Eidner, Selfmade City, 80. 123 Ibid., 66. 124 Ibid. 125 Johannes Novy, “What’s New about Urban Tourism? And What Do Recent Changes in Travel Imply for the ‘Tourist City’ Berlin?” in Jana Richter ed. 196. 126 Gesamtkonzept 2006, 5. Perhaps this unfairly ignores the creation of the Weimar Republic. 127 Ibid., 3. 128 Ibid., 4. 129 Ibid. 130 Ada Louise Huxtable, “Housing West Berlin,” in Architecture, Anyone?: Cautionary Tales of the Building Art (New York: Random House, 1986), 187. On alternative ways of regarding the Wall, see Ward, Post-Wall Berlin, 59–94. 131 Jenny Wüstenberg, “Transforming Berlin’s Memory: Non-State Actors and GDR Memorial Politics,” in Clarke and Wölfel,” 65–76. 132 Axel Klausmaier and Leo Schmidt, “Mauerrelikte,” in Henke, 347. 133 Tölle, “Urban Identity Politics in Berlin,” 356. 134 Gesamtkonzept 2006, 19. 135 Andreas Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997): 57-81, reprinted in Present Pasts (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 64. Hermine G. DeSoto, “(Re)Inventing Berlin: Dialectics of Power, Symbols and Pasts,

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138 139 140 141

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146 147 148 149 150

The City as Subject 1990–1995,” City & Society 8, no. 1 (1996): 29–49, studies the post-reunification dominance of the Western perspective through the analysis of street name changes in the central city. Gesamtkonzept 2006, 5. Robert Darnton, Berlin Journal 1989–1990 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 77, 79. For alternative views in 1989–90 specifically in the urban development community, see Bruno Flierl and Peter Marcuse, “Urban Policy and Architecture for People, Not for Power,” City 13, no. 2–3 (2009): 264–77. For further discussion of GDR oppositionists’ intentions to build a more democratic society, see Paul Hockenos, Berlin Calling: A Story of Anarchy, Music, the Wall, and the Birth of the New Berlin (New York: The New Press, 2017). Michael Pilz, “Biographies in Concrete,” in Birthler et al., 66. Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 22. Rainer E. Klemke, “Das Gesdamtkonzept Berliner Mauer,” 387; Saunders, Memorializing the GDR, 207–14, 231–6. Andrew H. Beattie, “The Politics of Remembering the GDR: Official and State-mandated Memory since 1990,” in Clarke and Wölfel, 29. See also Mary Fulbrook, “Jenseits der Totalitarismustheorie? Vorläufige Bemerkungen aus sozialgeschichtlicher Perspektive,” in Peter Barker, ed. The GDR and Its History (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 35–53. David Clarke and Ute Wölfel, “Remembering the GDR in a United Germany,” in Clarke and Wölfel, 15. This trope continues today, as in the report that “voting results and opinion polls show that many East Germans have a precarious relationship to democracy;” see Marianne Birthler, “40 Years of Division Need 40 Years to Heal,” in Birthler et al., 26. Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–33. Beattie, “The Politics of Remembering the GDR,” 32. Saunders, “Remembering Cold War Division,” 12; Claire Hyland, “‘The Era Has Passed, But It’s Nice to Remember’: Eastern Identification with the GDR Past and Unified Germany,” in Clarke and Wölfel, 144–56. For an attempt to recognize the complexity and legitimacy of East Germans’ experience, see Robert Halsall, “GDR Architecture and Town Planning in Post-unification Germany: Geschichtsaufarbeitung or Aesthetic Autonomy?” in Barker, 185–214. Clarke and Wölfel, “Remembering the GDR in a United Germany,” 10. Ibid., 17–18. Gesamtkonzept 2006, 30. Clarke and Wölfel, “Remembering the GDR in a United Germany,” 18–20. Ibid., 22; see also Beattie.

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151 Huyssen, 53–4. 152 Darnton, Berlin Journal 1989–1990, 79. 153 Fulbrook, “Historical Tourism,” 130, 133. 154 Gesamtkonzept (2006), 6. 155 Klausmaier (2009), 103–4; Axel Klausmaier, “Die Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer an der Bernauer Strasse,” in Henke, 398. 156 Harrison, 198. 157 “Interview with Bruno Flierl,” in Birthler et al., 110. 158 Pilz in Birthler, 68. 159 Darnton, a scholar of eighteenth century and Revolutionary France, who had attended 200th-anniversary celebrations in France before his sojourn in Berlin, is the first writer I am aware of to have made this comparison. It was not lost on Berliners, however; Darnton refers to a sign at the November 4, 1989, demonstration at Alexanderplatz that read “1789–1989.” He notes that its contemporary context was discussions of political reform and building socialism, not reunification, which became the hegemonic goal over the following months; 318–19. See also Marion Detjen, “Die Mauer als Politische Metapher,” in Henke, 426–39. 160 Wüstenberg, 74; on the Sabrow Commission also see Beattie and the introduction by the editors to Ann Fuchs, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, and Linda Shortt, eds. Debating German Cultural Identity since 1989 (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011), 8. A few scholars have discussed the impact that experiences with and the model of memorials to Nazism’s victims had on the conceptualization of Berlin Wall memorials; see, for example, Knischewski and Spittler, “Competing Pasts.” Reverberations from earlier intellectual conflicts, including the historians’ debate (Historikerstreit) and debates over the renovated Neue Wache memorial, may also have had an impact; see Ladd. In addition to memorials’ organizational structures and emphasis on victims, there may be other influences from the experience of wrestling with the Nazi past that are worth exploring, including the vexed issue of defining perpetrators; see Paul B. Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 161 Wüstenberg, 67. 162 http://archiv.revolution89.de/?PID=static,Ausstellung,00300-OpenAir,Index_en; https://www.havemann-gesellschaft.de/ausstellungen/friedliche-revolution-undmauerfall/; see also Colomb, Staging the New Berlin, 254–5. 163 Dolff-Bonekämper, “The Berlin Wall,” 247; Pierre Nora, Lieux de Mémoire (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1992). The term “sites of dispute” offers the possibility of referring to interaction within a discursive space and so it seems preferable for my purposes to the focus on identity entailed in “memory contests” as developed

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in Anne Fuchs et al. The term “dissensus” is now more familiar through the work of Jacques Rancière, as in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London and New York: Continuum, 2010); the radical, imaginative break with the given that is implied by this term adds a useful dimension to Dolff-Bonekämper’s contribution. See also Fred Evans, Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy: An Essay in Political Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 164 Flierl interview in Birthler et al., 111. See also the interview with Daniel Libeskind in this volume, 98–107. 165 Gesamtkonzept 2006, 13, 26. 166 See Daniel Libeskind, The Space of Encounter (New York: Universe, 2000), also Jaskot, 139–41. 167 See http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/aktuell/wettbewerbe/ergebnisse/2007/ bernauer_strasse/ergebnis.shtml 168 Teutsch, Unverfugt, 97. 169 Dolff-Bonekämper, “The Berlin Wall,” 240–1. 170 See Rogalla, Es fehlen noch 60 Meter Postenweg. 171 Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen, Spaces of Uncertainty (Wuppertal: Verlag Müller + Busmann, 2002), 54. 172 Harrison, quoted on 207. 173 Matthias Bernt, Britta Grell, and Andrej Holm, “Introduction,” in Bernt et al., 14. 174 Cupers and Miessen, Spaces of Uncertainty, 31. 175 Andrej Holm, “Urban Renewal and the End of Social Housing: The Roll out of Neoliberalism in East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg,” Social Justice 33, no. 3 (2006): 114–28.

