The German Wall: Fallout in Europe (Studies in European Culture and History)

Studies in European Culture and History edited by Eric D. Weitz and Jack Zipes University of Minnesota Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the very meaning of Europe has opened up and is in the process of being redefined. European states and societies are wrestling with the expansion of NATO and the European Union and with new streams of immigration, while a renewed and reinvigorated cultural engagement has emerged between East and West. But the fast-paced transformations of the last fifteen years also have deeper historical roots. The reconfiguring of contemporary Europe is entwined with the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, two world wars and the Holocaust, and with the processes of modernity that, since the eighteenth century, have shaped Europe and its engagement with the rest of the world. Studies in European Culture and History is dedicated to publishing books that explore major issues in Europe’s past and present from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives. The works in the series are interdisciplinary; they focus on culture and society and deal with significant developments in Western and Eastern Europe from the eighteenth century to the present within a social historical context. With its broad span of topics, geography, and chronology, the series aims to publish the most interesting and innovative work on modern Europe.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Fascism and Neofascism: Critical Writings on the Radical Right in Europe by Eric Weitz Fictive Theories: Towards a Deconstructive and Utopian Political Imagination by Susan McManus German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust: Grete Weil, Ruth Klüger, and the Politics of Address by Pascale Bos Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration by Leslie Adelson Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to Hiroshima to September 11 by Gene Ray Transformations of the New Germany edited by Ruth Starkman Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture edited by Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick

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Legacies of Modernism: Art and Politics in Northern Europe, 1890–1950 edited by Patrizia C. McBride, Richard W. McCormick, and Monika Zagar Police Forces: A Cultural History of an Institution edited by Klaus Mladek Richard Wagner for the New Millennium: Essays in Music and Culture edited by Matthew Bribitzer-Stull, Alex Lubet, and Gottfried Wagner Representing Masculinity: Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture edited by Stefan Dudink, Anna Clark, and Karen Hagemann Remembering the Occupation in French Film: National Identity in Postwar Europe by Leah D. Hewitt “Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture edited by Valentina Glajar and Domnica Radulescu Choreographing the Global in European Cinema and Theater by Katrin Sieg Converting a Nation: A Modern Inquisition and the Unification of Italy by Ariella Lang German Postwar Films: Life and Love in the Ruins edited by Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East edited by Robert L. Nelson Cinema after Fascism: The Shattered Screen by Siobhan S. Craig Weimar Culture Revisited edited by John Alexander Williams Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust edited by Valentina Glajar and Jeanine Teodorescu The German Wall: Fallout in Europe edited by Marc Silberman

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Th e Ge r m a n Wa ll Fa llou t i n Eu rop e

Edi t e d b y

M a rc Si lbe r m a n

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THE GERMAN WALL

Copyright © Marc Silberman, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11216–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The German wall : fallout in Europe / edited by Marc Silberman. p. cm.—(Studies in European culture and history) ISBN 978–0–230–11216–2 (hardback) 1. Germany—History—Unification, 1990—Influence. 2. Germany— History—Unification, 1990—Social aspects. 3. Germany—Social conditions—1990– 4. Berlin (Germany)—History—1990– 5. Political culture—Germany. 6. Mass media—Germany. 7. National characteristics, German. 8. National characteristics, European. I. Silberman, Marc, 1948– DD290.26.G474 2011 943.08798—dc22

2011001466

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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Con t e n t s

List of Illustrations

vii

Preface

ix

Acronyms

xi

List of Contributors

xiii

Introduction: Where Is Germany? Marc Silberman Part I

1

Re-Viewing the Berlin Wall

One

Germany 1989: A New Type of Revolution? Konrad H. Jarausch

11

Two

The Different Aesthetics of the Berlin Wall Olaf Briese

37

Three Politics, Culture, and Media before and after the Berlin Wall Henning Wrage Part II

Re-Newing Berlin in Unified Germany

Four

Re-Capitalizing Berlin Janet Ward

Five

Interim Use at a Former Death Strip? Art, Politics, and Urbanism at Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum Karen E. Till

Six

Jugendweihe : Revitalizing a Socialist Coming-of-Age Ceremony in Unified Berlin Barbara Wolbert

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59

79

99

123

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vi / contents

Part III Re-Settling Berlin’s Others Seven Neither Eastern nor Welcome: The Confused Lives of Berlin’s Balkan Migrants, 1950–2000 Isa Blumi Eight

Class of 1989: Who Made Good and Who Dropped Out of German History? Postmigrant Documentary Theater in Berlin Katrin Sieg Part IV

Nine

Ten

145

165

Re-Negotiating Europe’s Center

On Italian Bridges: Navigating Rocks and Hard Places in Post-Wall Europe Lina Insana Breaking Down the Walls: The European Library Project B. Venkat Mani

187 205

Works Cited

227

Index

247

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Illust r at ions

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3

3.4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1

Berlin, East Side Gallery (2010), © Olaf Briese Berlin, East Side Gallery (2010), © Olaf Briese Berlin Wall Memorial, Bernauer Strasse (2010), © Olaf Briese Berlin Wall Memorial, Bernauer Strasse (2010), © Olaf Briese Gewissen in Aufruhr, shot in summer 1961, shows in the background the still open Brandenburg Gate, probably for the last time in television before 1989. DVD capture One, Two, Three (shot compilation): Piffl’s ride toward the Brandenburg Gate (2a, 2b) and the beginning of the chase after he has crossed the border (2c). DVD capture Die Mauer: a film of the Berlin Wall being built in 1961 is screened on the Wall’s remnants in 1989, revealing the source of reproduction (the projector) and its reception (the audience). DVD capture Herr Lehmann constructs the second-order televisual representation of the fall of the Wall and of a West Berlin audience. DVD capture Reichstag dome, Berlin (1999). Designed by Foster + Partners. © Janet Ward Renata Stih & Frieder Schnock, excerpt from “Hänsel & Gretel and the Gold in the Reichsbank,” competition entry (1999). © Stih & Schnock, Berlin / ARS, NYC Chancellery, Berlin (2001). Designed by Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank. © Janet Ward The Brandenburg Gate under renovation, draped in Telekom’s publicity (2001). © Janet Ward Viewing platforms of the New Berlin as the Palast der Republik is “environmentally deconstructed.” © Karen Till, 2007

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52 53 54 55 67 68

72 73 87 89 91 92 100

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viii / illustrations

5.2 Turn It One More Time © Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser, 2007, Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, “Parcella” series. Photograph by Folke Köbberling © 2007 5.3 Glühbirne/Lightbulb © Philip Horst, Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, “Inventory” series, 2006. Location: Block between Kommandantenstrasse, Seydelstrasse, and Alte Jakobstrasse. © VG Bild-Kunst, 2006 5.4 Single Room Hotel Berlin © Etienne Boulanger, 2007–2008, Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, “Spekulation” series. Corner of Kommandantenstrasse and Neue Grünstrasse. © Etienne Boulanger, 2007, courtesy of Association Etienne Boulanger 5.5 Und er kommt nicht allein © Valeska Peschke, 2007–2008, Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, “Spekulationen” series. Photograph by KUNSTrePUBLIK, e.V. © VG Bild-Kunst, 2007 5.6a Restgrün © Ulrike Mohr/VG Bild-Kunst, 2005. Photograph by Ulrike Mohr / © VG Bild-Kunst, 2005 5.6b Neue Nachbarn/New Neighbors © Ulrike Mohr, 2008, Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, “Spekulationen” series. Photograph by Skulpturenpark Berlin, e.V. © 2008 6.1 Jugendweihe in the multipurpose hall of the youth center “Come-In” in Berlin-Adlershof, 1994. © Barbara Wolbert 6.2 Jugendfeier in the Friedrichstadtpalast in Berlin-Mitte, 2009.

101

108

110

111 112 113 129

133 © Gabriele Groschopp. 6.3 “Days for you: Jugendweihe 2009.” Fashion show in Linden-Center, a shopping mall in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. © Daniel “classless” Kulla 135 9.1 Trans-European transport network: priority project No. 1 (Rail axis Berlin—Verona/Milano—Bologna—Napoli— Messina—Palermo). © European Commission, 2005; administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics, 2001 191 9.2 “La Sicilia fugge” [“Sicily is escaping”] © Franco Donarelli 195

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P r e fac e

This anthology began as an idea during a year-long collaboration between Marc Silberman and Venkat Mani, whose brainstorming in 2008 led to the plans for a conference to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall. The forty-second Wisconsin Workshop took place on November 5–7, 2009, in Madison under the title “The Wall Came Down: On the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall,” where initial drafts of the essays collected here were presented and discussed. We wish to thank the following organizations and agencies at the University of Wisconsin for their generous funding of the conference: the Anonymous Fund in the College of Letters and Sciences; the Center for German and European Studies (CGES); the Center for European Studies (CES), the Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA); the Center for the Humanities; the departments of German and History; as well as the program in Global Studies. In addition, we are grateful to the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany in Chicago for its financial support. Following the conference presentations and their accompanying lively discussions, the contributors began a year-long process of critiques, queries, and revisions that have yielded the current volume. The editor is grateful to the authors for their engagement, commitment, and patience during this process. He also thanks the series editors, Eric Weitz and Jack Zipes, for their enthusiasm and support in seeing this volume through to completion.

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Ac ron y ms

AWO BBI CDU CENL DEFA DM DVP EC EDL EU FDJ FDP FRG GDR IBA MfS NATO NVA PDS SDP SED SPD TEL Ulib

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Arbeiterwohlfahrt (Workers Welfare) Berlin Brandenburg International Airport Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union) Conference of European National Librarians Deutsche Film AG (state-owned film company, GDR) Deutsche Mark (German Mark, FRG) Deutsche Volkspolizei (German People’s Police, GDR) European Commission European Digital Library European Union Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth, GDR) Freie Demokratische Partei (Free Democratic Party) Federal Republic of Germany German Democratic Republic (East Germany) Internationale Bauausstellung (International Building Exhibition) Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry of State Security, Stasi) North Atlantic Treaty Organization Nationale Volksarmee (National People’s Army, GDR) Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (Party of Democratic Socialism) Sozialdemokratische Partei (Social-democratic Party, GDR, Oct. 1989 until Sept. 1990) Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany, GDR) Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany) The European Library Universal Digital Library

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xii / acronyms

UNESCO WDL WDR

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United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization World Digital Library Westdeutscher Rundfunk (one of West Germany’s public television broadcasters)

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Con t r i bu tor s

Isa Blumi is assistant professor of history at Georgia State University in Atlanta and research fellow at the Center for Area Studies at Leipzig University with special interests in the Balkans, Middle East, and Islamic Studies. His publications include the monograph Rethinking the Late Ottoman Empire: A Comparative Social and Political History of Albania and Yemen, 1878–1918 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2003) and Chaos in Yemen (London: Routledge, 2010). His current book project, “Redefining Balkan Nationalism: Albanian Identities at the End of the Ottoman Era,” draws on his experience as a member of the Provisional Government of Kosovo in 1999 and as a consultant for the United Nations Mission in Kosovo and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Olaf Briese is a research fellow at the Institute for Religious Studies of the Free University in Berlin. Trained in philosophy, he has published extensively in the fields of aesthetics (history of metaphors) and historical anthropology (history of cholera in Europe). His publications include Die Macht der Metaphern. Blitz, Erdbeben und Kometen im Gefüge der Aufklärung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998) and the four-volume Angst in den Zeiten der Cholera (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003). His current book project, Steinzeit. Mauern in Berlin (forthcoming Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2011), focuses on the aesthetics of the Berlin Wall and includes a systematic comparison to other historical walls. Lina Insana is associate professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research and publications focus on Holocaust literature and film, including her recent prize-winning monograph Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), as well as on images of Southern Italy in European literature and the literature and film of Sicily. In this latter context she is engaged currently in a research project on the place of Sicily in larger frameworks of geopolitical and cultural belonging.

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xiv / contributors

Konrad H. Jarausch is the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He co-founded the UNC Center for European Studies and until recently co-directed the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, Germany. He has written or edited about 40 books on modern German history. Starting with Hitler’s seizure of power and the First World War, his research interests have moved to the social history of German students and professions, German unification in 1989–1990, the nature of the East German dictatorship, the structure of German history in the twentieth century, the recivilizing of the Germans after Hitler, the caesura of the 1970s as well as the complicity of educated Germans with Nazi crimes. B. Venkat Mani is associate professor of German and faculty affiliate of Global Studies, Center for South Asia, and the Center for German and European Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research areas include nineteenth to twenty-first century German literature and culture and theories of transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonialism. His book, Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007), focuses on contemporary German and Turkish literatures. His forthcoming book, “Borrowing Privileges: World Literatures and Bibliomigrancy,” is a study on comparative and world literature with a special focus on libraries and publishing houses. Katrin Sieg is professor of German and core faculty in the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Her research areas cover feminist and critical race theory, theater and performance, and post-1945 German culture. Her publications include the prize-winning Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002) and Choreographing the Global in European Cinema and Theater (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), which focuses on theatrical performances and films addressing multicultural politics in post-Wall Berlin. Marc Silberman is professor of German and has been director of the Center for German and European Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He publishes on postwar literature, traditions of political theater (Brecht, Heiner Müller), and the history of cinema. He edited the Brecht Yearbook (1989–1995), and recently co-edited the volume Screening War: Perspectives on German Suffering (Rochester: Camden House, 2010). He is co-editor with Karen E. Till and Janet Ward of the forthcoming volume Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012).

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contributors / xv

Karen E. Till, trained as a cultural geographer, is Lecturer in Cultural Geography at National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Her geoethnographic research explores the interrelationships between place-making, personal and social memory, and cultural politics in contemporary cities, as exemplified in her 2005 monograph The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and the co-edited volume Textures of Place: Rethinking Humanist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). She is currently working on two book-length projects, “Interim Spaces,” on re/uses of the Berlin Wall after its fall, and an internationally comparative study of “Wounded Cities.” Janet Ward is associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and an interdisciplinary scholar of German and comparative urban studies, visual culture, and architecture. Her publications include Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) and Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space, and Identity (forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). She is presently preparing a comparative study of urban destruction and reconstruction. In addition to co-editing a volume with Marc Silberman and Karen E. Till, she is coeditor with Jeffry Diefendorf of a project entitled “(Trans)Nationalism and the German City.” Barbara Wolbert is the DAAD Professor of Anthropology and an affiliate of the Center for German and European Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her interests include visual culture, art, and media in the context of German immigration, identity and diversity politics, and the process of Europeanization. Her books include Migrationsbewältigung: Orientierungen und Strategien (Göttingen: Edition Herodot, 1984) and Der getötete Pass: Rückkehr in die Türkei (Berlin: Akademie, 1995), as well as the co-edited issue of New German Critique on “Multicultural Germany: Art, Media and Performance” (Spring/Summer 2004). Henning Wrage completed his dissertation at the Humboldt University in Berlin in 2007 on literarature, film, and television in East Germany in the 1960s: Die Zeit der Kunst: Literatur, Film und Fernsehen in der DDR der 1960er Jahre—Eine Mediengeschichte in Beispielen (Heidelberg: Winter, 2008). In 2009 and 2010, he was a Feodor Lynen post-doctoral fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation). He is completing a book-length media history of postwar Germany in the 1950s.

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I n t roduc t ion: Wh e r e Is Ge r m a n y? Marc Silberman

When the Berlin Wall opened unexpectedly on November 9, 1989, it marked a rupture of global significance in the history of the twentieth century. For Germany’s national history, the event has become—next to the defeat of 1945—the most significant date in collective memory, advancing very quickly to the status of a foundational myth of postwar German identity. An improvised barrier when the East German Central Committee first decided to install it on August 13, 1961, for Cold War Europe, the Berlin Wall represented the architectural incarnation of the Iron Curtain: a symbol of border crisis and of systemic difference and division. Today the Berlin Wall has literally disappeared, dismantled and removed to the realm of museums and commemorative sites. Ironically, this concrete barrier has become now a symbol for the passage of time and the process of change. But it was not only a symbol 50 years ago. It was also a local marker of world significance that linked politics, the public sphere, and the everyday experience of millions of people for the nearly 30 years of its existence. Understanding this central Cold War construct can also point to the possibilities inherent in its demise, both in Germany and within the larger context of European expansion: the fall of the Wall refers to a turning point, an end of one history and a new beginning, that of the post-Wall era. Yet we know from experience that momentous historical ruptures—the French Revolution, 1871, 1914, 1933, 1945—are not easily “processed,” rather the process itself of making sense of the past is fraught with false starts, blind spots, and illusions, but also with epiphanies and unsuspected connections. This volume’s title, The German Wall: Fallout in Europe, refers to multiple consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall: looking back with fresh perspectives at the physical barrier, how it was built, why it came down, and how it has been mediated; detailing the processes of restoring and revitalizing the reunited city and the reconstituted nation, both of which had been torn asunder; recognizing the new challenges of integrating socially and politically the old and new

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2 / marc silberman

minorities; and identifying how a new European identity is struggling to emerge after the disappearance of the German Wall and with the appearance of a united Germany. Throughout history, walls have functioned as effective markers of power, lines of defense, boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, and divisions between “us and them.” One thinks of Hadrian’s Wall, the Roman Limes on the Rhine and Danube, the Great Wall of China, the Maginot Line, the Siegfriedwall, and the Atlantikwall. The Berlin Wall was the first wall that the leaders of a modern government erected to prevent its population from emigrating. Its construction was a culmination point of earlier divisions that telescope back to the turn of the century and to polarizations that prevailed in Wilhelmine Germany. Those tensions between political parties, pacifists and militarists, the upwardly mobile and the endemically impoverished, new urbanites and traditional landed gentry would continue to play themselves out in the revolutionary chaos that overtook Germany after the defeat of the Great War and in the parliamentary stand-offs that increasingly plagued the fragile democracy of the Weimar Republic. The National Socialist regime was able to forcibly repress this polarization by means of ghettos and concentration camps—implementing another kind of boundary—and the abrogation of civil rights that ultimately redefined the national community or Volksgemeinschaft along racial and political lines. Weary contemporaries might have thought and wished that the deadly politics of racial exclusion and boundary transgression would finally end, but the consequences of World War II generated new polarizations. Indeed, borders and boundaries, guarding and being guarded, and the construction of separate, dichotomous identities accompanied Germany’s division almost from the moment of its defeat in 1945: the onset of the Cold War in 1947, the introduction of two different currencies in Germany’s occupation zones in 1948, the Soviet blockade in Berlin with the resulting Berlin Airlift, and the founding of two German states in 1949. In this sense, the Wall built in 1961 literalized in concrete much older ideological divisions and with a geopolitical reach far beyond the 155-kilometer barrier surrounding West Berlin. And although this division was the consequence of international tensions, it was understood by many as the symbolic reminder of Nazi crimes and as punishment for German hypernationalism. While the opening of the Berlin Wall heralded the end of division and a willingness to rewrite postwar histories, at the same time, the unexpected moment of reunion and rejoicing left more than a few politicians, diplomats, intellectuals, artists, and pundits thinking about the implications of transgressing boundaries; reconfiguring the nation; and, at the individual level, engaging often difficult dialogues about the politics of memory and reevaluating the past in the process of moving forward.

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introduction / 3

New beginnings never wipe the slate clean. The German-German border, whose symbol the Berlin Wall became, was the object of a decadeslong domestic and foreign political tug-of-war. Not only was it a question of establishing and negotiating borders, but it also involved the selfdefinition of the nation as large or small, as states among other states or as part of a larger entity, as friend or enemy of its neighbors. In this sense, Germany’s wall subsumed a national discourse about German identity: what did it mean to be German in a divided country? In East Germany, national identity was premised on the idea of a struggle for unity against the image of an enemy, the fascist enemy of the Third Reich, and the imperialist enemy of the capitalist West. Stalinist policies aimed at eliminating difference by circumscribing the enemy and protecting one’s own “camp.” Thus, although official East German rhetoric appealed to German unity based on language, culture, and history, in the freeze of Cold War polarities, the idea of socialist particularism dominated the Realpolitik of protecting the autonomy of the Soviet Occupied Zone and—after 1949—the newly founded German Democratic Republic. The emphasis on socialist heritage and a socialist national culture accompanied the gradual process of turning inward and shielding itself from the other side of the Wall. It is remarkable that in late November 1989, immediately after the opening of the Wall, the petition launched by prominent East German artists and intellectuals, entitled “Für unser Land” (For Our Country) and appealing for a renewal of socialism in an autonomous East Germany, was couched in terms of antifascist and humanistic ideals of solidarity. That it found little or no popular resonance might suggest the extent to which culture and identity for the majority of East Germans existed only because of the Wall and in direct relation to their image of West Germany beyond this German wall, often conveyed by means of radio and television reception that the border fortification was unable to block. East Germans revealed themselves, at least in this moment of rapid disintegration, as an imagined collective grounded not on solidarity but on disavowal and exclusion. Meanwhile, West Germany’s gradual integration into NATO (the Western defense union) and the European Community during the 1950s diminished the need for a strong national identity. Civil institutions such as the constitution and “national” success stories such as the postwar reconstruction and the benefits of the social welfare state anchored the self-image of the state and its citizens. Symptomatically, the East’s perceived otherness, especially after the success of détente in the early 1970s, gave rise to an extended discussion in the West about the existence of two German cultures, fundamentally different because of their different systems of discourse and separate contexts of production and reception. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, these parallel particularisms did not end but

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4 / marc silberman

rather were renewed, while bearing the traces of the 40-year history of postwar division. But the Berlin Wall is bigger than this national story, for it serves too as a lingering specter haunting the new walls, barriers, and fences dividing populations in the twenty-first century. The Wall was a political and architectural phenomenon that literally cemented a split between two different societies, creating an outer edge marking a defensive boundary. In the microcosm of the city of Berlin, it also marked an inner edge, forming an enclosure like those that were meant to protect and contain medieval cities and later ghettos. As post-Wall Europe expands the European Union and opens its internal borders among member states, its outer borders come under increasingly harsh control. Meanwhile, the post-1989 permeability of boundaries has not weakened the ties between territory and identity; rather, they are being fiercely recreated on various scales. In short, today we continue to see how divisions deepen cultural, political, ethnic, and religious differences between various populations: from the 38th parallel in Korea to the new borders within the former Yugoslavia and around post-Soviet Russia, from the euphemistic “fences” being constructed on the U.S.-Mexican border or in Israel’s West Bank to the walling off of parts of Baghdad to separate Sunni and Shiite residential districts. As demonstrated by the post-history of Germany’s wall, the reification caused by such separations between communities rarely solves underlying political problems and has remarkable implications for the dynamics of social and political change. This anthology consists of ten lectures originally presented at a conference held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in November 2009 to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Revised and expanded with a view toward the fiftieth anniversary of the building of the Wall in 2011, the authors—scholars from the fields of literary and cultural studies, history, anthropology, media studies, and geography bring their expertise and disciplinary methodologies to bear on the multifaceted implications of borders and boundaries as well as on the attempts at bridging and crossing divides in post-unification Germany and Europe. Part I, “Re-Viewing the Berlin Wall,” juxtaposes three contributions that retrospectively assess the status of the Wall and its sudden disappearance. Konrad Jarausch poses the question of whether the “democratic awakening” in East Germany in fall 1989 constitutes a “new kind of revolution,” a peaceful revolution, as it has frequently been called. His analysis of the long-term causes, short-term events, and multiple influences that caused the regime to collapse suggests that it was indeed the result of a revolutionary challenge from below. Comparing the nature of this upheaval to historical revolutions, he shows that it initially followed the familiar

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introduction / 5

script of popular revolts but then departed from it, owing to its peaceful character and specific German national form. In considering both the domestic and international consequences of the political transformation in Germany, Jarausch clarifies the distinctive character of the revolution of 1989. Olaf Briese seeks to complement political and historical scholarship on the Berlin Wall by focusing on its aesthetic and architectural components. As he elaborates, not only were there antecedents to the Wall going back centuries, but we also tend to remember only its last construction phase after 1975–1976, while the earlier, provisional structures have been largely forgotten. By attending to specific aspects of the Wall’s design and fascination, he argues that we must account both for its political symbolism and historical transformations, that is, the various phases in the Wall’s construction, and for the way it presented a different aesthetic “face” to the East and the West. Lastly, Briese discusses the post-Wall Berlin Wall and its future status as an object of commemorative events and memorial sites. Henning Wrage links the political logic behind the Berlin Wall to specific media depictions surrounding its erection and demise. If one concedes that the Wall was a Cold War necessity in 1961 to maintain a tense peace in Europe between two conflicting social systems and to avoid the instability that threatened to lead to a hot war, it is no surprise that early film and television productions explicitly foregrounded the political dimension of the events after it was built. Wrage shows that after the fall of the Wall, the media became more self-reflexive, no longer just reflecting political rationales but also playing a role in constructing them within the realm of public discourse. Part II, “Re-Newing Berlin in Unified Germany,” presents three facets of the challenge to restore Berlin as the reunited capital of the reunited nation, while coming to terms with its former national and political division. These essays examine the conflicted processes of remembering and forgetting in architectural design, art exhibition, and ritual practices. Janet Ward situates Berlin’s current challenges in its palimpsests of past urban transformations, from Imperial and Weimar dreams of modernization to Nazi designs, wartime bombs, and postwar division. The re-capitalization of post-Wall Berlin takes place on political, infrastructural, and architectural levels, as evidenced in major projects like the rebuilt Reichstag and the new government quarter, the re-creation of the Potsdamer Platz ensemble, and the transformation of the Schönefeld Airport into an international hub. Centering and globalizing the city, as Ward argues, is achieved by building for power and display: engaging star architects, appealing to tourist-consumers, and fashioning a unique urban brand. Karen Till examines how artistic projects and processes can engage urban residents in the “new” Berlin. Situated on a former “death strip” of the Berlin Wall,

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the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum creates site-specific installations as a means of exploring the unique history and present-day significance of this seemingly empty space. Till considers how creative practice subverts traditional land-use and ownership claims to this property through participatory, sometimes playful, installations. As she shows, using surrounding buildings, streets, and empty spaces, the artists have learned to animate a process of critical reflection about how urban imaginaries are embedded within power relations. Barbara Wolbert brings an ethnographer’s fieldwork to bear on the practice of Jugendweihe, a secular, socialist comingof-age ritual for young adults established by the East German Socialist Party in the early 1950s. Centered on an oath of allegiance to the state, the obligatory ceremonies counted participation by virtually all 14-year-olds when East Germany collapsed, yet after a hiatus of two years, it has once again become increasingly popular in East Berlin and Eastern Germany. Wolbert traces the transformation of the obsolete ritual of citizenship into a performance of shared feelings and continuity as a paradigm for Eastern German identity politics in a neoliberal welfare state that increasingly defines citizenship through consumer activity. Part III, “Re-Settling Berlin’s Others,” suggests that the Berlin Wall as a metaphor of separation and enclosure continues to haunt the city as its diverse populations struggle to forge new identities. These two essays offer insights into the ethnic separatism that became especially visible after the fall of the Wall. Isa Blumi looks back at (West) Berlin’s management policies for integrating migrant groups from Southeastern Europe that have generally been regarded as proof of the city’s reputation for tolerance and openness toward others. He details how official generic categories like “Greek,” “Turk,” and “Yugoslav” conceal not only the reality of complex and historically inflected subgroup divisions along ethnic, religious, linguistic, regional, and class lines but also generational differences within the respective subgroups caused by the growing political turmoil in the Balkan homelands in the 1990s. The misrepresentation of ethnic identity, Blumi contends, accounts for many of the government’s failed community-building initiatives that continue to shape the contingencies of Berlin’s social fabric. Katrin Sieg provides a case study of “talk-back” to these kinds of misrepresentation in her analysis of Turkish German documentary theater productions in Berlin that construct a repertoire of postnational, European identities based on postmigrant biographies and everyday practices. Current scenarios of difference privilege religion rather than ethnonationalism as the preeminent category dividing democratic European cosmopolitans from Turkish Muslim migrant Others, who are presumed to be crippled by an authoritarian mentality. According to Sieg, a series of live performances during the twentieth anniversary of the fall

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of the Wall undermined these tired binaries by positioning immigrants and their descendants as the drivers of democratic progress stalled by the dominant, quasi-national discourse of European community. Part Four, the final section, entitled “Re-Negotiating Europe’s Center,” begins to imagine post-Wall configurations in the expanded European Union. The concluding essays suggest two different responses to the postWall European context. If Germany’s wall marked during the Cold War a stand-off that stabilized European tensions in the East–West divide, then its dissolution is the single most important event for the realignment along North–South lines centered on the Italian Peninsula. Lina Insana examines how the fall of the Berlin Wall set in motion centripetal and centrifugal forces that have transformed Italy’s position at the edges of a Europe to which it cannot quite catch up: now it can envision itself as a land bridge that connects an emerging Mediterranean basin with the European Union’s power centers in Berlin and Eastern Europe. From this perspective, the negotiations about an EU-sponsored Berlin-Palermo transportation infrastructure plan, including the proposal for a bridge over the Straits of Messina, not only extends the traditional cultural mythology of bridges and in-between spaces but also symbolizes the powerful geopolitical dynamics unleashed by the fall of the Wall. Venkat Mani explores a different realignment in the virtual space of a library without walls, the European Library Project that was conceived as a consortium by the European Union in 1987 and realized in the 20 years after the fall of the Wall as an Internet portal to facilitate electronic access to the collections of participating national libraries by users all over the world. As a transnational cultural institution, it implements post-Wall Europe’s agenda of territorial expansion, regional integration, and financial collaboration while revealing how extant national-cultural particularities continue to define the ultimate frontiers of collective difference. Especially the German example, which Mani elucidates here, with its two “national” libraries enduring throughout the Cold War and numerous “national” collections accumulated over centuries of imperial acquisition, exemplifies the challenge in defining the very identification of cultural resources as European or belonging only to a specific European nation. The Berlin Wall, and with it the German divide, has become a symbol within the broader global discussion of contemporary border crises, a referent for separation, exclusion, and isolation. The danger of inflating and finally defusing its symbolic value becomes all too apparent in the commemorative events surrounding its construction and its disappearance. The essays collected here resist this instrumentalization of the Wall and German reunification as an all-purpose signifier for history’s vagaries by grounding claims and conclusions in the specifics of the city’s

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and the nation’s past. At the same time, their varied approaches and objects of inquiry, modulated by methodological diversity, demonstrate how an interdisciplinary dialogue enriches our understanding. Guiding us through the geopolitical and mental spaces of the German wall, the authors assembled here chart out the beginnings of a new narrative and its fallout in Europe.

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Pa rt I R e -Vi e w i ng t h e Be r l i n Wa ll

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Ch a p t e r O n e Ge r m a n y 19 8 9: A Ne w Ty p e of R e volu t ion? Konrad H. Jarausch

During the summer of 2009, Germany was inundated by a tsunami of commemorations for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall in 1989. Newspapers such as the Tagesspiegel ran a series of personal stories, recalling the transformation of individual lives; TV networks such as ORF broadcast films of memorable moments such as the Pan-European picnic that opened the Hungarian border; opposition groups put together exhibitions such as the open air gallery on the democratic awakening at the Alexanderplatz in Berlin; academics organized numerous international conferences, culminating in the Berlin history forum on “Europe between Division and Revolt”; and politicians, involved in a lackluster election campaign, endlessly pontificated on the civic lessons of the overthrow of the SED dictatorship.1 At the risk of triggering revulsion, this emotional evocation has inadvertently demonstrated how far the collapse of communism has receded from the concerns of the present. The time has come to historicize 1989. The Wende, as it is colloquially known in German, has attracted so much attention because it is the most important event of the second half of the twentieth century in Europe. The overthrow of the communist dictatorships that enslaved unwilling populations has not only allowed democracy, capitalism, and pluralism to return to Eastern Europe. The fall of the Wall has also ended the Cold War, the arms race, and the ideological confrontation between East and West that had brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. Moreover, the lifting of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet Union have liberated captive nations and permitted the countries of the old Mitteleuropa to join the effort of European integration. Finally, the reunification of Germany after four decades of division has finished the leftover business of World War II by creating a peace

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settlement in Central Europe that was approved by all participants. This is what historians call a caesura, an event that has transformed political, economic, and cultural life and redrawn the map of Europe—with hardly a shot fired.2 The celebrations of 1989 were not just harmless festivities but a form of memory politics, contesting the master narrative of the revived German national state within a uniting Europe. At stake are both the content and interpretation of how the end of the GDR will be portrayed in school books, media editorials, and political education. Each intervention therefore promotes a different version, depending upon its historical philosophy, ideological point of view, and current political agenda.3 For instance, some analysts emphasize the West’s military and diplomatic victory in the Cold War, while others stress a dissident-led democratic rising of East German citizens, and yet others highlight the collapse of the communist regime from within.4 Led by Helmut Kohl’s memoirs, conservative opinion has settled on a version that foregrounds anticommunist opposition in the East and commitment to German unity in the West. More confused and defensive, the Left’s interpretation instead centers on the spread of détente, the return of civil society, and the democratization of socialism.5 Owing to the mixture of eyewitness reporting and scholarly analysis, there is no agreement in sight.6 In spite of the increased attention, disappointingly few new theories or interpretations have been proposed. The recent debate, centering on the issue of whether the GDR was an Unrechtstaat (a state marked by injustice), is a red herring because no one disputes its dictatorial nature; but repression alone does not characterize it sufficiently.7 Adding qualifying adjectives to the term “revolution” is hardly more helpful, since they range from the religiously inspired “peaceful revolution” via the dissident claim of “our revolution” to the misleading “German revolution” that leaves out the East European context.8 Timothy Garton Ash’s neologism “refolution,” which combines reform and revolution, is more constructive but also more applicable to the gradual transitions in Poland and Hungary than to the rapid change in the GDR or Czechoslovakia, let alone the putschlike transformations in Bulgaria and Romania.9 Rethinking the revolution issue is therefore the key to any novel interpretation, but it needs to be addressed in a more diachronic and synchronic fashion, comparing the Wende to earlier German upheavals and to the concurrent transformation of East Central Europe. We need a complex explanation to historicize the caesura of 1989, one that does not reduce it to a single aspect but that stresses contingency, complexity, and contagion. A unicausal scheme cannot encapsulate the complications of the democratic awakening, overthrow of communism, end of the Cold War, German unification,

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and the East’s return to Europe. Moreover, any new interpretation must not only reconstruct what happened but also take into account how it is remembered, creating a self-reflexive loop that avoids the trap of naïve partisanship. Neither anticommunist triumphalism nor postsocialist nostalgia will advance our understanding much further. Finally, the German case ought to be treated both as representative of some central features and as distinctive owing to the choice of unification. Only by embedding it more strongly in an East and West European perspective do its characteristics become apparent. With the help of temporal distance, the following remarks will reconsider the origins, trajectory, and consequences of the peaceful revolution in Germany. A Tangle of Causes How can one explain a complicated set of events such as the overthrow of communism? In contrast to the reductionism of some social science approaches focusing on mobilization theory, historians tend to stress the complexity of interacting factors.10 Conventionally, they divide causes into long-range structural preconditions that prepare a change and shortrange concatenations of events that actually bring it about. Added to this dichotomy, however, must be a dynamic element that describes the process of contagion, crucial for a revolutionary sequence. To go beyond the usual “laundry list” that notes different forces impinging upon a development, it is essential also to describe the pattern of their interplay and to weight their relative influence.11 The key challenge therefore consists of reconstructing how structural deficits and contingent events created an unstoppable momentum of democratic awakening. A chief reason for the rejection of communism was the stagnation of the planned economy, evident in constant comparison with the dynamic West. It was logical for a materialist ideology to put its faith in outperforming capitalism, encapsulated in Walter Ulbricht’s 1957 dictum of “overtaking without catching up” with the FRG. Despite the special handicap of reparations paid to the Soviet Union, the labor-intensive state economy seemed almost competitive during the early postwar years when the task was to rebuild. But nationalized industry and collectivized agriculture proved too cumbersome to master the high-tech transition to the third stage of the industrial revolution, starting in the 1970s, and Erich Honecker’s “unity of social and economic policy” failed to meet the test of globalized competition. Instead, the GDR economy was characterized by low productivity, frequent shortages, decrepit infrastructure, and unrealistic pricing, making it dependent upon credits from the affluent FRG. By the late 1980s, many East Germans had become disaffected since their living standards lagged, compared to the West.12

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Equally important was the improvement in the international climate from the second Cold War to détente, because it transformed the GDR from an asset into a liability. For the Soviet Union, the occupation of the center of Germany was the symbolic prize of victory over the Nazi invader, but keeping it required it to station almost half a million Red Army soldiers in a none-too-friendly environment. During the height of the arms race, the Soviet Union considered the East German client state as an important staging area for a possible incursion into Western Europe and an advanced missile base to threaten NATO capitals with retaliation. But when the confrontation waned in the second half of the 1980s, the costs of keeping an occupation army and of supporting East Berlin with cheap oil began to loom larger, since the Soviet budget was already overstrained from keeping up with the West. This new Soviet thinking inspired Gorbachev’s rhetoric of a common “European house,” which implicitly posed the question of whether the Germans would occupy one or two rooms.13 Another significant dimension was the revival of civil society that challenged the power monopoly of the SED. Initially, the communists had curtailed civil rights and repressed opposition in a red version of Gleichschaltung (Nazi synchronization), transforming all organizations into their own auxiliaries. But gradually, informal groups began to form within the party structure or without, when young people gathered to hear Western rock music, when writers described the shortcomings of “real existing socialism,” or when artists experimented with abstract styles. In the early 1980s, an independent peace movement started to crystallize within the shelter of the Protestant Church, taking up issues such as the environment or women’s equality and developing, in response to repression, into a campaign for human rights. Though the membership of these informal groups was small, they increasingly dared to go public in contesting the election fraud of May 1989 and demonstrating against the regime.14 A final precondition was the ruling party’s loss of confidence in the achievability and justice of the socialist cause. Initially, the project of purging a perpetrator country of fascism and of creating an egalitarian and peaceful society had inspired a committed minority and attracted such intellectuals as Bertolt Brecht or Stefan Heym from the West. But already, the uprising of 1953 showed that many people did not agree with this goal and needed to be coerced by Soviet tanks to build socialism, even if the SED eventually softened its methods into a “welfare dictatorship.” Instead of realizing utopian equality, a new nomenklatura elite formed that possessed all the traditional trappings of power, including even feudal hunting rights! Ironically, the catalyst to reform this posttotalitarian system now came from the Soviet Union, but the aged leadership around Honecker refused to budge, isolating the GDR. While a younger generation understood the