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Conclusion: Public Art within an Urban Discourse In fraught times dominated by global capital it may seem quixotic for this study to emphasize moments of liberatory possibilities in a past in which public art articulated and drew from the aspirations of citizen-activists. But not only is it necessary to preserve awareness of the repository of practices that contributed to these moments. It is also valuable to remain alert to the vocabularies and strategies of intervention these practices engaged and that are now themselves part of the city’s “permanences”—“continuities that exist in the deepest layers of the urban structure,” as Aldo Rossi wrote.1 Recognized in this way, these works of public art constitute resources for future artists and activists as well as for efforts that may even now be underway in new, unseen, interstitial corners of Berlin. The visual and spatial practices that enabled these public artworks to participate in the larger discourses of their times concerning urban redevelopment also rendered them constitutive elements of the city, where they continue to remain available as that discourse resumes. We have seen such public art practices in Berlin in murals from the 1970s and 1980s, in post-reunification street art, as well as in our examples of public sculptures from the late 1980s through the early years of the new millennium. West Berlin murals reclaimed exposed firewalls and dreary apartment building façades. The street art scene appropriated walls, advertising placards, common street structures, and derelict buildings. Post-reunification sculptors built their works from seemingly inconsequential elements of ordinary city life, such as pavements, vacant spaces, and lamp-posts. The reliance that all of these placed on vernacular materials wove these works of public art into the fabric of the city. By taking the city as their subject in these ways, often without reference to the city as an explicit subject, public art re-visioned the idea of the city and proposed that the city can be understood to be constructed from locally resonant nodes connected through networks of wider historical meaning.

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Moreover, these public art initiatives evolved within a wider climate of urban awareness. An activist citizenry emerged, beginning in the 1960s, through engagement in historical research to excavate the Nazi past in the city; they developed the tools and skills to then challenge current planning policies that threatened their neighborhoods with demolition. Destruction of physical embodiments of the past would have erased recently located traces of historical events and ruptured continuities within the architectural, spatial, and social infrastructures of the city. In collaboration with actions undertaken by citizen activists, including scholars, students, immigrants, women’s groups, and activist planners and architects, West Berlin muralists articulated alternative visions for urban redevelopment. In their murals, they represented activists’ concerns and helped further their projects; they built a new audience for public art while bolstering challenges to the dominant policy of urban renewal through demolition. West Berlin murals can best be understood, in other words, within a discourse created by urban activists. The claim to the right to the city that we can identify with this collective effort characterized the endeavors of other urban mural movements working internationally in the same period. Though inspired by Mexican and US muralists of the 1930s, the new international murals’ themes, sites, and audiences were significantly different. What unified the innovations of international muralism, of which the West Berlin murals were a part, was that they addressed and spoke for the claim by ordinary citizens—including immigrants, youth, working people, women, and people of color—to the right to the city, to shape their cities to meet their needs and desires. On this account, they represent a new model of mural making that is derived from, but different than, the earlier one. The revaluing of traditional structures, ensembles, and streetscapes that this activism achieved in West Berlin through murals, as well as through sitins, building occupations, demonstrations, citizens’ initiatives, and other legal and illegal actions, led to new, preservationist municipal planning policies. Such revaluing of built form from the past also contributed to the eventual rise of the phenomenon of gentrification. The full impact of this was felt only after reunification, when artists, youth, students, cultural workers, and others settled in previously off-limits Eastern districts; in the wake of their interventions there and in previously marginalized West Berlin neighborhoods, these districts became attractive to speculators and developers. The street art scene that first flourished in these areas in the climate of new possibilities created by the fall of the Wall embraced some of the same experimental and heterogeneous approaches to urban development that characterized West Berlin activism in the

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1970s and 1980s; it transformed derelict or neglected spaces both visually and functionally, encouraging residents to claim their right to create a more diverse and improvisational city. These initiatives were increasingly undermined after the turn of the millennium, however, as artists, along with other residents, fell victim to displacement and their art was instrumentalized by city-marketers and private developers. The body of public sculptures that we examined in Chapter 3 actively draws the viewer into considerations of their urban character and relationships through the nature of their sites and materials. Their reliance on interstitial spaces and infrastructural elements of urban life embeds these sculptures in the fabric of the city and in the daily rounds of their viewers. They address an audience made sensitive during the decades before the fall of the Wall to the resonant details of the urban environment and to citizens’ role in shaping urban redevelopment. Even the narratives of contested sculptural initiatives highlight the readiness of citizens to discuss and debate art within the public sphere. All of the instances we analyze attest, in a variety of ways, to the contributions of these works to the larger discourse in Berlin concerning the nature of the city, even as that was being redefined institutionally in the context of reunification. Each of these bodies of public art, then, responded to and participated in a wider public discourse on urban development in Berlin. Although their contexts were different, the artists who produced these works were able to seize upon moments of liberatory possibilities that enabled them to represent in physical form alternative understandings of and visions for the city. This was not true of the Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse, which registers its conception of the city in different terms and manifests a more problematic relationship to the discourse on urban redevelopment than we find in these earlier works. To focus attention on the city as a divided space was one of the explicit mandates for the theme of the Memorial. This Memorial does, indeed, build on the vocabulary of urban materials and forms for which earlier public art laid the foundation. We can see this in its dependence on infrastructural fragments, its deployment of vernacular urban elements, its reliance on exposed firewalls, on the void of the remaining no-man’s land, and on the ground plane, and in the opportunities it presents for intervals of viewer participation. This urban vocabulary affirms the integral connection of the Memorial to its site and to the city at large. Yet, as recounted in Chapter 4, the Memorial promotes a narrow view of the city’s division. It is a view that is constrained by the continuation of a Cold War perspective and a contemporary unwillingness to take into account a full range of historical perspectives and experiences, especially those of East Berliners.

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Moreover, it reflects the pressures of speculative property redevelopment in the area. This narrow reading reduces the period of division to the lifespan of the Wall and posits the Memorial itself as the end-point of the narrative that began when the first bricks were plastered into place on August 13, 1961. But the stones of Berlin argue otherwise, and perhaps the vocabulary of sculptural, architectural, and spatial practices that the Memorial deploys can provide the basis for future alternative interpretive strategies. The fragmentary nature of the Bernauer Strasse memorial landscape—its remnants of the Wall juxtaposed with segments of a contemporary openwork screen of rods that fills in its gaps, the archaeological traces of other Wall emplacements, the patrol path, the Window of Remembrance and many pavement markers, the tracks of buried tunnels, the Chapel of Reconciliation and 1998 Monument, documentation stations, and other elements—as well as the memorial landscape as a fragment of the entire Berlin Wall memorial cityscape resist completion. Fragments call attention to the gaps between them; they conjure absence and cultivate “tolerance of unresolved ambiguity.”2 Fragments sustain an openended framework that solicits viewers’ questions and exploration through research and imagination. As the contrast between the memorial landscape and the 1998 Monument attests, it may be more fruitful to preserve fragmentary evidence that gives witness to the absence of the past and liminal access to it, than to restore or recreate evidence of the past as a sealed object. Furthermore, the practices included in the Memorial that derive from those introduced by post-reunification public sculptures—site-specificity, incorporation of vernacular features, use of diverse materials, and integration of two- and three-dimensional media—similarly encourage conceptual and participatory experience. To the extent that the fragmentary nature of the Memorial evokes the need on the part of the visitor to actively assemble meaning from its dispersed elements, a more multi-voiced alternative to the Memorial’s current narrative may emerge. The Bernauer Strasse memorial landscape may hold the potential to evolve not only in relation to the ongoing redevelopment of its surrounding neighborhoods but also in relation to new inquiries that visitors press upon it. Indeed, such inclusion of diverse voices and responsiveness to multiple perspectives are the hallmarks of works that embody what James E. Young has called “collected memory.” In contrast to monuments that impose “monolithic meaning and national narratives,” those that are grounded in collected memory represent the perspectives of “multiple voices of … everyday historians,” of “individual citizens.”3 They acknowledge and promote multi-vocal expression