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need for some limited changes to preserve power, the inflexible dictator maintained: “Neither ox nor ass can stop socialism’s path.”15 While these trends imperceptibly eroded the bases of communism, it took an extraordinary concatenation of events to actually bring the system down. The Soviet abandonment of armed intervention to suppress internal dissidence in Warsaw Pact member states was crucial. The strategy of “goulash communism” had never quelled all unrest in the Eastern Bloc, once an independent trade union called Solidarnosc had developed in Poland, which even the imposition of martial law in 1981 was unable to stop. Since Mikhail Gorbachev did not want to endanger his improving contacts with the West, he publicly repealed the Brezhnev doctrine in the spring of 1989, following instead a “Sinatra doctrine” (referring to the song “My Way”), which would allow each country to determine its own path toward socialism. This relaxation of control emboldened the Polish opposition to push for free elections and the Hungarian communist party to restore pluralism without the threat of interference.16 For the frustrated East Germans, these were encouraging signs, suggesting new possibilities. The sense of a weakened repression also encouraged more GDR citizens to flee to the West in the summer of 1989, lest they miss this opportunity. Because the Wall had been built in August 1961 to keep in a restive population, leaving was the most drastic form of protest against the regime. The FRG facilitated this desire by offering refugees immediate access to West German citizenship and economic help with integration, claiming they had just moved from one part of the same country to another. An irate SED leadership tried several times to “let off steam” by allowing some tens of thousands to leave, but such concessions inevitably increased the number of new applicants for release. When the Hungarian government started to dismantle the barbed wire fence on the border to Austria and refused to return those caught crossing it, a veritable mass exodus developed, with thousands of people leaving behind their Trabi cars in Hungary. Attempts to close the border only pushed refugees into FRG embassies, forcing the SED to ship them West by train.17 These emotional scenes, circulated in the media, severely damaged the GDR’s political legitimacy. The unprecedented flight triggered a cycle of mass demonstrations, increasing from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands between September and November 1989. Initially, the protests were small and timid affairs: whenever dissidents dared to leave the church sanctuary to show critical banners, they were ruthlessly attacked by the secret police, beaten, and jailed. But the banding together of refugees shouting “We want to get out” inspired a growing number of dissidents who wanted to reform the GDR to go public as well, declaiming, “We want to stay here.” In Dresden, the passing of refugee trains sparked street battles around the

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train station, but in Leipzig, the peace vigils at the Nikolai Church against police repression remained nonviolent, attracting more demonstrators every Monday, eventually filling the avenues around the entire center city. In Berlin, where the state’s fortieth anniversary celebration had ended in the brutal suppression of a protest, around half a million people gathered at the Alexanderplatz in early November to demand real change, using colorful posters and witty chants.18 Confronted for the first time since 1953 with massive manifestations of popular discontent, a confused SED leadership vacillated between repression and conciliation. It did not help that Honecker himself took a lengthy vacation and underwent gallbladder surgery, putting him out of commission for over two decisive months. The hard-line faction of older politburo members, including the economic tsar Günter Mittag, construed the unrest as counterrevolution that needed to be put down by the ample forces of the secret service, the police, the army, and the “fighting brigades” in the factories. A more flexible grouping around some of the younger leaders, coached by the former spymaster Markus Wolf, did not want to follow the Chinese example of bloodshed at Tiananmen Square, hoping, instead, to channel the protest into peaceful dialogue. With Soviet encouragement, the latter finally rebelled and forced Honecker to resign on October 18, 1989. But the more pragmatic successors, led by Egon Krenz, had acted too late to head off changes that were spinning out of their control.19 While these unforeseen events dramatized the structural problems, the growing discontent turned into a mass movement for democracy through a process of contagion that attracted new recruits. Its active virus consisted of the several thousand courageous dissidents who were creating an opposition network throughout the GDR. They were mostly educated individuals in their thirties and forties who had opted out of the SED-controlled advancement within the system but wanted to transform it instead. They communicated through a samizdat of mimeographed newssheets such as the Umweltblätter (environmental newsletter), produced for members of a church congregation, because these remained under the radar of official censorship. They met with increasing frequency during various Protestant conferences, focused on promoting peace or ecumenical unity, sometimes even without approval by the hierarchy. On such occasions, they debated the shortcomings of the GDR and the democratization of socialism with increasing boldness. Though penetrated by the Stasi, these groups formed a counter-elite, capable of mounting public opposition.20 Crucial for spreading the message of the movement was also the reporting of the West German media, since their radio broadcasts reached all, and their television programs covered most of the GDR. Every evening, East Germans emigrated virtually to the West by watching not only

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entertainment such as the Tatort crime series but also the newscasts of the Tagesschau that provided more reliable information than the boring party line of their own Aktuelle Kamera. As a result of Willy Brandt’s 1970s Ostpolitik, which had recognized the GDR de facto but not de jure, Western journalists were allowed to work in East Germany, much to the chagrin of Erich Mielke’s secret service, which tried to hamper their reporting. For instance, FRG media broadcast the news of Solidarity protests in Poland, interviewed East German dissidents, reported on the mass exodus, and showed shocking pictures of police repression.21 Though Western politicians liked to be photographed with SED leaders, some members of the Greens and the SPD also helped the opposition out of the public limelight. Owing to this alternate media system, images of the exodus and demonstrations were seen all over the GDR. More decisive yet was the liberating experience of participation in an actual demonstration because it dispelled the pervasive sense of fear that had enforced passivity. Beyond the original refugee and dissident protesters, bystanders were often drawn to express their solidarity with the victims by the brutality of police repression. The demonstrators’ chorus “we are the people” resonated among frustrated citizens because it contested the party’s right to speak for them, while the chant “join our ranks” invited spectators to become active themselves. Once one had actually crossed the invisible line, the solidarity of hundreds, even thousands of like-minded strangers, provided a sense of security against the nightsticks and water cannons, and newfound kinship created a heady feeling of empowerment. Participation in a demonstration suddenly freed suppressed feelings that poured out in witty placards, informed scathing banners, and inspired critical slogans. The protests therefore broke social silence and conquered public space, allowing ordinary people to voice their hopes.22 Less visible, but also essential, was the seepage of doubt within the ranks of the party that immobilized the apparatus just when it most needed to respond. For once, the SED cliché of “learning from the Soviet Union means learning how to win” was reversed because now the winds of reform blew from the East, splitting the party loyalists. When Gorbachev tabled the option of military intervention, the SED leadership had to find its own way to cope with its domestic unrest. At the same time, the lurid images of bloodshed on Tiananmen Square in June 1989 discredited the use of force among the more sensitive communists, who did not want to be associated with a “Chinese solution.” Moreover, the immobility of the old men in the politburo had pent up a good deal of frustration among younger party members who were striving to formulate theories of “modern socialism” or proposing the establishment of a state ruled by law. This often-overlooked spread of internal confusion within the SED facilitated

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the dissident challenge because it blocked effective measures to regain popular loyalty.23 Contrary to clichés of German obedience or neo-Stalinist stagnation, structural deficits eroded legitimacy, fortuitous events inspired unrest, and contagion mobilized the masses. The GDR’s long-range economic and political problems had created a festering climate of discontent that steadily eroded its citizens’ loyalty. The unexpected coincidence of Soviet permissiveness and Hungarian reforms then led to a mass flight and a cycle of demonstrations, which half-hearted concessions failed to contain. Finally, the interaction of dissidents, Western media, protest experience, and party doubt set off a mobilization that brought hundreds of thousands of East Germans into the streets, demanding tangible reforms. In analytical terms, exit and voice acted not as alternatives but rather as a mutually reinforcing pair that undercut loyalty. At the same time, the struggle over Honecker’s succession created a leadership vacuum in the SED that prevented a forceful response.24 Structural problems provided the kindling, fortuitous events the spark, and contagion the wind that fanned the flames of protest engulfing the GDR. A Revolutionary Upheaval Was the democratic awakening in the fall of 1989 merely the collapse of an inept dictatorship or truly a “peaceful revolution”? The answer to this question depends both on the empirical evidence regarding the process and on the definition of the concepts. Recently, social theory has begun to treat revolution as the most extreme case in a whole spectrum of social movements, protests, and rebellions, stressing both its structural and cultural dimensions. The collaborative approach of Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly has expanded the scope of analysis even further by looking at an entire genre of “transgressive contentions,” only a few of which can be truly called revolutionary. Since diachronic comparisons of over 700 European revolutions have identified merely a dozen or so successful cases, attention is shifting from the conventional question of the origins of unrest to the trajectory of subsequent development, decisive for success or failure.25 A closer look at the actual course of the East German protests will show what kind of contention unfolded in 1989. The early stages of the confrontation between a restive population, a dissident counter-elite, and a weakening SED followed the conventional script of popular protests developing into political revolts. The first step was the recovery of free speech that restored a public space in which the opposition and the citizenry could express their concerns. This process began harmlessly enough with self-criticism by loyal party members such as the head of the Writers’ Union, Hermann Kant, or the leader of the Liberal

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Democratic bloc party, Helmut Gerlach. It spread through the passing of reform resolutions in semipublic spaces by groups such as the Berlin rock musicians or the students of the Humboldt University, who addressed a set of wishes to the ruling authorities. The real break occurred, however, with the recapture of public space in the streets of Plauen, Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin, when the demonstrations grew large enough to escape party control. Typically, one of the first demands concerned the restoration of civil rights, because freedom of speech and assembly were the precondition for all further changes.26 With the newly won freedom, opposition groups could organize openly and present their programs to the public, thereby giving vent to long-held frustrations. In earlier years, the lack of communication, Stasi penetration, ideological differences, and personal rivalries had hampered cooperation among dissidents. But on September 9, 1989, a novel group, called the New Forum, dared to go public by appealing for an open dialogue about what needed to be changed in the GDR. Perhaps because of its omnibus character and thematic vagueness, the movement spread like wildfire in spite of all continuing prohibitions and secret service efforts at subversion. Other thematically more focused groups such as Democracy Now, United Left, various Greens, and the Independent Women’s League followed quickly but could attract only a limited number of members. More significant were the creation of a Social Democratic Party and the founding of the Democratic Awakening because both explicitly challenged the SED by rejecting its definition of socialism and questioning its claim to democracy.27 With their slogans on banners and in resolutions, GDR citizens formulated an escalating series of demands that started with the reform of socialism but culminated with its revolutionary replacement. The initial wishes concerned merely the right to be heard at all, to be allowed to express independent opinions, and to participate in the political process without party supervision. Once some human rights were restored, the messages quickly became bolder, calling for the removal of Honecker and the entire politburo of old men. After the dictator had fallen, the populace expressed skepticism about his successor and focused on the GDR’s many administrative, economic, and cultural shortcomings, especially demanding greater freedom of travel. When the Modrow government announced the democratization of socialism, the public went even further, rejecting the renewal of communism altogether and voicing first calls for reunification.28 Reflecting the loss of fear, this escalation of demands kept the SED on the run. Faced with mounting pressure from below, the communists did not collapse but tenaciously pursued a whole series of strategies to retain power.

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First, they sought to appease the populace by removing Honecker and his coterie from their party and state offices. Second, they initiated a series of public dialogues in the form of town hall meetings that would allow citizens to express specific wishes without endangering SED leadership. Third, the party also gambled on changing specific policies, such as easing the rules for travel, which an ill-timed announcement and public testing expanded into the opening of the Wall on November 9 . Fourth, the more popular Hans Modrow tried to broaden the basis of his government by giving the nominally independent bloc parties some real leeway and creating a national union cabinet, closing ranks in face of the emergency. Finally, protests also forced him to transform the hated Stasi into a new security service, focused more on intelligence gathering than repression. While these measures rallied some support, party members continued to resign in droves, and the majority of the public kept wishing for yet more changes.29 In the midst of rising tension, the democratic awakening departed from the bloodshed that was characteristic of other revolutionary contentions by taking a peaceful turn. Early on, the protests teetered on the brink of violence, since the refugee trains sparked street battles around the Dresden train station, and the police repression in Berlin was exceedingly brutal. But on October 9, nonviolence astonishingly prevailed in Leipzig since protesters without weapons had no chance to win by using force against a numerous and well-equipped security apparatus. It also helped that clergymen in their prayer meetings and candlelight vigils continually urged peacefulness as did secular members of the peace movement. At the same time, the authorities also chose restraint, since Gorbachev kept the Red Army garrisoned, there were no clear orders from Berlin, and pragmatists had ousted the hardliners who wanted to let the tanks roll. Moreover, some members of the factory militia and recruits refused to march, while many SED functionaries had lost their stomach for ordering bloodshed.30 Nonviolence forced the two sides to talk to each other. During the climax of the confrontation in early December, the dissidents refused to seize power, though it was literally “lying on the street,” and chose to negotiate instead. For Modrow, the situation looked bleak because the economy was reeling, owing to the continued mass exodus across the now open frontier. Incensed by lame apologies and the destruction of files, the public forced the closing of regional Stasi headquarters. Threatened by demands for its dissolution, the SED was forced to reinvent itself as the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) to retain its financial assets and preserve at least a core membership. Although dissidents such as Rainer Eppelmann of the Democratic Awakening sensed that power was theirs for the taking, they did not make a serious attempt to grab it. The opposition was too

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disunited to act with dispatch. Because of its programmatic vagueness, the New Forum was already crumbling, while the more political groupings were still organizing themselves. Though courageous in resistance, the dissidents also felt unprepared to run a government.31 In a move typical of the entire transition in East Central Europe, both sides therefore compromised on creating a Round Table—the SED to broaden its power, the opposition to control it. Initiated in Poland, this forum was a device to bring government and dissidents together under neutral church moderation to end repression, debate necessary changes, and ensure that reforms would be promptly initiated. Replicated locally and sectorally, these round tables helped defuse confrontations because they created a channel for negotiating the implementation of popular demands. While the government’s legitimacy was growing weaker by the day, the opposition groups derived their power from the unceasing street protests. The Central Round Table focused especially on dismantling the secret service, and it decided to handle the issue of power transfer through free elections. In spite of deep-seated distrust, such compromises were possible because both sides were searching for a democratized socialism in a renewed GDR, a kind of Third Way.32 The agreement on free elections, to be held on May 6 but then moved forward to March 18, was the final step in keeping the East German revolution peaceful. The SED consented, because it had the advantage of a million-member apparatus, control of the media, and an army of full-time functionaries. The restructured bloc parties such as the CDU or FDP and the new groups such as the SDP agreed, because they could hope for massive campaign assistance from experienced West German professionals. Only the dissidents objected, because they remained disunited, which forced them to mount a spirited but amateurish effort with little help from the Green party. The result of the turnout of over 90 percent was truly revolutionary, since the Alliance for Germany, forged by Chancellor Helmut Kohl, won over 48 percent of the vote, the SDP came in a weak second, while the PDS dropped to under 20 percent, and the Bündnis 90 of the opposition tallied barely any votes at all. The clear outcome showed that four-fifths of the East Germans rejected communism and wanted a rapid transition to a Western-style democracy.33 Another major difference from other revolutions was the unification option that distinguishes the German transformation from the trajectories of the East Central European neighbors. As a result of postwar division, the existence of a successful Western state did eventually serve, as Konrad Adenauer had predicted, as a kind of magnet for the citizens of its Eastern rival. If the connections were seriously damaged by the building of the Wall in 1961, the mandate of the Basic Law to strive for reunification, reaffirmed

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by a Constitutional Court decision on the Ostpolitik treaties, kept the door open, although West German citizens were losing interest in their Eastern cousins. While in TV images and hearsay the West had long served as an imaginary alternative, only the travel after the fall of the Wall revealed to East Germans the full extent of the difference in living standards, making them want for themselves the riches of a consumer society. The November 9 shock therefore inspired calls of “we are one people,” expressing the conviction that the quickest path to a system change was to join the FRG.34 This desire for reunification was also a result of the “German policy” pursued by successive Bonn cabinets. The CDU governments were strong on rhetorical appeals to “our brothers and sisters” in the East during the holiday commemorating the June 17, 1953, uprising, but they lacked any practical way to implement it. The SPD policy makers had instead figured out that “change through closeness” would soften the SED repression, but many of them gradually lost sight of the goal of restoring unity. Both major parties responded to the mass exodus and the spread of the demonstrations in confused and hesitant fashion, agreeing only on rhetorical support for reforms in the GDR and the promise of material aid. It took until the end of November for Kohl to seize the political opportunity with his daring Ten Point Plan that sketched a way to eventual unity through a confederation that would evolve into a federal state. Once the issue had been broached, the overwhelming reception during his visit in Dresden, when tens of thousands shouted “Helmut, Helmut,” convinced Kohl to push even more actively for unification.35 The sudden revival of the “German question” disturbed the international scene, which had become accustomed to treating German division as the price for Nazi crimes. Especially the Soviet Union wanted to retain its victory prize, but the British and French leaders Thatcher and Mitterrand were also unenthusiastic; only the Bush government in the United States saw German unity as a chance to push Russia out of Eastern Europe. Infected by the joy of Berliners dancing on the Wall, public opinion abroad was generally sympathetic, but elites, especially in Poland and Israel, worried about a recrudescence of the past. The management of the unification process required a complicated set of negotiations between the two German states and the four victor powers of the World War II, known as the two-plus-four talks. On the key issue of the Eastern frontier, Kohl eventually overrode objections of the German expellee lobby, while Gorbachev ultimately gave in on the other contentious topic of NATO membership.36 In the end, everyone agreed that anchoring a united Germany in the West would help the East return to Europe at last. The actual form of unification was simultaneously determined by negotiations between the de Maiziere and Kohl governments. Following

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the precedent of the Saar’s return to West Germany in 1956, they chose paragraph 23 of the Basic Law, stipulating the accession of additional states rather than paragraph 146, mandating a constitutional convention, because it was quicker and more predictable. This method also demonstrated that unification was not a merger of equals but that a bankrupt East was joining a wealthy West largely on the latter’s terms, because the former had been a dictatorship, and the latter was a democracy. Time was of the essence, since GDR tax receipts were drying up, and grumbling in Moscow about Gorbachev’s concessions made it uncertain how long the diplomatic “window of opportunity” might remain open. A currency, economic, and social union extended the West German DM to the East, along with the extensive welfare system, so as to stop the flow of refugees. Finally, a unification treaty laid down complicated rules for actually transferring West Germany’s legal, economic, and political system to the East.37 The astounding success of this peaceful and national revolution derived from the crumbling of power above, the mounting challenge from below, and the fortuitous help from outside. The SED’s change of course from open repression to controlled dialogue and partial democratization was essential in opening the gate to mass protest. The dissidents’ courage in criticizing the regime was crucial for recovering enough human rights to allow public debate, while the demonstrations of ordinary GDR citizens for a better life were instrumental in rejecting dreams of a Third Way by insisting on a more fundamental system change. Exploiting the softening of enmity through the SPD’s Ostpolitik, Helmut Kohl’s as well as HansDietrich Genscher’s political skill was decisive in negotiating the international and domestic shape of unification. Finally, President George Bush’s resolve was significant in pressing for unity, while Mikhail Gorbachev acted as one of “the heroes of retreat” for allowing it.38 Communism collapsed only because it was strongly pushed from within and without. A Mixture of Consequences Another indication of the revolutionary nature of the overthrow of SED rule was its powerful effect in transforming virtually all areas of personal and political life. Domestically, the transition from a dictatorship to a democracy, a planned to a market economy, a controlled to a civil society, and a censored culture to pluralist experimentation could hardly have been more radical. Internationally, the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the end of the Cold War, and the return of the East to an integrating Europe fundamentally redrew the map of the old continent and reshaped diplomatic relations. But in comparative perspective, the German case differs from

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other East European transitions because the new system was imported from the West rather than homegrown, increasing the speed of change but limiting choice.39 According to personal experience, opinions therefore differ on whether this transformation ought to be considered a threatening takeover from the outside or an overdue liberation from within. The revival of democracy was initially achieved by East German demonstrators, but its form came to be dominated by Western representative institutions. While dissidents clamored for human rights in order to express their criticism in public, the SED sought to transform acclamatory “democratic centralism” into a controlled dialogue; meanwhile, the eviscerated bloc parties rediscovered an independent role. The exodus and demonstrations compelled the SED to allow an opposition, strike its own primacy from the constitution, revitalize the Volkskammer (parliament), and dismantle the secret police. But the dream of intellectuals, enshrined in the Round Table, who had hoped to democratize socialism and find a Third Way between East and West, was rejected by the silent majority. Instead, the popularly elected de Maiziere cabinet, the first legitimate GDR government, chose to join an established Western democracy in order to stave off economic collapse.40 Accession to the FRG had the advantage of transferring functioning institutions from the West, but it cut short the continuation of self-democratization from below. The introduction of a social market economy proved quicker in sweeping away moribund planning structures than in creating “flourishing landscapes” in the East. Many refugees of the mass exodus were motivated by hopes for a better life, while dissident intellectuals who had little economic knowledge supported the creation of a trusteeship agency to oversee privatization. While the SED was only willing to introduce limited market incentives into its state-run system, its functionaries, plant managers, and members of the secret service quickly privatized assets on their own. Though only some Western-oriented parties campaigned for a social market economy, the GDR’s bankruptcy compelled a currency union, cushioning the vagaries of competition by an elaborate welfarestate safety net. Unfortunately, election concerns set the exchange rate too high at 1:1.5, while the rapid rise in wages demanded by the unions rendered Eastern products uncompetitive.41 The economic transformation therefore unleashed a process of “creative destruction” in which short-term gain hampered long-term growth. In contrast, the return of cultural pluralism, based on a revitalized civil society, seemed more positive, at least initially. Many actors, rock musicians, artists, and writers had been in the forefront of the “democratic awakening” so as to gain greater freedom of expression and renew ties to the international community. But soon disappointment set in because

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the strapped state governments cut subsidies and closed “houses of culture,” while Western media chains bought up Eastern newspapers and dominated radio and TV stations. Similarly, reemerging old associations and newly established groups cultivating regional traditions led to a veritable explosion of civil society. But in the large national associations such as trade unions, Eastern Germans were always in a structural minority, with their concerns overshadowed by the more numerous Westerners. Therefore, a whole new species of regional spokespeople emerged, expressing Eastern German disappointments and cultivating a nostalgic GDR identity.42 These transition problems demonstrate that the domestic transformation of East Germany was, indeed, profound, if somewhat overly dominated by the West. The frequently invoked Anschluss metaphor, which expresses feelings of being overwhelmed, is nonetheless inaccurate, since the GDR joined the FRG rather than the latter swallowing up the former.43 Though their importation did cut short revolutionary constitution building from below, the institutions of representative democracy have proven stable enough to allow the postcommunists a share of power. It was rather the storm of economic competition that blew away the illusion of being able to work as before in the East but to consume as in the West and disappointed hopes in rivaling FRG prosperity. Also, for all the intellectual complaining of authors such as Daniela Dahn, other East Germans such as the Berlin theologian Richard Schroeder have strongly defended the gains of unification. When viewed from the perspective of their neighbors, the Eastern transformation has been a great success, although compared to the West, it still has a long way to go. On the whole, the international repercussions of the collapse of communism have been more positive for the East Germans and their neighbors than has often been realized. The fall of the Wall on November 9, 1989, not only freed travel to the West but also lifted the Iron Curtain that had divided the continent for over four decades. The end of the Cold War hastened the departure of the Red Army from its numerous bases in East Germany and the adjoining states, finishing an occupation that had limited their sovereignty. In the former GDR the overthrow of the SED also ended the militarization of society by dissolving the National People’s Army (NVA), the state security forces (MfS), the People’s Police (DVP), and the factory brigades. Moreover, the crumbling of the Warsaw Pact allowed the Western Alliance to spread its security umbrella eastward, thereby helping to stabilize the newly independent states. While history has not ended with the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the liberation of Eastern Europe have ushered in a new era of peace in Central and Eastern Europe.44

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Though the disappearance of the GDR caused some phantom pain, fears of the rise of a “Fourth Reich” turned out to be vastly exaggerated.45 The unprecedented dismantling of an entire government apparatus not only threw a number of SED functionaries out of work, it also caused ideological disappointment at the loss of the utopia of creating a better, that is, antifascist Germany. But for the East Germans themselves, it meant the revival of local self-government more responsive to citizen concerns, as well as the return of the historic Länder or states, expressing regional pride and serving as an essential building block in the FRG’s federal system. The controversial move of the capital from the provincial Bonn to the metropolitan Berlin did increase German assertiveness somewhat, but predictions of an unstable, domineering “Berlin Republic” were belied by the facts. The high costs of unification and the multiple tasks of bringing the East up to Western standards left little room for German hegemony and encouraged the government to continue its incremental, multilateral, and peaceful foreign policy.46 The end of the Cold War unfortunately also revived ugly currents of nationalism that had previously been suppressed by bloc confrontation and socialist internationalism. In Germany, efforts of right-wing intellectuals to end Holocaust contrition through “normalization” were quickly blocked by left-wing criticism. Similarly, the despicable outbursts of xenophobic violence by youthful skinheads aroused widespread resistance, with hundreds of thousands demonstrating for tolerance in candlelight processions. Among neighboring countries, the drive for national self-determination led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, creating a series of newly independent states from the Baltic to the Danube. Nationalism was most problematic in the dissolution of Yugoslavia, since it inspired a series of civil wars that sent waves of refugees to Germany and forced the FRG to revise its prohibition of military deployment abroad.47 While the collapse of the Soviet Empire seemed liberating, the bloodshed in the Balkans demonstrated the possibility of renewed warfare in Europe. Overcoming European division nonetheless also opened the door to the cultural and social Westernization of the East. For a long time, the people behind the Iron Curtain had coveted the prosperous consumer lifestyle as well as the popular entertainment culture that symbolized the West. Overnight, East Germans found themselves in a Westernized country without having to leave their homes, while their neighbors gained access to the products and fashions that had previously been out of reach. In military terms, the extension of NATO first to East Germany and later also to Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and the Baltic states moved the security frontier eastward to Belarus and Ukraine. In economic terms, the gradual opening of the European Union to the membership of the East

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Europeans brought the benefits of integration to formerly excluded countries, sparking a rapid catch-up in growth. As the foreign license plates on numerous trucks on the Autobahn indicate, Germany has recovered its central position on the European continent, enhancing both its security and prosperity.48 Surprised by such far-reaching changes, East Germans had to make an enormous effort to adapt to these unfamiliar circumstances. Most threatening was the economic crisis that resulted from the double transition from a centralized command economy to an open market and from bloc protection to global competition. One fundamental problem was the complexity of the privatization process, overseen by the Treuhandanstalt (Trusteeship Agency), which preferred to sell companies and land to private investors rather than engaging in industrial policy. Another difficulty was the productivity gap, since Easterners produced only one-third as much per worker as Westerners, which meant that their rising wages created price levels that rendered their goods uncompetitive. A final handicap was the collapse of the Eastern market because neighbors could now buy more cheaply on the world market. The result was a severe drop in industrial production that led to mass unemployment, reaching one-fifth of the workforce, twice the level of the West. This downturn destroyed job security and left Easterners scrambling for survival.49 Owing to the fear of a Western taxpayer revolt, the federal government only belatedly came to the rescue and transferred staggering sums to rehabilitate the East. With bipartisan approval, Chancellor Kohl created a massive Aufbau Ost program (Rebuild the East) that was financed by a special income tax surcharge to repair the derelict infrastructure as a precondition for economic recovery. At the same time, the various welfare programs spent huge amounts to subsidize unemployed workers and offer them retraining opportunities, which maintained consumption on a lower but still acceptable level compared to the West. With special tax deductions, the cabinet sought to attract industrial firms to the East and to help construction companies by rebuilding dilapidated housing. While it failed to generate a general boom, the transfer of 2 trillion euros did eventually create new growth centers around Dresden, Leipzig, Jena, or Potsdam, while smaller towns and the countryside continued to suffer outmigration.50 However, taking advantage of the new opportunities required a basic change of mentality toward active self-help. The psychological adjustment to a more competitive Western world was complicated by the incessant disclosures of collaboration with the secret police. Initially, public resentment against the party elite’s lavish lifestyle in the Berlin suburb of Wandlitz had helped to discredit the SED nomenklatura. Moreover, dissidents had insisted on the preservation

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of the Stasi files in an independent federal depository in which victims could consult their records, and the government could conduct background checks for further hiring. At the same time, public hearings of the official Enquetekommission (parliamentary commission of inquiry) so successfully exposed the repressive character of the prior regime that most East Germans reject the idea of its resuscitation. Nonetheless, the media’s incessant disclosures of informal collaboration with the MfS on the part of new leaders such as Lothar de Maiziere or Manfred Stolpe and even popular idols such as Olympic figure skater Katarina Witt created a pervasive sense of scandal that fed a nostalgic backlash, since it seemed to devalue all prior Eastern lives.51 Learning Western-style parliamentary democracy proved more difficult and time consuming than anticipated. Unfailingly, opinion surveys revealed high attachment to democracy in the abstract, while showing considerable distrust in its actual functioning and a preference for social solidarity. While some Western politicians such as Kurt Biedenkopf became popular as Landesväter (state leaders), many of the lower-level helpers who sought to explain the new regulations were derided as Besserwessis owing to their arrogance. In a formal sense, parliamentary institutions seemed to function well enough, though parties often had difficulties in recruiting candidates for office because citizens were preoccupied with their private affairs. The inclusion of the postcommunist PDS helped legitimize the system because former regime supporters saw it as representing their interests, but its radical rhetoric continued to contradict its responsible government action. Eastern Germans therefore remained unsure whether to attribute their tribulations to the GDR legacy or to the FRG’s capitalist character.52 Public understanding of the implications of 1989–1990 has been hampered by framing the issue as the success of unification rather than as the result of revolution. Magnifying the psychological insecurity of transition, the talk of a Vereinigungskrise (unification crisis) and constant polling on “the progress of unity” are misleading, because they ignore the concomitant structural transition.53 After decades of exploitation, some frustration with the slowness of catching up and with the lag in being recognized as truly equal is understandable. But the focus on the Western standard is unhelpful because a comparison with the East reveals that Eastern Germany has advanced much further than all of its neighbors. At the same time, this perspective also increases Western irritation about a lack of gratitude for the material sacrifices that make some neglected areas in the old federal states look more impoverished than rising districts in the new Länder.54 In some ways, the recent celebrations are therefore an effort to reassure the public that the upheaval was ultimately necessary and largely benign.

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A New Kind of Revolution In contrast to other upheavals of twentieth-century history, the democratic awakening of 1989–1990 constitutes a positive caesura with far-reaching and mostly constructive consequences. Historians use this concept to denote significant events that turn development in a different direction, closing an epoch and beginning a new one. Unlike the regime collapses of 1918 and 1945, the overthrow of communist rule was not the result of a military defeat; in contrast to 1933 or 1949, popular mobilization did not lead to a new right-wing or left-wing dictatorship. If anything, some of its methods and goals resembled the generational revolt of 1968 in the West—only with more extensive results that not only changed attitudes and lifestyles but also transformed the political system, economic structure, and the like.55 By toppling the SED regime, the fall of the Wall ended German division and thereby the postwar period, while bringing democracy to the East and inaugurating a new era of the Berlin Republic. What made this upheaval different from the others? The distinctive nature of the 1989–1990 caesura is often misunderstood because it constituted a new kind of revolution. The East German uprising went far beyond a mere change of tactics from repression to pragmatism, which Krenz signaled with the sailing term Wende that implied altering course to reach the same goal.56 Like in 1953, 1956, 1968, and 1980–1981, the attempt to reform communism failed because it proved impossible to contain aspirations for freedom and a better life that made the population push for a more fundamental system transformation. Theorist Jack Goldstone defines revolution as “an effort to transform the political institutions and the justifications for political authority in society, accompanied by formal or informal mass mobilization and noninstitutionalized actions that undermine authorities.”57 Clearly, the exodus and demonstrations fit the criterion of mobilization, while the overthrow of SED rule and the self-dissolution of the GDR qualify as transformation of institutions. As part of a wider transition from communism, the democratic awakening is a classic example of escalating mass action from civil resistance through socialist reform to a complete revolution.58 The surprisingly peaceful character of this civil revolution stemmed from an exceptional degree of restraint by all major actors who consciously chose to pursue their conflicting aims without violence. A crucial precondition was Gorbachev’s repeal of the Brezhnev doctrine that kept the Red Army in its barracks and also indirectly held the GDR security forces in check. The actual break with the use of force on October 9 in Leipzig stemmed from a surprising coalition of dissidents trained in the peace movement, citizens afraid of the overwhelming power of the state, and

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party members unsure of how to act in the face of the succession struggle. Each of these groups pursued different aims: while the SED functionaries tried to salvage their power with concessions, the opposition wanted to democratize socialism, and the people preferred a social market economy. But all three agreed on common methods of organizing their competition through public dialogue, co-optation into a sharing of power, and decision by free election. Ultimately it was this procedural compromise that allowed for a peaceful transition.59 The peculiar national form of the transformation was determined by the wish of most East Germans to overcome the country’s division, which the FRG’s leaders could not ignore. The SED remained opposed, because it realized that, unlike in Poland, there was no reason for the GDR to exist without socialism; most dissidents had reservations about the FRG’s capitalist democracy and preferred to humanize their own state; only ordinary East Germans were impressed with Western prosperity and freedom, pushing to join the Federal Republic as soon as possible. Though the younger generation of West Germans had long given up on unity, the Basic Law, as interpreted by the Constitutional Court, maintained the unification mandate. While the SPD’s Ostpolitik had paved the way to detente, it was Chancellor Kohl of the CDU who gambled his career on actual unification, overcoming domestic reluctance and foreign opposition. The result of this cooperation was a “rush to German unity,” which led to the accession of five new states and initiated a process of Westernization from above and outside at tremendous cost.60 A litany of complaints about transition problems sometimes obscures the fact that the revolution of 1989 was a rare and astounding historical success. No doubt, coping with deindustrialization, unemployment, loss of social services, and Stasi scandals may be frustrating, but compared to the gray, penned-up, party-regimented, scarcity-dominated, secret-service controlled life in the GDR, the new possibilities for travel, consumption, entertainment, and participation are breathtaking.61 In contrast to the failure of 1848 and civil strife after 1918, the democratic awakening of 1989 has achieved most of its goals.62 It overthrew the stifling communist dictatorship, overcame the deep division of Germany and Europe, and relegated the Cold War to the museum. In dissolving the Soviet Empire, it created a new multipolar world order. While the transformation troubles ought not to be slighted, the caesura of 1989–1990 has created the chance of a better life for millions of East Europeans. Emblematic of this interrelated change is the sculpture of a Polski Fiat breaking through a section of the Berlin Wall at the Gdansk shipyard. Is this not reason enough to celebrate?

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Notes 1. “Erzählen Sie doch Ihre eigene Geschichte von 1989!” For examples, see www. tagesspiegel.de/meinjahr89; Friedrich Havemann Gesellschaft, “Friedliche Revolution 1989/90,” http://www.revolution1989.de/ (accessed July 24, 2010); Henrik Bispinck, Monika Stösser, and Luise Tremel, eds., Programm: Geschichtsforum 1989/2009: Europa zwischen Teilung und Aufbruch (Berlin: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2009). 2. See the exhaustive bibliography in Michael Richter, Die friedliche Revolution: Aufbruch und Demokratie in Sachsen 1989/90, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009); Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); Werner Weidenfeld, Außenpolitik für die deutsche Einheit: Die Entscheidungsjahre 1989/90 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998). 3. Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 4. Alexander von Plato, Die Vereinigung Deutschlands—ein weltpolitisches Machtspiel: Bush, Kohl, Gorbatschow und die geheimen Moskauer Protokolle (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2002); Konrad H. Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 5. Helmut Kohl, Erinnerungen 1982–1990 (Munich: Droemer, 2005); Andreas Rödder, Deutschland einig Vaterland: Die Geschichte der Wiedervereinigung (Munich: Beck, 2009), versus Gerhard A. Ritter, Wir sind das Volk! Wir sind ein Volk! Geschichte der deutschen Vereinigung (Munich: Beck, 2009). 6. Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow, eds., Verletztes Gedächtnis: Erinnerungskultur und Zeitgeschichte im Konflikt (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002). 7. Martin Sabrow, ed., Wohin treibt die DDR-Erinnerung? (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). See Guko, “Merkel: Die DDR war ein Unrechtsstaat!” May 2009 9, http://cdu-politik.de/2009/05/09/die-ddr-wareine-unrechtstaat/ (accessed July 24, 2010). 8. Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Endspiel: Die Revolution von 1989 in der DDR (Munich: Beck, 2009); Erhart Neubert, Unsere Revolution: Die Geschichte der Jahre 1989/90 (Munich: Piper, 2008); Rödder, Deutschland einig Vaterland. 9. Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague (New York: Vintage, 1990); and idem, “The Year of Truth,” in The Revolutions of 1989, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (London: Routledge, 1999), 108–24. 10. Karl-Dieter Opp, Peter Voss, and Christiane Gern, Origins of a Spontaneous Revolution: East Germany in 1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Steven Pfaff, Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of East Germany: The Crisis of Leninism and the Revolution of 1989 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 11. Chris Lorenz, Konstruktion der Vergangenheit: Eine Einführung in die Geschichtstheorie (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997); Geoff Eley, “History in a Moment

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12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

of Danger? National Retrieval, Memory, Everydayness,” paper delivered at the KCL/LSE conference, May 22–23, 2009. Günter Mittag, Um jeden Preis: Im Spannungsfeld zweier Systeme (Berlin: Aufbau, 1991); Gerhard Schürer, Gewagt und verloren: Eine deutsche Biographie ( Frankfurt an der Oder: Libri, 1996); Andre Steiner, Von Plan zu Plan: Eine Wirtschaftsgeschichte der DDR (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2004). Michael Gorbatschow, Wie es war: Die deutsche Wiedervereinigung (Munich: Econ, 2000); Julij A. Kwizinzkij, Vor dem Sturm: Erinnerungen eines Diplomaten (Berlin: Siedler, 1993). Erhart Neubert, Geschichte der Opposition in der DDR 1949–1989, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2002); Karsten Timmer, Vom Aufbruch zum Umbruch: Die Bürgerbewegung in der DDR (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000); Konrad H. Jarausch, “Aufbruch der Zivilgesellschaft. Zur Einordnung der friedlichen Revolution von 1989,” Totalitarismus und Demokratie 3 (2006): 25–45. Dieter Segert, Das 41. Jahr: Eine andere Geschichte der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau, 2008). The development of the SED remains under-researched. See Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio- Cultural History of the GDR (New York: Berghahn, 1999). Plato, Die Vereinigung Deutschlands; Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Bernd Eisenfeld, “Gründe und Motive von Flüchtlingen und Ausreiseantragsstellern aus der DDR,” Deutschland Archiv 37 (2004): 89–105. Richter, Friedliche Revolution, 1: 258 ff., 357 ff. See Bernd Lindner, ed., Zum Herbst ’89—Demokratische Bewegung in der DDR (Leipzig: Forum, 1994). Egon Krenz, Wenn Mauern fallen: Die friedliche Revolution: Vorgeschichte, Ablauf, Auswirkungen (Vienna: Neff, 1990). See also Kowalczuk, Endspiel, 419 ff. Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle, “Ich liebe Euch doch alle!” Befehle und Lageberichte des MfS, Januar–November 1989 (Berlin: BasisDruck, 1990); Hubertus Knabe, ed., Aufbruch in eine andere DDR: Reformer und Oppositionelle zur Zukunft ihres Landes (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1989). Stefan Wolle, Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR 1971–1989 (Berlin: Christoph Links, 1998). See also Marlies Menge, “Ohne uns läuft nichts mehr”: Die Revolution in der DDR (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1990). Wolfgang Schneider, ed., Leipziger Demontagebuch: Demo Montag, Tagebuch Demontage (Leipzig: Kiepenheuer, 1990). See also Hartmut Zwahr, Ende einer Selbstzerstörung: Leipzig und die Revolution in der DDR (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993). Heinrich Bortfeldt, Von der SED zur PDS: Wandlung zur Demokratie? (Bonn: Bouvier, 1992); Rainer Land and Ralf Possekel, Namenlose Stimmen waren uns voraus: Politische Diskurse von Intellektuellen aus der DDR (Bochum: Winkler, 1994). Pfaff, Exit-Voice Dynamics, 254 ff.

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germany 1989 / 33 25. Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (New York: Blackwell, 1993); Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 26. Neubert, Unsere Revolution, 63 ff.; Richter, Friedliche Revolution, 1: 195 ff. 27. For the key texts, see Konrad H. Jarausch and Volker Gransow, eds., Uniting Germany: Documents and Debates, 1944–1993 (Providence: Berghahn, 1994); idem and Helga Welsh, eds., One Germany in Europe, 1989–2006, vol. 10 of German History in Documents and Images (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2009), http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/section. cfm?section_id=16 (accessed July 24, 2010). 28. Richter, Friedliche Revolution, with diagrams of a quantitative analysis of demonstration slogans, 1: 234 ff., 495-96, 612 ff.; Neubert, Unsere Revolution, 111 ff. 29. Hans Modrow, Aufbruch und Ende (Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag, 1991). See also Hans-Hermann Hertle, Der Fall der Mauer: Die unbeabsichtigte Selbstauflösung des SED- Staates (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996). 30. Neubert, Unsere Revolution, 132 ff; Richter, Friedliche Revolution, 1: 357 ff; Kowalczuk, Endspiel, 401 ff. While the courage of the Leipzig citizens and party secretaries is undeniable, the role of Egon Krenz remains contested. 31. Rainer Eppelmann, Fremd im eigenen Haus: Mein Leben im anderen Deutschland (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1993). See also Richter, Friedliche Revolution, 2: 978. 32. Uwe Thaysen, Der Runde Tisch. Oder: Wo blieb das Volk? Der Weg der DDR in die Demokratie (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990). For contrasting evaluations, see Richter, Friedliche Revolution, 2: 982; Kowalczuk, Endspiel, 491–500. 33. For the Infas analysis of results, see Frankfurter Rundschau, March 20, 1990. See also Jürgen Falter, Wirklich ein Volk? Die politischen Orientierungen von Ost- und Westdeutschen im Vergleich (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000). 34. Diagrams in Richter, Friedliche Revolution, 2: 1036, 1103, 1477. See also Peter Bender, Deutschlands Wiederkehr: Eine ungeteilte Nachkriegsgeschichte, 1945–1990 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2007). 35. Horst Teltschik, 329 Tage: Innenansichten der Einigung (Berlin: Siedler, 1991); Kohl, Erinnerungen 1982–1990; Karl-Rudolf Korte, Deutschlandpolitik in Helmut Kohls Kanzlerschaft (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998). 36. James A. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989–1992 (New York: Putnam, 1995); Edward Schewardnadse, Die Zukunft gehört der Freiheit (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1991); Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Rebuilding a House Divided: A Memoir by the Architect of Germany’s Reunification (New York: Broadway, 1998). 37. Theodor Waigel, ed., Unsere Zukunft heißt Europa: Der Weg zur Wirtschaftsund Währungsunion (Düsseldorf: Econ, 1996); Wolfgang Schäuble, Der Vertrag: Wie ich über die deutsche Einheit verhandelte (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1991); Dieter Grosser, Das Wagnis der Währungs-, Wirtschafts- und Sozialunion (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998); Wolfgang Jäger, Die Überwindung der Teilung (Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 1998).

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34 / konrad h. jarausch 38. Maier, Dissolution, 330 ff. See also Konrad H. Jarausch, “Implosion oder Selbstbefreiung? Zur Krise des Kommunismus und Auflösung der DDR,” in idem and Sabrow, eds., Weg in den Untergang, 15– 40. 39. For orientation on transformation literature, see Guillermo O’Donnel and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Axel Croissant and Wolfgang Merkel, eds., Consolidated or Defective Democracy? Problems of Regime Change, special issue of Democratization 11, no. 5 (2004). 40. Lutz Wicke, Lothar de Maiziere, and Thomas de Maiziere, Öko-soziale Marktwirtschaft in Ost und West: Der Weg aus Wirtschafts- und Umweltkrise (Munich: dtv, 1990). See also Lothar de Maiziere and Christine de Maizieres, Anwalt der Einheit (Berlin: Argon, 1996). 41. Gerhard A. Ritter, Der Preis der deutschen Einheit: Die Wiedervereinigung und die Krise des Sozialstaats (Munich: Beck, 2006). 42. Daniela Dahn, Westwärts und nicht vergessen: Vom Unbehagen in der Einheit, 4th ed. (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2002); Hans Misselwitz, Nicht länger mit dem Gesicht nach Westen: Das neue Selbstbewusstsein der Ostdeutschen (Bonn: Dietz, 1996). 43. Helle Panke, ed., Die DDR zwischen Wende und Anschluss (Berlin: Helle Panke, 1999); see Stefan Bollinger, “DDR 1989/90—Vom Aufbruch zum Anschluss,” Utopie kreativ 103, no. 4 (1999): 110–21, versus Richard Schroeder, Die wichtigsten Irrtümer über die deutsche Einheit (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2007). 44. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005). The implications of the partial collapse of the Versailles states Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and the reemergence of the Brest-Litovsk order have not yet been sufficiently understood. 45. Edwin Hartrich, The Fourth and Richest Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1980); Jorge Semprun, Blick auf Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). 46. Max Otte, A Rising Middle Power? German Foreign Policy in Transformation, 1989–1999 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). 47. Konrad H. Jarausch, “Normalisierung oder Re-Nationalisierung? Zur Umdeutung der deutschen Vergangenheit,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 21 (1995): 571–84. See also Christian Hacke, Die Außenpolitik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Von Konrad Adenauer bis Gerhard Schröder, rev. ed. (Munich: Ullstein, 2003). 48. Wolle, Heile Welt der Diktatur; Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Wie westlich sind die Deutschen? Amerikanisierung und Westernisierung im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999). 49. Jörg Roesler, Ostdeutsche Wirtschaft im Umbruch, 1970–2000 (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2003). See J. D. Bindenagel, “Reflections on the 1989 Revolution, German Unification and America: The East and Eastern German Economy,” paper delivered at the German Historical Institute (Washington, DC) on September 24, 2009. 50. Adolf Haasen, Toward a New Germany: East Germans as Potential Agents of Change (New York: iUniverse, 2009). See also Daniel Gratzla, “Aufbau Ost: 1,2 Billionen Euro, die sich lohnen,” Tagesspiegel, August 28, 2009.

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germany 1989 / 35 51. Andrew Beattie, Playing Politics with History: The Bundestag Inquiries into East Germany (New York: Berghahn, 2008). 52. Laurence McFalls, Communism’s Collapse, Democracy’s Demise? The Cultural Context and Consequences of the East German Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995). 53. Jürgen Kocka, Vereinigungskrise: Zur Geschichte der Gegenwart (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995). 54. Klaus Schröder, Preis der Einheit: Eine Bilanz (Munich: Hanser, 2000). See also Günter Heydemann, “ ‘Blühende Landschaften’ oder entvölkerte Landkreise? Die neuen Bundesländer zwischen Wachstums- und Schrumpfungsprozessen,” Totalitarismus und Demokratie 6 (2009): 87–100. 55. Konrad H. Jarausch, “1968 and 1989: Caesuras, Comparisons, and Connections,” in 1968: The World Transformed, ed. Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 461–77. 56. Konrad H. Jarausch, “Wende, Zusammenbruch oder Revolution? Begriffsschwierigkeiten mit dem Umbruch von 1989/90,” Das Parlament 35-36 (August/September 2000). See also Matthias Damm and Mark R. Thompson, “Wende oder friedliche Revolution? Ungleiche Deutungen einer historischen Zäsur,” Totalitarismus und Demokratie 6 (2009): 21–35. 57. Jack Goldstone, “Towards a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001): 139–87. 58. Maier, Dissolution, 108 ff. See also Jürgen Kocka, “1989—Eine transnationale Revolution,” Neue Gesellschaft: Frankfurter Hefte 5 (2009): 46–49. 59. Peacefulness has often been asserted but rarely analyzed: Richter, Friedliche Revolution, vol. 2: 1345 ff., and idem, “Masse und Eliten—Ungleiche Ziele im ostdeutschen Transitionsprozess,” Totalitarismus und Demokratie 6 (2009): 37–47. 60. Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity; Ritter, Wir sind das Volk! passim. 61. Jana Hensel, After the Wall: Confessions from an East German Childhood and the Life That Came Next, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Public Affairs, 2004); or Thomas Brussig, Heroes Like Us, trans. John Brownjohn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). 62. Timothy Garton Ash, “Conclusion,” in Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath, ed. Sohrin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000); Konrad H. Jarausch, “Kollaps des Kommunismus oder Aufbruch der Zivilgesellschaft? Zur Einordnung der friedlichen Revolution von 1989,” in Die demokratische Revolution 1989 in der DDR, ed. Eckart Conze, Katharina Gajdukowa, and Sigrid Koch-Baumgarten (Cologne: Böhlau, 2009), 25–45.

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Ch a p t e r Two Th e D i f f e r e n t A e st h e t ic s of t h e Be r l i n Wa ll Olaf Briese

The Exceptionality of the Wall? From a global perspective, the Berlin Wall was a complete anomaly. It neither closed off a state or territory from the outside world nor protected one from invasion. What’s more, it was functionally backward: it protected the East German state from the escape of its own citizens; it was a barrier directed internally. This was, so it seems, globally unheard of. The Berlin Wall was part of the GDR’s comprehensive state border, of course, and from an international perspective, part of the Iron Curtain that sliced through Europe after World War II. Territories and borders secured by walls had always existed and continued to exist. A recent volume has thoroughly analyzed such state and territorial borders—that is to say, those borders secured by walls.1 The Great Wall of China, the Amurrite Wall, the Median Wall, the Cappadocian Wall, the Roman limes, the West Wall, the Atlantic Wall, the border between the United States and Mexico, between Israel and the Palestinian territories, and many more: these are all state and territorial borders meant to keep others out. They are meant to repel military invasions, control shipments of goods, regulate the flow of groups of people, and (this is a modern phenomenon) prevent mass immigration or supposed infiltration. But the fundamental innovation of the Berlin Wall and the GDR’s entire state border was the fact that it was directed not toward the outside but the inside. It was meant to prevent, through material means and the use of force, the state’s citizens from leaving their own country. But is this really absolutely new? Hadn’t there already been such walls in previous centuries and, even in Berlin, walls that were designed to prevent the population from emigrating or fleeing? There had indeed been such a wall, the “Akzisemauer” (an excise or customs wall) that existed

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(ca. 1700 to 1865). Its actual function, at least in the first third of the eighteenth century, was as an antidesertion wall, designed to prevent the escape of soldiers and even the general populace. In eighteenth-century Berlin, soldiers deserted without a second thought and were executed without a second thought as well, if caught.2 Desertion was a daily occurrence despite punishment of the gauntlet or hanging as stipulated by edicts and decrees. The antidesertion wall and guards stationed around garrisons like Berlin’s made flight more difficult, but necessity was the mother of invention, even under the shadow of the gallows. If flight over the wall seemed too hopeless, the soldiers fled during marches, campaigns, or in the middle of battle. Walls were the most important protection against the continuous loss of valuable human capital. At the end of the seventeenth century, the Berlin fortress walls were still adequate to this task, but on their completion, they became useless—architectural junk. Berlin grew beyond them. Around 1700, several new suburbs were founded. For this reason, from 1705 to 1708, a combined customs and antidesertion wall was built around the growing city.3 That meant, of course, that the soldiers guarded themselves. In 1755, there were around 900 soldiers to man all the gates and walls and almost 20 guard posts within the city. The military guarded itself, and if a desertion was successful, the guards and their commanding officers were punished. What caused this ceaseless flood of desertion? What drove the recruits to flee the country? The reason was forced conscription and military service under brutal conditions. The absolutist state, formed through a standing army, necessitated the use and abuse of soldiers. With ravenous hunger, the state devoured both its own population and soldiers who were recruited and kidnapped from “abroad.” This path led from the local, regular militias at the end of the seventeenth century to standing armies of troops stationed far from their homes. Certain regiments began a system of forced conscription, which the “Soldier King” immediately intensified upon ascending the throne in 1713. The goal was intensive recruitment of foreigners and locals for the Prussian army through promises and earnest money, but instead a wave of unchecked violence ensued. An official and unofficial state of exception was declared in Prussia; covert and overt terrorism, that is, state-sponsored terrorism, spread across the country. Prussia was a rogue state. If enough rural and urban Prussian children could not be torn from their homes (schoolhouses and church services were preferred hunting grounds for the state-sponsored kidnappers), then travelers passing through were forced to believe the unbelievable: that they could wake up in a soldier’s frock behind garrison walls. Inevitably, there were even riots against these “recruiters” in cities and villages.

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Holding the inhabitants of Berlin and an entire state’s population hostage was in no way an accomplishment unique to twentieth-century communists. The greater the pressure on potential or future members of the military, the stronger the desire of large parts of the population to turn their backs on this barbaric country. And it was no coincidence that in the year 1713, when the new “Soldier King” greatly intensified “forcible recruitment,” edicts against military desertion intersected with edicts against “civil” desertion. Rural or urban subjects attempting to flee or leave were punished as deserters. By 1713, all citizens were seen as potential deserters. Those leaving the country without permission were known explicitly as “deserters,” and their personal property was subject to confiscation. This phenomenon was becoming increasingly palpable: anxious investigations had revealed that between the years 1712 and 1714, around 17,000 Berliners left the city.4 The antidote was not a decrease but rather an increase in state terror. Citizens were thrown in municipal and state prisons. All soldiers were subjects, and all subjects were soldiers, and the only thing that could prevent their desertion was a wall. The situation did not improve until 1733. With the so-called “Kantonalsystem,” a predecessor of a regular system of conscription, the indiscriminate impressment of recruits was over, at least within Prussia. Under this system, the exception became the rule. State terror was codified, generalized, and normalized. From then on, every subject was a potential soldier. As a consequence, children were registered in the cradle and pledged to the service of a particular regiment. “Auferstanden aus Ruinen”: The “Generations” of the Wall after 19615 The Berlin Wall was not absolutely exceptional after all. The “Akzisemauer” was designed to prevent the flight of subjects and forcibly recruited citizens. In the beginning, in 1708, it was made of wooden planks. Starting in 1734, it underwent several rounds of renovation, becoming a brick and mortar wall. Was the Berlin Wall at least a real wall from its beginnings in 1961? No. It was a chronological series of several different barrier systems of which only five or six could really be described as walls in the narrow sense. The very first barrier (in a temporal sense as well) was a human blockade, a wall of bodies. Potential escapees were scared away by the physical presence of guards. This kind of human wall (preferably formed by trained combat units from the factories, not by conventional soldiers) took on a representative place in East German visual propaganda. Barbed wire, which had been invented at the end of the nineteenth century, was the

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most important and effective technical material used in the early days. It could be deployed extremely quickly, was cheap and mobile, and had sufficiently proven its effectiveness in the camps and wars of the twentieth century. Economic advantages notwithstanding, barbed wire had two clear disadvantages: it necessarily evoked the image of imprisonment, and it could not really prevent violent breakout attempts using vehicles. The “First Generation” Wall: Because of these various advantages and disadvantages, during a meeting of the so-called general staff under Erich Honecker on September 20, 1961, it was decided to build a wall 18–20 km long and 2 m high. But even before this, immediately following the closing of the border, sections of wall had been erected at specific locations. These walls were in the beginning not the industrially produced, molded components forming the walls of the “third” and “fourth” generations (erected in 1965 and 1976 respectively) but rather a disorderly conglomerate of concrete slabs, beams, bricks, and cinder blocks crowned by barbed wire. Most were only 30 cm thick. It was a perverse piece of urban reconstruction, a ruinous wall of junk in a city still marked by war. Owing to the lack of foundations under most of its parts, it was direly in need of maintenance, as Major-General Poppe, the Berlin Stadtkommandant (city commander), self-critically admitted at the end of 1964: “Because of the conditions caused by the measures taken on August 13, 1961, the technical barricades had to be erected in a short time without the requisite testing and in some cases by a workforce lacking the necessary knowledge for the job.”6 The “Second Generation” Wall: Prior scholarship has yielded various interpretations of what the “second generation” might be. On the one hand, the wall described above—a thin, segmented wall propped up by concrete blocks, slabs, and columns and prone to collapse—could be described as the “second generation” of the Wall. That would be merely a reinforced, thicker wall. On the other hand, the combined ensemble of an exterior and interior wall can be seen as the “second generation” Wall. Apparently the systematic construction of this interior wall began in June 1962. With its construction, the real “death strip” came into being—a garishly lit cage bordered by a thrown-together collection of makeshift objects. The exterior wall was an unfinished, rough mix of architectural materials and styles. Concrete slabs, concrete beams, cinder blocks, and bricks copulated in a desolate architectural orgy. The facades of bricked-over buildings and preexisting cemetery walls (like along Bernauer Straße in Berlin) were integrated into the Wall. Wooden screens jutting out at strategic points reinforced the Wall’s makeshift character. Photos provide sporadic impressions of this sloppy, botched job, this fragile monstrosity.7

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The “Third Generation” Wall: Walls evolve. Concrete walls were new in the nineteenth century, but their career blossomed only with industrial manufacturing processes in the second half of the twentieth century. For the Berlin Wall, this was the path to a “third generation”: the industrial preproduction of large wall sections and on-site assembly with heavy machinery. There was a reason for this innovation. The politburo and the Nationaler Verteidigungsrat (National Defense Council) showered accusations about the wave of refugees (and increasingly deserters) that showed no signs of abating on the defense ministry, the commanders responsible for border patrol in Berlin, and other local leaders (for example, during Defense Council meetings on September 20, 1963, and October 29, 1964). In this context, Stadtkommandant Poppe must have been given a “robust mandate”: the systematic construction of a wall. From then on, a different sort of wall was born, a qualitatively new concept came into being. The form most appropriate to concrete’s properties as a building material had been found. The latest solution was a combination of steel supports and stacks of narrow concrete slabs, fitted vertically into the supports. Up to ten narrow slabs were stacked on top of each other, held up by the supports. This new method of wall construction originated in the mid-1960s and was used even more often by 1968. During the mid-1960s, the wall became the foremost element of a refined, graduated barrier system: an interior wall, a border alarm fence, antitank barricades, dog-patrolled areas (mainly on the edges of Berlin), observation towers, light arrays, patrol paths, plowed or raked strips of ground, trenches to prevent vehicular breakouts, and finally, at the outermost point, the above-mentioned strip of wall. The “Fourth Generation” Wall: Reinforced concrete had proven itself as a building material. The only problem was, as mentioned, the quality of the finished product. Beyond this, the construction of the “third generation” Wall was arduous and costly, its foundation was not optimal, and it could not withstand collisions with heavy vehicles. Last but not least, not only did this Wall’s many edges and crossbeams offer good targets for vandals from the West with crowbars and hoists, but—even worse—it actually aided escapes: the crossbeams offered a perfect series of footholds. Better solutions were needed. New trends in industrial engineering favoring the increased use of elements with large surface areas were apparently partially responsible for the development of the Grenzmauer 75 (Border Wall 75). It consisted of pieces of supporting wall: 15 cm thick, 1.2 m wide, 3.6 m high (4.0 m including the pipes on top), and a T-form base that made a foundation unnecessary but nevertheless prevented the Wall from being forcibly toppled. Starting in 1976, the barrier around West Berlin was rebuilt using

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45,000 of these components (but also with others slightly modified at the base). Of these, 29,000 were installed on the sector border and 16,000 at various locations on the outer ring. The “Fifth Generation” Wall: It was 1988, just before New Year’s Eve. The leadership of the Grenztruppen (Border Guards) was worried once again. Their border had to be secure but in a cost-effective manner, and neither was remotely the case. The cost especially was cause for consternation. Over the decades, spending for the wall, that is, for all border protection in the GDR including the border to the West, had consistently grown faster than national income. The increasing economic pressure did not stop at the border. Accusations of a lack of fiscal discipline circulated. In 1988, state spending for border protection (not only in Berlin) was two times greater than for athletics and almost as great as cultural spending. A single 1.2 meter-wide section of the Grenzmauer 75 cost 359 East German Marks, and 45,000 of them were installed. This was only the spending for the exterior wall. There were additional costs for fences, trenches, patrol paths, towers, and so on. Money had to be saved on personnel, materials, and—this was explicitly stated—the cost of continuous lighting. On December 30, 1988, an action plan for the time frame of 1991 to 1995– 2000 resulted. The plan called for, among other measures, the reduction and partial deactivation of the expensive lighting but included additional new ideas: infrared and microwave devices, radio wave-emitting systems, vibration detectors, new radio transmission interception devices, and new climbing hindrances.8 The “Sixth Generation” Wall—The Green Future: The pressure on the Grenztruppen command grew. They were to sink costs and increase effectiveness, but how? In December 1988, a high-tech wall for the 1990s was planned. But there must have also been commanders who more realistically gauged the economic as well as the technical potential of this country, which they were charged with protecting from the escape of its own citizens. Microelectronics cost amazing sums of money, and they had proven themselves (as a ubiquitous line in internal memos had it) extremely error prone and not yet ready for deployment. Up to 50 percent of all border alarms previously in use had been triggered by wildlife or weather. This apparently was another factor leading to the “green border” alternative. On January 10, 1989, just after the plan from December mentioned above, a team from the Militärtechnisches Institut der Nationalen Volksarmee (Military Technology Institute of the National People’s Army) presented a further study with the title “Possibilities for a renovation and redesign of barrier and warning fences.” The comrades had cultivated their bounty of green ideas in the heavily forested region of Bad Saarow. They called for barriers to conform to the natural landscape; hedges specifically

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appealed to them. If one took care to use flora suited to the regional soil and climate, these green barriers would have a longer life span, require less maintenance, and, more important, cost less. Even accounting for damage from frost, wild animals, and pests, nothing spoke against this effective and attractive green type of wall. It would offer a reliable and low-cost barrier, deployed in three rows stabilized with building materials (reinforced concrete, wire coils, and metal mesh). The jaw-dropping climax of these recommendations for the military beautification of the landscape: “the demand for ‘attractiveness’ is to be granted priority over the demand for ‘barrier effectiveness.’ ”9 But discussions about the construction of this landscape hedge soon proved irrelevant: the Wall fell at the end of the year. Report for Beautification Duty! This wall, in its day the most photographed in the world, was only a piece of architecture in its spare time. It was a political barrier; it sliced through the city organism without mercy. Nevertheless, a fascination emanated from it, like a fascination emanates from other divided cities. Their architecturally divided elements, like separated Siamese twins, highlight the fundamental ambivalence of the world and display it in the urban mode. Divided cities produce a certain spatial aesthetics, an architectural aesthetics of togetherness, of unsettled togetherness, and in their own way, they are the aesthetic embodiment in space of the world’s failure. An aesthetic imperative: divided in unity, united in division. In Berlin, this aesthetic imperative came to a head through the dividing element of the Wall, which did not merely divide but was itself the division: a bold spatial wedge, a rim of city bent inward with its extreme aesthetics of space and its own aesthetic value. Like the one that emanated from the 40 km long fabric installation Running Fence by Christo (1972–1976), the Wall had its own mysterious aesthetic fascination. How can we explain this fascination? Did the Berlin Wall have a special aesthetics? How did architects view this artifact? How did someone like Rem Koolhaas, certainly no architectural dilettante, come to describe the Wall as “heartbreakingly beautiful”?10 I will attempt an answer: the primary aesthetics of the Berlin Wall, that is, the aesthetics of the structure as such, was not monolithic. There was no such thing as the aesthetics of the Berlin “Wall.” Instead, there are several functional aesthetics dependent on the object (but not immanent to the object), at least five of them: the aesthetics of uniformity, the aesthetics of modernity, the aesthetics of kitsch, the aesthetics of emptiness, and the aesthetics of the ruinous. And finally, on the East German side, there was a sixth: the aesthetics of absence.

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1. The Aesthetics of Uniformity One demand continually pervaded the chain of command governing the Wall: the production of “order and security.” On the one hand, this was a technical term for the enforcement of military discipline; on the other hand, this demand also implied aesthetic norms. The border system had to be standardized. This will to uniformity was shared by the organization of the Grenztruppen, the unified, uniformed appearance of the border guards, as well as the standardization of the barrier system, including its foremost elements (in the beginning, only a few kilometers of wall). Normalization, standardization, and uniformity are the conditio sine qua non of military practice. Correspondingly, the border system was also “standardized” over the years. An important first step in this direction was the widespread demolition of residential and industrial buildings standing on the border (decided during the fifteenth meeting of the Nationaler Verteidigungsrat on June 13, 1963).11 A further step in mid-1963 was the Berlin Stadtkommandant’s planned construction of a border prototype, which was to be a model for other sections of the border in Berlin.12 But in the early years, it did not seem that any fundamental changes were really intended. In a contrite piece of self-criticism early in 1965, the Stadtkommandant admitted that “the technical barriers are non-standard and maintenance-intensive, . . . [They] often do not increase the prestige of the German Democratic Republic on the world stage.”13

2. The Aesthetics of Modernity During the early stages of the Wall construction (1962), there were recommendations to standardize the process in order to “increase the prestige of the GDR.”14 In 1964, there were explicit orders for “beautification work” (which probably meant cleanup, organization, and standardization).15 The ugly, improvised sections on the west side of the Wall had been covered over the years with smooth slabs of concrete, at least at the border crossings. The will to beautification did not stop with the border crossing points. The Wall itself—at that time (aside from certain sections in the inner city) not so much a wall as a barbed wire cage—was to get a more acceptable look. From the west, the Wall was to look less like a huge entanglement of wire reminiscent of a concentration camp. New solutions were needed, and over the years, the border, a functional and symbolic synthesis, was purposefully aestheticized. Only then did it truly become a “wall.” And this wall, almost of its own volition, both forced and enabled new means of aestheticization. An effective and aesthetically pleasing barrier was required. According to a plan of February 1965, the goal was to “construct elements of high quality

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that conform better to the landscape,” and also to “strengthen the reputation of the German Democratic Republic in the eyes of the world.”16 For this reason, as a later document from late April 1974 put it, the Wall had to be given “a good engineered appearance.”17 The Grenzmauer 75, that is, the “fourth generation” Wall, satisfied the planners’ aesthetic criteria especially well. It was, according to Klaus-Dieter Baumgarten, the head of the Grenztruppen in 1982, “easy to maintain and beautifully designed.”18 And, to be sure, it was not bad looking. Just as there is a specific barbed wire aesthetics (mixtures of spolia and concrete block masonry), there is also an aesthetics specific to rows of industrially produced, reinforced concrete blocks. Reinforced concrete is notable for its ideal formability, homogeneity, smoothness, uniformity, rigidity, and durability. That meant it was perfectly suited as a symbol of collectivity to materially manifest border status. This material aesthetics of the concrete went hand in hand with a certain formal aesthetics: symmetry and regularity as the aesthetic translation of ideological premises. If the first walls had all the hallmarks of improvisation and eclectic use of spolia through the incorporation of walls from buildings, cemeteries, and factories, then the walls built with concrete were realized in uniform geometric forms: the standardized quality of a standardized society. Through a formal language specific to concrete, the “Wall” took on an aesthetically stringent, thoroughly normalized form—social geometry through material geometry. This was of course in harmony with general trends of industrial mass construction in the GDR. An efficient, austere formal language was developed, one that veered in the direction of the architectural avant-garde: the reduction to plain, pure practicality; pure architecture; simple minimal functionalism; a utilitarian structure in white. The interior wall, usually painted on both sides with rows of white squares, intensified the Gestus of this monumental “minimal art.” 3. The Kitsch Aesthetics On July 1, 1983 a meeting of the Nationaler Verteidigungsrat resulted in new groundbreaking decisions. These resolutions, with an eye on Berlin, called once again for “an improvement of the appearance of this section of the border.”19 The decision solidified an idea that had always been in the back of the minds of those responsible for the Wall, namely, to create an attractive whole. For this reason, in 1983, the orders multiplied within the chain of command that called for “neatness and uniformity,” prescribed “landscaping and garden work” at the Brandenburg Gate, and supported a “sophisticated look,” with a “colorful design” and an “improvement of the city’s appearance.” A “representative appearance” was to be achieved.

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The goal was—sancta simplicitas—an “attractive total picture.”20 That also meant new grouting, plaster work, and a uniform coat of white paint for the Wall at prominent locations, for example, around the Brandenburg Gate. The reason why this surprising urge to beautify the Wall gripped the authorities in 1983 can be reconstructed by means of files from the Federal Military Archive in Freiburg. It was connected to aspirations for both international recognition and billion dollar loans. In this critical year, shortly before Franz Josef Strauss’s visit in summer 1983, the Nationaler Verteidigungsrat made far-reaching decisions to remove mines on the Western border and to make the visual design of the border in Berlin more “humane.” For the Berlin Wall, that meant the focused reduction of barrier components. Less was more. By order of the Nationaler Verteidigungsrat in July 1983, unpleasant and superfluous elements of the Wall disappeared: “pits and antitank barricades, foxholes, guard houses, and dog patrol areas.”21 The ensemble of structures making up the border was programmatically streamlined, and the Wall itself finally became aesthetically dominant. This was accompanied by a process of Vergartenzwergung or “garden gnoming” the Wall, at least at the prominent areas around the Brandenburg Gate. The aim was to create a “sophisticated appearance” with “planters,” “lawn,” and “decorative wall elements.”22 The mighty Wall, which made a mockery of the regulations for community garden parcels, became the boundary of a gigantic community garden paradise, a veritable state garden parcel. The Brandenburg Gate mutated into a miniature portal to a performative garden parcel idyll. In January 1988, after continued complaints from Erich Honecker himself that the outward effect of the new decorations was insufficient, the “death strip” was, so it seems, refunctionalized into a sort of garden, complete with flower boxes and rolling wrought iron gates for the interior wall.23 4. The Aesthetics of Emptiness The conscious shaping of the wall ensemble, especially from 1983 on, led to a reduction of previous barrier elements. As mentioned, antitank barricades, guardhouses, foxholes, dog patrol areas, vehicle trenches, and other elements disappeared with increasing frequency. A cascade of sketches detailing the current wall and planned future versions, prepared in connection with the aforementioned decisions of the sixty-seventh meeting of the Nationaler Verteidigungsrat, make it clear that this streamlining did not occur solely for functional reasons. A pair of before-and-after sketches by the head of the Grenztruppen did not yet represent the planned development with sufficient contrast: while many former elements of the Wall had been eliminated, the diagram depicting the “new” system still contained a

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large strip of highway barriers (replacing the vehicle trenches).24 After the National Defense Ministry rejected this plan, the commander removed the superfluous strip in the next pair of sketches prepared for the printer’s proofs. Moreover, in the sketch depicting the “old” system of barriers, someone, probably a high-ranking defense ministry official, had penciled in an additional guardhouse. On paper, the old border was supposed to look as chaotic as possible, while the new border was to appear as empty and pristine as possible.25 This altered pair of sketches from April 1983, now apparently in stark enough contrast, served as supporting documentation for the decision of July 1, 1983, and only the second has been reproduced in the scholarly literature.26 The strip of Wall increasingly took on the character of a smooth surface within the jagged area encompassed by the exterior and interior walls. Jagged smoothness, smooth jaggedness. A heterotopia emerged, an enclave of emptiness, an inter-city break. The empty center: the urban space was disassembled from the middle outwards. A negative city grew, an absolute space as absolute in-betweenness. As decentered as it was compromised, the city had an internal border, which proved to be an expanding empty space. It was an urban cannula filled with nothing but anti-city. What filled this space was light, eternal light. Two pearl necklaces of reinforced concrete had crystallized with only luminous emptiness between them. More and more the Wall was transformed into a bold light array, a grandiose, permanent light installation, like a landscape composition of extensive textile walls by Christo, or light installations by Dan Flavin or Ólafur Elíasson. Gradually an illuminated meditation landscape took shape. Emptiness instead of fullness, lack instead of excess, an area free of architecture and people. What remained was an interplay of shadows on stone walls, strips of asphalt and sand—plowed, raked sand—a contrasting, zen-like arrangement, the enlightened semantics of nothingness. The wall ensemble styled itself as a state-enforced zone of silence, as a path of enlightenment, a “sanctum” enclosed by two walls, the eternal white nothingness of nirvana. The architectural state of exception was the political state of exception—pure nothingness and pure power, the pure potentia of death. Berlin was cut through with an imploding wasteland of potential lethality, an intercity temple devoted to violence, like no memorial will ever be able to reproduce. At its center a violent, lethal nonplace; an alluring, pitiless obstacle course; a forbidden zone with nothing but the silence before the shot. The actual designers were no longer in control of the architectural result of their work. This experiment in construction had long ago taken on a life of its own. The final product had an aesthetic will of its own that transcended the horizon of its producers by several dimensions. The Wall enjoyed a career as a thing of its own making. Things, as cultural studies

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proved long ago, are objects that can act. They determine actors as much as they are determined by them. Things, or objects, have a specific agency that propels them onward of their own will. The series of generations of wall builders became relentless servants of an architectural experiment that led unrelentingly into the logic of pure emptiness, pure death. 5. The Aesthetics of the Ruinous/Non-Ruinous In 1976, inspections of the sections of Wall in Berlin-Mitte (Bernauer Straße, Friedhof Liesenstraße) and Treptow brought some alarming things to light. The repeated verdict: “repairs required,” “repairs required,” “repairs required.”27 But the regiment commander and the leader of the border patrol for “Mitte” district apparently postponed repairs, because three years later, the head of the Grenztruppen expressed his displeasure at the state of the border, especially on Bernauer Straße: “it is a terrible sight and damages the reputation of the GDR. There are anti-GDR slogans and commemorative crosses on several sections. Parts are in danger of collapse. Various materials are stored in the 3 to 5 m strip between the ruins of buildings. Trees and brush jut out over border security structures in some places.”28 To be sure, never before had the Wall looked as fantastical and picturesque as at certain places along Bernauer Straße. The exterior wall here was comprised of cemetery walls and facades of old apartment buildings with upper stories carefully lopped off and doors and windows bricked over. They were connected seamlessly to concrete blocks crowned with barbed wire, which blocked the emptiness of blinded street junctions. An unreal structure, a grotesque crenation, an artificially created ruin serving as a barrier. In the beginning, the Wall had the character of a jerry-rigged, unstable set of improvised spolia that made a mockery of all official technical norms and standards and even collapsed occasionally due to the lack of foundation. Here the original wall was preserved. Here the sector border began at the facades of the buildings and not, as elsewhere, in the middle of the street. For this reason, they were suitable for the exterior wall. In September 1961, the residents of the buildings belonging to these facades had already been evacuated, and later the buildings themselves were completely removed up to the top of the ground-floor wall. A ruinous band of wall remained in the landscape, an architectural mélange: Kaiser-Wilhelm-tenement-architecture à la Honecker. After the danger of collapse for this mad assemblage of ruins had been diagnosed—identified as the building cellars, which had been hastily filled in—the usual bizarre exchange between different authorities could now begin. The result: removal of the building remnants and construction of the Grenzmauer 75 along this strip as well, during 1980. The task was made even harder by