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to embody a diversity of views and experiences. Young’s notion also recognizes that a monument that frames collected memory may involve “a never-to-becompleted process, animated (not disabled) by the forces of history bringing it into being.”4 Such a monument is as much materially and intellectually connected to the times in which it is constructed as it is aligned with the period that it recalls. Indeed, memory itself is a complex construction that is refracted through the debates and polemics provoked by the events on which it is based as well as by contemporary circumstances. For Young, then, such a monument “succeeds only insofar as it allows itself full expression of the debates, arguments, and tensions generated in the noisy give and take among competing constituencies driving its very creation.”5 Working with the concept of collected memory runs counter to the distrust of personal memories and the imposition of a singular, West-centered narrative manifested in the mandate that shaped the Memorial’s execution, as evidenced, for example, in the Gesamtkonzept. And yet the history in which the Wall is embedded is not a closed chapter; it continues to reverberate and to be inflected by contemporary developments. A working framework that incorporated the idea of collected memory would open the door to many new possibilities at the Berlin Wall Memorial. These could address some of the issues that were discussed in Chapter 4, such as embracing a broader understanding of the city’s division to integrate periods before the Wall’s erection and after its fall, as well as taking a wider look at how the entire Rosenthaler Vorstadt was and continues to be affected by the neighborhood’s division. Such explorations may offer suggestive possibilities for examining other areas of the city that were divided by the Wall, as well. Pursuing an approach that emphasizes collected memory would also offer the prospect of transforming the Memorial into a site for promoting freer discussions among diverse constituencies, especially former East Berliners, about their understandings and experiences of the past. By encouraging these, the Memorial might stimulate a wider historical and urban discourse that may in turn affect ways of construing its own installations. Young’s notion of collected memory also speaks to aspects of the challenge to traditional monumentality mounted by the public sculptures of the postreunification period. In contrast to didactic, static, and bombastic monuments of the past, the new sculptures insert themselves into interstitial spaces of everyday life, where often viewers come upon them unawares. Their vernacular materials and uses of urban infrastructure knit them into the quotidian patterns of city life in ways that leave room for individual reflection; they solicit a multiplicity of responses—“multiple voices,” in Young’s terms—as they encourage viewers to

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contemplate these public sculptures’ connections to the city and to the networks of meanings they locate. It is through the materials they use and their deployment of urban infrastructure, too, that these public sculptures bring together Alois Riegl’s categories of intentional and unintentional, or historic, monuments, and foreground distinctive ways in which his concepts highlight key features of urbanity.6 The sculptures’ intentionality is clear, as they are new, deliberately constructed works. However, like the West Berlin murals from the 1970s and 1980s, their reliance on, and even celebration of, urban infrastructure as their medium draws purposeful attention to the repository of historic witness that the city represents. They point, in other words, to characteristics of the city that bear historic meaning unintentionally. The Berlin Wall Memorial performs a related fusion, integrating the unintentional monument of the Wall within the intentional construction of the Memorial. The categories do not collapse upon each other; they remain distinct, but their conjoining in new works of public art enacts the ongoing ability of historic monuments to repeatedly renew understandings of the city, an ability that the concept of the unintentional monument itself was created to affirm. Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city embraces both Young’s emphasis on multi-vocality and Riegl’s and Rossi’s assertions of the malleability of historic urban structures. To these Lefebvre adds a fundamental interest in locating levers for change in local agency, and an insistence on privileging use value over exchange value. All of these are features of the works of public sculpture, West Berlin murals, and the post-reunification street art scene that we have examined. Their claims to the right to the city pose the city as a dynamic force-field of possibilities in which people can imagine and construct an enriching environment for their lives. For much of the past seventy years, Berlin was a site of rebuilding, first during the decades following the Second World War and then in the wake of the fall of the Wall. Attuned to both decay and transformation, the critical discourse that developed around the process of reconstruction seized upon alternative options to the solutions proposed by mainstream planners and developers. As the Tacheles squatters proclaimed in the early 1990s, “ideals are ruined, let’s save the ruin.”7 By disturbing fixed patterns of thought and embracing the generative possibilities of contradictions, new ideals and a new conception of the city could be fashioned using shards of the old ones. Also at hand were visual traditions from which the public artists whose works we have been looking at could draw support and inspiration for their

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innovations in forms, mediums, and ways to connect with their audiences. Critiques of traditional monumentality offered by earlier twentieth-century Modernists, including Cubists, Constructivists, and Dadaists, as well as architectural modernists, introduced new materials and abstract forms that emphasized the constructed nature of the artwork. Contemporary explorations in Minimalism, Conceptual Art, Performance, and Installation art pioneered new visual, intellectual, psychological, and environmental approaches to artmaking. All of these helped promote the creation of a new vocabulary of forms and new spatial strategies that took into account both the physical environment in which the artwork is situated and the active role of the viewer as a participant in the construction of the work’s meaning. For the specific bodies of public art that concern us, those new vocabularies and strategies included attending to the climate of public awareness regarding urban redevelopment that began to develop in the 1960s, and deploying innovative practices in ways that focus attention on the nature of the city. These approaches expanded the definition of public art beyond its reference to art that is sanctioned and funded by public bodies and that appears in public space. The new approaches to public art that we have seen offer a strong contrast to the mainstream, often corporate, model of public art in which commodified ornamental objects re-inscribe secular representational and ceremonial “scripted spaces” with images that convey power and hierarchy.8 Instead, the examples of public art in this study reveal a strong connection to place and a vocabulary of urban infrastructural forms and mediums that encourage viewers to interrogate and reflect on the idea and possibilities of the city that their strategies suggest. Public art, as we have seen, can serve as a repository of public memory; this can be the role of its explicit subject matter. But beyond this, public art can also instigate awareness of important ways in which urban space and infrastructure themselves preserve urban memory. Such crucial supports for much of the public art that we have looked at, using the rubrics of networks, voids, and ground planes, function in this way; they draw our attention to the physical structures and spaces of the city that comprise the armatures of historical meaning. Another contrast that many of these works of public art offer to the corporate practice of staging prestige cultural objects in isolation can be found in the sites they occupy, which are often fallow, if not derelict, surfaces and spaces. They reclaim exposed firewalls and their nearby vacant lots, crumbling façades, and shattered remains of decades-old abandoned structures. Some of the sculptures we discuss make use of interstitial or leftover spaces, where their appearance is unexpected and provocative. Restoration is not the goal of any of these.9