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the fact that the workers could not touch West German soil, which began just on the other side of the Wall, and if at all possible, they were not to let so much as a single brick infiltrate the other side. Also, no demolition work was to be done on weekends or on Western holidays.29 Bernauer Straße, too, advanced to the status of an architectural highlight. One more symbolic victory, which seemed sorely needed. Despite the growth of the Grenzmauer 75, there were still very run-down sections of Wall, mainly at remote locations, at the north and south ends of the intercity border, as well as on the border between the GDR and West Berlin. Aesthetic solutions became increasingly difficult for financial reasons alone. So there was continuous improvisation: makeshift construction at a socialist crawl. This melancholy, this present-day decay of the Wall was captured in photos by Manfred Hamm, Wolfgang Petro, and Matthias Hoffmann. Most important, we have Henry Ries’s photographs showing the construction, restoration, and constant deterioration of the Wall over the decades to thank for the fact that this ruin aesthetics, which temporally extended the ruinous postwar city, will not be forgotten. 6. The Aesthetics of Absence From the perspective of the West, the wall ensemble was present when looking down or from a bird’s eye view. From the East, it was practically absent. The reverse side kept itself out of sight, concealed itself within the city organism, hiding itself in the carefully protected forbidden zones. The only window to the Wall from the East was the Brandenburg Gate with its well-groomed lawns and flowerbeds. The rest, that is, the Wall as such, was buried in the restricted zone: no entry, no looking, thou shalt make no graven images. The introduction of restricted zones began nominally with a decision of the Nationaler Verteidigungsrat on November 29, 1961, which instituted “control strips” (usually 10 m) and “security strips” (usually 100 m). Around the external border of the district of Potsdam, a security zone of 500 m was called for. The entrances to the security zone were restricted; registration of visitors and special permits were required. In mid-1963, this practice was officially sanctioned through the Grenzordnung (legal regulations governing the border). Three pragmatic vectors overlapped in this restricted zone. First, there was the intent to intercept potential “opponents,” that is, escapees, before they made it to the actual death strip in order to minimize the burdensome material and technical expansion of the border zone. Second, the continuous escape attempts and the arrest of escapees were to remain hidden from Western eyes to the furthest extent possible. Third, escape tunnels (so-called agent tunnels) were henceforth to be combated by widened restricted zones. In this manner, the real

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border was anticipated by a preborder: first, one of barbed wire and guard houses; later, one of flowerpots and forbidding signage. Year by year the reach of this restricted area was trimmed back. But this interdiction zone, which seemed aesthetically monumental to the West, in the East became the embodiment of a secret, which was strengthened by being kept. Even the name “Mauer” was taboo. One spoke in archaic, traditional terms of the “antifascist bulwark.” An electrified empty space came into being, a hidden phantasm, a fetish triggering a numinous shudder, hung with a ban on graven images. The Wall was an invisible magnet that energetically attracted and repulsed. Its aesthetic absence, not its monumental character, became a source of fascination: a rift in the city, hulled in prohibition, a city-state hymen guarded hysterically from within in an inversion of the patriarchal order, that is, to prevent penetration from the inside. Kitsch on the Wall The most innovative art action ever concerning the Berlin Wall was by Joseph Beuys. In the program of a July 20, 1964, performance in Düsseldorf, he suggested that the Wall be raised by 5 cm to correct the proportions. Of course, this action never took place. What did take place was kitsch (often state-subsidized kitsch) for the purpose of producing valuable moral and political simple-mindedness. This art on the Wall is, in contrast to the primary aesthetics of the pure architectural ensemble, a secondary aesthetics of the Wall. The art (on the Western side naturally) was, up until the beginning of the 1980s, of necessity always art around the Wall, never art on the Wall. Until this time, the bigwigs in the East systematically defended their sovereign realm against the slightest touch. One instance of art around the Wall was, for example, a happening by Allan Kaprow. On Köthener Straße in 1970, he erected a “Sweet Wall” using 400 concrete blocks but with white bread and marmalade instead of mortar. The grand finale was the obligatorily original demolition of the wall by human hands—walls could be destroyed! 30 After a series of independent artists had meanwhile discovered the Wall itself as an art object in very different ways, the West Berlin Senate straggled behind with its international contest for “the cautious urbanization of the Berlin Wall” during Berlin’s 750-year anniversary in 1987. But political correctness meant that the Wall itself was off limits. So once again, there was art around the Wall writ large. Nevertheless, there were some innovative ideas. One suggestion was for a “transit wall,” that is, a traveling mini wall that would stand on the Lorelei, travel down the Rhein, and be carried by elephants over the Alps. There were also the usual conventional suggestions for turf walls, ice walls, or frozen sand walls.31

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In the meantime, a new trend in this secondary aesthetics had established itself: art on the Wall. The first condition for this trend was the well-anchored Grenzmauer 75 with its coat of white primer (the first test sections came to Berlin-Mitte in 1976). The second condition was that the GDR border authorities tolerate these art actions. The early 1980s represented a caesura in this respect. In connection with the previously described efforts at making the border system more “humane” and attractive, painting on the west side was increasingly tolerated. Bright paintings were more acceptable than antisocialist slogans. Sprayed but also painted phrases had conquered the Wall by the beginning of the 1980s. In July and August of 1983, cabaret artist Wolfgang Neuss documented the cosmos of these Wall phrases from Schlesisches Tor to Bernauer Straße in a reading that is available as a CD today: “Nobel Peace Prize for Honecker,” “Adolf Honecker is back!” “GDR=Concentration Camp.” The Wall had deteriorated into an anticommunist bulletin board and could not be repainted fast enough to withstand this onslaught. It was therefore convenient that paintings covered these slogans, and in 1984, painters and graffiti artists began the work of the secondary aestheticization. The largest canvas in the world was used for temporary works of art, which were painted over again and again, sometimes by those that created them, sometimes by others. This represented a sort of nonstationary art. That changed after the fall of the Wall. Because the Wall had disappeared almost completely, art around the Wall once again became popular. This took place at Wall locations that no longer existed materially, at a Wall that had long ago been destroyed. This can be described as a tertiary aestheticization. Now, art served the purpose of making a location visible that no longer physically existed. This includes politically well-meaning actions like the construction of a wall of styrofoam and wood on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz to protest restrictions on asylum seekers (Institute for Nomadic Studies/Berlin History Workshop) or event planner Christoph Blaesius’s conceptless concept of building a 46 km artificial wall through Berlin on the occasion of the forty-fifth anniversary of the Wall’s construction in 2006. The high point of this impoverished festivalitis was the installation of a luminous, candy-colored transparent wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate in 2007, which was supposed to refer to the division of the Korean states (“Vanished Berlin Wall” by Eun Sook Lee). For now, the last sequel to this event-kitsch was the Wall Festival on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall, as projected by Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit in June 2008. This time the fall was staged with oversized dominoes (130 x 80 x 30 cm), designed to tumble after a sovereign gesture by the mayor on the evening of November 9, 2009. Naturally, the obligatory concerts and fireworks followed—a Wall Festival with a Fan-Meile (fans’ zone).

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The Wall was quickly purged from Berlin’s cityscape but persists in the mind as a kitschy obsession. The tangible expression of this kitsch is the so-called East Side Gallery, which opened on Mühlenstraße in Friedrichshain in the spring of 1990, along the old interior wall, that is, on the city’s newly opened eastside. If the Wall in the East had previously been for the most part invisible, functional, and bare, a 1300 m length was now busily conquered with art, confronting the horror vacui and fear of the construction’s naked practicality. This bleak interior wall, which documented the bleakness of its designers almost perfectly, was turned into an imaginatively overvalued schoolyard wall. The gift of friendship to the defenseless GDR was imposed on the city in a coup de main. It was a cultural investment that cost nothing— after reunification, these sections of the Wall were designated as a historical monument. What is this lovable kitsch comprised of? First, an advertising and comic-book aesthetics in a representational idiom; second, figures from fantasy and esotericism; third, well-meaning anti-barbed-wire-art. The free space on the section of wall still standing on Mühlenstraße in eastern Berlin proved ideal for these purposes. It was close enough to the center but still far enough away to be spared the hammering of the Mauerspechte (“Wall woodpeckers” who retrieved souvenir

Figure 2.1

Berlin, East Side Gallery (2010), © Olaf Briese.

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Figure 2.2 Berlin, East Side Gallery (2010), © Olaf Briese.

chunks of the Wall with hammer and chisel). Admittedly, this open-air art had a valuable side effect: immediate protection and monument status for a section of the Berlin Wall, which had disappeared almost at the speed of light from other parts of the city. Note well: at the East Side Gallery, the Wall itself was placed under monument protection, not its “artified”

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surface. Nonetheless, in the meantime, there has been a serious change in public opinion, and for years, a seemingly trite battle has raged over preservation of the paintings themselves, a battle for a state-sanctioned comprehensive collision policy for art. First came the momentous demolition, then several waves of monument protection. The current unsettling and alarming result: in 2005, the State of Brandenburg listed a total of five extant sections or Wall elements. In Berlin, 17 single entities have been registered.32 They are the object of a new wave of aestheticization that works through monument designation and didacticization. According to plans for the redesign of Berlin’s inner city under the rubric of “critical reconstruction,” even parts of the Wall have undergone such a treatment. The goal was and is not preservation (which is impossible anyway because the original is gone) but rather contemporary reconstruction. One result among many is the installation by the architect Sven Kohlhoff along the former strip of Wall on Bernauer Straße, dedicated in 1998. This critical reconstruction, impressive as it is, cannot replace the original Wall ensemble in any way. According to the “total concept” put forward by the Berlin Senate in June 2006, this installation is to become the center of a large-scale monument landscape: “a racetrack of memory” (Hoffmann-Axthelm). Considering the situation,

Figure 2.3 Berlin Wall Memorial, Bernauer Strasse (2010), © Olaf Briese.

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Figure 2.4

Berlin Wall Memorial, Bernauer Strasse (2010), © Olaf Briese.

this street would be the ideal nucleus of a commemorative concept, if only something were left of the original border ensemble. Yet almost nothing remains except a few sections of Wall. The unimaginable has happened. Here, just as in other places, the slate has been wiped clean. One of the most important modern wonders of the world, the twentieth-century architectural wonder, has simply disappeared from the radar. This was the structure that, like no other, symbolized politically, militarily, and architecturally the temporary division of the city and German state, not to mention the division of the world into two power-hungry blocks, the structure that with a single false political or technical move could have transformed the globe into a postatomic desert. Here was a monument and a monstrosity, a part of the world cultural heritage: demolished, dumped, and pulverized. The audacious strip of concrete had been chiseled to pieces—a total loss for the city. Now, with the nolonger-present Wall crying out from the beyond, an operetta wall is being carefully constructed. The winning design of a contest announced by the Berlin Senate on July 30, 2007, was honored on December 12, 2007. Its general plan is a steel curtain punctured with multiple holes and flanked by other artful elements. “Art against concrete. Art was victorious.”33 This maxim, dubiously elevated to the central focus of Wall commemoration by

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former Berlin Mayor Walter Momper in 1990, is being celebrated in retrospect with increasing effort. How far apart are monument preservation and didactic monumental camouflage? Is an operetta landscape being created in which the power of pedagogical memoria replaces the original that spoke for itself? Will a monument park be created, a strolling path, a Wall Park for fun city nights, a contemporary, spruced-up double? Will this aestheticization, without the utterly bleak original, continue up through the beer-soaked, bratwurst-filled Wall festivals of the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries? Notes Translated by John Davis with Marc Silberman 1. Astrid Nunn, ed., Mauern als Grenzen (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, 2009). 2. “Berliner Garnison-Chronik, zugleich Stadt Berlin’sche Chronik für die Jahre 1727–1739, mitgetheilt von Dr. Ernst Friedlaender,” in Schriften des Vereins für die Geschichte Berlin 9 (1873), 13, 29, 36, 42, 47. 3. Helmut Zschokke, Die Berliner Akzisemauer. Die vorletzte Mauer der Stadt (Berlin: Berlin Story, 2007). 4. Helga Schultz, Berlin 1650–1800. Sozialgeschichte einer Residenz (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1987), 98. 5. “Auferstanden aus Ruinen” (risen from the ruins) was the title of the GDR’s national hymn, words by poet Johannes R. Becher and music by Hanns Eisler; see http://ingeb.org/Lieder/aufersta.html (accessed July 29, 2010). 6. Stadtkommandant der Hauptstadt der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, “Programm des perspektivischen pioniertechnischen Ausbaus der Staatsgrenze im Bereich der Grenztruppen der Nationalen Volksarmee, Berlin bis 1970” (undated, probably late 1964), Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg (hereafter: BArch-MA), VA 07/3212, Bl. 47–93, here Bl. 48; see also Olaf Briese, “Pfusch am Bau. Beiträge zur Baugeschichte der Berliner Mauer,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 57 (2009): 613–36. 7. On this improvised Wall, see Leo Schmidt, “Architektur und Botschaft der ‘Mauer’ 1961–1989,” in Die Berliner Mauer. Vom Sperrwall zum Denkmal, ed. Anke Kuhrmann (Bonn: Deutsches Nationalkomitee für Denkmalschutz, 1999), 60ff. 8. Volker Koop, “Den Gegner vernichten”: Die Grenzsicherung der DDR (Bonn: Bouvier, 1996), 11ff. 9. From a study by the Military Technology Institute of the National People’s Army, January 10, 1989, cited in Wolfgang Rathje, “ ‘Mauer-Marketing’ unter Erich Honecker. Schwierigkeiten der DDR bei der technischen Modernisierung, der volkswirtschaftlichen Kalkulation und der politischen Akzeptanz der Berliner ‘Staatsgrenze’ von 1971–1990” (Ph.D. diss., Universität Kiel 2001), 818. 10. Rem Koolhaas, “Field Trip,” in Koolhaas and Bruce Man, S, M, L, XL (Rotterdam: Monacelli Press, 1995), 222.

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the different aesthetics of the berlin wall / 57 11. “Protokoll der 15. Sitzung des Nationalen Verteidigungsrates am 13. Juni 1963,” BArch-MA, DVW 1/39472. 12. Stadtkommandantur Berlin. Chef des Stabes, “Vorlage Nr. 5/63 für die Leitung der Stadtkommandantur: Auswertung der Ergebnisse der Grenzsicherung im 1. Halbjahr 1963 im Bereich der Stadtkommandantur Berlin vom 24.07.1963,” BArch-MA, VA 07/5457, Bl. 82–104, here Bl. 94, 100. 13. Stadtkommandant der Hauptstadt der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, “Beschluß über den perspektivischen Ausbau eines Grenzsicherungsstreifens entlang der Staatsgrenze im Bereich der Grenztruppen der Nationalen Volksarmee, Berlin, in der Zeit von 1966–1970 von Februar 1965,” Mauerarchiv Hagen Koch, 26 Blatt, here Bl. 3. 14. ZK der SED. Abteilung für Sicherheitsfragen “Zusammenfassung von bewaffneten Provokationen und Sprengstoffanschlägen durch westberliner Ultras im Bereich der 1. Grenzbrigade (B),” (ca. June 1962), Bundesarchiv BerlinLichterfelde (SAPMO), DY 30/ IV 2/ 12/ 75/ Fiche Nr. 2, Bl. 158–82, here Bl. 172. 15. “Protokolle von Grenzbegehungen im Bereich der 1. Grenzbrigade, Juli 1964,” BArch-MA, VA 07/5820, Bl. 24, 43. 16. “Beschluß über den perspektivischen Ausbau eines Grenzsicherungsstreifens,” Mauerarchiv Hagen Koch, Bl. 2, 3. 17. Leiter Pionierwesen an Kommandeur des Grenzkommandos Mitte [n.d., probably late April 1974], BArch-MA, GTÜ 13244, Bl. 9–13, here Bl. 11. 18. Thomas Flemming and Hagen Koch, Die Berliner Mauer. Geschichte eines politischen Bauwerks (Berlin: be.bra verlag, 2001), 83. 19. “Vorschlag zur Erhöhung der Wirksamkeit der Grenzsicherungsanlagen an der Staatsgrenze der DDR zur BRD und zu BERLIN (WEST),” in “Protokoll der 67. Sitzung des Nationalen Verteidigungsrates der DDR am 01. Juli 1983,” BArch-MA, DVW 1/39528, Bl. 338–49, here Bl. 340. 20. Rathje, “Mauer-Marketing,” 157, 163, 164, 165, 167, 174, 177. 21. “Vorschlag zur Erhöhung der Wirksamkeit der Grenzsicherungsanlagen an der Staatsgrenze der DDR zur BRD und zu BERLIN (WEST),” in “Protokoll der 67. Sitzung des Nationalen Verteidigungsrates der DDR am 01. Juli 1983,” BArch-MA, DVW 1/39528, Bl. 338–49, here Bl. 340. The corresponding recommendation by the Minister of National Defense and by the GDR Border Patrol can be found in BArch-MA, GTÜ 17790. 22. Grenzkommando Mitte. Der Kommandeur, “Entschluß zur Neugestaltung des Bereiches BRANDENBURGER TOR vom 25.07.1984,” BArch-MA, GTÜ 13957, Bl. 21–30, here Bl. 22; see also similar recommendations in “Entschluß zur Weiterführung der Maßnahmen zur Gestaltung des Grenzabschnittes BRANDENBURGER TOR bis POTSDAMER PLATZ vom 25.09.1983,” ibid., Bl. 57–61. 23. Rathje, “Mauer-Marketing,” 174–75. 24. Chef der Grenztruppen der DDR, “Entscheidungsvorlage über Maßnahmen zur Erhöhung der Wirksamkeit von Grenzsicherungsanlagen an der Staatsgrenze zur BRD und zu BERLIN (WEST) in den Jahren 1983–1990 vom 06.01.1983,” BArch-MA, GTÜ 17790, Bl. 117–40, here Bl. 131, 133. 25. Chef der Grenztruppen der DDR, “Vorschlag über Maßnahmen zur Erhöhung der Wirksamkeit von Grenzsicherungsanlagen an der Staatsgrenze der DDR

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26.

27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

zur BRD und zu BERLIN (WEST) vom 24.03.1983,” BArch-MA, GTÜ 17790, Bl. 158–82, here Bl. 168, 177. Minister für Nationale Verteidigung, “Beschlußvorlage für den Nationalen Verteidigungsrat der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik: Erhöhung der Wirksamkeit von Grenzsicherungsanlagen an der Staatsgrenze zur BRD und zu BERLIN (WEST) vom 13.04.1983,” BArch-MA, GTÜ 17790, Bl. 141–57, here Bl. 153–54. “Grundsätze für den Ausbau der Staatsgrenze der DDR zu Westberlin mit Grenzmauer neuen Typs vom 02.11.76,” BArch-MA, GTÜ 8988, Bl. 17–22, here Bl. 20–21. Chef der Grenztruppen der DDR, “Vorschlag zur Durchführung von Abrißmaßnahmen und zur Fortsetzung des Neubaus der Grenzmauer an der Staatsgrenze der DDR zu WESTBERLIN vom 10.12.1979,” BArch-MA, GTÜ 11991, Bl. 1–3, here Bl. 1. Grenzkommando Mitte. Der Kommandeur, “Entschluß zum Abriß der Mauerruinen und zum Bau der Grenzmauer–75 vom 27.02.1980,” BArchMA, GTÜ 11417, Bl. 62–66, here Bl. 62–63. Ralf Gründer, Berliner Mauerkunst. Eine Dokumentation (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007), 84–85. Ulrich Baehr, Freya Mülhaupt, and Eberhard Knödler-Bunte, Mythos Berlin Concepte. Katalog zur Werkausstellung “Mythos Berlin” 1987 (Berlin: Mythos Berlin Ausstellung GmbH, 1986); Eberhard Knödler-Bunte and Knut Hickethier, Mythos Berlin. Zur Wahrnehmungsgeschichte einer industriellen Metropole. Eine szenische Ausstellung auf dem Gelände des Anhalter Bahnhofs (Berlin: Ästhetik und Kommunikation, 1987), 285ff. Johannes Cramer, “Der Gartenzaun um Berlin. Was blieb von der Mauer?” in Der unbestechliche Blick. Festschrift zu Ehren von Wolfgang Wolters, ed. Martin Gaier, Bernd Nicolai, and Tristan Weddingen (Trier: Porta-Alba-Verlag, 2005), 236; Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper, “Denkmalschutz für die Mauer,” Die Denkmalpflege 58, no. 1 (2000): 33–40; Gerhard Sälter, Mauerreste in Berlin. Der Abbau der Berliner Mauer und noch sichtbare Reste in der Berliner Innenstadt, 2nd rev. ed. (Berlin: Verein Berliner Mauer, 2007), 18ff.; Gerhard Sälter, “Das Verschwinden der Berliner Mauer,” in Revolution und Vereinigung 1989/90. Als in Deutschland die Realität die Phantasie einholte, ed. KlausDietmar Henke (Munich: dtv, 2009), 353–62. Walter Momper, “Introduction” to Kuzdas, Berliner Mauer Kunst (1990), cited in Nikolaus Wegmann, “Die Mauer 1961–1989,” Weimarer Beiträge 47 (2001): 117.

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Ch a p t e r Th r e e Pol i t ic s, Cu lt u r e, a n d M e di a be for e a n d a f t e r t h e Be r l i n Wa ll Henning Wrage

This chapter treats the political and cultural rationales that rose and fell with the Berlin Wall as well as the iconography that developed around the establishment and dissolution of the inner German border. While the standard narrative of the Wall references the brutal imprisonment of a whole country and the unexpected liberation in November 1989, there are some irritating contradictions in the story that need to be foregrounded and help to explain the transformation of the political rationale into cultural narratives in general and into metaphorical transpositions specifically. An examination of several films about the Wall produced in 1961 reveals— whether from the East or the West—how they share the conviction that the two German societies are incommensurable. Indeed, this proves to be symptomatic for almost all audiovisual productions depicting the Berlin Wall until 1989. Post-1989 depictions of the Wall, in contrast, only serve to emphasize the strong political orientation of the earlier films, for they no longer engage geopolitical issues but rather become self-reflexive, offering second-order representations of a superseded iconographic and semantic tradition. Political Rationales: Why the Berlin Wall? When Berlin was divided after the war, according to the agreements made at the Yalta Conference in 1945, a series of events soon led to increased tensions among the former allies. Owing to profound disagreement about the first elections in Berlin and to the unexpected introduction of a new currency in the Western zones and West Berlin, the Soviet Union restricted rail traffic to and from West Berlin in the spring of 1948. Three months later, all road traffic was halted, which made the blockade of Berlin complete.

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The Western allies reacted with the Berlin Airlift until the USSR ended the blockade in 1949. A second phase of escalated tensions between the USSR and the Western allies began when in 1958, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet head of state, demanded the withdrawal of all occupation forces from Berlin. In the meantime, the Soviet Union had given to East Germany control of all access routes to West Berlin through the GDR, recognizing the sovereignty it exercised over its own borders. These are just some of the events that demonstrate why in 1961 Berlin was not just a city but rather the focal point in a fierce struggle of social systems called the Cold War. Berlin was a zone of ambivalence and permanent instability, and seen from the perspective of global politics, a solution for the “Berlin problem” was at the top of the agenda. The SED had another severe problem: the porous boundary between the sectors of occupied Berlin provided literally a hole, an escape hatch through which East Germans looking for political freedom or a higher standard of living could leave for the West. Between 1945 and 1961, about 2.5 million East Germans fled this way, reducing the GDR population by around 15 percent. Most of the emigrants were young and well educated, which affected the postwar East German economy most severely. As Frederick Taylor points out: “The country was losing the cream of its educated professionals and skilled workers at a rate that risked making the Communist state totally unviable.”1 Hence, already on September 15, 1954, a regulation in the passport law came into effect that forbade East Germans from leaving the GDR without permission; violations were prosecuted with prison sentences of up to three years. Still, the border between the sectors in Berlin remained open, becoming the most important escape route for those who desired to leave the country.2 In 1961, the controversy between the superpowers became increasingly heated. On July 25, 1961, John F. Kennedy gave a speech stressing the need for NATO countries to protect West Berlin, stating that a Soviet attack on Berlin would be equivalent to an attack on NATO: “Those who threaten to unleash the forces of war on a dispute over West Berlin should recall the words of the ancient philosopher: ‘A man who causes fear cannot be free from fear.’ ”3 On August 4, 1961, Khrushchev reacted in a speech to leaders of the NATO counterpart, the Warsaw Treaty Organization, and implicitly threatened to unleash a nuclear war: You convinced yourself that Khrushchev will never go to war . . . so you scare us, [expecting] us to retreat. True, we will not declare war, but we will not withdraw either. We will respond to your war in kind . . . [L]et Kennedy know . . . that if he starts a war then he would probably become the last president of the United States of America.4

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Under these circumstances, the political rationale of locking down Berlin’s border seemed almost inevitable, even from the perspective of American foreign policy. Indeed, the building of the Berlin Wall did not compromise what was referred to as the “three essentials”: the continued presence of the Western allies in Berlin, free access routes in and out of Berlin, and the right of self-determination for the citizens of West Berlin.5 Kennedy himself made no secret within the circle of his close advisors that he was relieved about the developments—to quote him according to Michael Beschloss: “Krushchev would not have a wall built if he really wanted to take West Berlin. If he were to occupy the whole city, he wouldn’t need a wall. This is his way out of his predicament. It’s not a particularly pleasant solution, but a wall is a sight better than a war.”6 In this rationale, the Wall was not a worst case scenario but rather the solution to a permanent situation of instability. Hence, it is not surprising but yet quite intriguing to observe that even if the situation was obvious to all players in the game, the political discourse in both systems in 1961 constantly sought not to make the Wall a subject of discussion. Several obvious examples illustrate the conundrum. On June 15, 1961, Annamarie Doherr from the West German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau asked at a press conference if the creation of a “free East Berlin” would imply the creation of a border at the Brandenburg Gate. East German Head of State Walter Ulbricht responded with the following statement, probably being the first to coin the border as a “Wall”: Doherr (Frankfurter Rundschau): I would like to ask a follow-up question, Mr. Chairman! Does the creating of a Free City in your opinion mean that a state border will be installed at the Brandenburg Gate? And are you determined to see this through with all the consequences? Walter Ulbricht: I understand your question to mean that there are people in West Germany who wish that we mobilize the construction workers of East Germany’s capital city to build a wall? I am not aware of the intention to do this. The construction workers in our capital city are busy building apartments, and their labor power is used entirely for that. No one intends to build a wall . . . In a certain sense there are clearly questions of state borders between West Berlin and the German Democratic Republic, if West Berlin becomes neutral. But there remains a difference between regulations for the state border with West Germany and those affecting Berlin.7

This has been considered a blatant lie ever since. In 2009, however, historian Matthias Uhl discovered minutes of proceedings between Walther Ulbricht and Nikita Khrushchev from August 1, 1961, that imply the final order to brick up the Wall had been given by Khrushchev and not before that day, in other words, after the infamous press conference cited above.8

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On the other hand, East German plans of action for closing the Berlin border must have existed already in 1958 (or before).9 Thus, the question is not if Ulbricht lied but how to qualify this lie. And it still holds true that he concealed the massive population emigration as the most severe problem of East German politics before the Wall was built, afterward cynically justifying it as a means to exclude Western aggressors rather than a last ditch attempt to fence in his own people. Kennedy, on the other hand, was not thoroughly honest either. He stated three weeks before the Wall was built that Berlin is “the great testing place of Western courage and will,” and that the United States would be willing to risk a war to defend the status quo.10 Cultural Transformations: East German Literature, Film, and Television after 1961 If, from a perspective of political logic, there were actually reasons for the Wall in 1961 shared by both sides, even while the reasons were shielded from public discourse, then the question arises as to how political logic was transformed into cultural logic. Did political reasoning supersede the ethical dimension of the events? In a nutshell, the answer is yes. While it may seem surprising, not a few among the cultural elite welcomed the Wall in 1961. Recognized GDR authors such as Franz Fühmann, Stephan Hermlin, and Erwin Strittmatter publicly applauded the closing of the border on August 13, 1961.11 The “Kampfgruppe” of the DEFA film studios (a paramilitary organization formed by employees in all state-owned companies) helped guard the border between West Berlin and Potsdam, a suburb on the southwestern side of the city in East Germany.12 Moreover, ostentatiously supportive films of the Wall such as Der Kinnhaken (Punch to the Chin, Heinz Thiel, 1962), Und deine Liebe auch (And Your Love Too, Frank Vogel, 1962), or Sonntagsfahrer (Sunday Drivers, Gerhard Klein, 1963), featuring popular stars like Manfred Krug, Angelika Domröse, and Armin Mueller-Stahl, were released in the aftermath of August 13, 1961. Why did prominent artists in East Germany regard the building of the Wall—that meant nothing less than the systematic imprisonment of their entire country—as the beginning of a period of cultural freedom? What conceivable reason can there be that East German artists did not oppose the cynical distortion of facts implied in the official assertion that the Wall did not constrain the people in the GDR but rather kept out Western spies and saboteurs? A major factor was the prevalent isolationist hope among intellectuals and artists that the Wall would make it possible to build a new society and a new culture without the permanent threat of external interference and

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internal oppression in the face of the open border to the West. This hope became a formative element in the master narrative of the “Ankunft im Alltag” (arrival in everyday life) that dominated cultural production in the early 1960s.13 Only a minority might have believed communist party ideologue Horst Sindermann’s claim that the Wall “immured three imperialistic armies in West Berlin,”14 implying therefore exclusion instead of inclusion. Yet to many in the cultural sphere, it seemed as if one of the most important arguments for censorship was now rendered obsolete. No longer could restraints on literature, theater, and films that pointed to real problems in East German society be justified with the argument that the class enemy in the West would exploit them ideologically. The first years after the Wall was built seemed in fact to confirm this hope: a distinct change of atmosphere was noted in the field of literature and performance, in the DEFA studios, and even in the public television studios. The SED never ceased its claim to control the arts, but it made a number of remarkable concessions that heralded a partial and welcome liberation of East German culture for several years.15 Considering the effect of the Berlin Wall on East German culture, it is useful to differentiate between literature and film on the one hand and television on the other. In contrast to the 1950s, literature and films now became self-referential in their tendency to problematize conflicts between an individual protagonist’s pursuit of happiness and the utopian claims of East German society. Although novels and films of the early 1960s were still committed to a mode of socialist-realist storytelling that suspends current deficits in view of tomorrow’s promises, they articulated in a profoundly new way an awareness that social(ist) progress demanded a price in the relinquishing of individual demands. One of the most widespread metaphors at this time for the promises of the new society was the spaceflight of Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin, whose groundbreaking technological feat took place almost exactly four months before the Wall was built. This event, prominently cited for instance in the novella Der geteilte Himmel (1963), for which its author Christa Wolf was awarded the “Nationalpreis” (the National Prize of the GDR) in 1964, became a cultural trope that transformed the vertical opposition of up and down, heaven and hell, into a semantic and chronological one of the negative past and the positive future.16 A man leaving earth, ascending toward heaven, and returning alive was not just the catalyst for a propaganda offensive but became a core metaphor for the redemptive vision of a new socialist society. Surmounting the limits of gravity here compensates for the insurmountable borders between the two Germanys, becoming from today’s perspective an admittedly irritating symbolic exchange that can be found as well in novels such as Karl-Heinz Jakobs’s Beschreibung eines Sommers

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(1961), Erwin Strittmatter’s Ole Bienkopp (1963), and Frank Vogel’s film Und deine Liebe auch (1962). In all in these narratives, however, the closure of the border functions less as an explicit object of depiction than as the starting point for stories about the emergence of the new society. Television, in contrast, was the primary medium in which competition between the East and the West intensified after 1961. Despite its novelty (television technology was implemented for public use in Germany only in the early 1950s), TV was the Cold War medium, owing to the fact that about 80 percent of the East German audience could receive both the Eastern and Western public broadcasting programs.17 Early on, the party leadership considered a number of rather extreme solutions for this problem. In October 1961, Albert Norden, secretary for agitation in the SED Central Committee, initiated a test to see whether the “West program” could be jammed, and there were detailed plans worked out on how to build a kind of “electronic wall” consisting of a chain of low-range jamming-senders.18 Although this idea was never implemented, another project called “Ochsenkopf” (oxen’s head) was put into action. Members of the communist youth organization Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth, FDJ) were sent out to redirect the antennas on residential and apartment house roofs so as to limit West German television reception. Among the many problems the “Ochsenkopf” initiative encountered was the fact that broadcasting stations (especially in the large reception area of West and East Berlin) were situated so close to one another that turning the antennas not only made it impossible to receive the Western stations but jammed as well the reception of the GDR’s own public broadcaster, Deutscher Fernsehfunk. In the end, East German citizens continued to watch West German television despite political admonitions, and in so doing, they established it as a program rival to GDR television. Forced to compete with its Western rival in its own programming choices, the East German television station followed various strategies. One was blatant propaganda. The most perfidious example is probably a show targeted to third- to sixth-grade pupils called Die Grenze (The Border, 1966), written and performed by Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. The production explicitly addressed the inner German border, justifying it with an argument that Antonia Grunenberg has described as East Germany’s “antifascist foundational myth.”19 This phrase refers to a construction of the self and enemy that generalizes communist resistance across the entire GDR, while positing the Federal Republic as an uninterrupted continuation of the Third Reich. Of central importance is the political, moral, and cultural transformation that turned the Third Reich from a space of guilt occupied by the perpetrators into a space of martyrdom occupied by the victims. In East Germany’s reconstruction literature and cinema, this

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synecdoche had the effect of making the antifascists (in reality a small minority) a norm for the large majority of those who were fellow travelers or perpetrators, encoded in the figure who typifies arrival and change. In Die Grenze, documentary images of dead East German border guards and of the confrontation between American and Soviet tanks at Berlin’s Checkpoint Charlie border crossing on October 27, 1961, illustrate the commentary about the need to protect East Germany’s borders from the Nazi organizations still present and tolerated in the West. Moreover, it explains the geographical and political division as a moral one, based on the strong opposition of the self and the (enemy) other, as conveyed in the following quote: Do we hate our fellow countrymen in the West? Not at all, they are Germans like us, brothers and sisters. What divides us are their masters who control West Germany and West Berlin . . . That is why we hate war and those who make war . . . Twice they grasped for world domination in two world wars . . . Now they are preparing for the third time . . . Our GDR is opposed to them. Here they stand at the border of the power. That is why they hate us. And we hate them. Is it bad to hate them? We love our parents, our teachers, our socialist homeland, we love peace, life . . . But can we love our parents, homeland, and peace without hating everything that threatens what we love? Can we love the Good without hating Evil? People say it is bad that we teach you to hate. Do we teach you to hate? We teach you to love. Hate is only one aspect of love. How can you love peace without hating war? How can you fight for peace if you don’t hate the enemies of peace from the depth of your heart? It is not enough to love peace. Peace is made by people, just like war is. Therefore, you must fight for peace. Against those who want war. They hate us. And if peace is to survive, we must hate them, hate them because we love peace and life.20

While this kind of propaganda was not unusual for East German television, it was typically deployed only in controlled reception environments such as schools. The reason was simple. Since West German television programs were available as an alternative for the vast majority of East German viewers, and since these viewers were in a position to exercise their option to switch channels when the program became too boring or didactic, the East German television producers had to find more subtle ways of ethically authorizing the Berlin Wall to their audiences. Gewissen in Aufruhr (Conscience in Commotion) was a remarkable production that prominently justified the Wall as the “antifaschistischer Schutzwall” (the antifascist bulwark, the GDR’s official name for the Berlin Wall). The five-part television miniseries was shot in 1960 and 1961 at breakneck speed by two production teams working in parallel under two directors (Günter Reisch and Hans-Joachim Kasprzik). Although

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it became one of the greatest hits of East German television in the early 1960s, and the official party newspaper Neues Deutschland praised it as a “delightful experience” and “artistically consummate,” its production story actually begins in the West.21 For the first German miniseries ever was produced by WDR, one of the West German public broadcasting companies: the adaptation of Josef Martin Bauer’s best-selling novel, So weit die Füße tragen (As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me, Fritz Umgelter, 1955). The film’s authentic look and feel, combined with the novelty of the television miniseries format, were spectacularly innovative at the time.22 GDR television producers were clearly taken aback by this innovation on the part of their West German competitors: “In Adlershof, we were totally shocked,” when the “West’s invention was released. This principle had not occurred to us,” claimed Hans-Erich Korbschmitt, who directed the hastily produced “counter program,” the four-part Flucht aus der Hölle (Escape from Hell, Hans-Erich Korbschmitt and Hans-Jürgen Brandt, 1960).23 Here a German member of the Foreign Legion succeeds in fleeing from Africa to East Germany with the help of the Algerian freedom movement. The production was an obvious copy both of the West German miniseries format and of its plot, albeit with different political coding for the story of the soldier returning home. One year later, Gewissen in Aufruhr followed as East German television’s more serious response. It not only demonstrates a competitive relation between television stations in the East and West that continued even after the Wall was built, but it also translates into distinct cultural tropes the political rationale mentioned above that seeks to justify the border’s closure before it happened. The story of Wehrmacht colonel Joachim Ebershagen shows him undergoing a change of heart that begins during the Battle of Stalingrad (Winter 1942–1943) and matures in Soviet captivity. Gewissen in Aufruhr is a film about and for the war generation, showing how Germans suffered during the war by framing their ordeal in a split that portrays the normal soldiers as victims and the Nazis and higherranking military officers as unscrupulous and corrupt. This opposition is then projected into the postwar period and used to delegitimize West Germany, again following the narrative pattern of the “antifascist foundational myth.” Arriving home to East Germany in 1949, Ebershagen enthusiastically directs his freshly awakened antifascist political commitment against rearmament. As part of this commitment, he accepts an invitation from his former general who lives now in Munich. The viewer experiences the West with all the visual attributes of urban decadence typical for its portrayal in GDR media: tempting shop windows, flashy advertisements, tabloid headlines, and so on. Now a complex tale of intrigue begins in which a CIA agent and a hidden tape recorder play the decisive roles. The

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agents try to convince Ebershagen to defect to West Germany. When this fails, he is prosecuted for aiding and abetting espionage and sentenced to six years in prison. While Ebershagen serves his seemingly endless prison sentence and is subjected to systematic physical and psychological abuse, contrasting parallel sequences show West Germany’s economic miracle of reconstruction and rearmament. It is a deceptive liberal new beginning, which includes the reinstatement of generals already clearly established as criminals in previous episodes into high-ranking positions in the newly established Bundeswehr, the West German army. Finally, Ebershagen is released from prison and returns home through the Brandenburg Gate. After Ebershagen walks through the Brandenburg gate—at the same time, crossing the inner German border—he and his wife embrace. At this moment, Herbert Keller’s 1952 song “Unsere Heimat” blends in extradiegetically on the sound track: “Our homeland, that’s not only the cities and villages / Our homeland is also all the trees in the forest . . . / And we love our homeland, it’s beautiful / And we protect it because it belongs to the people / because it belongs to our people.”24 The song emphasizes the fragility of a homeland that is constructed only differentially, through contrast with the enemy. The passage through the Brandenburg Gate shows the effortless crossing of a border between two diametrically opposed societies, but this very effortlessness is called into question by the

Figure 3.1 Gewissen in Aufruhr, shot in summer 1961, shows in the background the still open Brandenburg Gate, probably for the last time in television before 1989. DVD capture.