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The City as Subject

By transforming and repurposing these sites, they contribute to a critical discourse on the direction of urban development and the agents who shape it, helping to articulate a claim to the right to the city. Additionally, through their acts of reclamation, they enact social processes of construction that belie the bureaucratic and technocratic real-estate-driven methods of development that dominate planning protocols. And by revaluing overlooked, decrepit, and debased sites, these works of public art refocus attention on the elemental features of built form and infrastructure of which a city is constructed and which continue to bear its character and history. Thus, to read the works of public art that we focus on here as taking the city as their implicit subject is a way to discover what is not immediately evident otherwise, namely how they can function as part of a wider discourse. Underlying the explicit subjects of these works are shared visual forms and spatial strategies that positioned these public artworks in relation to what were seen as some of the most pressing concerns of their day among a broad range of Berlin citizens. We find the clearest evidence of this in the relationship between the ideas, practices, and aims of West Berlin muralists of the 1970s and 1980s, and the wider community of citizen-activists and others whose challenge to mainstream urban redevelopment articulated a claim to the right to the city. This climate of urban awareness persisted in the post-reunification period, however, creating a knowing audience for the street art scene as well as for the public sculptures that we examined in Chapter 3. Although urban redevelopment issues continued to be significant, the absence of diverse views from both East and West at the Berlin Wall Memorial has meant that the potential there for connecting with a larger alternative discourse remains to be realized. Public art of itself creates neither a vibrant public discourse nor moments of liberatory possibilities. Rather, as most of the examples of public artworks in Berlin that we have examined here have shown, by taking the city as their subject and connecting with a lively and widespread public discourse concerning urban redevelopment, they contributed in essential ways to collaborative efforts to bring about social change. These public artists’ insistence on drawing attention to the forms and materials that build a city, which they often relied upon as well to build their artworks, celebrated the city as a deliberate, active construction, an ongoing project in which citizens sought to participate. By grounding their artworks in the city’s infrastructure, they ensured that their works of public art advocated for a view of cities as repositories of the histories of such constructive projects that remain available for the future.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9

Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman (1966; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), 59, 128. Ottilie Mulzet, “Translator’s Afterword,” in Szilárd Borbély, ed. Berlin-Hamlet (New York: New York Review Books, 2016), 98. James E. Young, The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 15. Ibid., 16. Ibid. This is similar to Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper’s notion of “dissensus;” see Chapter 4. Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 21–50. Daniela Sandler, Counterpreservation: Architectural Decay in Berlin since 1989 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 126. See Chapter 2 above. Leslie Sklar, The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities, and Capitalist Globalization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 229. See also John Bingham-Hall, “Public Art as a Function of Urbanism,” in Cameron Cartiere and Martin Zebracki, eds. The Everyday Practice of Public Art: Art, Space and Social Inclusion (Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 163. Sandler also makes this observation regarding the architectural interventions she studies.

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Index Note: page references in italics indicate figures; Pl indicates plate numbers. abandoned sites See neglected sites absence 7, 91, 94, 96, 99, 103, 128, 184, 186, 204 See also voids abstraction 73–4, 87, 117, 151, 163, 168, 207 activism 2, 4–5, 12, 14, 16–17, 201–2, 208 and the Berlin Wall Memorial 129, 148, 153 citizen-activism 2, 4, 5, 12, 30, 34, 83, 114, 201–2, 208 grassroots 2, 14, 16, 24, 78, 180 and public sculpture 69–71, 82, 83, 105, 115 in Rosenthaler Vorstadt and Wedding 136, 143, 144, 144 and West Berlin murals and street art 21, 24, 27–32, 34–5, 37, 39–40, 44–5, 48, 51, 54, 56, 58–9, Pl 4 see also occupations (buildings; housing) agency 23, 59, 179, 180, 206 Aktion 507 (group) 31 Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek, Kreuzberg, Gemalte Illusionen exhibition, 1983 28, 41 Amerika Haus, Street Art: Public Wallpainting in the USA (Street Art: Öffentliche Wandmalereien in den USA) exhibition, 1974 36–7, 41, 43 Assmann, Jan and Aleida 177–8 audience 7, 16–17, 45, 70–1, 202, 203, 208 Backjumps (magazine) 54–5, Pl 15 Basch, Gabriele, Wahre Geschichte (Genuine History), 1999 102, Pl 26 Bebelplatz, Library (Micha Ullman) 91–4, 92, 93, 97, 110, 115, 184, 186 Behkalam, Akbar, mural of tree with figures, Kreuzberg, 1980 38, Pl 8

Bengtsen, Peter 48–9 Benjamin, Walter 31, 83, 109, 163 Berlin History Workshop 77 Berlin Wall double cobblestones marking path of West-facing Wall, 1997– 101–2, 133, 155, 184, Pl 24 Gesamtkonzept for memorialization of 153–6, 158–9, 161, 167, 172, 175–82, 187–8, 205 no-man’s land 101–2 see also under Memorial to the Berlin Wall social and urban history of 134–47, 136, 138, 140, 141, 144, 146 viewing platform from West to East Berlin 129, 132, 152, 161, Pl 29 Berlin Wall Association (Verein Berliner Mauer; later Berlin Wall Foundation) 150–3, 156 Berlin Wall Memorial See Memorial to the Berlin Wall and its Victims and to the Division of the City at Bernauer Strasse Biddle, George 43 Biebl, Rolf, sculpture of Rosa Luxemburg, 1999 85 Biedermann, Karl, Der verlassene Raum (The Abandoned Room), 1988–96 103, 103 billboards 43, 49–50, 50, 52 Blu, Hourglass, 2010 52, 55, Pl 13 Bohemian immigrants footprint of former church on church on Bethlehemkirchplatz, 1994 99–100, Pl 23 pedestal relief of Bohemian refugees (Alfred Reichel), 1912 100–1, 101 Boltanski, Christian, The Missing House, 1990 90–1, 97, 186, Pl 22 border crossings 102, Pl 26

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­ orofsky, Jonathan, Molecule Man, 1999 114 B Bremen, public art program 35–6 Brunner, Werner 26 Calder, Alexander, La Grande Vitesse, 1967–9 70 Camphausen, Gabriele 153 cautious urban renewal 5, 33, 44, 48, 58–9, 83, 142 Chamberlain, John, Tower of Klythie, 1995 114 Charlottenburg 27, 34–5, 44, Pl 5 Checkpoint Charlie 154–5, 183 Chicago, The Wall of Respect mural 43 Chile 31, 38 city marketing 14, 34, 44, 53–6, 173, 189, 203 Clarke, David 177–8 Cold War 12, 16, 69, 106, 127, 128, 168, 175–7, 203 Colomb, Claire 173 Color in the Cityscape (Farbe im Stadtbild) public art program 36 communism 85, 106–7, 111–12, 136, 178 Communist Party 85, 111, 136 conceptual art 8, 97, 117, 207 constructivism 207 Cooper, Martha 51 corporate development 6, 13, 16, 49–50, 54–5, 58, 72, 115 corporate-sponsored art 1, 2, 6, 7, 9, 17, 23, 69, 114, 207 Crinson, Mark 162–3 critical urban theory 6 cubism 207 culture, urban See urban culture Curtis, Barry 118 dadaism 49, 57, 207 Darnton, Robert 176–7 Debord, Guy 49, 115–16 Demnig, Gunter, Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones), 1995– 97, 98, 133, 171, 184 demolition 4, 5, 26, 30–3, 47, 75, 82, 118, 141–3, 147, 202 See also preservation derelict sites See neglected sites development See urban redevelopment displacement 6, 54, 59, 73, 100, 145, 203 Dolff-Bonekämper, Gabi 181, 186–7