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plot as a whole, especially in the final two installments of the series. As it turned out, politics was faster than fiction. This scene contains probably the last images of an open Brandenburg Gate, shot in the summer of 1961 just before the construction of the Berlin Wall. Again we can observe the transformation of one trope into the other. Past and future, fascism and antifascism, and progress and reaction are figured in the topographical opposition of East and West, showing Germany divided into two fundamentally warring societies. Even though the sequence was shot before the Wall was built on August 13, 1961, the success of the miniseries was not constrained by the new reality. Encoding a Cold War construction of the self and the other, it showed a state of danger being overcome. Billy Wilder’s American comedy One, Two, Three, also shot in the summer of 1961, struggles with the closure of the border as well, but from quite a different perspective. While eschewing any political stance, it nonetheless implicitly confirms the conclusion of Gewissen in Aufruhr. Like the latter, One, Two, Three was overtaken by the political events, and despite good reviews, it did not succeed at the box office (taking in only about 5 million dollars). If in Gewissen in Aufruhr, the position of “Heimat” as a space of belonging is encoded even in the camera position (zooming in and out and panning from the East German side of the border), then the camera in the famous Brandenburg Gate episode in One, Two, Three processes

Figure 3.2 One, Two, Three (shot compilation): Piffl’s ride toward the Brandenburg Gate (2a, 2b) and the beginning of the chase after he has crossed the border (2c). DVD capture.

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a similar operation from the West (see figures 3.2a and 3.2b) before moving its position to the East (figure 3.2c). It should be added, however, that this shift into the East was possible only virtually. Wilder and his team had been working on the exterior shots in Berlin—or “Splitsville,” as he called it in an interview25 —since June 1961, and for the entire time Wilder was engaged in a private war with the East Berlin authorities over permission to shoot the sequence through the Brandenburg Gate. He was finally able to stage the sequence up to the border in July, but that was all. To complete the Brandenburg Gate scenes, he finally authorized his production manager, Walter Tauner, to build a full scale replica of the structure on the back lot of the Bavaria Studios in Munich at a cost of $200,000, so the image in figure 3.2c is not the real Brandenburg Gate but a mock-up. Unlike Gewissen in Aufruhr, Wilder’s One, Two, Three has a high cutting rate, accelerating through large spaces, offices, a hotel ballroom, and airport runways.26 The widescreen camera uses the spaces well. There are often two corresponding levels of action in the foreground and the background, and as in so many films of the period, the confrontation of societies is framed in the encounter of personalities through a love story. Everyone in the universe of One, Two, Three is overdrawn, whether German, Russian, or American; everyone is a caricature and everyone follows his or her own selfish agenda, be it Piffl with his dogmatic faith in communism or MacNamara’s assistant, Schlemmer, a satirical stand-in for the proverbial German penchant of blind obedience to authority. Nothing is spared. West Berlin is revealed to consist of an opulent and liberal veneer barely concealing a still notoriously compliant society of former Nazis. And while this is structurally equivalent to the portrayal of the West in Gewissen in Aufruhr, the other part of Germany is portrayed in an equally unfavorable light. In spite of the satirical character of the entire film, One, Two, Three implies the impossibility of a peaceful relationship between the postwar Germanys, if the precondition for the relationship between Scarlett and Piffl is his lightning-fast metamorphosis from a blue collar worker into the young, titled noble, Graf von Droste-Schaumburg. Both films translate the political rationale that I mentioned above into the logic of culture: they show the insuperable rupture between the societies. Many more examples could be mentioned, spanning four decades from early East German productions by Heinz Thiel (Der Kinnhaken, Punch to the Chin, 1962) and Gerhard Klein (Sonntagsfahrer, Sunday Drivers, 1963) to much later productions by Margarethe von Trotta (Das Versprechen, The Promise, 1995) and Roland Suso Richter (Der Tunnel, The Tunnel, 2001). Almost all of them illustrate the history of two globally competing social systems on the macrolevel through the struggle of individuals to create a meaningful relationship on the microlevel. A third familiar figure in movies

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dealing with the German-German border also works with the opposition of the individual and society but draws a different distinction. Here the border becomes a place that denounces the political rationale itself by showing how it provokes the individual’s suffering. Helmut Käutner’s Himmel ohne Sterne (Heaven without Stars, 1956) or Martin Ritt’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) are notable examples. Documentary images of the border guard Conrad Schumann jumping over the barbed wire into the West, of fenced in, desperate faces peering from behind the barriers, of refugees jumping out of windows of buildings abutting the Wall in Bernauer Straße—all these images became distinct iconographic and moral stereotypes in the West. In a similar way, the image of a lone East German border guard standing silently in the middle of the road before an approaching M48 tank during the escalation of October 1961 became a political and moral synecdoche for the East. As such, these images were used and reused since that time in media productions in both Germanys. Second-Order Representations: Images of the Wall after Its Demise The variety of productions responding to the fall of the Wall is so diverse that it is feasible here only to point out some of the last films produced at the state-owned DEFA studios before they were privatized in 1992 and to discuss two productions in detail that symptomatically contrast different Eastern and Western approaches.27 DEFA reacted rather quickly to the events of 1989, but the focus of its final productions was the “Wende” itself (literally “change,” referring generally to the political and social transformations in East Germany during 1989 and 1990) rather than the fall of the Berlin Wall. Between May 1990 and September 1991, it released three films dealing with specific phases of the GDR’s collapse: Peter Kahane’s Die Architekten (The Architects, 1990) is set in the late 1980s and alludes to the “Wende” events only toward the end of the film; Egon Günther’s Stein (1991) begins in early autumn of 1989 and ends with the fall of the Wall; and Jörg Foth’s Letztes aus der DaDaeR (Latest from the Da-Da-R, 1990) is set after the events of 1989, at a time when the collapse of socialism seemed certain and the future still undetermined. Each film employs a different narrative technique: Die Architekten constructs a linear narrative and maintains familiar aesthetic conventions of the DEFA studios; in Stein, flashbacks and imaginary episodes set in Italy repeatedly disrupt the chronology; Letztes aus der DaDaeR finally abandons narrative coherence completely, consisting of only loosely connected songs and cabaret numbers in the style of the eponymous Dada. These films present often disenchanted farewells to the GDR, but still insist on the hope of achieving a

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better society, even at the price of limiting personal freedom. To quote an interview with Jörg Foth: “We have become the victims of our own discipline, of our insight. We pushed and hoped for new beginnings, change, and progress, although the end was the only possibility.”28 Not surprisingly, these features avoid quoting directly the iconographies of the rise or the fall of the Wall. The shutting of the border had become obsolete, along with the rhetoric to legitimize it; and the images of the border opening probably were not regarded with unmitigated enthusiasm because for these artists, the end of the GDR was modulated by strong feelings of loss. After the fall of the Wall, images closely connected to the obsolete geopolitical opposition for which it stood posed a considerable aesthetic challenge for film directors. Hence, some of the post-“Wende” productions transformed them into second-order depictions, that is, into signs that communicate themselves as signs, showing not just the Wall but also their own materiality as signs, their conventional use, and their own cultural history. These later images of the Wall approximate the graffiti on the wall as signifiers that communicate—as Jean Baudrillard claims—first and foremost the preconditions of their own existence.29 The most obvious example for this phenomenon is Jürgen Böttcher’s lyrical documentation Die Mauer (The Wall). A visual meditation on the Berlin Wall’s physical presence and gradual eradication, the film evokes poetically its visual traces in the culture of historical images. Shot in 1990, Die Mauer has no extradiegetical commentary, only ambient sound and speech. It starts with long shots in a field of ruins filled with more or less destroyed and displaced segments of the Berlin Wall. With no obvious message, it documents the border’s transition from a seemingly indestructible and impenetrable structure into a recycled commodity, its metamorphosis from an object of fear into one of touristic and commercial interest. Böttcher’s film follows the “Mauerspechte” (wall woodpeckers who chop off small junks of the Wall as souvenirs or to sell) and visitors from Sweden and Japan; it shows the production of Wall depictions by a CNN reporter; and it even records the reaction of the people in the street to his own portrayal of the Wall. The self-reflective recursion climaxes when the director projects the whole frameset of depictions of the Wall on the Wall, suggesting a postpostmodern attempt to reintegrate the signifier and the signified. At the same time, he transforms the ubiquitous and resplendent Wall graffiti into a palimpsest, an underlying structure of self-signifying signifiers. Moreover, Böttcher reveals the dispositive of media reception and production, that is, the entire network of discourses, interactions, and institutions constituting the cinema apparatus. Thus, we see audiences watching the screen images of the Wall on the Wall, the projector throwing the images onto the Wall, and the camera recording the entire scene. This complex, multilayered

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Figure 3.3 Die Mauer: a film of the Berlin Wall being built in 1961 is screened on the Wall’s remnants in 1989, revealing the source of reproduction (the projector) and its reception (the audience). DVD capture.

setup is complemented with a score that echoes the construction-site equipment dismantling the Wall. Finally, the footage itself presented in this setup and spaced at various intervals in the film is interesting to note: a five-minute montage of well-known images of the building of the Wall, images of escape attempts, historical documentary sequences of torchlight processions through the Brandenburg Gate from the pre-World War I Wilhelmine era and the Third Reich. The result is a profoundly remarkable, multifaceted representation of the symbolic construction of the Cold War edifice at the very moment of its dismemberment. Leander Haußmann’s Herr Lehmann (2003), the cinematic adaptation of Sven Regener’s novel of the same title, brings together a director with an East German socialization and a screenplay humorously expressing typical reactions to the opening of the Berlin Wall in the microcosm of West Berlin’s bohemia, where its status was that of an unquestioned precondition of everyday life rather than a problem to be overcome. Since the protagonist’s thirtieth birthday happens to coincide with the announcement that travel restrictions for GDR citizens would cease, the film subtly quotes the interrelation of personal and social ruptures constituted by the earlier films discussed here: Lehmann decides to embark on a new phase of life exactly at the moment when the Wall opens. Yet the images of the opening of the Wall are again second-order depictions. Images of the peaceful revolution

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Figure 3.4 Herr Lehmann constructs the second-order televisual representation of the fall of the Wall and of a West Berlin audience. DVD capture.

are framed on a TV screen, hence reminding us of the materiality of communication. Thus, Herr Lehmann is not only pointing out the formative power of the media but also its blind spots: the end of West Berlin as a part of the “Wende” history that has otherwise scarcely received media coverage—a disappearing, self-contained social space with its own specific dynamic inside the closed society of the GDR. The closure of the Berlin border in 1961 reflects in hindsight a politically consistent logic for the state of instability in the tense Cold War situation that leaders from both sides of the conflict had acknowledged but also hesitated to admit publicly. The incompatibility of East and West German societies inherent in this political rationale shaped the depictions of the Berlin Wall for a long time, whether in the melodramatic narrative mode of Gewissen in Aufruhr or in the satirical one of One, Two, Three. Embedding depictions of the Wall in explicit moral coordinates, motivated by political convictions, was in general the rule rather than the exception in both the East and the West. This strong interrelation between iconicity and ideology might explain in part why DEFA directors avoided direct depictions of its fall in the transitional years of 1990 and 1991, favoring a more wide-ranging narrative of social disintegration and experiment, while others like Jürgen Böttcher and Leander Haußmann shifted their focus to the communicational materiality of medial depictions themselves. This brief overview of films and television productions about the Berlin Wall

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exemplifies the entire spectrum of audiovisual culture in the twentieth century, serving as metonymies for the inextricable nexus of our perception of the world and medial representation.30 They remind us, on the one hand, of the postwar priority to adapt and recode political distinctions in culture, connecting the National Socialist past to the discourse of the respective present. The later productions, on the other hand, negotiate a specifically modern tradition of reflecting on the process of their own constitution and artistic means. They transcend the status of representation by constructing representations of representations, which enables them to become a corrective to the medial mainstream of collective memory. Notes 1. Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961–1989 (New York: Harper-Collins, 2006), xviii. 2. Jürgen Ritter and Peter Joachim Lapp, Die Grenze. Ein deutsches Bauwerk (Berlin: Christoph Links, 1998), 24–25. 3. Cited in Hans Louis Trefousse, The Cold War: A Book of Documents (New York: Putnam 1965), 260. 4. Cited in Cindy Mur, The Berlin Wall (Farmington Hills: Greenhaven Press, 2004), 51. 5. Jost Dülffer, Europa im Ost-West-Konflikt 1945–1991 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2004), 271 ff. 6. Michael Beschloss, Powergame: Kennedy and Chruschtschow. The Crisis Years 1960–1963 (New York: Edward Burlingame, 1991), 281. See also W. R. Smyser, Kennedy and the Berlin Wall (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 101 ff. 7. Annamarie Doherr, Interview with Walter Ulbricht, in Frankfurter Rundschau, June 15, 1961; rpt. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, ed., Dokumente zur Berlin-Frage, 4th ed. (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1987), 418–19. Translations throughout by Henning Wrage. 8. For a summary see Matthias Uhl, “Ein eiserner Ring um Berlin. Chruschtschow diktierte Ulbricht 1961, die Mauer zu bauen. Die Folgen eines erstaunlichen Gesprächs,” Die Zeit 24 (June 4, 2009), http://www.zeit.de/2009/24/op-edMauerbau (accessed July 28, 2010). 9. Glen D. Camp, Berlin in the East-West Struggle 1958–61 (New York: Facts on File, 1971), 179, as well as the proceedings of a meeting between Khrushchev and Walter Ulbricht on November 30, 1960, when Khrushchev stated: “We must create the conditions so that the GDR economy will not be vulnerable to our enemies. We didn’t know that the GDR was so vulnerable to West Germany. This is not good; we must correct this now.” Cited in Hope Millard Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953– 1961 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 153. 10. John F. Kennedy, “Radio and Television Report to the American People on the Berlin Crisis” (July 25, 1961), cited in Henry Steele Commager, Documents of American History, Vol. 2 (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), 708.

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politics, culture, and media / 75 11. Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR, new expanded ed. (Berlin: Aufbau, 2000), 175 ff., and Alessandra Jaforte, Die Mauer in der literarischen Prosa der DDR (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1991), 14–15. 12. Ralf Schenk, Eine kleine Geschichte der DEFA. Daten, Dokumente, Erinnerungen (Berlin: DEFA-Stiftung, 2006), 130. 13. Dieter Schlenstedt, “ ‘Ankunft und Anspruch.’ Zum neueren Roman in der DDR,” Sinn und Form 3 (1966): 814–35. 14. Horst Sindermann, “Es geht um Grundfragen, nicht um privaten Kummer. Diskussionsbeitrag auf dem 11. Plenum des ZK der SED,” in Dokumente zur Kunst-, Literatur- und Kulturpolitik der SED, ed. Elimar Schubbe (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1972), 1094. 15. Henning Wrage, Die Zeit der Kunst. Literatur, Film und Fernsehen in der DDR der 1960er Jahre. Eine Kulturgeschichte in Beispielen (Heidelberg: Winter, 2009), 212 ff. 16. Christa Wolf, Der geteilte Himmel [1963] (Munich: Luchterhand, 1999), 196: “[A]lles, was bisher geschehen ist, [erhält] Sinn: [dadurch,] daß ein Bauernsohn den Himmel pflügt.” (Everything that has happened up until now becomes meaningful because a farmer’s son has plowed the heavens.) 17. Thomas Beutelschmidt und Henning Wrage, “Fernsehdramatik 1961–1969,” in Deutsches Fernsehen Ost. Eine Programmgeschichte des DDR-Fernsehens, ed. Rüdiger Steinmetz und Reinhold Viehoff (Berlin: Verlag für Berlin Brandenburg, 2008), 201–22. 18. Knut Hickethier und Peter Hoff, Geschichte des deutschen Fernsehens (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998), 285. 19. Antonia Grunenberg, “Anti-Faschismus als Staatsdoktrin: die DDR,” in Antifaschismus—ein deutscher Mythos (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1993), 120–44. 20. Eberhard Halamoda, dir., Die Grenze. Eine Fernsehfibel für 10- bis 14jährige, first aired on the Deutsche Fernsehfunk on September 18, 1966. 21. Katja Stern, “Gewissen in Aufruhr. Ein hervorragendes Kunstwerk vom Weg eines deutschen Patrioten,” Neues Deutschland, September 19, 1961. For additional positive reviews in the East German media, see Sybill Mehnert, “Das hat uns alle gepackt. Gewissen in Aufruhr—ein Kunstwerk, das höchste Auszeichnung verdient,” Junge Welt, September 16, 1961; and Wolfgang Joho, “Ein deutsches Schicksal. Zu dem Fernsehfilm Gewissen in Aufruhr,” Sonntag, September 24, 1961. 22. For a more detailed comparison of So weit die Füße tragen and Gewissen in Aufruhr, see Wrage, Die Zeit der Kunst, 273 ff. 23. Cited in Peter Hoff and Hans Müncheberg, Experiment Fernsehen. Vom Laborversuch zur sozialistischen Massenkunst. Die Entwicklung fernsehkünstlerischer Sendeformen zwischen 1952 und 1961 in Selbstzeugnissen von Fernsehmitarbeitern (Berlin: Verband der Film- und Fernsehschaffenden, 1984), 207. 24. “Unsre Heimat, das sind nicht nur die Städte und Dörfer / unsre Heimat sind auch all die Bäume im Wald . . . / Und wir lieben die Heimat, die schöne / Und wir schützen sie, weil sie dem Volke gehört, / weil sie unserem Volke gehört.” See “Unsre Heimat” (lyrics by Herbert Keller, music by Hans Naumilkat), Fröhlich sein und singen (BMG Amiga CD, 1998), track 11, text quoted

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25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

from Bernd Pachnicke, ed., Deutsche Volkslieder für Singstimme und Klavier (Leipzig: Edition Peters, 1976), 70. Robert Horton, Billy Wilder: Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2001), 35. The scenes at the Tempelhof Airport were shot in a studio re-creation as well in Los Angeles. For a more extensive discussion specifically of “Wende” films, those produced in the wake of the fall of the Wall, see Sean Allan, “1989 and the Wende in East German Cinema. Peter Kahane’s Die Architekten (1990), Egon Günther’s Stein (1991) and Jörg Foth’s Letztes aus der Da Da eR (1990),“ in 1949–1989: Cultural Perspectives, ed. Clare Flanagan and Stuart Taberner (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 231–44. Cited (in German) in Allan, “1989 and the Wende in East German Cinema,” 235. Jean Baudrillard, Kool Killer oder Der Aufstand der Zeichen, trans. from the French by Hans-Joachim Metzger (Berlin: Merve, 1978). As Niklas Luhmann claims: “Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media.” Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1.

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Pa rt II R e- Ne w i ng Be r l i n i n Un i f i ed Ge r m a n y

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Ch a p t e r Fou r R e- Ca p i ta l i z i ng Be r l i n Janet Ward

All of new Berlin is owned by the developers. —Karl Scheffler (1910)1

In this third decade since the fall of the Wall, the center of the postmillennial, reunified Berlin is still being rebuilt by design. Planning overreach is a problem by association: after all, urban social engineers—including the Nazi Albert Speer, of course, but also avant-garde modernist ideologues such as Ludwig Hilberseimer and Le Corbusier, all with discernible roots in the earlier City Beautiful movement—have too often wanted to rewrite a city’s center in order to remold its inhabitants.2 According to postmodern tenets, urbanism as order is (or should be) dead; ergo we should not expect to control or reconfigure city space in the manner that urban planners once thought possible. Yet despite these cautionary planning tales, today’s Berlin has been overhauled as part of its reinstatement on the political, infrastructural, and architectural levels and in tandem with the former West German federalist system’s accommodation of the regained capital.3 We have witnessed immense efforts toward the re-capitalization of post-Wall Berlin—a process that has continued regardless of whether this contemporary post-industrial city may have lost its right to represent the nation in the first place. In fact, the re-capitalizing of Berlin constitutes a self-regenerating, self-renewing source of energy, at least for political, cultural, and architectural ideologues. Former Chancellor Helmut Kohl tapped into this tradition in his assertion of September 1997 at the foundation stone ceremony for the governmental quarter on the Spree River bend (Spreebogen). For Kohl, Berlin constituted the new “business card” of the German nation and, as an opportunity for such a new beginning, was unparalleled by any other capital city.4 Over-valorizing the reunified capital in this way was a tendency embraced in turn by the German and

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international media and feuilletons.5 Responding to the former plans for this city have been the multiple promotional models of the reunified capital cropping up during the 1990s and beyond. The planning of the New Berlin has been shown to the public in a series of self-obsessed displays of the city’s current and future shape, such as the outdoor “Schauplätze—20 Jahre Berlin im Wandel” (Places on Display—20 Years of a Changing Berlin) that celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall in terms of several showcased sites of urban renovation.6 Yet far from forging images of stability, the post-1989 re-capitalizing of Berlin has exposed just how malleable the city actually is. This is hardly a new characteristic, since even the site of the city was once in doubt. When urban reconstruction began in earnest after World War II, the city’s chief planner Karl Bonatz took issue with his Weimar-era predecessor Martin Wagner for having considered the unrealistic alternative of restarting bombed-out Berlin by building a brand new capital on nearby fresh terrain—a city from scratch, so to speak. Wagner was not the originator of this utopian idea, which had been charted for various German cities, in fact, and had been given credence as a future scenario by the Nazi government itself during the Allied aerial bombardment of World War II. Following on from Bruno Taut’s Expressionist text, Die Auflösung der Städte (1920, The Dissolution of Cities), the Nazis conceptualized a future soil-based Stadtlandschaft (“urban countryside”). According to such initiatives, Hamburg’s burned-out center was to be rebuilt on the periphery in a new “garden city,” Munich was to be moved to the Starnberger See, Dresden to the Heller, and Hannover to the Deister.7 These visionary plans were short-lived. Bonatz, a former bunker designer under Albert Speer’s direct command at the Third Reich’s General Building Inspectorate for the Redevelopment of the Imperial Capital, seamlessly took up the directorship of Berlin’s planning department from 1947 to 1950, where he assumed the mantle of a conservative realist for the city’s rebuilding. He conveniently shifted sole authorship of this new-city-next-door planning dream to poor Wagner, who had been fired and exiled from Nazi Germany in 1933 after just over six years in office.8 Bonatz’s mundanely practical and infrastructural “New Plan for Berlin,” which took over from his immediate postwar predecessor Hans Scharoun’s far more radical, unrealized “Collective Plan” (1946), became in turn just one in a long series of suggested rewrites for the city, for which actual urban trauma was no prerequisite. During the interwar years, for example, ways to recenter and hence modernize the German capital had emphasized both streamlined traffic flow and urban densification by building up (even if on Berlin’s sandy soil up did not mean all that high). The infrastructural innovations of Weimar Berlin were based on the belief—as expressed in

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an enthusiastic 1927 essay by Alfred Gellhorn—that a “mechanizing of the concentration points” of traffic intersections and major public squares would produce an appropriate “intensifying of the city” in tandem with the age: in short, a bringing together via symbolically tall structures of a dispersed capital city that would then communicate better with itself.9 Gellhorn’s visionary plan was for an extension of the east–west axis, an “Avenue of the West,” to be punctuated by a streamlined series of core intersections, each defined in its center by towering high-rises accommodating the multidirectionality of traffic surrounding them. Thus, the process of “three-dimensional urban planning,” or the “conquering of the sky for the construction of the city,” became part and parcel of the modern era’s desire to insert centralized strength into the city (that is, the skyscraper as the image of the urban per se).10 Even if much of the 1920s boosterism in Berlin’s skyscraper discourse was visionary and never realized, its impact was significant. As the late architectural critic Manfredo Tafuri once noted, the modern German skyscraper became a “metaphor symbolizing a rediscovered collectivity” and a Schwitters-like “Merzbau, that, by upsetting the order of the stratified city, succeeds in recuperating a . . . genius loci.”11 The boosterist discourse in Berlin’s planning history is so intense because more has been expected from Berlin than from any other German city. Small wonder is it that Berlin has so often failed to satisfy its assigned role(s). In 1970, at the height of Berlin’s Cold War, when the divided city seemed as much a punitive emblem of its Nazi past as a brave outpost for the West against the Warsaw Pact countries, Roland Barthes identified our expectation of the concentric nature of cities as a source of the uneasiness produced by such “quadrangular, reticulated cities” as Los Angeles or such “empty” city centers as in Tokyo’s sacred central space. He appended this expectation to Western metaphysical assumptions concerning the condensed fullness of Western urban centers as a “marked site”: in other words, we feel that “to go downtown or to the center-city is to encounter the social ‘truth.’ ”12 When we do not recognize this city center, it is as if we do not find ourselves—hence the urban planning drive can to some degree be explained as a drive to recover that sense of loss. Berlin’s Wall, responsible as it was for turning the city’s center into two sets of peripheries, was certainly not the first indication of this city’s distance from a subliminal ideal of the urban social condition. Indeed, Berlin offers much fodder for critique and creativity precisely in terms of its repeated failures to fulfill these innate expectations of the concentric center not just representing but somehow even providing access to truth. One marker of these insufficiencies is how the city has historically failed in its relationship to the German nation as its capital. Part of the conundrum extends, for example, back to

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Karl Scheffler’s observation some 40 years after Wilhelmine Germany’s unification that “Berlin has never been a natural center, never the predestined German capital.”13 It has been continually perceived by western Germans as peripheral to German cultural development because of its proximity to a Slavic Stamm (lineage). At the end of the failed Weimar Republic, Hermann Ullmann held parvenu Berlin if not accountable for, then symptomatic of the country’s troubles in his book Flucht aus Berlin (Fleeing Berlin): “We all suffer from ‘Berlin,’ not just those who have to live there.”14 By the time Berlin became reunified Germany’s sutured capital— drawing to it a decade after the fall of the Wall, 7,000 rather reluctant West German government employees from Bonn and Bad Godesberg—and long after the swift dismantling of East Berlin’s state function as the “Hauptstadt der DDR” (Capital of the GDR), globalization was well underway, and neither city nor nation-state existed in the form they once did. The impact of globalization on urban form has indeed been the “fundamental phenomenon” that Henri Lefebvre once recognized, one that pluralizes city centers while nonetheless insisting on new acts of centering.15 Post-Wall attempts to re-capitalize Berlin may have ignored globalization’s impact on the “limits of the nation-state,” as Jürgen Habermas cautioned about efforts to situate the Berlin Republic in a historical discourse that omits broader twentieth-century influences at its peril: “Anyone who replies to the signals . . . of desolidarization with an appeal to the ‘self-confident nation’, or by calling for a return to the ‘normality’ of the reestablished national state, is using the devil to drive out Satan.”16 For national identities in general and Berlin’s urban identity in particular, the question emerges whether globalization leads to the implosion of the notion of a capital city. Some have gone so far as to believe that the “city has lost its obligation to represent the nation”; today’s capitalism “forces us to seek a balance between the former idea of the capital and the city as a commodity, as a product of technology and commercialism.”17 Despite such qualms, the reclamation of post-Wall Berlin’s capital status has gone ahead, forcing adjustments in turn from the West German federal system. In so doing, the city has not been able to wholly separate itself from the all-invasive processes of globalization.18 Yet Berlin’s case is not a contradictory one. While postmodern theory abounds with tales of the rise of the global city at the expense of the nation-state (the Westphalian state model with full sovereignty) to accommodate the dream of the borderless world, wherein not just the state but also its power becomes deterritorialized as it shifts toward global and even virtual corporate companies and markets, this is hardly tenable in real time. Reterritorialization, rather than deterritorialization, is the more likely result of globalization’s processes.19

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Moreover, border-free theory is much more likely to be of interest to the West; in the postcolonial world, in contrast, internal sovereignty and stateidentity are still being earned within nations forged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by external (Western) superimposed boundaries of territorial spoils. Thus, the statalized world will endure even in a nonstatalized environment of transnational capital. In this era of “glocalized” double-speak, then, it should be no surprise to learn that the process of re-capitalizing a city for its national audience nowadays involves at least a staging of the globalizing turn to catch up with other leading capitals and/or global cities. Conversely and simultaneously, Berlin’s city planners have made use of territorializing strategies whereby the rebuilt center bespeaks “images of locality and historicity,” in short, a “reinscription of national legacies and subnational identifications,” as Lutz Koepnick has observed: “ . . . it is Berlin’s drive toward the global that produces locality and historical particularity in the first place.”20 Yet the desired goal of reforging Berlin’s concentric field in ways that reinvigorate the presence of a corporate and governmental elite, while strengthening the European/German ideal of the Altstadt (old city) in ways that signify urban historical continuity and community—all this remains elusive. Whatever Berlin’s long-term achievements will finally be in terms of its recentered sites of genius loci, we must also situate them within the millennial skepticism that sees urban identities as losing out to today’s myriad ageographic “nonplaces” such as malls, freeways, and airports that no longer take a city’s history and locality into consideration.21 In this case, then, every single instance of post-Wall reurbanization (like the gentrification of 1980s and 1990s London or New York) produces not the real but a series of “urbane disguises,” a “city of simulations” superseding the historical city.22 What city developers aim for, therefore, is not what the residents will get. Despite such considerations, it is nonetheless the case that Berlin—as one of many former Eastern-Bloc cities such as Warsaw, Budapest, and Moscow—has been staging what some observers do regard as a veritable comeback in the regenerative direction of urban civitas.23 As a result of global city factors and the post-Iron-Curtain era, Europe’s urban system is in the midst of creating many new and complex center-periphery relationships. Within each of these cities, postcommunist transformations affect both the infrastructural “base” and the architectural “superstructure” or urban visage. Re-capitalizing Berlin on the superstructural level has involved iconic replacements or inventions of structures by star architects that add to the city’s (inter)national prominence. Essentially, this has been achieved by a commodification (high-tech or otherwise) of the city’s public, commercial, and governmental spheres. We can still suspect something along

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the lines of urbanist Peter Marcuse’s concern that Berlin’s architectonic facelift is hiding something: all the debates concerning the architectural style of the New Berlin amount to a form of cladding that conveniently lets the other decisions (“power and its uses, wealth and its uses,” as he puts it; namely, who owns what, when, and how) continue to be made in private and shielded from public input.24 Yet such building continues to determine the cityscape for consumption and tourism purposes, and especially for city branding. This brings us to the question as to why, after all, do we insist on building for power and display? Not just for a nation’s might, one might say, but for the psychological well-being of the city’s denizens: to claim in three-dimensional terms that its genius loci is one of permanence. And yet these days, recentering the city amounts to urban self-endangerment: the stronger, wealthier city is in fact far more at risk in the post-9/11 era. The greater the number of critical iconic points, the more places there are that can be attacked.25 Global, nodal cities become the most at risk; thus, attempting to re-capitalize Berlin may yet lead to further impermanence. Nonetheless, candidates for Berlin’s ultimate postExpressionistic Stadtkrone, or “city crown,” abound—be this completed projects like the entertainment area of the rebuilt Potsdamer Platz, the Federal Chancellery, the luxury shopping arcades of the Friedrichstraße; ongoing projects such as the “Mediaspree” corporate development along the riverbank at the Osthafen; as well as future reurbanization plans for the areas around the Main Railway Station (the Europacity) and the Alexanderplatz.26 But all is not as it would seem, at least not in Norman Ohler’s novel, Mitte (2001), which depicts an impermanent virtual reality within the rotting Altbau-fabric of the former East German capital. Here, urban degeneration among the frenzied capitalist gentrification all around the Hackesche Market area occurs in both the electronic and physical realms. We can recall the famous building-site representations of Berlin’s earlier modernity, as detailed in Alfred Döblin’s montage visions of the interwar capital in Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) in which cinematic perspectives were spliced into the novel, such as the pile driver in violent operation, the subway tunneling, or the street work at Rosenthaler Platz. In Ohler’s novel, in contrast, rebuilding Berlin has forged not so much an infectious modern urban energy of renewal as a damaged environment that has sold its authentic Faustian soul en route to a desired era of post-Wall rehabbing and a vainly sought-after world-ranking among cities.27 In Ohler’s (or his protagonist Klinger’s) world, a seismic fault seems to lurk underneath postWall Berlin’s attempt to refurbish its streets with the pre-Wall capital city’s identity. Cracks will appear in the New Berlin’s structures because the new is make-believe old.

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This kind of critique of reunified Berlin as a site of simulation—as opposed to the world-city of interwar modernity that it used to be—has emerged as an unintentional consequence of the crimes against “authentic” representation committed by Critical Reconstruction. Critical Reconstruction is known as that now somewhat infamous, conservative blueprint initiated by Berlin’s former building director Hans Stimmann and the late West Berlin architect Josef Paul Kleihues. Before reunification, it had gained currency as a concept for the model of the “European City” at earlier venues like the International Building Exhibition of 1987.28 The tenets of Critical Reconstruction determined the idealized, nostalgic remaking of Berlin in its Planwerk Innenstadt (Inner City Work Plan), which is still underway despite the illusory nature of its restorative goals. In 1996, the Plan’s author, Stimmann, proposed his vision of making Berlin whole and complete, adopting a modernist planner’s panoptic strategies even as he decried the effects of architectural modernism. By 1999, the Plan became city policy.29 It pumped perhaps too much artificial life into Mitte, such was its emphasis on retrieving a certain version of the German capital. Further, it has been applied as a means of silencing proponents who wanted to retain prominent sites and structures, not just former GDR architecture but East German “public” yet practically voided spaces. Essentially, the Plan’s too-transparent aim has been to run roughshod over the physical landscape of former communist Berlin and to deny the eastern districts’ particular history of urban socialist development during most of the second half of the twentieth century. The increasing impression gained of today’s Berlin is that the city has been in some key respects forcibly recentered. Such an observation is backed up by maps of the first post-Wall Flächennutzungsplan (Land Use Plan) of 1994. Issued by the reunified capital’s Senate Department for Urban Development, these maps implied that the areas voided by the removal of the Wall had already all been uniformly reconstructed according to the era prior to division, indeed as if the Wall had never been.30 Such recovery efforts have been aimed at Berlin’s symbolic structures as well as its nodal communications and transportation networks. This bid for a retrieval of former metropolitan status befitting the global age is being expressed in the new international airport on the city’s southern periphery: Berlin-Schönefeld, now termed Berlin Brandenburg International (BBI). Moreover, the recentering process has led to demotions in or demolitions of former icons. Against the signed protest of more than 100,000 West Berliners, the Zoo train station (Zoologischer Garten) has been demoted to a local portal after years of postwar service as the national arrival and departure point for connections to and from West German cities. Taking its place is the recently built Hauptbahnhof (Main Railway Station), which

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lies in Berlin’s newly regained center rather than “old” West Berlin. A similar demotion in order to displace and replace the center applies to the fall 2008 closure of Tempelhof Airport, this time despite even stronger organized protests from over 200,000 mostly West Berliners in a referendum that nonetheless failed to meet the minimum voting quota, as well as to the future closure of West Berlin’s Tegel Airport, once the transformation of Schönefeld airport into BBI is complete. The now empty site of the Palast der Republik (formerly the seat of East Germany’s parliament) might yet be replaced with a baroque façade version of what had stood there before, the Hohenzollern Stadtschloß (City Palace), referred to as the future Humboldt Forum, although its financing is now in serious doubt. Where once the royal City Palace was deemed an unwelcome center that would have displaced the GDR’s desire for its capital’s new socialist core, so too the now demolished Palace of the Republic was considered an obstacle or block for reanchoring reunified Berlin. In the same vein of a programmatic reinforcement of Berlin’s national role, more of the six federal government ministries that had stayed in Bonn when others moved to Berlin in 1999 are now moving what amounts to a second headquarters to the capital after all, gradually shifting their Bonn locations to a mere formality.31 During the 1990s building “spree” all around Berlin’s Spree River, Volker Hassemer, the senator of development for Berlin prior to the fall of the Wall and founder of the city marketing company Berlin Partner, typified voices that hailed this “great opportunity” to fill in the center of Berlin that had been laid to waste by the no-man’s-land of the Wall and to “modernize it from the ground up.”32 One building that was most famously emptied out, purged as it were, and modernized from the ground up within its four exterior façade walls is the Reichstag (originally built between 1884 and 1894). The opening up of the building denotes its significance—up to one-third of the interior was removed to make this possible.33 With this act of phoenix-like resurrection, British architect Lord Norman Foster granted Berlin one of its best new candidates for a Stadtkrone. Architectural judges such as James S. Russell assessed the building’s rebirth, specifically the replacement high-tech glass dome neatly symbolizing the transparent workings of the reunified democracy in terms of whether a building such as this really could “help a people remember the sins of the past and dedicate themselves to a less pathological future.”34 In 1999, when the renovated Reichstag was opened, the hope was that it indeed could and would. The double spiral of publicly accessible walking ramps affording views from within the famous cupola above the plenary chamber have helped reassert the building’s nodality between the Brandenburg Gate and the new government quarter. Foster’s dome was swiftly accepted as a leading symbol of the Berlin Republic—if not of Berlin itself—because of its qualities as a

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Figure 4.1 Reichstag dome, Berlin (1999). Designed by Foster + Partners. © Janet Ward.