East Berlin 2, 5–6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 203, 205 and the Berlin Wall Memorial 128, 151, 155, 168, 175–9, 181, 189–90 murals and street art 32, 45–8, 56–8 public sculpture 90, 91, 103, 107, 110–11 see also Rosenthaler Vorstadt East Side Gallery 22–3, 155 ecological themes See environmental themes Eisenman, Peter, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 98–9, 105, 115 environmental themes 14, 25–6, 29, 37–8, 52, 75, 117 opposition to nuclear energy 27, 31, 37 exhibitions 36–7, 41, 43, 180–1 façades ­and public sculpture 94–5 of Rosenthaler Vorstadt 146, 148 West Berlin murals 21, 22, 27–9, 34–5, 42, 46, 51, 52, 201, Pls 2, 3, 4, 8, 13 Factory, The, Mitte 173 Feversham, Polly 129 firewalls, exposed 2, 3, 9, 11, 14, 201, 203, 207 Berlin Wall Memorial murals and photo-murals 160–2, 165–8, 171, 174, 176, 183, 188, Pls 32, 42, 43, 44 murals in West Berlin 21, 22, 25–8, 34–5, 37, 42, 44, 51, 60, Pls 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 15 in public sculpture 91, 97, Pl 22 Fischer, Manfred 148–9, 151 Flierl, Bruno 179 Flierl, Thomas 153, 154, 177, 181 Fluxus 49, 74 fragments 162–3, 203–4 Franke, Harald 140–1 Frankfurt Architecture Museum 128 Frankfurt School 6 Frederick the Great, equestrian statue of 93–4 Friedrichshain 48, 52, 57–8, 85, Pl 12 Fritz, Fabian, and Markus Beer, Wilmersdorf mural, 1987 40–1, Pl 9 Fulbrook, Mary 167, 179 funding 44, 47, 70, 89, 118, 143, 151

Index GDR See German Democratic Republic (GDR) Gemeos, Os, Yellow Man, 2005 55, Pl 15 gentrification 13, 24, 47, 54, 55, 58–9, 91, 145, 189, 202 See also occupations; property; development/ speculation German Democratic Republic (GDR) 10, 16, 46–7, 110–13, 118, 175–81, 189–90 conflation with the Nazi regime 10, 167, 171, 184 Herbert Baum Memorial Stone (Jürgen Raue), 1981/2000 111–13, 112, 119 Karl Liebknecht memorial/façade of former Council of State building 84–5, 84 workers’ protests of June 17, 1953 106–9, Pl 28 Gersch, Christine, and Igor Jerschov, Pocketpark, 2005 104–5, Pl 27 Giedion, Siegfried 74 Girot, Christophe, Sinking Wall, restored 1997 102–3 González-Torres, Félix, Es ist nur eine Frage der Zeit (It’s just a matter of time), 2002 52, 56, Pl 11 Görss, Rainer, Reflexum, 2000 94–6, 95 Göschel, Wolfgang, Joachim von Rosenberg, and Hans-Norbert Burkert, Spiegelwand (Mirror Wall), 1992–5 94, 95, 97 graffiti 21–4, 45, 48–51, 53–5, 58–9, 138, 170, Pl 10 See also street art ground planes 10–11, 15, 203, 207 and the Berlin Wall Memorial 133, 182, 184–6, 188 and public sculpture 72, 85, 97–105, 98, 101, 103, Pls 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 Grunderzeit (foundation era) 11, 135, 141, 176 See also Wilhelmine era Haacke, Hans, Denkzeichen Rosa Luxemburg, 2006 85, 86 Hadid, Zaha 128 Halbwachs, Maurice 116 Hansaviertel 25 ­Harvey, David 39–40

227

Hecker, Zvi, Micha Ullman, and Eyal Weizman, Blatt (Leaf or Places of Remembrance), 1994–6 87, 88 Heiliger, Bernhard, Flamme (Flame), 1963 74 Hemingway, Ernest 73, 117 Henke, Luke 55 Herbrich, Peter, Jürgen Wenzel, and Theseus Bappert, Memorial on Levetzowstrasse, 1988 86–8, Pl 20 Hessel, Franz, Walking in Berlin 135, 136 heterogeneity 4, 7, 16, 17, 40, 43, 44, 59–60, 71, 114, 182, 202 highway construction 27, 32, 75 Hikmet, Nazim 38, 52 Hildebrandt, Alexandra 154 Holm, Andrej 33, 46 Holocaust 14, 86, 92, 94, 98 Horn, Karl-Dieter 37 housing policy 25, 30, 46, 58, 137–42, 145, 173 See also cautious urban renewal; gentrification; occupations; property; urban redevelopment Humboldt Forum 111, 118 Huxtable, Ada Louise 175–6 Huyssen, Andreas 114, 176, 178 identity 14, 34, 41, 42, 45, 176, 178 ideology 108, 114, 177, 178–9 illusionism 27, 29, 34–5, 37, 40 imagery 4, 22, 23, 29, 38–9, 49, 84, 102–3, 183 infrastructure See urban infrastructure Initiative for the Political Memorials of the GDR (Initiative politische Denkmäler der DDR) 110 installation art 8, 117, 207 International Building Exhibition 33 Iran 31, 38 Jacobs, Jane 32 Jarausch, Konrad 111, 118 Jewish life and culture 86–90, 96, 99, 103, 135–6, 183 Orte des Erinnerns (Places of Remembrance; Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock), 1994 78–80, 79, 82, 89, Pl 18

228

Index

synagogue memorials 86–8, 88, Pl 20 see also Holocaust, Jewish Museum, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Stolpersteine Jewish Museum 88–9, 94, 97, 99, 183, 186 Jonker, Julian 80 Karrenberg, Katharina, Leipziger Platz proposal 107, 109 Klausmeier, Axel 143, 152–3, 176 Kleihues, Josef Paul 139 Knischewski, Gerd 151 Koons, Jeff, Balloon Flower, 2000 114 Kracauer, Siegfried 115–16 Kreuzberg See West Berlin murals Kreuzberg Art and Cultural Center (KuKuCK) 28 ­Modell Deutschland (German Model) mural, 1978 28–9 Kuhn, Armin 33, 46 KuKuCK See Kreuzberg Art and Cultural Center Kunst im Stadtraum (Art in City Space) program 36, 76, 104 Kunsthaus Tacheles (Art House Tacheles), Mitte 56–8 Kwon, Miwon 114–15 Lefebvre, Henri 22, 39–40, 42–3, 49, 58, 115 See also right to the city Lenin, Vladimir, monuments to 110 liberatory possibilities 2, 6, 16, 23, 44, 52, 118, 190, 201, 203, 208 Libeskind, Daniel, Jewish Museum 88–9, 94, 97, 99, 183, 186 Liebknecht, Karl, memorial to 84–5, 84 Lin, Maya, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1980–2 70 Lingner, Max, Building the Republic, Finance Ministry building, 1952 108–9 Ludwig, Eduard, Berlin Airlift Memorial, 1951 74 Luxemburg, Rosa, memorials to 83–5, 83, 86 Marcks, Gerhard, Der Rufer (The Caller), 1967, installed in Tiergarten 1989 89–90, Pl 21 Matschinsky-Denninghoff, Brigitte and Martin, Berlin, 1987 76, 78, Pl 17