“readily marketable logo” for the nation.35 Thanks to the dome, the building displays both itself and its view to tourists: its message is for its visitorconsumers to buy into technologized capitalism and buy into Germany. This is transparency incorporated, so to speak, as if Bonn’s architectural credo has been remade for the Berlin highlife. In fact, the visiting public is able to catch no more than a glimpse through the dome’s base of the politicians’ deliberations beneath them. The public’s gaze is directed outward, bouncing off the dome’s glass surfaces rather than into the parliamentary space below. Instead, the politicians are free to gaze upward at the touring public, continually ascending and descending the dome above them. The Reichstag’s transparency effect is really more one of translucency. The electric beacon of the Reichstag dome by night, alongside its commercially oriented neighbor at Potsdamer Platz, the Sony Center’s dynamic circustent roof designed by Helmut Jahn, offers up a set of dialectically gleaming anchors for post-Wall Berlin that hearken back to the city’s famed emphasis during the 1920s on Lichtarchitektur (architecture of light).36 Yet in terms of Berlin’s governmental visage, the new Reichstag is the exception rather than the norm. The German government could not afford to modernize everything and could not insert its governmental ministries

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and administrative offices into new buildings all across town. In many instances, office space had to be utilized in structures that had heavy historical baggage. The work of Berlin scholars such as Brian Ladd and Karen E. Till has made abundantly clear that the question of the German capital’s architectural identity still evolves around the “ghosts” of Nazism, and such encounters have only escalated since the fall of the Wall and the opening up of the eastern half of the city to western historical obsessions.37 Rebuilding Berlin has exposed, covered up, erased, and alternatively even produced multiple instances wherein the city’s previous geopolitical markings, traces, and strata have been forced into new public interpretations. Even though initial fears are still warranted that the loss of Berlin’s ruptured fabric can forge false historical continuities in the new architecture, after 20 years it is apparent that as many layers have been revealed as hidden. In the words of Andreas Huyssen, Berlin as palimpsest is “a disparate city-text that is being rewritten while previous text is preserved, traces are restored, erasures documented. . . . Berlin as palimpsest implies voids, illegibilities, and erasures, but it offers also a richness of traces and memories, restorations and new constructions that will mark the city as lived space.”38 Berlin’s truer post-Wall reinstatement, then, is a new form of inscription: a recognition of its interactive segmentations. Not all building-site palimpsests have led to comfortable revelations for the German capital. Journalist Michael Z. Wise offers a discussion of the accession of reunified Germany’s Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Ministry) to the monumental stone structure of the former Nazi Reichsbank (built according to the designs of Heinrich Wolff from 1934 to 1940). He eclipses the building’s subsequent postwar decades as the Central Committee headquarters of the East German Communist Party when he focuses instead on the 1.28 tons of gold purchased by the Reichsbank from the SS, originating in Holocaust victims’ possessions—including their teeth—and stored in the basement during its initial Nazi era incarnation.39 But he then resumes his book’s general discourse of architectural normalization, citing the view of Berlin architect Hans Kollhoff (in charge of post-Wall modifications to the building) that Nazism will not in fact linger within these same walls and that to espy Nazism in every stone façade is “paranoid.” “The stones themselves,” concludes Wise, “are not guilty. . . . On the other hand, political architecture cannot be entirely separated from the context in which it arose.”40 Is Wise’s “both-and” stance an inevitable tactic in which we engage, perpetuating thereby a voyeuristic attraction to “Nazi” stone that continues to drive our (global) public imaginary about Berlin? As we know, in the decades of West German public architecture, and especially in Bonn, glass was associated with postnationalistic sensibilities of democratic

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openness.41 Thus, Wise perpetuates the (West) German belief system that the Foreign Ministry’s new frontispiece, located directly in front of the old, has been a necessary façade. The new structure, designed by Thomas Müller and Ivan Reimann, has glass-walled offices that open into the democratically glass-fronted and -topped courtyard (Lichthof ).42 Public access to this foyer is encouraged by means of a fountain sculpture and coffee shop; visiting dignitaries are greeted in another open courtyard. The new building thus shields the unacceptable alternative of the inaccessible Nazi stone structure behind, which at over 667,000 square feet became prewar Berlin’s largest office space. This cover-up prompted artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock to remind public memory about the palimpsests involved in this building’s past. Their satirical images, released in 1999 when the diplomats first moved from Bonn into the two Berlin offices, showcased the Nazi predecessor structure’s background as a profit center for the Holocaust.43 Successfully shielded by the gleaming white

Figure 4.2 Renata Stih & Frieder Schnock, excerpt from “Hänsel & Gretel and the Gold in the Reichsbank,” competition entry (1999). © Stih & Schnock, Berlin / ARS, NYC.

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Foreign Ministry’s “front door,” the unheralded older building unobtrusively extends most of a city block’s length and width along the canal and is where most of the diplomats actually conduct their work. No matter how fresh an architectural start has been attempted, even the newest key structures in Berlin have not been able to avoid engaging the city’s Nazi and Communist traces. An example of a major project that tried to meet both challenges head on and simultaneously provide a symbolic recentering of the city by dint of joining that which was not connected before, is the government quarter along the Spreebogen (Spree River bend). It bespeaks the arrival of reunified national governance—the new “spatial presence of the state in the city.”44 Yet the new West-East governmental axis designed by Axel Schultes with Charlotte Frank for the New Berlin’s parliament, the winner of the Spreebogen Urban Design Competition, has not been able to and has not wished to escape Berlin’s twentieth-century planning ruptures. The architectural competition for the Spreebogen site included the Humboldthafen’s industrial area north of the Spree and contained instructions specifying the role of axiality to bring the city’s east and west together. The Schultes-Frank winning design can be contrasted with the deconstructivist entry by Morphosis, which consisted of a series of undulating thin buildings along the curves of the riverbank. The Morphosis design entry for the German governmental quarter intended its fluidity to offer a new kind of “wall” for the reunified city: a “connective tissue” in fact.45 In contrast and far more boldly than such a wave-effect would have offered, the Schultes-Frank concept for the Federal Chancellery and for the accompanying parliamentary buildings, entitled the “Band des Bundes” (Federal Band or Federal Ribbon), crosses the river just north of the redomed Reichstag at precisely the arc location of the Spree River. It ostensibly provides the formerly divided Berlin with a bridge across the former border: an act of which the sociologist of modern urbanity, Georg Simmel, would have been proud.46 It is also a new node with its own underground station. In the end, Schultes and Frank built only the Chancellery, which opened in 2001; other architects designed the other government buildings in their master plan; and the west-east axis was shortened. Nonetheless, the axiality is powerful enough to pull one in: the Alsenblock (or Paul-Löbe-Haus, designed by Stephan Braunfels) leaps dramatically across the Spree to the Luisenblock on the other side, repeating the circular “washing machine” motif that has been ascribed to the Chancellery itself.47 The design that thus boldly joins east and west crosses, however, the memory of the Nazis’ planned North-South Axis at a precise perpendicular angle, taking maximal advantage of the “n” shape in the river bend, just as Adolf Hitler and Speer would have done in their placement of the Great

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Figure 4.3 Chancellery, Berlin (2001). Designed by Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank. © Janet Ward.

Hall inside that same loop. Indeed, Schultes has come in for quite a bit of criticism over the way he has put architectural power to use for the new German center of government.48 Reasons for this critique are exacerbated not only by the Chancellery’s solitaire status and its raised fortress garden, which is surrounded by a moat-like wall higher than the Berlin Wall ever was, but also by the series of underground tunnels protecting parliamentarians from the public. Schultes’s governmental axis that spans the Spree can be understood as a somewhat naive symbolic step in the direction of east-west healing, a welding together of that which the Wall had severed. And yet its deeper level of response remains that of an epitaph to the Nazis’ wished-for axiality for Berlin’s cityscape. In defense of his vision for a government quarter that reaches “right across Speer’s state axis,” Schultes has complained that his original plan for a People’s Forum was axed, as were his initiatives that would have linked the Chancellery to the other buildings and hence softened the lines.49 Even the government quarter does not quite escape the shortcomings of reunified Berlin’s overindulgence in new iconic architecture that is awash in symbolic effects. Certainly the Spreebogen project “stands for” more than it is. One might look in vain, as architectural historian

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Max Page does, for the capital’s “own Guggenheim Bilbao, its work of transcendent architecture.”50 Yet not all of the recentering efforts for the city have proven so exhausting. One structure simply gained in significance as a stabilizing image for the city by dint of its frontline border position during the decades of division, as well as its memorable role as the effective herald of the opening of the Wall itself in November 1989: the Brandenburg Gate. We can think here of Kohl’s staged walk through the Gate in December 1989. Paul Virilio’s vision of a postmodern borderless city (and specifically his question: “Where does the city without gates begin?”) has been turned on its head by Berlin, as it has sought to define itself without the Wall by reemphasizing its famous former custom’s gate instead.51 A telling image for Berlin’s initial phase of post-Wall reunification could be found in the Telekom ad that covered the Brandenburg Gate during its renovation in 2001. This Berlin icon used to stand tantalizingly out of reach to Westerners during the Cold War, just on the eastern side of the Wall. As a former symbol of the border, it now stood draped by Telekom’s proud boast: “Wir verbinden” (we connect). Even the Gate’s pillars had been pushed into a new position by the ad’s trompe d’oeil. In a sense, the Brandenburg Gate remains perhaps the best Stadtkrone to date,

Figure 4.4 The Brandenburg Gate under renovation, draped in Telekom’s publicity (2001). © Janet Ward.

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reestablishing itself amidst its myriad new competitors because it shows itself off as a successful Simmelesque act of bridging at the Wall’s most photographed site of separation and subsequent celebration at the Cold War’s end. Out of the architectural overlay and reconnection of the city’s public arena thus arises a series of urban fragments that will together seek to give a holistic impression. It is interesting to note how, within this framework of historical architectural repair, Berlin’s immigrant and working-class identities are regarded for the most part as representational accidents that are best dispossessed or suppressed. We are witnessing Berlin’s architectural self-re-creation, but it is an image meant for privileged, “included” groups only. The remapping of Berlin’s public stage was intended to create a new interrelated cohesiveness, suggesting national strength both to the world and above all to the reunified Germany, but the projection has clashed with the city’s (and country’s) actual demographics, its dwelling and working norms. Only recently have Berlin’s boosters begun to adjust their global visions to include a more diverse mission statement for the capital, or Leitbild.52 Even though it remains to be seen whether the re-capitalizing of Berlin can really give the city and the country what it promised, clearly it has repositioned at least the image of German statehood. The truer gauge of this achievement, however, will be seen not just in Berlin’s new governmental and commercial buildings but in encounters with existing sites, structures, and spaces that reveal rather than hide the discontinuous, often traumatic evolutions of the city’s past. Accepting Berlin’s discordant layers caused by the hot and cold wars of the twentieth century corresponds well with the palimpsest-ideals of postmodern urban planning, which “looks at the city as the result of temporal accumulations in space, a sequence in which the latest intervention takes its place.”53 Of course, Berlin’s version of this is more extreme than most, and therein lies its unexpected potency. The redomed Reichstag, the former Nazi Reichsbank-turned-ForeignMinistry, the Spreebogen government quarter, and the Brandenburg Gate itself constitute just some examples of the complex temporal-spatial encounters that make reunified Berlin still so necessarily incomplete, and hence so vivid. Notes 1. Karl Scheffler, Berlin. Ein Stadtschicksal, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1910), 187, translation here and throughout by the author. 2. For a critique of the City Beautiful movement, see Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996), 174–78, 202.

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94 / janet ward 3. Part of this essay is included in my book on Berlin, forthcoming as Post-Wall Berlin: Borders, Space, and Identity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 4. “Berlin ist die Visitenkarte,” Die Welt, September 27, 1997. 5. A lone voice of caution was offered by former cultural minister Michael Naumann, Die schönste Form der Freiheit. Reden und Essays zur Kultur der Nation (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 2001), 213. 6. See www.mauerfall09.de/portal/schauplaetze/schauplaetze.html (accessed March 20, 2010). 7. Werner Durth, “Stadt und Landschaft,” in 1945. Krieg—Zerstörung—Aufbau. Architektur und Stadtplanung 1940–1960, ed. Jörn Düwel, Werner Durth, Niels Gutschow, and Jochen Schneider (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1995), 154; and Jeffry M. Diefendorf, In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 118–20. 8. Karl Bonatz, “Der neue Plan von Berlin,” Neue Bauwelt 2, no. 48 (December 1, 1947): 755–62. 9. Alfred Gellhorn, “Formung der Grossstadt,” Die Form 2, no. 2 (1927): 56. 10. Gellhorn, “Formung der Grossstadt,” 56, 57 (emphasis in the original). 11. Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant- Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1987), 175, 174. 12. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs [1970], trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); excerpted in The City Cultures Reader, ed. Malcolm Miles, Iain Borden, and Tim Hall (New York: Routledge, 2000), 195. 13. Scheffler, Berlin, 11. 14. Hermann Ullmann, Flucht aus Berlin (Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1932), 9. 15. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996), 208. 16. Jürgen Habermas, “1989 in the Shadow of 1945: On the Normality of a Future Berlin Republic” [1995], in Habermas, A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany, trans. Steven Rendall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 180. 17. This opinion was offered by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki in reference to Berlin after the Wall; quoted in Hans Stimmann, ed., Babylon, Berlin etc. Das Vokabular der europäischen Stadt (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1995), 163. 18. See Janet Ward, “Berlin, The Virtual Global City,” Journal of Visual Culture 3, no. 2 (2004): 239–56. 19. David Newman, “Boundaries,” and Sankaran Krishna, “Boundaries in Question,” both in A Companion to Political Geography, ed. John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 133, 304. 20. Lutz Koepnick, Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 241, 242. 21. Marc Augé, Non-Places [1992], trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 2008); Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization (Rotterdam: NAi, 1998); and Iain Sinclair, London Orbital: A Walk around the M25 (London: Granta, 2002).

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re-capitalizing berlin / 95 22. Michael Sorkin, “Variations on a Theme Park,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992), xiv. 23. See, for example, Karl Schlögel, “The Comeback of the European Cities,” International Review of Sociology 16, no. 2 (2006): 471–85. 24. Peter Marcuse, “Reflections on Berlin: The Meaning of Construction and the Construction of Meaning,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22, no. 2 (1998): 334. Marcuse continues this line of inquiry in his “Tradition in a Global City?” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 17, no. 2 (2006): 7–18. 25. See Chapter 17 in Mike Davis, Dead Cities and Other Tales (New York: New Press, 2002). 26. For city-wide, up-to-date developments on these multiple projects, see the website of Berlin’s Senate Department for Urban Development: http://www. stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/planen (accessed November 22, 2009). 27. Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Die Geschichte von Franz Biberkopf [1929] (Munich: dtv, 1988); and Norman Ohler, Mitte (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2001), 222. 28. See Gabriel Rosenfeld’s account of post-Wall Berlin’s architectural transformation as an aspect of the “Architects’ Debate,” itself an offshoot of the “Historians’ Debate.” Rosenfeld, “The Architects’ Debate. Architectural Discourse and the Memory of Nazism in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1977–1997,” History and Memory 9, no. 1–2 (1997): 208–16. 29. On the four Planwerke for Berlin (Inner, North-East, South-East, West), see http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/planen/planwerke/index.shtml (accessed July 14, 2009). On the continuing future for Planwerk Innenstadt, see Hans Stimmann, ed., Berliner Altstadt. Von der DDR- Staatsmitte zur Stadtmitte (Berlin: Dom, 2009). 30. Carolyn Loeb, “Planning Reunification: The Planning History of the Fall of the Wall,” Planning Perspectives 21, no. 1 (2006): 67–87. For updated versions of the Land Use Plan, which has since been revised in 1998, 2004, and 2008, see the Berlin Senate’s website: http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin. de/planen/fnp/ (accessed June 3, 2009). 31. The Bonn-Berlin Act of 1994 is meant to maintain the special status of Bonn as a “Federal City” (Bundesstadt) in relation to Berlin, but public opinion doubts its longevity, and the number of government employees in Berlin has risen by over 1,100 since the millennium. See, for example, “Bonn-BerlinGesetz. Bundesregierung soll ganz nach Berlin ziehen,” Berliner Morgenpost, November 22, 2008; “Bonn-Berlin-Gesetz. Mehrheit für Totalumzug nach Berlin,” Spiegel- Online, April 29, 2007, www.spiegel.de/politik/ deutschland/0,1518,480092,00.html (accessed July 26, 2010). 32. Interview with Volker Hassemer, “Informationstechnologie entlastet die Städte,” in Virtual Cities: Die Neuerfindung der Stadt im Zeitalter der globalen Vernetzung, ed. Christa Maar and Florian Rötzer (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1997), 188. 33. Michael S. Cullen, Der Reichstag. Parlament, Denkmal, Symbol (Berlin: be.bra verlag, 1999), 332.

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96 / janet ward 34. James S. Russell, “With his sleek, ecological design, Lord Norman Foster imbues the Reichstag with Germany’s new self-image,” Architectural Record 187, no. 7 (July 1999): 103. 35. Eric Jarosinski, “Building on a Metaphor: Democracy, Transparency and the Berlin Reichstag,” in Berlin: The Symphony Continues. Orchestrating Architectural, Social, and Artistic Change in Germany’s New Capital, ed. Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Rachel J. Halverson, and Kristie A. Foell (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 64. 36. This auratic reworking of the Weimar era is suggested by Koepnick in Framing Attention, 255–56. See also Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 37. Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); and Karen E. Till, The New Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 38. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 81, 84. 39. Michael Z. Wise, Capital Dilemma. Germany’s Search for a New Architecture of Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 95–96. See also the government brochure with text by Hans Wilderotter, Das Haus am Werderschen Markt. Von der Reichsbank zum Auswärtigen Amt (Berlin: Auswärtiges Amt, 1999), 30, http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/diplo/de/ A Amt/VirtuellerRundgang/Uebersicht,navCtx=21922.html (accessed December 17, 2009). 40. Wise, Capital Dilemma, 101, 107. 41. Wise, Capital Dilemma, 25. Before Nazism, German modernist architectural debates were trying to lift Berlin out of its rental-barracks stone; see, for example, Werner Hegemann, Das steinerne Berlin. Geschichte der größten Mietskasernenstadt der Welt [1930] (rpt. Berlin: Vieweg-Verlag, 1988). On the glass-as-democratic-symbol debate, see Deborah Ascher Barnstone, The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany (New York: Routledge, 2005); Bernhard Schulz, “Noch einmal eine europäische Stadt,” Tagesspiegel, September 3, 1998; and Max Welch Guerra, Hauptstadt Einig Vaterland. Planung und Politik zwischen Bonn und Berlin (Berlin: Verlag Bauwesen, 1999). 42. Volker Wagner, Regierungsbauten in Berlin. Geschichte, Politik, Architektur (Berlin: be.bra verlag, 2001), 56–59. 43. Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, “Open Space: Berlin after Reunification” [2009], an online exhibition at http://places.designobserver.com/entry. html?entry=11657 (accessed December 15, 2009). 44. Harald Bodenschatz, “Hauptstadtplanungen aus der Perspektive der Stadt,” in Geschichtsmeile Wilhelmstra β e, ed. Helmut Engel and Wolfgang Ribbe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 247. 45. Alan Balfour, “Morphosis: Spreebogen,” in Berlin, ed. Alan Balfour (London, UK: Academy Editions, 1995), 121. 46. Georg Simmel, “Brücke und Tür,” Der Tag, September 15, 1909.

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re-capitalizing berlin / 97 47. For a discussion of the reaction to Schultes’s design, see Heinrich Wefing, Kulisse der Macht. Das Berliner Kanzleramt (Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 2001), 40–77. 48. Marcuse, “Reflections on Berlin,” 333. 49. Axel Schultes, “Berlin—The Belated Capital,” in Berlin, ed. Alan Balfour (London, UK: Academy Editions, 1995), 46; see also Matthias Oloew, “Die Raumgreifenden,” Tagesspiegel, January 29, 2008. 50. Max Page, “Berlin’s Identity Crisis,” Architecture 93, no. 9 (2004): 26. 51. Paul Virilio, “The Overexposed City,” in Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (New York: Trustees of Columbia University / Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 547. 52. Since 2004 Berlin’s Office of Migration and Integration boasts a multicultural motto: BĘŘŁŸÑ; see www.berlin.de/lb/intmig/ (accessed September 3, 2009). See also Stephan Lanz, Berlin aufgemischt: abendländisch—multikulturell—kosmopolitisch? Die politische Konstruktion einer Einwanderungsstadt (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2007). 53. Alan Colquhoun, “On Modern and Postmodern Space,” in Architecture Criticism Ideology, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985), 116.

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Ch a p t e r Fi v e I n t e r i m Use at a For m e r D e at h St r i p? A rt, Pol i t ic s, a n d Ur ba n ism at Sk u l p t u r e n pa r k Be r l i n _ Ze n t ru m Karen E. Till

Twenty years after unification, Berlin continues to promote the (re)building of the city through marketing practices, including tours, white models, viewing platforms, and buildings wrapped with plastic façades to depict future urban scenes for residents and visitors to imagine. Although these strategies of making the city under construction, renovation, deconstruction, and reconstruction into a spectacle were most clearly evident during the first 15 years of Berlin’s post-unification construction boom, urban landscapes continue to be used as temporal frames to situate the city in a future to come. In 2006 and 2007, for example, viewing platforms invited visitors to look at the scene of the “environmental deconstruction” of the Palast der Republik as planners, to view a site from an elevated platform and imagine how the future Humboldt Center might replace this former GDR parliamentary building. Elsewhere in the city, artists Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser excavated three plots in a series of adjacent empty lots in central Berlin in 2007 and erected viewing platforms that led down into those sites. Their artistic excavation-installation, Turn It One More Time (2006–2008), unearthed building foundations, coal furnaces, cellars, even toilets—remnants of earlier urban inhabitants. In describing their work, the artists noted that viewing platforms erected on the western side of the Berlin Wall after 1961 “allowed citizens to see beyond the division. Now, rather than leading upwards, the excavations led downwards and offered a new view into the history of a place.” Köbberling and Kaltwasser also observed how the “view” of the city from their platforms encouraged visitors to encounter the urban natural environment. The artists listed on a large billboard at the site the diverse array of plants in the overgrown fields they excavated according to their biological species. For the artists,

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“the stairway [down into the excavation] . . . provided an experiential path,” bringing viewers into the opened ground “to be surrounded by the site’s intrinsic, biological processes.” When standing on the platform, visitors were surrounded by layers of earth and the plants just above ground and at eye level. Here they could witness “the territorial appropriation [of the city] by wild plants:” “This overwhelming presence of flora presented the natural potentials of the place typically beyond the interests of its potential developers.”1 As these artists remind, the urban practice of viewing the city from atop wooden platforms has a deeply personal as well as political and economic performance history in divided and post-unified Berlins. Viewing platforms in recent memory were first erected in haphazard fashion by locals to retain some kind of contact between family members and neighborhoods separated in 1961. These flimsy structures became associated with memories of loss, displacement, and division for many Berliners. Sturdier viewing edifices were later erected in West Berlin, changing the emotional politics of viewing to a geopolitical gaze of authority. As Cold War icons of defending Western spaces of “democracy,” the platforms soon also became tourist attractions that promoted the voyeuristic consumption of the (Eastern Bloc) Other and an understanding of urban space as transparent. Moreover, at the time that Köbberling and Kaltwasser installed Turn It One More Time,

Figure 5.1 Viewing platforms of the New Berlin as the Palast der Republik is “environmentally deconstructed.” © Karen Till, 2007.

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Figure 5.2 Turn It One More Time © Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser, 2007, Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, “Parcella” series. Photograph by Folke Köbberling © 2007.

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their inverted use of a platform in Berlin questioned post-unification viewing practices at construction sites by developers and city authorities.2 The artists exploited the trope of the platform to challenge the assumption that city planners and politicians are the city’s strategic experts, or the all-seeing, masculine surveyors who look at and define the world according to national imaginaries, property values, and potential economic development. Rather than look up at the spectacle of skyscrapers and renovated structures being built and rebuilt, they asked the viewer to look down into the spaces of land speculation and then to move down into the earth, like a city archaeologist. The platform created an urban encounter of inverted perspectives, reminding us that the act of looking is never neutral but always tied to specific histories of social practices, institutions, and power relations. The artists questioned the authoritative gaze as a form of knowing, playing with perceptions of distances and closeness, to confront the state’s scopic regimes and the city’s institutions for economic and scientific management.3 Köbberling and Kaltwasser’s installation points to the inherent problems of city marketing strategies. To package landscapes, streetscapes, and even neighborhoods as consumable scenes treats space and time as bounded entities that can be commodified. Even though cities continuously undergo processes of transformation, planning land-use maps, public policies, and even theories of the city represent urban space and life as well as the places that residents inhabit in static terms. In contrast, the artists invited residents and passersby to explore, envision, remember, and create new ways of encountering their city, past and present. As architectural historian Dolores Hayden argues, little scholarly work documents the changes, losses, and new designs of particular places in cities that may resonate in the collective memory of local residents.4 And yet the experiences, memories, and desires of residents and visitors offer a complex repository of understanding “urbanism as a way of life,” to borrow urban sociologist Louis Wirth’s oft-cited 1938 essay.5 If urban designers, the building professionals, and urban theorists are serious about producing socially sustainable cities and communities in the future, they must acknowledge that residents are the caretakers of urban places. As I suggest in this chapter, planners as well as scholars have much to learn from locally based artists who have experimented with a range of participatory and transformative approaches to engage residents in representing and defining their city and the places and neighborhoods they inhabit. At the same time, artistic interventions offer residents creative practices that encourage an appreciation of the fragility of the social ecologies of place. As I have argued elsewhere, such nuanced interactions and attitudes may also result in the development of a place-based ethics of care in the context of a city that has experienced a violent national past and dramatic urban change.6

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In this chapter, I focus on projects that have emerged as a direct consequence of the divided city such as Turn It One More Time, curated by the artistic collaborative Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum and located in the shadow of the former Berlin Wall in one of the city’s former “death strips” in Berlin Mitte. In what appeared to be an empty, overgrown lot in an isolated yet centrally located part of the city, artists worked in and through this post-Wall space, appropriating the materials and spatial practices of city-building professionals including media images, buildings, streets, and parcels of land, while questioning how land development and urban use in the “new” Berlin ignored the legacies of a once-divided city. Rather than treating space as an empty container to be filled in or emptied out, they began with an understanding of the city as constituted by inhabited places that intersect with other complex places.7 Their artistic matter mobilized the stray stuff, remnants, leftovers, unwanted forms, and seemingly empty lots of the city (including the “death strips”), to create what I call “interim spaces” through which nonnormative, critical spatial, and historical imaginaries of the city could be explored. Their work invited encounters with the city as an enacted environment and asked visitors and locals to take notice of the complex ways places are made and remade. To understand how these artists, visitors, and residents engaged with the projects, I first consider the more general post-unification marketing and planning contexts of their work. From Zwischennutzung to Interim Spaces In 2008, Berlin’s Mayor Klaus Wowereit launched a new image campaign for the city under the slogan “Sei Berlin” (Be Berlin). As urban sociologists Claire Colomb and Ares Kalandides asked, “Why does it still matter for Berlin’s political leaders to search for a new image, a new slogan, a new ‘brand’ twenty years after the fall of the Wall and the reunification of the city?”8 They noted not only that the “New Berlin” marketing strategy was not so new by this time but also that the city did not appear to be functioning well economically. Although the “creative industries” sector appears to be strong, such as in music, design, and art, the Berlin city-state (Land) has nearly faced bankruptcy, so that the public sector has had to rely heavily on private funding and public-private partnerships. Colomb further argues that the “Be Berlin” marketing campaign and the recent “Urban Pioneers” project of the Berlin Senate’s Department of Urban Development appear to be capitalizing on local, spontaneous projects at seemingly vacant plots, that is, in spaces that planners and large-scale developers normally consider economically irrelevant.9 She also mentions that in addition to publishing a “how to” book about managing underutilized urban spaces for

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developers, cultural event planners, and local neighborhood authorities, the Berlin Senate Department provides the following services: web page inventories of available properties for temporary use; management assistance for building and construction gaps owned by public agencies; the coordination of a Berlin-wide database of vacant plots awaiting redevelopment; and funding for small consultancies that mediate between owners and so-called “temporary users.”10 City authorities refer to this “new” planning concept as Zwischennutzung or temporary use. The formal recognition and management of so-called urban wastelands—including brownfield and former industrial sites (unused sites that may have high levels of environmental pollution from former uses), unused buildings, and vacant plots and buildings resulting from division, war damage, erasures by successive political regimes, poor planning, and the disuse of infrastructure—are actually radical for any city or state planning agency. Yet in the international urban management context defined by Richard Florida’s persuasive rhetoric about the significance of the “creative class” to urban economic growth, the notion of “temporary use” by “urban pioneers” in the “creative city” appears to be a new planning fad in Berlin, similar to other cities searching for a way to become competitive and establish an economically based identity.11 Although many local residents are cynical about the ways in which seemingly redundant spaces in the city are being claimed by city authorities under the label of Zwischennutzung, Berlin does make a contribution to how urban space might be theorized and even “mapped.” To be sure, the Senate Department for Urban Development borrowed this already existing concept from local parlance: Zwischennutzung emerged as an informal way for residents to refer to a kind of squatting or inexpensive use of city buildings, parcels, spaces, and infrastructure during the period of intense change following unification in the early 1990s. The term became a concept through its more public use and clearly gained the attention of city planners when the ZwischenPalastNutzung Verein (The Interim Palace [of the Republic] Use Association), an organization of activists, planners, and artists, and the artistic directors of the “VolksPalast” or People’s Palace project, explored and remade the spaces and memories of the GDR Palast der Republik before it was completely torn down.12 Indeed, Philipp Oswalt and Philipp Misselwitz, co-founders of the research platform Urban Catalyst, referred to the success of the ZwischenPalastNutzung/ Volkspalast activities when they argued that artistic and public use of the “ruins” of the Palast der Republik functioned as a catalyst to bring new programs, actors, and individuals to the city and thus offered alternative ways to imagine what urban development might mean.13 Similarly when Berlin’s Senator for Urban Development, Ingeborg Junge-Reyer, described

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Zwischennutzung as a “magical concept” in the Senate’s Urban Pioneers publication of 2008, she defined it as a special Berlin development strategy whereby residents could form meaningful spaces that “reflect and nurture their vision of the future.”14 In addition, she asserted that planners would have the opportunity to become familiar and comfortable with the notion of “the temporary,” and property owners would benefit in having their “dead-end on the urban landscape” rediscovered.15 In this most recent appropriation of Zwischennutzung as a development and planning strategy by the Berlin Senate, the inventive ways that residents have historically used urban space remain unrecognized. Berliners (in past and present) interact with their city’s fabric to facilitate, fashion, and conceive of formal and informal activities. To mention just a few, these have included: the squatters’ movement in West Berlin and postunification Berlin; informal markets in, under, and around metro train stations; caravan communities; flea, art, and weekly markets in public squares, alleys, and other spaces; and more recently, the construction of urban beaches on inner city canals. If one also considers the range of ways that groups and individuals have used urban spaces through the history workshop movement, street art, site-specific theater, or even through the invention of public venues, such as outdoor neighborhood movie theaters, it becomes clear that Berlin, just as many other cities, has a particularly rich history of using urban spaces in ways that may seem to be temporary but have a regularity to them. These activities, moreover, establish attachments to the lived city that offer an understanding of urbanism quite distinct from the locations or occupancies that city zoning and land-use mappings might suggest.16 In addition, shorter-term, “event-oriented” occupations of urban space appealing to a subaltern counterpublic, such as squatter protest actions, may change mainstream appreciation of the public realm.17 Some may even affect policy or public institutional practice and thus lead to longer-term uses or understandings of space, for example, when squatters choose to create a commune; when communes become an informal means of instituting rent control; or when rent control becomes an expectation. While this example is, of course, simplistic, my point is that what was once considered “temporary” may become a central presence for redefining the city and its functions. Supposed temporary uses may yield traditions, social movements, attitudes, and approaches for residents to claim their right to the city.18 How might we, as urban scholars, better communicate the alternatives that the Volkspalast organizers articulated and the creative ways in which Berliners experience and engage their city? I suggest a concept that acknowledges some aspects of official planning and development rhetoric, yet respects the local histories of and attachments to the city I describe

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above. Rather than focus on temporary land use per se (Zwischennutzung), a planning concept that designates parcels of property according to zoning codes and development strategies, I argue that a more appropriate concept is interim spaces. First, the concept of interim spaces recognizes space as relational rather than seeks to stabilize urban space through boundaries. A Cartesian, absolute understanding of space treats it as a container, as bounded or owned: things, peoples, activities are placed in or removed from this container. Plots zoned for one kind of land use or activity prevent other activities from taking place there; land-use maps classify space according to parcels of property. In contrast, an understanding of space as relational acknowledges how spaces may be created in relation to one another, may function across spatial scales (such as social space), or may work through times (when the imprints of the past offer possibilities for the present and future). The concept of interim spaces offers residents and guests temporal and spatial resources to make and remake their city. Second, if spaces are understood as relational, then the German term zwischen is more accurately translated as “interim” for my purposes than the English “temporary” (land use, in the sense of technical planning). The notion of interim allows for the dynamic and open-ended sense of in-betweenness, interventions, and unexpected possibilities. Interim suggests a fluidity of temporality, rather than an understanding of time measured and designated as insignificant or as located between the “real” times of before development and after development. Urban appropriations of “wastelands” enliven public space and offer new possibilities to imagine a neighborhood. SkulpturenPark Berlin_Zentrum Following unification, many buildings and parcels of land were sold or shut down; some became vacant, particularly along the former border of the divided city, as social and economic systems merged and nonresident speculators held onto property in hopes of making money. While much of the literature about Berlin’s urban transformations focused on the deals and drama of Potsdamer Platz, there were other Todesstreifen or death strips that remained empty.19 One such area was a five-hectare plot near the Fischerinsel in central Berlin that was comprised of 62 vacant lots owned by different private companies and individuals. Artists animated the complex space-times and pathways of urban remainders in what appeared to be the mundane leftover materials of Berlin’s post-unification milieu, including vacant buildings, empty lots, viewing platforms, and even stray trees. In November 2006, the collective of artists KUNSTrePUBLIK e.V. decided to create Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum at this seemingly

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overgrown plot. Matthias Einhoff, Philip Horst, Markus Lohmann, Harry Sachs, and Daniel Seiple, none of whom are from Berlin originally, had been looking at this area each day from their fourth-floor studio space in an otherwise deserted office building in the former East, where other artists and a design firm were located. They decided to explore this area as a particular place and hosted and conceived of site-specific projects that dealt with the unique history, geography, culture, and present-day significance of the supposed “empty lot.”20 The artists began doing research about the area and realized that this somewhat isolated plot had often been at both the center and margins of the city’s history. They thought that creative interpretations of the area might encourage those locals who have lived in the city for awhile as well as the many Berliners who had more recently moved to the city to explore their own urban histories and relationships to this place. For the first two years, they hosted three series of projects that included their own installations, other artists’ work, and also student projects. They addressed “subjects such as urban development, land speculation, and civil participation . . . on top of this uncultivated land.”21 Whereas “Inventory” was funded by the artists, the collaborative began writing grants on behalf of the Skulpturenpark for the exhibition series “Parcella” (in cooperation with the Lumen Foundation, Budapest) and “Spekulationen,” successfully getting support from Bipolar (a GermanHungarian initiative financed by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes) and the Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Berlin). News of the series traveled quickly, and art circles recognized the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum as an attractive, off-beat venue; the international curators of the 2008 Berlin Biennale invited the collective to be one of five locations for hosting installations and projects.22 While the experience of hosting the Biennale met with mixed feelings on the part of the collective, they decided to continue their work with two additional series, “Landreform” and “Wunderland,” from 2008 to 2010, funded by Kunstfonds (Bonn) and the European Cultural Foundation respectively. In 2006, the artistic collaborative launched the Skulpturenpark Berlin_ Zentrum by conducting historical research and then making artistic inventories of the area. Philip Horst’s Lightbulb, for example, created a sense of mutual responsibility for the area by residents who might not otherwise have considered themselves part of the same community. Horst installed a 300-watt light bulb that was suspended between two buildings standing 120 meters apart. Dangling 20 meters above these lots of overgrown fields, the soft light bulb could be turned on by a wireless remote control switch. Residents living in the surrounding apartment buildings were given the remote control for three days each and asked to keep a log of when they turned the light on and off.23 According to the artist, while most residents

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initially were quite playful with the switch, after a day, the ritual of turning the light on and off became part of their everyday routines. Some residents turned this switch on or off with their other home light fixtures, such as when they arrived home, whereas others switched on the light over the lots at night, when their own lights at home were off. It became clear from the residents’ written comments that even in the short period of three days, individuals began to feel a sense of responsibility and attachment to the area. Some were reluctant to pass the switch to the next resident, in case they disregarded the neighborhood light. The simple task of turning on the light when one came home transformed an otherwise overgrown field into a public realm in which an informal network shared responsibility for this formerly ignored space. In the second series of projects, “Parcella,” the collective curated other artists’ work, including Köbberling and Kaltwasser’s excavation and platform installations. Wiebke Grösch and Frank Metzger’s New Borders / Neue Grenzen ran through the month of August 2007. The artists hired a security guard to monitor and patrol a predetermined route that was created by local residents’ own pathways, rather than replicate the path of the

Figure 5.3 Glühbirne/Lightbulb © Philip Horst, Skulpturenpark Berlin_ Zentrum, “Inventory” series, 2006. Location: Block between Kommandantenstrasse, Seydelstrasse, and Alte Jakobstrasse. © VG Bild-Kunst, 2006.