Mauerpark (Wall Park) 155 meaning 7–9, 13, 15, 201, 204, 206–7 and the Berlin Wall Memorial 128, 132, 154, 164, 175, 183, 186 and public sculpture 70, 76, 81–2, 90–1, 105–6, 111, 113, 115–18 Media Spree development, Friedrichshain 55–6, 59 Memorial to the Berlin Wall and its Victims and to the Division of the City at Bernauer Strasse 127–90, 130, 131 afterlife of the landscape 171–4 archaeological boxes 162, 164–7, Pl 38 Church of Reconciliation 131, 140–1, 141, 143, 146, 148–9, 152, 152, 155, 161, 165, 166, 171, 178, 187, Pl 35 and the city 181–90, 185 commemoration steles and plaques 128, 147, 148, 149, 159, 160, 163–4, Pls 29, 32, 37 Cor-ten steel elements 150, 157, 159, 159, 161–8, 185, 185, Pls 31, 34, 35, 39 design competitions/commissions 150, 154, 156–8, 165, 167, 184 Documentation Center and observation platform 141, 151, 153, 155, 156, 161, 164, 171, 172, Pl 35 grass and green space 184–5, 185 landscape 154–71, 159, 160, 162, 166, 169, 170 marked underground escape tunnels 133, 167–8, 173, 185, Pl 39 Memorial to the Memory of the Division of the City and to the Victims of Communist Dictatorship, 1998 150–5, 157, 160, 161, 163–5, 171, 182–3, 204, Pls 35, 36 murals and photo-murals on firewalls 160–2, 165–8, 171, 174, 176, 183, 188, Pls 32, 42, 43, 44 no-man’s land 9, 129, 131, 131, 145, 151, 152, 155, 158, 161, 165, 167, 183, 184, 203, Pl 32 orientation maps and plans 156, 158–9, 159, 161, 168 patrol path 167–9, 170, 174, Pls 40, 41, 46

Index and the persistence of forgetting 175–81 social and urban history of 134–47, 136, 138, 140, 141, 144, 146 toward memorialization 147–54, 148, 149, 152 Visitor’s Center (Infopavillon) 156, 157, 161, 172, Pl 34 ­Wall zone 128–32, 130, 140–8, 151–5, 158–75, 159, 169, 182–8, Pl 32 Window of Remembrance 163, 180, 183, 204, Pls 36, 37 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 98–9, 105, 115 memory 7–8, 127, 205, 207 and the Berlin Wall Memorial 127, 153, 159, 163, 175–81, 183 collected 204–5 collective 159, 178, 183, 204 cultural 14, 118, 177–8 forgetting 175–81 politicization of 177, 178, 180 and public sculpture 69–71, 82, 101, 106, 109, 111, 115–16, 118 Mexican murals 36, 41 Milla and Partners, and Sasha Waltz, Citizens in Movement (Bürger in Bewegung) 110–11 minimalist art 8, 97, 207 Mitchell, Don 39 Moabit 37, Pl 7 modernism 8, 11, 12, 72–4, 116–18, 137, 141, 146, 207 modernization 22, 142 Moholy-Nagy, László, Berliner Stillleben (Berlin Still Life), 1931 135 Montgomery, Robert, text installation on billboard, Kreuzberg 49–50, 50 monumentality 8–9, 15, 17, 72–4, 78, 81–2, 116–17, 205, 207 monuments 8–10, 15, 73–82, 77, 79, 204–6, Pls 16, 17, 18, 19 intentional and unintentional 9, 70, 116, 127, 147, 206 murals international muralism 5, 23, 202 Mexican 36, 41 New Deal America 5, 36–7, 41, 43 see also West Berlin murals Musil, Robert 73, 105–6

229

National Monument to Freedom and Unity 110–11 Nazi regime 12, 30, 52, 71, 77–80, 90–1, 96–9, 108, 111–13, 186, 202 conflation with the German Democratic Republic (GDR) 10, 167, 171, 184 see also Holocaust neglected sites 2, 5, 14, 24, 31, 39, 47–8, 55, 57–9, 139, 142–3, 182, 201, 203, 207 networks 15, 207 and the Berlin Wall Memorial 133, 182–4, 188 and public sculpture 82–9, 83, 84, 86, 88, Pl 20 Neuhaus, Christianne 34 Neuhaus, Gert, Zipper, 1979 34–5, Pl 5 Neukölln (Rixdorf) 100–1, 101 New Berlin 1, 13 New Deal, USA, Works Progress Administration program (WPA) 5, 36–7, 41, 43 Niepel, Irene, Tempelhofer Ufer mural, 1981 35, Pl 6 Nordbahnhof (station) 155–6, 189 North, Michael 113 occupations (buildings, housing) 6, 28–33, 38–9, 44, 46–8, 54–8, 202, 206 collective living 31, 46 evictions 28, 30, 47 Kunsthaus Tacheles (Art House Tacheles), Mitte 56–8 ­occupied Schokoladen activist base, Ackerstrasse 143, 144 Oldenburg, Claes 70 and Coosji van Bruggen, Houseball 100–1, Pl 23 Orozco, José Clemente 41 Palast der Republik 111, 118, 178 Pankow 104–5, Pl 27 Paolozzi, Eduardo, black and white mural, 1976 25–6 Paris 4, 42–3 pavements See ground planes Pejic, Bojana 107 performance art 8, 55, 117, 207 permanences 7, 16–17, 73, 97, 201 Pickford, Henry 167

230

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planning See urban planning policy policy See housing policy, renewal policy preservation 5, 9, 202 and the Berlin Wall Memorial 147–50, 181, 186–7 counterpreservation 58 practices in West Berlin 141–2 and public sculpture 70–1, 75, 81–3, 104, 115–16 West Berlin murals 27, 31–4, 57 property ownership 31–3, 58, 87, 156 property reclamation/restitution 109, 150, 168–9, 169, 174, 188, Pl 40 property speculation and development 2, 5, 6, 13–16, 24, 29, 47–8, 51–9, 189, 202, 204 Spekulanten Raus graffiti 48, Pl 10 see also corporate development; housing policy public art 1–11, 201–8 background of in Berlin 11–13 and the right to the city 39–44 see also corporate-sponsored art; graffiti; murals; public sculpture; street art; memorials; monuments; West Berlin murals public engagement 8, 12–13, 22, 29, 31, 106, 117, 181, 202 public sculpture 1, 2, 3, 7–9, 10, 13, 15, 17, 69–73, 201, 203–8 commissions 72, 74, 83, 85, 104, 106, 111, 165 conflicts 105–13, 112, Pl 28 design competitions 78, 87, 91, 98, 103, 106–7, 110 ground planes 97–105, 98, 101, 103, Pls 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 networks 82–9, 83, 84, 86, 88, Pl 20 new monuments 73–82, 77, 79, Pls 16, 17, 18, 19 reclaiming the urban realm 113–19 voids 89–97, 92, 93, 95, Pls 21, 22 Ratgeb Artists Group (Werner Brunner, Paul Blankenburg, Werner Steinbrecher, Nil Ausländer, and Bernd Micka) 26, 29, 32, 44 The Civilization-damaged Tree of Redevelopment Breaks through

Moabit’s Historical Landscape, 1979 37, Pl 7 The History of the Bohemians and Rixdorf, 1980 100 workers’ training center mural, Muskauer Strasse, Kreuzberg, 1982 29, Pl 3 Raue, Jürgen, Herbert Baum Memorial Stone, 1981/2000 111–13, 112, 119 RAW (Reichsbahnausbesserungswerk) area, Friedrichshain 57–8 ­real estate See property redevelopment See urban redevelopment Reichel, Alfred, pedestal relief of Bohemian refugees, 1912 100–1, 101 renewal See cautious urban renewal renovation 31–4, 37, 44, 46–8, 51–9, 113, 138, 143–5, 146, 174 Retzer, Helga 43 Riegl, Alois 70, 81, 83, 116 right to the city 2, 4–5, 15–16, 22–4, 71, 202, 206, 208 as paradigm for public art 39–44 and street art 45–60 Rivera, Diego, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City, San Francisco Art Institute, 1931 40–1 Robert Havemann Society, “Revolution and the Fall of the Wall” exhibition 180–1 Rodin, Auguste 73 Rosenberg, Elissa 80, 158 Rosenthaler Vorstadt 134–47, 156, 163, 166, 172–4 building fabrics at Wall emplacements, 1984 138, 138, 142 Mietskaserne or “rental barracks” 135, 136, 138, 139 occupied Schokoladen activist base, Ackerstrasse 143, 144 renovated façade in 145, 146 Rossi, Aldo 32 Rothmann, Christian, Jürgen Wäldrich, Annegret Hauffe, Hans-Christian Kuhnow, Stefan Halbscheffel, Wo ist die Admiralstrasse geblieben? (What’s left of Admiralstrasse?), 1986 27, Pl 2

Index Rüppel, Wolfgang, June 17, 1953 Memorial, 2000 107–9, Pl 28 Sabrow Commission, 2005 177–8 Sachs, Nelly 104 Sachse, Karla, Kaninchenfeld (Rabbit Field), 1999 102, Pl 25 Sagebiel, Ernst 108 St. Elisabeth church and cemetery 140, 143, 164–5 St. Sophia church and cemetery 140, 150, 162, 163 Sandler, Daniela 58 Scharoun, Hans 137 Schlicht, Gisela, Luisenstadt Canal mural, 1981 27 Schmidt, Leo 129, 143, 152–3, 176 Schmidt-Brümmer, Horst 36 Schöneberg, Orte des Erinnerns (Places of Remembrance) 78–80, 79, 82, 89, Pl 18 Schorske, Carl 118 Schüler, Ralf, and Ursulina SchülerWitte, Memorial to Rosa Luxemburg, 1987 83–4, 83 sculpture See public sculpture Seibert, Georg, Memory, 1986 87 Serra, Richard Berlin Junction, 1987 76–7, 77 Tilted Arc, 1981 70 Shapiro, Joel, untitled stick figure, 1994 114 Siedler, Wolf Jobst 32 signage 79, 81–2, 155, 162, 170, 174, 184, 186, Pl 18 See also street names Simon, Hans 143 Siqueiros, David Alfaro 41 ­sites of dispute 181 See also collected memory situationism 4, 49 Skulpturenboulevard (Sculpture Boulevard), Department for Culture program 74, 105 solidarity 14, 22, 32, 38, 42 Soviet Union 112, 134, 137 See also Cold War Spittler, Ulla 151 squats/squatters See occupations (building, housing) Steglitz 94, 95, 97

231

Stih, Renata, and Frieder Schnock, Orte des Erinnerns (Places of Remembrance), 1994 78–80, 79, 82, 89, Pl 18 Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones; Gunter Demnig), 1995– 97, 98, 133, 171, 184 street art 1, 2, 3, 5–6, 9, 14, 16–17, 201–2, 206, 208 Backjumps (magazine) 54–5, Pl 15 and the right to the city 45–60, 50, 53, Pls 10, 15 small figures 52, 53, Pls 12, 14 stencils, stickers, wrappings 23, 45 see also graffiti; West Berlin murals street names 13, 78, 142, 178 street plans 7, 26–7 Suhr, Heinrich 137–8, 141 Tacheles See Kunsthaus Tacheles Taut, Bruno 111, 113 Tempelhof Airport 74, 108 Tiergarten 83–4, 83, 89–90, Pl 21 Strasse des 17. Juni 89, 106–7 Till, Karen 80 Tölle, Alexander 176 Tomsky, Nikolai, Lenin monument, 1970 110 tourism 10, 113, 114, 152, 154, 172, 189 Uhlmann, Hans 74 Ullman, Micha, Library, Bebelplatz, 1995 91–4, 92, 93, 97, 110, 115, 184, 186 Union of Organizations for the Victims of Communist Dictatorship (UOKG, Union der Opferverbände Kommunistischer Gewaltherrschaft) 180 Unter den Linden 93–4 urban awareness 7, 15, 24, 44, 69, 71, 72, 105, 202, 208 urban culture 21, 32, 53–4, 70 urban development/redevelopment 1–5, 9, 14–15, 17, 201–3, 207–8 and the Berlin Wall Memorial 134, 141, 146, 169, 176, 182, 189 capitalism/neoliberalism 4, 6, 39, 47, 59, 60, 175, 177 and public sculpture 69, 96, 100, 119

232

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and West Berlin murals 21–3, 27, 31–4, 38–40, 42, 44, 45, 47 see also corporate development; property; occupations (buildings, housing) urban infrastructure 1, 2, 4, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 205–8 and the Berlin Wall Memorial 130, 132, 155, 182, 188 and public sculpture 69, 81, 105, 115–17 social 135, 139, 202 and street art 51, 52, 54, 59, 60 Urban Nation, One Wall program 50–1 urban planning policy 5, 13, 24, 30–3, 36, 47, 71, 75, 141, 144, 202, 208 See also demolition; housing policy; preservation value, use and exchange 4, 32, 39, 58, 59, 206 Vasconcello, Josefina de, Reconciliation sculpture 165, 166 Vasudevan, Alexander 44 Venice Architectural Biennale, Unbuilding Walls, 2018 133, 179–80 voids 15, 207 and the Berlin Wall Memorial 133, 182, 186–8 and public sculpture 72, 89–97, 92, 93, 95, Pls 21, 22 Vostell, Wolf, Two Concrete Cadillacs in the Form of the Naked Maja, 1987 74–6, 78, Pl 16

Wagin, Ben, Weltbaum – Grün ist Leben (World Tree I – Green is Life), 1975 24–5, Pl 1 Waldemarstrasse 81, façade painted by residents, 1975 29–30, Pl 4 Weber, John 43 Wedding 134, 137–46, 156, 172, 174 building fabrics at Wall emplacements, 1984 138, 138, 142 Ernst-Reuter-Siedlung, 1954 137–8, Pl 30 postwar shops on Bernauer Strasse 140, 140 Weissler, Sabine 128 Wende (“the turn”, period of great change) 24, 45–6, 48 West Berlin murals 1–5, 9, 10, 13, 14–16, 17, 21–4, 201–3, 206, 208 commissions and competitions 25, 27, 34–7, 41, 51 context 24–39, Pls 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 illegal 2, 3–4, 14, 21, 28, 31–6, 44, 53, 202 legal 2, 4, 14, 27, 30, 32, 36, 202 and the right to the city 39–60, Pls 9, 11, 13, 14, 15 Wilhelmine era 11, 12, 26, 34, 74, 84 See also Grunderzeit Wilmersdorf 40–1, Pl 9 Wittenbergplatz, Orte des Schreckens (Places of Terror), 1967 81, 82, Pl 19 Wölfel, Ute 177–8 Zion Church 143

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234

235

236

237

238

Plate 1  Ben Wagin, Weltbaum—Grün ist Leben (World Tree I—Green Is Life), 1975. (Author, 2012)