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former border patrol. As the artists wrote, “this daily action refers to the history of the place, the former militarized zone within the Berlin Wall. On the other [hand], it underlies a contemporary dilemma affecting the site: the privatization of public space.”24 A security guard is usually hired to monitor shopping centers, gated communities, or pedestrian zones. In this conceptual piece, the guard was asked to take note of an area where there is seemingly nothing to control or note. After 1989, real estate owners and the city established different kinds of borders in terms of land-use zoning. Temporary fences were erected to delineate some of the properties and discourage trespassing and loitering. Other areas gave way to trails and shortcuts through which residents meander with their dogs, when they take a work break, or when they let their kids play in the fields. For the artists, the guard “becomes an actor of a repetitive performance where his or her employment and controlled route are on display.”25 Part of the performance included regular times to walk through and “check” the area, as well as writing up notes that he provided as part of his job. The third series, “Spekulationen,” also hosted visiting artists, including Etienne Boulanger’s Single Room Hotel Berlin. The artist made an affordable two-star hotel using billboards and public advertising materials and located the structure on one of the park’s corners to blend the billboards into the existing landscape. From the outside, the one-story construction of billboards were actual ads; Boulanger leased the hotel’s façade to advertising companies, so the ads provided not only the hotel’s architecture but also its economic sustainability. With the added revenue, the hotel offered affordable and competitive rates; it was quite popular and sold out quickly. Moreover, while the billboards served their typical purpose to draw attention to themselves through their size and aesthetics, they also provided urban camouflage for the hotel and for its guests to come and go unnoticed.26 The project’s sophistication and popular success evolved out of Boulanger’s previous work, Plug-in Berlin, a series of investigations in which the artist temporarily inhabited Berlin’s urban and public architectural spaces. Between 2001 and 2003, for example, he domesticated a large crawl space behind an advertising sign in a metro station; he also moved into a gap in a bridge’s concrete foundation. The spaces often required subtle modifications, such as building a cardboard wall, to camouflage his infiltration. With Single Room Hotel Berlin, Boulanger constructed new commercial and architectural spaces for guests to occupy. His creative practice presents an alternative to typical urbanization and development; his strategies for maximizing public space offer residents a way to live within and without the system. Berlin artist Valeska Peschke’s project in the “Spekulationen” series also used commercial aesthetics in the public realm, but she inverted the

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Figure 5.4 Single Room Hotel Berlin © Etienne Boulanger, 2007–2008, Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, “Spekulation” series. Corner of Kommandantenstrasse and Neue Grünstrasse. © Etienne Boulanger, 2007, courtesy of Association Etienne Boulanger.

commercial appropriation of public space through marketing icons. She created for the project a black silhouette billboard of a dog over seven meters tall: Und er kommt nicht allein (And He Doesn’t Come Alone). Peschke’s inspiration drew upon the city’s favorite pet, the dog, the wellknown poem “Schädelbasislektion” by Durs Grünbein about the border dogs along the death strip (the title of this project is drawn from the poem), and form of the Spanish Toro de Osborne.27 The Toro was a large, stylized black bull that the Spanish sherry company began erecting in 1956 along highways as an innovative advertising billboard. Nearly 40 years later, the European Union forbade alcohol advertisement on billboards, but by this time the bull had become an unofficial national symbol. After citizen resistance to the ruling, the Spanish High Court allowed the bulls to remain in 1997, without the Osborne brand name, as objects of cultural and aesthetic significance in the national landscape.28 In Berlin, Peschke’s work became a public devotional space to the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum’s most frequent users: dogs. According to the artist, “Und er kommt nicht allein displaces the principles of the

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Figure 5.5 Und er kommt nicht allein © Valeska Peschke, 2007–2008, Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, “Spekulationen” series. Photograph by KUNSTrePUBLIK, e.V. © VG Bild-Kunst, 2007.

Spanish Toro to downtown Berlin. At Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, how will local residents perceive this un-requested and identifiable monument which has just invaded ‘their’ space?”29 Although the artist had no idea how the figure would be received, it became a successful gathering place for locals (“Meet you at the dog”) and especially for dog owners’ organizations. Ulrike Mohr’s Neue Nachbarn / New Neighbors was a project about forced removals and exile using the tension between Berlin’s urban renovation and natural processes as metaphors. She sees her work as placing nonhuman natures in competition with human structures. In an earlier project, Restgrün, the artist removed five trees of spontaneous growth that had sprouted in the roof cracks of the Palast der Republik. As part of the “Spekulationen” series in 2008, she transplanted them at Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum. Just as their former home was being destroyed, the wild trees took root in the soil of the former no-man’s-land, planted in corresponding proximity as they had grown on the roof. Mohr placed Palast der Republik medallions around the trees and distinguished them from other spontaneous growth at the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum with small plastic botanical classifications pushed into the ground. The trees quietly and symbiotically blended in with their new neighbors, the wild trees that

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similarly sprouted from the cracks in the divided city.30 Mohr had hoped to transplant the trees again later that summer to the rooftop of the Neue Nationalgalerie, one of the venues for the Berlin Biennale, but she was only allowed to exhibit a sketch of the Neue Nachbarn project within the walls of the gallery and had to leave the trees at the Skulpturenpark Berlin_ Zentrum for her installation. According to the artist, the gallery directors considered it too political a gesture to transplant the trees to the city’s center, owing to the ongoing debates about the future of the Palast. Although the trees were allowed to stay at the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum for the period of the Biennale, new property owners wanted the trees removed from their plot; the collective also did not offer space elsewhere. The Palast trees are now in exile at a nursery in Berlin, and the artist hopes to find a new home for the trees in another city. While these projects were running, a number of individual lots were purchased for development at the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum: three investors set dates for breaking ground for new buildings, although only one was built during 2006–2008. In 2008, the model apartments for a high-end, Italianesque complex planned for the area ran alongside of the Berlin Biennale installations. The collective ended up developing an unusual set of relationships with the different land owners; some owners

Figure 5.6a Restgrün © Ulrike Mohr/VG Bild-Kunst, 2005. Photograph by Ulrike Mohr / © VG Bild-Kunst, 2005.

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were supportive, realizing that public attention would ultimately benefit their longer-term development agendas, whereas others did not cooperate, which meant that the changing spaces these owners fenced off also became part of the larger project. Moreover, after the Biennale local city authorities asked the artists to generate ideas and provide advice for the area’s future development. Within this context, the artists curated what might be their last two exhibition series, “Landreform” and “Wunderland,” to focus on “issues about labor, urban architecture and planning, land use, and the consequent changes within the community.”31 In addition to curating new projects and installations as part of the “Landreform” series, the artistic collaborative organized open forums, radio talk shows, and public lectures that included local residents, district authorities, scholars, and real estate experts on such topics as “sustainable development” and “The Artist and Urban Development.”32 In this way, they acted “as an attentive commentator on these dynamic processes [of neighborhood and urban change] and their effects on the economic, social, and everyday reality of the area.”33 What began as an experiment in creative squatting—a practice quite familiar to the city’s artists, students, and un- and underemployed—has since captured local residents’ and foreign artists’ support and now even shapes questions of urban development in the neighborhood. Indeed, their project has realized

Figure 5.6b Neue Nachbarn/New Neighbors © Ulrike Mohr, 2008, Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, “Spekulationen” series. Photograph by Skulpturenpark Berlin, e.V. © 2008.

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many of its goals, namely, “to inspire and frame other ways of perceiving, understanding, and experiencing vacated and unused urban space.”34 Conclusion Unlike the city planning approach to temporary land use as a means to longer-term investment, artistic and activist interim spaces offer different lessons about belonging in the post-unification city. In the case of the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, artists, visitors, and residents worked with past traces and layers to create intrusions into contemporary hegemonic understandings of the city. Using found materials—buildings, streets, empty lots, stray trees, and plants—artists defined and animated spaces that invited a process of critical reflection about how urban imaginaries are embedded within power relations and how citizens might engage the complex presences of what are assumed to be empty buildings or lots as lived places. The installations and processes of these artistic interventions connected residents and visitors to the city’s material fabric in unexpected ways; as performances, media circulations, recycled projects, excavations, and interrupted urban nature, residents were encouraged to suspend their quotidian routines. The symbolic and material moved across and through space, along pathways that blurred the boundaries between the insides and outsides of memory. Residents were invited to become witnesses and participants in their city’s (re)making by exploring the potentialities of the past and present in their imaginations for the future. In this way, projects at the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum subverted land use and ownership claims through participatory yet often lighthearted installations and forums. The ludic character of the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum artists’ work reflects what I argue is a different attitude toward the city, history, and politics than the artist-activists working in Berlin in previous years. These artists, as well as many of those whose works were hosted at the Park since 2006, are of a younger generation born in the late 1960s to 1970s (now in their mid-thirties to forties), a generation that was beginning to come of age politically about when or shortly after the Wall fell in 1989. Some came to study as university and art conservatory students and/or to live and work in Berlin or other Eastern German cities. I suggest that this generation of artists confronts and follows the city’s traces or Spuren differently than the earlier ‘68 generation in at least three ways. First, geopolitical relations and imaginaries have changed. Obviously, the Cold War and unification marked urban landscapes and desires for the future in particular ways. The city that these artists lived in and inherited as well as the stagings of Berlin’s pasts / presents / remembered futures changed in fundamental ways after 1989.

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Second, not only did the city’s physicality and staging change, the ways that activists and artists recognized and responded to the “empty spaces” of their city were also distinctive. This younger generation is less concerned with marking and making the landscape visible in a permanent way, such as with memorials or historical institutions; their interventions are often ephemeral and even playful. In contrast, in West Berlin, an older activist generation articulated anger, frustration, and rejection of a patriarchal system through their historical and artistic projects.35 Some activist-artists and activist-historians felt it was critical to create permanent spaces that would uncover conservative political projects and agendas as well as histories of official forgetting of the National Socialist past. For some, this attitude toward making memory visible through the landscape was tied to an activist educational and public agenda, aimed at communicating the message “Never again Auschwitz” that was particular to the German legacy as a “perpetrator society.” These political goals were also influenced by experiential forms of “political education” that emerged in Germany in the late 1970s and 1980s; some were tied to the historical projects pursued as part of a larger national competition established under former President Richard von Weizsäcker, which led to student research about the history of National Socialism in their local neighborhoods and communities.36 Moreover, the populist grassroots, localized history workshop movement, and other sitespecific forms of public art questioned the appropriateness of “sculpture on a pedestal” or emotive, realist plastic forms of commemoration. Some artists responded by creating what James Young has called counter-monuments, such as Horst Hoheisel’s Aschrott Brunnen in Kassel that inverted the form of a historical fountain into the ground to call attention to the forgetful nature of narratives about Jewish life in the community.37 In Berlin, the History Workshop Movement and the Active Museum against Fascism and for Resistance included artists, historians, and activists who drew upon the Swedish History Workshop movement and its logo of “We Stand upon Graves.” They began to view with suspicion city’s empty plots that were considered sites potentially hiding dark secrets about the past. By making visible previously invisible stories, activists sought to mark the historical significance of seemingly abandoned fields, “empty” sites, and vacated buildings. The Active Museum felt as though they needed to keep the past’s wounds open by creating “remembering landscapes,” which included activist interventions such as digs, posting alternative street signs and plaques with the truthful past, organizing walking tours, and other actions. The result of some of these “temporary” actions resulted in longerstanding historical institutions, local memorial museums (including the Topography of Terror), historical exhibitions, memorials, and related public artwork.

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In contrast, the younger generation of artist-activists approaches the “emptiness” of space in the city less in terms of uncovering evidence of the “forgetfulness” of a nation and its leaders who willfully tried to repress an unwanted National Socialist legacy, although vestiges of those Cold War political agendas still remain. They distinguish themselves from their predecessors in their critique of neoliberal planning and development strategies that fill in these so-called empty spaces, when in fact they see them as vibrant, alive, already full. They question the economic model of staging the “new” (neoliberal) city following unification, often by experimenting with other visions of the city that call attention to the possibilities of that urban vibrancy. The younger generation challenges international investment agencies’ definitions of land-use and property rights by engaging with residents’ rights to occupancy and using public space. Thus, their projects, like their predecessors’, call attention to lingering Cold War and conservative desires to normalize historical landscapes, for example, by reconstructing monumental historical palaces or structures from an untarnished, royal European (pre-Nazi, pre-national) past, at the same time that they confront urban theories of the obsolescence of the built environment as an outcome of capitalism’s overproduction. In other words, the postunification artists do work within the traditions of their predecessors in the former West—indeed, their work would be impossible without such social movements—but their understanding of the aesthetics of emptiness and their attitudes toward art, history, politics, and urbanism is distinctive. “Uncovering” the truth (treating the grass, land, old buildings as a superficial covering of a deeper-seated historical reality) or leaving some sort of permanent physical marker in the landscape, even if it is an alternative that challenges traditional forms, is not a necessary goal or outcome of their work. While landscape markers may have resulted from creative and collaborative engagements by both generations, the aesthetic goal of the younger artists is not to maintain a visible, and hence more permanent, presence in the landscape in the sense of a territorial claim to history. Third, the younger generation’s projects rest upon a rather different appreciation of the relations between the aesthetics of the political and the urban. They are less likely than their elders to define their artistic practice in opposition to the ideologies of mainstream political parties, and for this reason, they may seem less engaged with formal or modernist understandings of the political altogether. Of course, both generations work within existing traditions to challenge the “status quo” and the system of capitalism in some way, as I have already noted. But this younger generation’s work is not necessarily framed by a meta-narrative of resistance in the sense of confrontational, reactive city, state, and party politics that attempts to shame or unmask the doings of “the establishment.” Instead, they begin

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with the premise that the lived city and the political are more complex: capitalism is not monolithic, and party politics may be largely irrelevant to the politics of everyday life where memory/forgetting can work in multiple ways, including through affective as well “rational” and self-conscious forms. Their understanding of the political approaches Chantal Mouffe’s notion of agonistic politics, that is, an acceptance that social groups may have agendas that cannot be reconciled. Their practice rests upon an assumption that no common resolution is likely for bigger questions (such as the role of international capital in urbanization), but that micro-local and pragmatic change remain worth pursuing. Although theirs may be considered a less adventurous political agenda than a structuralist one, in their work they involve a broad cross-section of society in discussions about the city, its past and possible futures. From such a starting point, the question then becomes how democratic public spaces, realms, and networks can be created as forms of political engagement, where questions are posed, outcomes are uncertain, but all participants agree to respect each other as citizens.38 Indeed, the larger direction of the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum projects, as mentioned above, began to include open forums (on public radio stations, through community projects, through public speaker series) about urban development more generally and the future of the area at and around the plots used by artists. By their last series, however, international guest artists raised questions about the role of history, politics, and territoriality in the city in ways that encouraged a larger engagement with the politics and inheritances of divided cities. Angela Melitopoulos’s Möglichkeitsraum I / The Blast of the Possible: A Transnational Space Montage, for example, ran in 2009 as part of the most recent “Wunderland” series. The artist installed ten billboards depicting the situation of the Green Line that divides Nicosia, Europe’s last partitioned city. This transnational, spatial act of montage, of depicting the legacies of one divided city onto the spaces of Berlin’s death strips, included images of abandoned homes in the militarily controlled ghost city of Varosha in Cyprus and around the Green Line. The artist understands the billboards as an “unfinished screenplay,” as she sequenced the images of one forcibly deserted neighborhood in Cyprus (that might have occupied the past landscapes of Berlin’s former no-man’s-lands) to a city that may now be unified but still has abandoned structures as part of the legacy of division. Melitopoulos describes her work as “a project about the segmentation of collective memory in urban spaces and archives,” for the project makes connections across space and time to call attention to the violence of displacement resulting from political division.39 As the visitor walks through this landscape, looking up at the images, he or she will find telephone numbers scratched into the

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ground. Upon calling the number, visitors listen to stories (based upon archival research and oral histories) about other no-man’s-lands in Europe. Following the installation’s opening, the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum collaborative organized a roundtable discussion with the artist and guests from Nicosia, Berlin, and London on the themes of “nowhere” and “noman’s-lands.” As Melitopoulos’s work demonstrates, interim spaces are full of creative and political potential. The urban encounters offered to visitors through the projects I briefly described above create fluid contours between and through the space-times of the (known and) unknown city, provoking unexpected becomings and acts of discovery. These projects ask visitors to become active participants in the continual remaking of the urban ways of life; they invite residents to imagine their homes and cities as more inclusive spaces that may include past traces and connections to other destinations. In the process, residents, visitors, and tourists can explore these places as citizens and inhabitants of the city. They are encouraged to document the reasons why these places were made, how they were used, and why and to what ends they have become culturally important or obscure in the context of the “new” city. These artistic provocations ask visitors, residents, and city builders alike to look again and again at the city by reencountering its buildings, objects, social relations, and settings—its places—that together constitute the lived fabric of the urban realm. Notes 1. “Turn it one more time—Folke Köbberling & Martin Kaltwasser—Parcella # 03,” in Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, SkulpturenPark Projects: realisierte Projekte/realized projects 2006–2010, booklet at http://www.skulpturenpark. org/download/09- 01projects_sm.pdf, 10 (accessed March 5, 2010). 2. For a discussion of behind-the-construction-site-scenes of the city marketing program Schaustelle Berlin, see Claire Colomb Staging the New Berlin: Place Marketing and the Politics of Urban Reinvention Post-1989 (London: Routledge, 2011); Karen E. Till, The New Berlin Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Other artists also used inverted perspectives, scale, and viewing platforms to question the city’s marketing strategies, such as artist and scenographer Stefanie Bürkle: http://www.stefanie-buerkle. de/buerkle/index.php (accessed June 11, 2010). For a discussion of Bürkle and Köbberling and Kaltwasser, see Karen E. Till, “Re/Staging the City: Artistic Urban Encounters,” in Space and Truth/Raum und Wahrheit: Monitoring Scenography 2, ed. Thea Brejzik, Wolfgang Greisenegger, and Lawrence Wallen (Zurich: Zurich University of the Arts/Züricher Hochschule der Künste, 2009), 114–25. 3. On looking, see John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972); idem, Berger, About Looking (New York: Vintage, 1980);

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4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things [French 1966] (New York: Pantheon, 1971). Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995). Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44 (1938): 1–24. Although there are many critiques of Wirth’s work, his understanding of urbanism as a form of social organization that supports tolerance of difference remains relevant in the contemporary city. Karen E. Till, “Resilient Politics and Memory-Work in Wounded Cities: Rethinking the City through the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa,” in Collaboration for Resilience: Cases in Community Building and Resource Management, ed. Bruce Evan Goldstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT, forthcoming). As I have argued elsewhere, the concept of a site assumes problematic distinctions between time and space, interior and exterior worlds, and the individual and the social. See Karen E. Till, “Artistic and Activist MemoryWork: Approaching Place-Based Practice,” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 95–109. Claire Colomb and Ares Kalandides, “The New Be Berlin Campaign: Old Wine in New Bottles or Innovative Form of Participatory Place Branding? Reflections on the Evolution of Berlin Place Marketing and Branding,” in Towards Effective Place Brand Management: Branding European Cities and Regions, ed. Gregory Ashworth and Mihalis Kavaratzis (Cheltenham, UK, and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2010), 173–90. See also Hartmut Häussermann and Claire Colomb, “The New Berlin: Marketing the City of Dreams,” in Cities and Visitors: Regulating People, Markets, and City Space, ed. Lily Hoffman, Susan Fainstein, and Dennis Judd (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 200–18. Claire Colomb, Staging the New Berlin. Ibid. The Berlin Senate’s Department of Urban Development conducted a 2006 inventory of what it describes as abandoned spaces, including former industrial sites, redundant infrastructural sites, cemeteries, building plots, and vacant property and buildings resulting from the Stadtumbau Ost program. In 2007, it published a guidebook with various scenarios of successful and not so successful short-term uses and established its role as manager between property owners and potential users, which it describes as “Urban Pioneers.” Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, Urban Pioneers—Berlin: Stadtentwicklung durch Zwischennutzung (Berlin: Jovis, 2007). See also the Senate’s webpage: http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/bauen/baulueckenmanagement/, and the government-funded small agencies that market and develop temporary uses in such sites: www.zwischennutzungsagentur.de (both accessed March 5, 2010). Richard Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (New York: Routledge, 2004); Florida now has a copyrighted “creative class” webpage to promote his ideas: http://www.creativeclass.com/richard_florida/ (accessed June 11, 2010). See also Charles Landry, The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators (New York: Earthscan Publications, 2008). Amelie Deuflhard, Sophie Krempl-Klieeisen, Philipp Oswalt, Matthias Lilienthal, and Harald Müller, eds., VOLKSPALAST: Zwischen Aktivismus

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13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

und Kunst (Berlin: Theater der Zeit, 2006); Amelie Deuflhard and Sophie Krempl-Klieeisen,”Volkspalast: History of an Interim Usage: ArtIntervention-Activism-Transformation,” Monu: Magazine on Urbanism 4 (2006): 75–80, http://www.monu.org/monu4/Volkspalast.pdf (accessed March 5, 2010); and Philipp Misselwitz, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and Philipp Oswalt, eds., Fun Palace 200X, Der Berliner Schlossplatz. Abriss, Neubau oder grüne Wiese? (Berlin: Martin-Schmitz-Verlag, 2005). In 2006, the European Prize for Urban Public Space awarded a Special Prize to the ZwischenPalastNutzung/Volkspalast project. See http://www.publicspace. org/en/print-projects/d208-zwischenpalastnutzung-volkspalast (accessed March 5, 2010). For a brief discussion of the Palast versus Schloss debates, see also Karen E. Till, “Urban Remnants: Place, Memory, and Artistic Practice in Berlin and Bogotá,” Encounters 1 (March 2010): 75–87, and 101–103, www2.dokkyo.ac.jp/~doky0016/encounters/09/09_Karen.pdf (accessed August 9, 2010). According to the Urban Catalyst webpage, the program developed from a European research project of the same name that explored temporary uses of residual urban areas (2001–2003) and was founded by Philipp Misselwitz, Philipp Oswalt, and Klaus Overmeyer in 2003: http://www.urbancatalyst.net/index.php (accessed March 5, 2010). See also Philipp Oswalt, ed., Urban Catalyst: Strategies for Temporary Use (Barcelona: Actar, 2009). Klaus Overmeyer was hired as the managing editor for the Berlin Senate’s 2007 Urban Pioneers publication: Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, Urban Pioneers. Ingeborg Junge-Reyer, “Vorwort,” in Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, Urban Pioneers, 17. Ibid. My contrast draws upon the work of Henri Lefebvre, who distinguishes between representations of spaces, representational spaces, and lived spaces. Maps are one way of depicting urban space, which often does not mesh with the understandings and experiences of the lived city. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [French 1974], trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Here, I draw upon Nancy Fraser’s arguments about subaltern counter publics, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992), 109–42. On the Berlin squatting movement, see Alex Vasudevan, “Dramaturgies of Dissent: Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin, 1968–,” Social and Cultural Geography (forthcoming 2011). Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, ed. and trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); idem, The Urban Revolution [French 1970], trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (September-October 2008): 40–54; and Enrique Laraña, Hank Johnston, and Joseph Gusfield, “Ideas, Grievances, and New Social Movements,” in New Social Movements: From Ideology to Identity, ed. Enrique Laraña, Hank Johnston, and Joseph Gusfield (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 3–35.

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interim use at a former death strip? / 121 19. Elizabeth Strom, Building the New Berlin: The Politics of Urban Development in Germany’s Capital City (Lexington: Lexington Books, 2001). 20. Information about the Skulpturenpark projects stems from the collective’s publications and from informal conversations, email exchanges, and interviews between the artists and author from 2007 until 2009. See Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, Skulpturenpark concept & site history (published in March 2006 and updated October 2007), http://www.skulpturenpark.org/download/09- 01concept_sm.pdf (accessed March 5, 2010) and KUNSTrePUBLIK e.V., ed., Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum (Cologne: Walther König, 2010). 21. Ibid., 4. The series were “Bestandsaufnahme” (Inventory), “Parcella,” and “Spekulationen.” 22. The Biennale began hosting multiple-located events in Berlin’s vacant and re-occupied spaces in 2006. 23. “Bulb—Philip Horst—Bestandsaufnahme/Inventory,” in Skulpturenpark, Skulpturenpark Projects, 6. 24. “Neue Grenzen/New borders—Wiebke Grösch & Frank Metzger—Parcella # 04,” ibid., 11. 25. Ibid. 26. “Single Room Hotel—Etienne Boulanger—Spekulationen # 01,” ibid., 14; “Etienne Bounanger: Progress,” http://www.etienneboulanger.com/singleroomhotel/project.html; Joni Taylor, “Single Room Hotel in a Billboard’, July 2008, MINI space blog, http://www.minispace.com/en_us/article/ single_room_hotel_in_a_billboard/9/. For a general discussion of the artist’s work in transitory spaces, see http://www.etienneboulanger.com/fr/ (all accessed March 5, 2010). 27. Durs Grünbein, Schädelbasislektion: Gedichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). 28. For details, see Carla Johnson and Alyson Leatherman, “El Toro de Osborne: Advertising, Community, and Myth,” The Social Science Journal 42, no. 1 (2005): 135–40. 29. “Und er kommt nicht allein—Valeska Peschke—Spekulationen #02, Skulpturenpark, Skulpturenpark Projects, 15. 30. Ulrike Mohr, “Ausstellungsreihe SPEKULATIONEN (#3—#5), 17. Februar bis 23. März 2008,” http://www.ulrikemohr.de/index.php?/works--projects/ spekulationen/ (accessed March 5, 2010); “Neue Nachbarn—Ulrike Mohr— Spekulationen # 03,” Skulpturenpark, Skulpturenpark Projects, 18. 31. Skulpturenpark, Skulpturenpark concept & site history, 4. 32. “Survey Services—KUNSTrePUBLIK—Landreform #01,” a live broadcast talk show with real estate experts and public call-in discussions (on Radio 107.7), and “Consistory Talk 1—The Artist and Urban Development—Landreform #03,” with scholars from Istanbul, Berlin, and London, in Skulpturenpark, Skulpturenpark Projects, 21, 24. 33. “Site Description,” Skulpturenpark, Skulpturenpark concept & site history, 2. 34. “Evalution and Perspective,” ibid., 3. 35. See my discussion about the projects discussed below in The New Berlin, Chapters Three and Four.

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122 / karen e. till 36. One such project is represented in the West German film Das Schreckliche Mädchen (The Nasty Girl,1990), directed by Michael Verhoeven; also under the title of Das Mädchen und die Stadt oder: Wie es wirklich war. 37. James E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 267–96. 38. Chantal Mouffe, “Some Reflections on an Agonistic Approach to the Public,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2005), 804–07. 39. “Möglichkeitsraum I—Angela Melitopoulos—Wunderland #05,“ Skulpturenpark, Skulpturenpark Projects, 32. For more on the artist see “Angela Melitopoulous,” Liminal Zones: The Nicosia Seminar, http://liminalzones.kein.org/node/27 (accessed March 5, 2010); “Angela Melitopoulous,” European Institute for Progressive Cultural Politics, http://www.eipcp.net/bio/ melitopoulos (accessed March 5, 2010).

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Ch a p t e r Si x

Jug e n dw e i h e : R e v i ta l i z i ng a S o c i a l i st Com i ng - of - Ag e Ce r e mon y i n Un i f i ed Be r l i n Barbara Wolbert

Berlin in the spring of 2009: at a youth initiation event, called Jugendweihe, a poem entitled “Walpurgisnacht” is read in front of the girls and boys and their families.1 The poem’s last four lines refer to Germany’s East-West divide: “ . . . when the sun happens to shine at night / when Germany East and West happen to unite / when from clear skies a flash fills our pig-heads with light / well, this is then Walpurgis night.”2 The author’s recitation of these verses followed the official Jugendweihe speech and the appearance of about 50 young people on the CineStar stage in Hellersdorf, a movie theater in one of Berlin’s large and densely populated outlying eastern districts. These young people had climbed the stairs onto the narrow stage in front of the closed velvet curtain, covering the screen. They received applause, congratulations, a book, a bouquet of flowers, and a certificate. A comedian in a red tailcoat moderated the program of this coming-of-age celebration, which consisted of two songs by the show master himself, two performances by a singer in a powder-blue evening dress, and two dance teams—a troupe of break dancers and a couple of ballroom dancers—as well as the recitations of two poems, “Ich” and “Walpurgisnacht.” Read by the author at the very beginning and at the end of the program, these poems set the rather burlesque tone for most of the celebration, which was only interrupted by a condescending educational speech, a rather sentimental song, and the sheer amazement at the dancers’ acrobatics. In the spring of 2010, a similar ceremony took place on this and many other stages in Berlin, and the dates and times for the spring 2011 Jugendweihe in this same movie theater and other venues were already posted on the Internet.

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Many think Jugendweihe was a GDR ceremony. Others are aware that it has a much longer tradition. And some are familiar with similar celebrations in West Germany. The organizers of the post-Wall coming-of-age events do, in fact, emphasize that Jugendweihe goes back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Others refer to the Freethinkers, who established Jugendweihe in the 1880s as an atheist and humanist alternative to Catholic and Protestant confirmation celebrations (Firmung and Konfirmation). Almost simultaneously but independently, proletarian organizations offered their own coming-of-age ceremonies for the youth whom they were trying to attract as voters or activists. The Jugendweihe organizers today emphasize that the Nazis discontinued this tradition; they came up with their own initiations, celebrating boys’ entry into the Hitler Youth and girls’ initiation into the BDM, the Bund Deutscher Mädel (Association of German Maidens). While in postwar Germany, Jugendweihe was offered only in some cities of the West—in Hamburg, Dortmund, and a few others—and for only a couple of dozen young people, in the GDR it became a central social institution. Yet in the early 1950s, the new youth ceremony, which centered at this point around an oath of allegiance to socialism and to the socialist state, was established under increasing public pressure.3 Asked in 1989– 1990 about their own or their children’s Jugendweihe by someone from the West, many answered that they had to participate in it if they did not want to risk sanctions in their careers or education. And, indeed, a quarter of the Berlin eighth graders did not show up for their Jugendweihe that spring in the new East Germany—a GDR with open borders and without surveillance by the Stasi—even though those 14-year-olds had already been enrolled for it as part of their class before the Wall came down.4 During the short period of the post-Wall GDR, free communal elections took place, and public issues became subjects of roundtable discussions, such as the future of Jugendweihe, which were decisive for the ceremony’s survival. In the 1991 Jugendweihe season, the first one after unification, newly founded associations, which had been fostered by those discussions, continued offering coming-of-age events, although with little success. However, during the following years, an ever increasing number of adolescents participated in these ceremonies organized by a small number of locally or regionally operating associations. The celebrations in Berlin were organized by either the “Humanistischer Verband Deutschland” (Humanist Association Germany) or the “Interessenvereinigung Jugendweihe e.V.” (Interest Group Jugendweihe Inc.), now called “Jugendweihe Berlin/Brandenburg e.V.”5 The latter organization, for example, arranged the event in the CineStar in Hellersdorf. This chapter is devoted to Jugendweihe beyond socialism. It describes a state’s ritual of transition in a state of transition.

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An Oath of Allegiance, a Schnaps, and a Beer John Borneman suggests that Jugendweihe was part of a strategy in the struggle between the state and parents for control of children in which the church offered itself as an ally of the parents.6 At first, both the Catholic and the Protestant Churches fought ideological battles, seeing their rites of passage and Jugendweihe as mutually exclusive commitments.7 In the GDR capital, 20.7 percent of the youth took part in the spring 1955 ceremony, when it was initially presented as an ideologically rather open youth ritual, while the educational program preceding the official ceremony transmitted the ideas of dialectical materialism.8 After changes in the wording of the oath, which then emphasized the participants’ promised support for the socialist state, the churches agreed to compromises. The state benefited from this move, and by 1965 already 92.3 percent of the 14-year-olds participated in East Berlin; in 1986, this number rose to 98 percent.9 The core was still an oath of allegiance to the state, but over the years it had undergone a number of changes. By the mid-1980s, the participating eighth graders were asked to commit themselves to defending and supporting socialism, the classless state of farmers and workers, friendship with the Soviet Union and the other socialist countries, and the anti-imperialist struggle.10 How was this oath administered? When their escorts—in most cases, siblings, parents, and grandparents—had taken their seats, the girls and boys entered the room—a municipal hall such as a Kulturhaus (a culture center) or the school assembly hall—and took their reserved places in the front rows, from which they later rose and went onto a stage, if available, to swear the oath in front of their audience. The text was read out to them paragraph by paragraph, and after each one they swore in chorus: “Das geloben wir!” (we vow that). Each initiate received a certificate, a special Jugendweihe book accompanied by a quick handshake from the speaker, and flowers handed on by a member of the preteen youth organization, the Young Pioneers. All this took place after the speech by a representative of their parents’ generation, followed by a short speech of thanks by one of the initiates. Music was played, or a poem was recited. The Central Commission for Jugendweihe published guidebooks with details about the songs and poetry considered suitable for the festivities and possible slogans to decorate the hall.11 They usually suggested branches in full bloom or flower arrangements, a podium, flags, and a banner with a political slogan.12 The same commission recruited schoolteachers as members of Jugendweihe committees in every high school, who prepared the ritual sites and organized a preparatory program. The youth activities, referred to as the Jugendstunden, included discussions of ideological readings, field trips

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to socialist combines, museums, and monuments to the victims of fascism.13 Support for Jugendweihe was considered a labor union duty, particularly by socialist combines and cooperatives, and was anchored in the Law on Youth.14 Lea Shamgar-Handelman and Don Handelman’s anthropological studies on the symbolic representation of modern states’ social taxonomies helps us understand Jugendweihe as an event transmitting the “bureaucratic ethos of the state.”15 During the school year preceding the initiation, the young person graduated from the Young Pioneers to the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend or Free German Youth). During the first weeks of the eighth school year, the FDJ groups were constituted. This formation of politically organized youth collectives created a community of young people whose goals were seen as fully in accordance with the Jugendweihe concerns.16 She or he received the right to hold his own identity card.17 Fourteen-year-olds were allowed access to a new category of restricted movies. After Jugendweihe, students were to be addressed with “Sie,” the formal form for “you” in German. This complex of administrative regulations created a turning point in the life of young people. Jugendweihe was then perceived as a marker of a social transition. It also included unusual gifts and was the occasion for the largest and most obligatory family gatherings in the GDR, often bringing together the extended family, including former partners with their respective new families.18 Participation in such a family reunion was furthermore an acceptable reason for visitors’ visas to be issued for family members from the West.19 Jugendweihe parties had priority when reserving one of the much sought after tables in the few restaurants. Being enrolled for the ceremony was advantageous as well when it came to purchasing clothes in the “economy of shortage.”20 At the parties following the official Jugendweihe celebrations, the boys and girls used to drink their first glass of beer, wine, or hard liquor in the presence of their parents and other relatives, neighbors, and family friends without being blamed for disrespectful behavior or facing legal consequences. Often the adults challenged the 14-year-olds by offering those who had “come of age” that day alcoholic beverages and cigarettes. Those drinks play an important role in the Jugendweihe memories of people from all social strata who grew up in the GDR. While these practices privately confirmed the status passage proclaimed by the state, the new official privileges were understood as an acknowledgment of the young person’s promise to stand up for the socialist state, a pledge made in the public oath. Those who refused to participate had to expect sanctions, for example, when it came to admission to the desired institution of higher education. In short, Jugendweihe was a central instrument in the socialization of a GDR citizen.