Plate 2  Christian Rothmann, Jürgen Wäldrich, Annegret Hauffe, Hans-Christian Kuhnow, Stefan Halbscheffel, Wo ist die Admiralstrasse geblieben? (What’s left of Admiralstrasse?), 1986. (Author, 2012)

Plate 3  Ratgeb Artists Group (Werner Brunner, Paul Blankenburg, Werner Steinbrecher, Nil Ausländer, and Bernd Micka), Muskauer Strasse, 1982. (Author, 2012)

Plate 4  Building residents, Waldemarstrasse 81, 1975. (Author, 2012)

Plate 5  Gert Neuhaus, Zipper, 1979. (Author, 2012)

Plate 6  Irene Niepel, Tempelhofer Ufer, 1981. (Courtesy of Jutta Lüderitz, 2019)

Plate 7  Ratgeb Artists Group (Werner Brunner, Paul Blankenburg, Werner Steinbrecher, Nil Ausländer, and Bernd Micka), The Civilization-damaged Tree of Redevelopment Breaks through Moabit’s Historical Landscape, 1979. (Courtesy of Jutta Lüderitz, 2019)

Plate 8  Akbar Behkalam, 1980. (Author, 2012)

Plate 9  Fabian Fritz, 1987. (Author, 2019)

Plate 10  Spekulanten Raus (Speculators Get Out). (Author, 2012)

Plate 11  Félix González-Torres, Es ist nur eine Frage der Zeit (It’s just a matter of time), 2002. (Author, 2012)

Plate 12  Giggling figure in doorway. (Author, 2012)

Plate 13 Blu, Hourglass, 2010. (Author, 2012)

Plate 14  On the left, a monster menaces a city. (Author, 2012)

Plate 15  Os Gemeos, Yellow Man, 2005, for the second Backjumps Live Issue exhibition. (Author, 2012)

Plate 16  Wolf Vostell, Two Concrete Cadillacs in the Form of the Naked Maja, 1987. (Author, 2006)

Plate 17  Brigitte and Martin Matschinsky-Denninghoff, Berlin, 1987. (Author, 2006)

Plate 18  Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, Orte des Erinnerns (Places of Remembrance), 1994. The label depicted on the plaque on the left blends in with ordinary street signage. (Author, 2006)

Plate 19  Orte des Schreckens (Places of Terror), Wittenbergplatz, 1967. (Author, 2006)

Plate 20  Peter Herbrich, Jürgen Wenzel, and Theseus Bappert, Memorial on Levetzowstrasse, 1988. (Author, 2006)

Plate 21  Gerhard Marcks, Der Rufer (The Caller), 1967, installed in the Tiergarten in 1989. (Author, 2019)

Plate 22  Christian Boltanski, The Missing House, 1990. (Author, 2006)

Plate 23  Footprint of the former Bohemian church on Bethlehemkirchplatz, 1994; Claes Oldenburg and Coosji van Bruggen, Houseball. (Author, 2006)

Plate 24  Double cobblestones marking the path of the West-facing Wall, beginning 1997. (Author, 2006)

Plate 25  Karla Sachse, Kaninchenfeld (Rabbit Field), 1999. (Author, 2006)

Plate 26  Gabriele Basch, Wahre Geschichte (Genuine History), 1999. (Author, 2006)

Plate 27  Christine Gersch and Igor Jerschov, Pocketpark, 2005. (Author, 2019)

Plate 28  Wolfgang Rüppel, June 17, 1953 Memorial, 2000. (Author, 2006)

Plate 29  A viewing platform with visitors looking from West Berlin into the East, as seen in a photograph from 1965 posted on a Berlin Wall Memorial information stele. It shows the Wall at Schwedter Strasse, where it turned north from Bernauer Strasse. The building at the right would be torn down to build the concrete slabs of the Wall, exposing the firewall seen in Plates 42, 43, and 44. (Author, 2017)

Plate 30  Ernst-Reuter-Siedlung, Wedding, 1954. (Author, 2016)

Plate 31  Juxtaposition of Cor-ten steel rods with the exposed steel reinforcement bars of a deteriorated surviving section of the Wall along Bernauer Strasse. Remains of pre-Wall paving at the fronts of destroyed buildings can be seen at intervals at the foot of the Wall. (Author, 2017)

Plate 32  Within the Berlin Wall Memorial, the width of the Wall zone is most apparent at the west end, at the beginning of Area A. This view from the site of the Wall, where it would have run along Bernauer Strasse, looks across no-man’s land at closed-off Bergstrasse, to remains of a rear East-facing Wall. Information steles can be seen at rear left, and the firewall photo-mural at Gartenstrasse is visible in the distance on the right. (Author, 2017)

Plate 33  Plan, Berlin Wall Memorial at Bernauer Strasse. Evidence of the different postwar urban histories of the once-unified neighborhood can be seen in the contrasting pattern of building footprints on the Wedding side, above, and the Mitte side, below. (Courtesy of Weidner Händle Atelier)

Plate 34  Broad areas of glazing and Cor-ten steel sheathing connect the Visitor’s Center to the open-air Memorial across Bernauer Strasse to the right in this view. (Author, 2011)

Plate 35  The Berlin Wall Memorial Documentation Center and Reconciliation Church parish (1965 with later additions) and the observation tower can be seen across Bernauer Strasse. In front of that, four walls are seen in juxtaposition: a surviving section of the Berlin Wall, the Memorial’s Cor-ten steel rods, a reconstructed segment of the Sophien parish cemetery brick wall, and the Cor-ten steel exterior of the 1998 Monument. (Author, 2017)

Plate 36  An overview of part of Area A that shows, within the expansive lawn, the edge of the Sophien parish cemetery, the storage area for slabs of the Wall removed without authorization by the Sophien Church parish, the Window of Remembrance, and a section of the remaining Berlin Wall along Bernauer Strasse. Closing off the view at the upper right is the bounding wall of the 1998 Monument. (Author, 2014)

Plate 37  The Window of Remembrance commemorates those who died at the Bernauer Strasse section of the Wall; a reading of their names can be heard on the audio stele nearby. (Author, 2011)

Plate 38  Archaeological excavation of remains of a house along Bernauer Strasse. Documentation of families who lived along the street supplements traces of basement and first floor spaces. (Author, 2012)

Plate 39  The paths of underground escape tunnels are marked with Cor-ten bars. (Author, 2012)

Plate 40  One of the two remaining sites where private property owners maintain their claim to land where the patrol path runs. (Author, 2017)

Plate 41  The patrol path that has been reduced to a “tunnel” by private redevelopment in Area D. (Author, 2015)

Plate 42  Local advertising on a firewall at Schwedter Strasse. The following two Plates show a succession of firewall treatments at this site that indicates transformations of its relationship to its urban context. (Author, 1999)

Plate 43  A mural celebrating the Berlin-hosted 2006 World Cup matches on the firewall at Schwedter Strasse. (Author, 2011)

Plate 44  A photo-mural now integrates the same firewall at Schwedter Strasse into the Berlin Wall Memorial, which ends at this point. It depicts crowds surging through the Wall in 1989; this firewall in its deteriorated condition at that time is visible on the far right in the image. (Author, 2016)

Plate 45  This 2017 view from the end of Schwedter Strasse can be compared to the wider angle on this site from 1965 that is seen in Plate 29. (Author, 2017)

Plate 46  An ice cream café encroaches on the patrol path in Area D. (Author, 2016)