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Not Doing Obvious Things with Symbols After German unification, the pressure for political conformity eased, as indicated in the final Jugendweihe participation quota in spring 1990. The legally defined coming-of-age complex for eighth graders was defunct, and with the end of the socialist state, an initiation centered on an oath of allegiance to that state became altogether obsolete. And yet we know that the practice was not abandoned! After a sharp decline in the number of participants in 1990 and 1991, the ceremony regained popularity. Although to a lesser extent than in the mid-1990s, when nearly two-thirds of all 14-year-olds in the eastern parts of Berlin took part in Jugendweihe,21 20 years after the end of the GDR, it is still celebrated in Berlin and even more so in Brandenburg and the other new states in Eastern Germany where almost two-thirds of the young people participate at the age of 14.22 How could this obsolete ritual survive in the first place? And what is its significance today? To examine ritual and its transformation is to talk about form. A universalist understanding of the need for initiation rituals in the life cycle and a pluralistic recourse to confirmation separate from church law would be rather misleading. These explanations, used as legitimation strategies by both some scholars and organizers of the new Jugendweihe, can easily be confused with its content and does not answer these questions.23 According to Emile Durkheim, ritual brings together a socially weakened group and strengthens it, and the ritual form can make a decisive contribution to social continuity in a moment of crisis.24 Without dismissing the idea of rituals’ social potential, we critically note the limitations of his and other functionalist approaches in ritual studies concerning the inadequacy in explaining or even detecting social change and the discontinuities that can arise between symbolic forms and the social order. From Clifford Geertz’s perspective, ritual—also and especially controversial ritual—gains in significance by delivering a “metasocial commentary.”25 His research pursues two questions: What does the ritual effect? What is expressed in the ritual? Instrumentalist and symbolic approaches do share something noteworthy in the case of Jugendweihe after unification. Both are focused on a content, task, or significance that appears to lie behind the ritual form and thus ignores the significance of form. Swedish anthropologist Tomas Gerholm renounces such dichotomization in favor of an integrative point of view that proposes a change of perspective.26 He offers the blueprint for a theory of ritual in transformative contexts. The processes of disintegration and fragmentation, which determine postmodern societies, necessitate analytical differentiation. Gerholm’s example comes from V. S. Naipaul’s tale of a person who needs a ritual expert to model a ritual that he wants to perform correctly, but this pundit does not share

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the idea of a correct way to perform the ritual.27 These processes require the distinction between the task inscribed in a ritual and the meaning that it achieves from the social context. A ritual of transition that alters a participant’s social status functions in the first sense. Practically every ritual can, however, also operate in the second sense because it can take on new assignments. Stressing the importance of anchoring ritual not only in a symbolic system but also in a social context for understanding it in postmodern societies, Gerholm makes a remark in passing to which I give greater weight: “ . . . an especially interesting case would be a ritual without an immediate tangible effect: a ritual that is not doing obvious things with symbols, marrying people, curing them or whatever.”28 On the basis of such a ritual, it is possible to demonstrate the importance of social context to understanding it; furthermore, it leads to a discussion of the form itself. Jugendweihe after German unification is a particularly interesting case of a ritual without immediate tangible effects. According to its name, Jugendweihe is a blessing (Weihe), part of a rite of passage that starts with the Jugendstunden. It is, however, neither a ritual accompanied by change in status nor a ceremony affirming state order, after having lost its content as a state initiation ritual in the way Don Handelman and Lea Shamgar-Handelman might understand it. The significance of the practice can thus only be grasped in its social context and by concentrating on the ritual form as we found it in the 1990s, relieved of its functions. Let me recall a Jugendweihe of 1994. This event in Berlin-Adlershof took place in a multipurpose hall on the former military base of the Guard Regiment Felix Dzerzhinsky, a unit of the Nationale Volksarmee (National People’s Army) under the command of the minister for state security, which had been turned into a community and youth center called “Come In.” Above the stage hung a white banner with the word Jugendweihe written in lower case in a violet font—no political slogan, no emblem, flower arrangements, gray-violet decor matching the podium, a neutral celebratory atmosphere. This celebration started with a rock-and-roll performance by young girls called the “Tanzteenies”; then a representative of the Interessenvereinigung Jugendweihe introduced those staging the event: the speaker, the music group “inTeam.” In the 1990s, the audience no longer consisted of students from a single school class with their relatives, but hearing that the organizers were volunteers from this city district might nevertheless have conveyed a sense of community. Some of the songs were reminiscent of the FDJ Singing Movement; the texts dealt with trust, longing, and loneliness. One may or may not have heard political comments on capitalist society in the lyrics of their songs, such as in the refrain: “Frei, frei, vogelfrei, flieg oder stirb, fly oder die!” (Free, free, like

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fair game, fly or die [first in German, then in English]). Before the tenminute speech, “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana was performed, a piece from the musical repertory of socialist Jugendweihe ceremonies. Seeking to win broad agreement, the speaker cited Goethe, Tolstoy, and Henry Ford. Alluding to Gorbachev’s metaphor of the European house, she said: “First, however, it is important to fill in the trench caused by the demolition of the wall in our own home.” In the context of—to use her words—“societal changes,” she spoke about “the others” who must be prepared “to open up” and “to accept them as they are.” While the Wall, metaphorically or literally, did not have a deep foundation, in her comparison its fall caused a ditch or moat, yet another means of fortification. She did not refer to an inevitable “fall” of the Wall but rather to a violent undertaking, a demolition. The lack of clarity as to who the others were, who the agent and who the object, who the loser and who the beneficiary, allowed audience members to find their own critique in these remarks. “Congratulations on your Jugendweihe,” was repeated each time as ten to twelve names were called out, and the initiates lined up on the stage, where the speaker and a representative of the local office of the Interessenvereinigung Jugendweihe handed out books and certificates. Two girls offered flowers, as Young Pioneers formerly had done. The participants’ only public activity was to walk up to the stage, and the only act of “graduation” was their presence

Figure 6.1 Jugendweihe in the multipurpose hall of the youth center “Come-In” in Berlin-Adlershof, 1994. © Barbara Wolbert.

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at the speech. Everything went so smoothly that any question as to who actually received—and where, when, or how—the initiation, for which they were being congratulated, was avoided. Then, with the stage bathed in red spotlights, the “Tanzteenies” concluded the program, now in a bit more frivolous gymnastic tights and top hats. Participants could order a videocassette recording of the ceremony in the lobby. Returning to Gerholm, we must make the post-unification Jugendweihe context explicit, since the ritual is no longer anchored in a symbolic system. The experience of new sources for income, investment, and consumption possibilities diminished forced competition and depreciated old networks. The closing of enterprises, the restructuring of education, and political investigation procedures shook the social order to its roots, overturned plans for future life, and led to general nervousness. Jugendweihe now took place in a “public-social sphere which is henceforth only experienced as a zone ‘not literally’ controlled by ‘system pressures’ ” and which therefore appeared to cause anonymity and isolation. The formulations quoted here are from Hans-Georg Soeffner’s sociological study of ritualization processes in West Germany during the 1980s.29 Just as the expressly political activities he observed and understood as “naïve, unexamined ritualism” (90), so too Jugendweihe suggests togetherness and equality of feelings. At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, social scientists in general had to rethink ritual theory in the context of pluralizing societies. Anthropologists David Kertzer and Gerd Baumann, for example, expanded on Durkheim’s principle that ritual practice produces the experience of certain emotions rather than responding to them. Kertzer assumed that rituals produce solidarity, whether or not they are dependent on shared, common convictions.30 Baumann introduced the category of the “other” into the discourse on ritual in pluralistic societies.31 Ritual activities that serve to strengthen, define, or integrate a group into a larger social context were more often than not perceived by religiously or ethnically different groups, by onlookers, and by television viewers. In turn, the active participants were aware of this and indeed made ritual reference to these Others. In the case of Jugendweihe, the Others were first of all those for whom it had no significance. That primarily meant those from the West. Even without a common opinion among the participants as to the significance of this ceremony, Jugendweihe increased the consciousness of a common background—something that a headline in the magazine Der Spiegel pithily labeled “That Eastern Feeling.”32 Yet the social context alone cannot explain why the ceremony served this function; the ritual form in its own dynamic must be examined. Jugendweihe’s impact arose from a mixture of amateurism and perfection, from handicraft and pathos. Recognition

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and stirred emotions led the participants to overlook the fact that its ritual core—the oath—was missing. Whenever a specific, exclusive ritual core is present, the form may vary, but in this case the form itself carried the entire burden of ensuring the ritual’s survival. Form and Transformation An integral component of both forms of Jugendweihe in unified Berlin, the ceremonies offered by the Interessengemeinschaft Jugendweihe e.V. and by the Humanistischer Verband Deutschland, was the videocassette recording. These recordings interpreted and fixed the form and thereby contributed to conventionalizing Jugendweihe afresh and balancing out the lack of content. The highly standardized form was able to draw authority from the past without having to rely on the old ideology or being urged to offer a new one. The ceremony’s success lay in the paradox of guaranteeing proximity to tradition and simultaneously demonstrating distance from it. In this regard, the logic is noteworthy by which form, cleansed of (ideological) content, becomes available as virtual form. The second type of Jugendweihe, which the organizer Humanistischer Verband Deutschland referred to as an “alternative Jugendweihe” or the so-called JugendFEIER (youth CELEBRATION), spelled in part in capital letters to emphasize the events’ difference, appears at first glance to contradict this statement. The Jugendfeier events of the same year took place in several prominent venues, including the Congress Hall in Berlin’s central park “Tiergarten,” the Schauspielhaus Concert Hall at the historic Gendarmenmarkt, and in the Friedrichstadtpalast. At the last venue, I attended a celebration that began with a Beatles song performed by a trombone quintet, followed by sketches, a chanson, and rock music pieces in German. The second part, labeled “ceremonial,” consisted of a video review, the distribution of the certificates, a congratulatory speech, and a finale. Concentrating on the rhetoric and dramaturgy of this rapidly paced event helps eludicate the formal structure that underpins the conventions of the renewed ritual. Instead of a welcome speech, a sketch performed by three nonprofessional actors opened the ceremony, which at the same time provided a metatext for the entire event with an allegorical Saul-Paul conversion: A boy spoke to two girls on their way to the Jugendfeier. In youthful slang, they dealt with the difference between Jugendweihe and Jugendfeier, defined humanism, and gave information about the activities of the sponsor, the Humanitischer Verband. One of the girls ended the dialogue by hitting the punch line. As a flourish to the girls’ wit, the lead guitarist, now in the spotlight, hit a couple of sudden loud chords, and the rock group Gerhard Gundermann und Seilschaft (Gerhard Gundermann and Cronies) segued into the first piece,

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blending into the audience applause. While songs by the East German cult songwriter Gundermann were performed at small district ceremonies (for example, at the Adlershof ceremony described above), here the “new Gundermann” appeared in person with his newly minted ensemble. Then Dirk Michaelis, famous for a song expressing East Germans’ feelings during the exodus via Hungary and Prague in the summer of 1989, sang a chanson that addressed and appealed to the emotions of the older generation, who had experienced the end of their work teams and being laid off: “ . . . as if I did not belong to them, as if I did not travel together with them.” A second “self-serving” contribution, this time in the form of a video projection, connected the organizers with the participants by pointing out their already existing common history. Embedded in the larger history of the German past, it invited audience identification through solidarity with the victims. The rear scrim was used as a large-format projection screen that showed a mother and son discussing their decision to participate in the Jugendfeier. Then the female moderator was spotlighted: “Everybody got older and more mature in the last hour? But perhaps what is new began already half a year ago. Do you remember? With the opening in the Kesselhaus of the Kulturbrauerei everything began quite officially.” The projection presented familiar images from the community: the rocking masses of dancers at the “Opening Party” in Prenzlauer Berg, girls at a jazz dance project, the leader of a Kung Fu project in action, the Berlin Synagogue in the Oranienburger Straße, Moses Mendelssohn’s grave, and the monument at the former concentration camp in Sachsenhausen. Gundermann drove away the growing uneasiness with a few chords before the moderator, alternating with the actor who played the grandfather in the sketches, called out the names of the young people and wished them luck. Those called upon could be seen on the large projection screen on the stage as the spotlight picked them out and they rose from their seats to receive a book and flowers under spotlights. The congratulations at the seats and the speech, reduced to a wish for good luck offered by the project leader already seen in the film, as well as the vernacular of the sketches and the moderation indicate that the celebration has broken with rigid ritual. The final image arose from a spiral movement, pulling the young people onto the stage and bringing the others to their feet. Its spontaneity was the result of professional stage direction. The projection, the spotlights, and the four cameras played a crucial dramaturgical role here and during the entire ceremony. With a welcoming gesture, finally calling the youth onto the stage, Gundermann sang: “So gather here on this stage,” while the space around him filled with girls and boys waving hands and bouquets to the rhythm of the music. After postproduction was completed, VHS tapes of this show entitled Jugendfeier were mailed to the families.

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Figure 6.2 Jugendfeier in the Friedrichstadtpalast in Berlin-Mitte, 2009. © Gabriele Groschopp.

In the 1990s, the apparent renunciation of form was merely a departure from the expected form. A form that in this way appeared as a nonform could be perceived as content. In other words, an event that in terms of its transformativity was modestly introduced as a ceremony and organized as a performance found new acceptance as a ritual. Two constructs made this reversal possible. First, as an “alternative Jugendweihe,” the Jugendfeier of the Humanistischer Verband could and had to separate itself from the basic form of Jugendweihe, that is, from the new, post-1990 Jugendweihe. In contrast to the ceremony of the Interessenvereinigung Jugendweihe, at which prior programs were hardly mentioned, here the regularly recurring events were privileged, for example, the Jugendstunden in the GDR. The label “project” and the arbitrariness of themes created the necessary distance to the old ritual practices. The temporal depth, articulated, for example, by the projected video narration, was a constructive element of ritual content. Without making it explicit, it promoted the claim to accompany the girls’ and boys’ maturation process and thus, also in the case of the Jugendfeier, to establish continuity with the socialist Jugendweihe. Second, the TV show format compensated for the renunciation of this old form. In contrast to the “auditorium ceremonies” of the Interessenvereinigung Jugendweihe,

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here the spotlights and the professional cameras endow the uninfringed private sphere with the significance of a public event. The transitory nature of both ceremonies allowed the individual spectator to have a sense of belonging without having to surrender the shield of anonymity. The choice of performers, who were familiar from their GDR performance past, provided implicit references to the participants’ common background. Both ceremonies offered the opportunity to celebrate meaningfulness without having to take on some profession of faith, either religious or secular. The competitive coexistence of the two forms prevented internal wrangling about formal variations, which could have endangered the continuity of Jugendweihe. Because of the authority of symbolic form, whether adapted from the old practices, strengthened by state power, or borrowed from television, the ritual has been able to survive undamaged despite the loss of its significance as a state institution. The post-Wall Jugendweihe/Jugendfeier complex is not only an interesting case of a form without content, suitable for use as a conceptual model for the anthropology of societal transformation; it is also a key to understanding the intricacies of German unification. A Wild Card Since I am neither in agreement with the organizers’ idea of a comingof-age ritual as a natural practice, nor do I follow their rhetoric on the need for an alternative to a religious ceremony, I find it useful to address the social necessity of Jugendweihe or Jugendfeier, positioning them in the larger field of cultural production. What does their continuation enable even after the state, to which the young people were asked to commit themselves, vanished? What is the social significance of Jugendweihe after the unification? What has it offered because of and beyond the experience of “communitas”?33 What does it tell us now, more than 60 years after the founding of the two postwar Germanys and more than 20 years after their unification? In January 2000, an ad appeared in the Berliner Zeitung that gives us a first clue.34 Imagine the photograph of a girl and a boy, about 14 years of age. We see both faces and most of their bodies. They are dressed casually for mild weather. Their smiles seem to indicate mutual understanding. In the space between their bodies, a bit out of focus in the background, is a garden chair with wrapped gifts. One word is printed on the upper part of the image: Jugendweihe. Underneath this color photograph, we find the depicted clothes itemized and their prices attached. In the lower right corner of the ad, the letters C&A are resplendent in red, the logo of an international chain of clothing stores with merchandise in the lower price

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segment of the European market. In 2000, the post-GDR Jugendweihe was obviously well enough (re)established in Berlin that people would understand the laconic reference; the fact that the occasion qualified for an advertisement can furthermore be read as proof that the reputation of the new ceremony allowed for the evocation of positive associations that are imperative for selling a product. This advertisement substantiates that a ritual, originally devoted to the support of a socialist state, ironically helped to redefine the former citizens of this state as consumers within a market economy—a difficult process to which in particular Daphne Berdahl has drawn our attention.35 Along with other shopping occasions introduced in the 1990s, such as Valentine’s Day, national and multinational companies’ marketing strategies for the first quarter of the year in eastern Germany have meanwhile fully integrated Jugendweihe. The GDR textile industry used to present their yearly production of youth clothing in special fashion shows dedicated to Jugendweihe. This tradition was later picked up when, in January 1994, a youth fair took place in a former socialist party academy in Berlin, the “Haus am Köllnischen Park.” Announced as “1. Days for Youth 1994—Berliner Jugendmesse” (the original title), the fair was the

Figure 6.3 “Days for you: Jugendweihe 2009.” Fashion show in Linden-Center, a shopping mall in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. © Daniel “classless” Kulla.

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first widely visible step toward this commercialization. In fashion shows and in make-up and photo sessions, local businesses advertised products and services of immediate use for Jugendweihe participants. Bike shops, specializing in a product that belongs to the most popular Jugendweihe presents, banks offering savings accounts for 14-year-olds who could also expect monetary gifts, and private schools as well as travel agencies selling immaterial gifts such as art courses, language instruction, and trips had rented booths at the fair. Even the Berlin police and the army marketed themselves as attractive future employers. The staircases, hallways, and rooms were packed, but the fair did not turn out to be a successful investment for its organizer, a former GDR civil servant and new entrepreneur, and it was not repeated in the following year. The old connection between the fashion industry and Jugendweihe has meanwhile been revived by much bigger companies selling labels such as Orsay, s’Oliver, and Gerry Weber, as well as retail chains such as Douglas, Galeria, and Peek & Cloppenburg. The new shopping malls in the eastern part of Berlin are now the facilitators. In 1995, one year after the fair in the former socialist party academy, the Linden-Center opened for business in the district of Hohenschönhausen; and ten years later, Eastgate, one of the largest shopping centers in all of eastern Germany, attracting 25,000 visitors per day, opened its doors.36 Both were located in the privatized, remodeled, and restructured urban areas on the eastern margins of the former GDR capital city. They provide the stage for the contemporary Jugendweihe fashion shows, entitled “Days for you” (both correcting the orthographic flaw in the English title of the 1994 fair and suggesting continuity with it). The fashion shows rely on professional technical equipment, decoration, music, and moderation and on nonprofessional models.37 The models not only attract their own family and friends as audience members, they also exude an atmosphere of immediacy and involvement for the mall’s other shoppers and visitors. The collaboration of professional entertainers and nonprofessional performers furthermore allows for a socially rewarding semiprofessionalism in a world shaped by the unmediated experience of unemployment. In a district of Berlin, in which every fifth adult inhabitant has been laid off or did not find a job after school or vocational training and thus remains or reverts to the seclusion of a life lacking professional activities, these fashion shows convey the idea of participation in a public function. With regard to the need for bargain hunting, unemployment—though an obstacle to consumer’s potency— may lead to intensified consumer activities. Daphne Berdahl has deftly applied Arjun Appadurai’s view of consumption as the “principal work of late industrial society” to the Eastern Germans.38 Immediately after unification, they “had to learn not only how to navigate their way through new

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structures of consumer credit, domestic finance, and money management but also where and how to shop.”39 For the unemployed East Berliners of the twenty-first century, the mall has not only turned into a meeting place but also a substitute work place: “participation in the public sphere and membership in the new society depend not on what you produced, but on what, how and where you consume.”40 Jugendweihe has thus played a decisive role within former GDR citizens’ and their children’s socialization into Western consumer culture. It helped to reconcile East German labororiented collectivism with the challenges of consumerism in a situation of widespread unemployment. Like the fashion shows, the ceremony in the CineStar in May 2009, briefly described at the beginning of this chapter, took place in a commercial environment. A lack of public space large enough to organize such events but also profitable enough to cover their resulting costs had been a reason why the Hellersdorf youth ceremony had taken place outside the neighborhood for several years. When the stage enlargement and other modifications of this theater seating 500 visitors had been completed to meet the demands of the Jugendweihe organizers, one of the widely read Berlin newspapers covered the acclaimed achievement in an article.41 With the exception of the speech offering caution and encouragement by a man young enough to have had his own Jugendweihe already in the new Germany, this was first and foremost a show, striving for amusement and applause, presupposing a good general education, but making sure that a lack of cultural capital would not exclude anyone from understanding an allusion or a punch line. It was spiced up with cheesy jokes and here and there a slippery remark, resembling those of comedy programs on commercial TV stations, which became increasingly popular after satellite TV was introduced in Germany in 1996. This Jugendweihe touched political topics in a cracker barrel fashion. Alluding to governmental attempts to raise the official retirement age, for example, the poet and reader congratulated the youth on being only 75 years away from drawing a pension. Even though it set a different tone, these same topics came up at the Jugendfeier in the Friedrichstadtpalast of the same year. A well-known, middle-aged actress, who in lieu of a formal speech from the podium addressed the youth only with a mike in her hand from the middle of the large stage under a spotlight, wished that they would “ . . . have sympathy for other people who do not cope very well with difficult situations, with unemployment for example.” Politicians from a variety of political parties have accepted invitations for Jugendweihe speeches as a means to reach voters in the new eastern states. In 2009, Petra Pau gave speeches at two of the Cinestar celebrations. Marzahn-Hellersdorf is her electoral district. Before unification, she

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worked for the Central Council of the FDJ and Young Pioneers youth organizations until she became “arbeitslos,” as she emphasizes on her website.42 A founding member of the post-GDR socialist party PDS, she is currently an elected member of the party caucus and vice-president of the German Parliament. Another politician, Social Democrat Manfred Stolpe, appears in a video on the website of the Interessengemeinschaft Jugendweihe. A former federal minister and, until 2002, prime minister of Brandenburg, he stresses that Jugendweihe Berlin/Brandenburg e.V. is just a private organization, but he expresses his trust in its ability to perform as a facilitator of educational projects and social work and pledges to continue governmental support. Implicitly he refers to public services—such as pedagogical services targeting this state’s youth, which the Land Brandenburg has outsourced. Petra Pau’s webpage hints at an additional social function for the continuation of Jugendweihe after unification. Its direct link to the homepage of Jugendweihe Berlin/Brandenburg e.V. demonstrates how this organization has served as a network and employer for members of the former Central Commission for Youth Initiation, for organizers of summer camps and youth functionaries, who were, like Petra Pau, disbanded when the GDR imploded. This applies as well to professional educators, who after the fall of the Wall were no longer welcome as state employees due to their engagement in the GDR socialist party or their connections to the secret police. Members of Jugendweihe Berlin/Brandenburg e.V. and the Humanistischer Verband have used Jugendweihe to establish a private system of public education. In terms of social access and political content, they gained control of a field of cultural production that used to be a state domain. This case study shows what can become of a ritual form that has lost its content, as Gerholm put it, “a ritual without an immediate tangible effect: a ritual that is not doing obvious things with symbols.”43 An empty form can conceal the loss of content, borrow authority from established practices, and make itself available as a surrogate to those who need a performative structure to maintain a political course and social influence. Jugendweihe smoothed the way to unification for GDR citizens with very different interests and perspectives. It allowed conciliation of antagonistic positions among two distinct groups: those who had lost the albeit rather limited political power, social influence, and economic security of their former GDR state functions, and those from the GDR workforce who were neither willing to leave the east of Germany or of Berlin nor successful on the contested local or regional labor market and who had just learned to accept their immersion in consumer culture as a substitute for their participation in collectives of socialist industrial production. In other words, Jugendweihe has turned out to be a wild card. When brought into

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play, it reconciled Berdahl’s “spirit of capitalism” and anti-capitalist activism to (re)constitute a “cult of unity.”44 Thus, it has proven its transformative, affirmative, and subversive potential: it helped to integrate the East into the West German economic system, and it has kept the East apart from the West by means of social interventions, cultural initiatives, and party politics. Notes 1. This chapter expands my earlier study on the form and transformation of the Jugendweihe, published in Kuckuck. Notizen zur Alltagskultur und Volkskunde 2 (1995): 23–28, and in Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 94, no. 2 (1998): 195–207. The argument is based upon fieldwork carried out intermittently between 1992 and 1997 and now updated by participant observation, interviews, and Internet research in 2009 and 2010. I am grateful to Richard Gardner and Marc Silberman for editing the manuscript. 2. “Walpurgisnacht,” written and recited by Michael Ebeling at the Jugendweihe event of May 23, 2009 in the CineStar multiplex movie theater in BerlinHellersdorf (translation by Barbara Wolbert). The original German: “ . . . wenn nachts auch mal die Sonne scheint / wenn Deutschland Ost und West sich eint / wenn ein Blitz aus heitrem Himmel direkt in uns’re sturen Schädel kracht / ja, dann ist wohl Walpurgisnacht!” 3. Ute Mohrmann, “Jugendforschung in der DDR—unter besonderer Berücksichtigung volkskundlicher Untersuchungen zur Jugendweihe,” in Gegenwartsvolkskunde und Jugendkultur, ed. Klaus Beitl (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1987), 317. 4. Konrad Jahr-Weidauer, “Interesse an der Jugendweihe sinkt in Berlin,” Welt Online, April 15, 2006, www.welt.de/print-welt/article211010/Interesse_an_ Jugendweihen_sinkt_in_Berlin.html (accessed March 22, 2010). 5. Jugendweihe Berlin/Brandenburg e.V. calls its events Jugendweihe, while the Humanistischer Verband Deutschland uses the term Jugendfeier or “youth celebration.” The abbreviation “e.V.” stands for “eingetragener Verein” or registered association, indicating a voluntary association that may legally function as a corporate body rather than just a group of individuals. 6. John Borneman, Belonging in the Two Berlins. Kin, State, Nation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 164. See also U. Jeremias, Die Jugendweihe in der Sowjetzone (Bonn: Bundesministerium für Gesamtdeutsche Fragen, 1956). 7. Mark Allinson, Politics and Popular Opinion in East German 1945–1968 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 99–112. 8. In the entire GDR 17 percent initially enrolled for the Jugendweihe in 1954, the number rose to 89.5 percent in 1964, and half a year before the fall of the Wall the number reached 97 percent. See Mohrmann, “Jugendforschung in der DDR,” 317. 9. Borneman, Belonging in the Two Berlins, 165. 10. See Detlef Urban and Hans Willi Weizen, Jugend ohne Bekenntnis. 30 Jahre Konfirmation und Jugendweihe im anderen Deutschland 1954–1984 (Berlin:

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11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

Wichern Verlag, 1984), 58–59. See the oath of 1985: http://www.ddr-wissen. de/wiki/ddr.pl?Jugendweihe (accessed September 21, 2009). The Zentraler Ausschuß für die Jugendweihe (Central Commission for Youth Initiation) regularly published manuals as well as a Jugendweihe handbook and the magazine Jugendweihe. Zeitschrift für Mitarbeiter und Helfer, which was distributed to volunteer workers in the Jugendweihe committees. See Horst Adam et al., Handbuch zur Jugendweihe, eine Anleitung für Mitglieder der Ausschüsse für Jugendweihe und Jugendstundenleiter (Berlin: Volk und Wissen, 1974) and later editions. Gerhard Hoppe, Hinweise, Anregungen, Materialien. Zur Gestaltung sozialistischer Feierstunden (Berlin: Zentraler Ausschuß für die Jugendweihe, 1963). Gregory Wegner, “In the Shadow of the Third Reich: The ‘Jugendstunde’ and the Legitimation of the Anti-Fascist Heroes for East German Youth,” German Studies Review 19, no. 1 (February 1996): 127–46. See also Mohrmann, “Jugendforschung in der DDR,” 317, Bornemann, Belonging in the Two Berlins, 165. See Law on Youth, Article II, Paragraph 10; on the role of labor unions, see Gerhard Allendorf, Gewerkschaften und Jugendweihe (Berlin: Tribüne Verlag, 1959), 37–41, and idem, Die sozialistische Jugendweihe und die Aufgaben der Gewerkschaften. Lehrmaterial für das Fernstudium (Berlin: Hochschule der deutschen Gewerkschaften “Fritz Eckert,” 1964), 52–61. Lea Shamgar-Handelman and Don Handelman, “Celebrations of Bureaucracy: Birthday Parties in Israeli Kindergartens,” Ethnology 30, no. 4 (1991): 293–312. Horst Adam, et al. Handbuch zur Jugendweihe, eine Anleitung für Mitglieder der Ausschüsse für Jugendweihe und Jugendstundenleiter, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Volk und Wissen, 1977), 26–27. On the FDJ see Ulrich Mählert and Gerd-Rüdiger Stephan, Blaue Hemden—Rote Fahnen. Die Geschichte der Freien Deutschen Jugend (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1996), and Helga Gottschlich, ed., Links und links und Schritt gehalten . . . Die FDJ: Konzepte–Abläufe–Grenzen (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 1994). See Ute Mohrmann, “Sitten und Bräuche im Lebenslauf der DDR-Bürger,” Abhandlungen und Berichte des Staatlichen Museums für Völkerkunde Dresden 44 (1990): 443. Ute Mohrmann, “Alltag und Festtag in der DDR: Zu unserem Umgang mit volkskundlichen Traditionen,” Ethnographisch-Archaologische Zeitschrift 27 (1986): 36; idem, “Jugendforschung in der DDR,” 317. Jugendweihe, a 1978 film directed by Celino Bleiweiss and based on a screenplay by Gerhard Rentzsch, deals with visitors from the West. Shown only once in the GDR, it not only portrayed the Westerners with critical irony but allowed viewers also to perceive Jugendweihe from the perspective of outsiders. Berdahl applied this expression, which Kornai had coined in 1992 with reference to other states of the Eastern Bloc. Daphne Berdahl, “The Spirit of Capitalism and the Boundaries of Citizenship in Post-Wall Germany,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 47, no. 2 (2005): 238. On 31 December 1994, Berlin had 37,222 youth, 17,257 of whom lived in the eastern districts of Berlin (Statistisches Landesamt); 11,500 took part in

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22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

the Jugendweihe, while 6,934 youth had a Protestant Konfirmation and 1,158 youths had a Catholic Firmung. See Konrad Jahr-Weidauer, “Interesse an der Jugendweihe sinkt in Berlin,” Welt Online, April 15, 2006, www.welt.de/ print-welt/article211010/Interesse_an_Jugendweihen_sinkt_in_Berlin.html (accessed March 22, 2010). In 2008, 60 percent of the fourteen-year-olds in the state of Brandenburg (surrounding the capital city Berlin) had a Jugendweihe or Jugendfeier. About 8,000 were enrolled for the Jugendweihe, 3,000 for the Konfirmation. The number of youths having a Firmung was estimated to be considerably lower with reference to over 200 Catholics who had their Firmung in 2006. Berliner Morgenpost, June 5, 2008, http://www.morgenpost.de/printarchiv/brandenburg/article191230/Tausende_Brandenburger_feiern_Jugendweihe.html (accessed March 16, 2010). About 50 percent of the respective age group in Sachsen-Anhalt enrolled for the Jugendweihe in 2010. See also Naumburger Tagblatt Online, March 11, 2010, http://www.naumburger-tageblatt.de/ ntb/ContentServer?pagename=ntb/page&atype=ksArtikel&aid=126828 9681843&openMenu=1013016724285&calledPageId=1013016724285&l istid=1018881578312, and Mitteldeutsche Zeitung Online, March 11, 2010, http://www.mz-web.de/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=ksta/page&atype =ksArtikel&aid=1268289681843 (accessed March 16, 2010). Stephan Eschler and Hartmut M. Griese, Ritualtheorie, Initiationsriten und empirische Jugendweiheforschung. Beiträge für eine Tagung der Europäischen Jugendbildungs- und Jugendbegegnungsstätte Weimar (Stuttgart: Lucius und Lucius, 2002). See also Kachi Bräutigam, “Die Jugendweihe—Initiationsritual für die ganze Familie?” in Deutsche Erfahrungen—Deutsche Zustände: Beobachtungen aus dem Alltag nach der Wende, ed. Wolfgang Benz and Marion Neuss (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 1995), 151. See Emile Durkheim, Die elementaren Formen des religiösen Lebens [French 1912], trans. Ludwig Schmidts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981). Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play. Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 448. Tomas Gerholm, “On Ritual: A Postmodern View,” Ethnos 53, no. 3–4 (1988): 190–203. Gerholm’s argumentation is based on an anthropological reading of a chapter in Naipaul’s autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival. The author/narrator’s sister dies in Trinidad. Though the Hindu funeral ceremony is very important to the surviving son, he knows hardly anything about it, and the pundit who instructs him does not consider it necessarily the only correct ceremony. See V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections (New York: Viking Press, 1987). Gerholm “On Ritual,” 200–201. Hans-Georg Soeffner, Die Ordnung der Rituale. Die Auslegung des Alltags 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992); in English, The Order of Rituals. The Interpretation of Everyday Life, trans. Mara Luckmann (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997). David Kertzer, Rituals, Politics and Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 76.

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142 / barbara wolbert 31. Gerd Baumann, “Ritual Implicates ‘Others’: Rereading Durkheim in a Plural Society,” in Understanding Rituals, ed. D. de Coppet (London: Routledge, 1992), 97–116. 32. “Der Frust der Freiheit: Sieben Jahre nach dem Fall der Mauer,” Der Spiegel 27 (July 3, 1995): 38–64. 33. Victor Turner, “Liminality and Communitas,” in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti- Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969), 94–130. 34. Berliner Zeitung, January 21, 2000. I am grateful to Levent Soysal for providing this ad from his fieldwork on youth culture in Berlin as a piece in my puzzle. 35. Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended: Re-unification and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 170. 36. These are figures published by Verwaltung ECE Projektmanagement G.m.b.H., the company running Eastgate. See http://www.eastgate-berlin. de/de/seite/das_center/das_Center.php (accessed March 23, 2010). 37. The casting and training for these shows are publicly advertised by Jugendweihe Berlin/Brandenburg e.V. 38. Arjun Appadurai (1993), as quoted in Berdahl, Where the World Ended, 170 (emphasis in the original). 39. Ibid. 40. Daphne Berdahl, “The Spirit of Capitalism,” 248. 41. mat, “Bald feiern zur Jugendweihe im Filmtheater?” Berliner Zeitung, May 31, 1999. http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/archiv/.bin/dump. fcgi/1999/0531/lokales/0114/index.html (accessed March 27, 2010). 42. “Arbeitslos” means jobless or unemployed. The sentence in which she uses the word states that she was laid off. See http://www.petrapau.de/person/ index_b.htm (accessed March 27, 2010). 43. Gerholm, “On Ritual,” 200–01. 44. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Cult of Unity and Cultivated Differences” [French 1965], in Pierre Bourdieu et al., Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 13–72.

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Pa rt III R e- Se t t l i ng Be r l i n ’s O t h e r s

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Ch a p t e r Se v e n Ne i t h e r Ea st e r n nor We lcom e: Th e Con f used Li v e s of Be r li n’s Ba l k a n M ig r a n t s, 1950 –20 0 0 Isa Blumi

Throughout this volume, Berlin’s modern history is associated with division. Often lost in this history are the contributions that hundreds of thousands of migrants and “postmigrants” made in sustaining these divisions. By the time Social Democrat Klaus Wowereit became mayor in 2001, for instance, the city government’s long history of policies that put Berlin at the forefront of expanding a role for immigrants in the larger society had introduced patterns of social, cultural, and economic exchange that affected the transformations taking place since the fall of the Wall a decade earlier. A major contributor to this spirit was the commissioner for foreigners, Günter Piening, who after 2003 hoped to establish a Federal-State Council for Integration and Migration. Outsiders have read these initiatives as an admirable continuation of Berlin’s long history of integrating Europe’s Eastern immigrants. That being said, the Social Democrats’ subsequent pledge to open services to migrants in a manner that aspired to further strengthen the city’s famed “intercultural” ethos has continued to blur the far more complex role this interchange has played in shaping what some scholars of migration to Germany have identified as “transnational” space.1 This chapter suggests new ways to appreciate the diversity of experiences among the disaggregated groups of Balkan migrants in Berlin during the past 60 years of Cold War and unification history, taking into account, for example, that they were often victims of considerable state-led violence in their places of origin. I suggest these migrants from Yugoslavia and Turkey are important components to an interactive process that actually shaped how Berlin’s political and cultural elite conducted their affairs over the course of the

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1950–2000 period. Moreover, the contribution of this interactive dynamic to the quintessential Berlin story demands that we reconsider how “hosts” such as the mayor’s office and the commissioner for foreigners adopted policies to integrate them into the city’s economic livelihood during the Cold War. As this chapter outlines, the city’s guardians unintentionally created a set of conditions through their integrationist polices that played a role in the paradoxical widening of divisions within migrant communities, hitherto unacknowledged in the scholarship on the topic. These policies, in other words, formulated over the years to better manage the considerable number of migrant workers and their dependents and—even more ambitiously—to induce peaceful coexistence and then assimilation, unintentionally created intra-communal rivalries among large numbers of Eastern migrants. These rivalries themselves evolved into a series of contentious attempts at individual and group representation that had a significant impact on Berlin’s modern history. Berlin’s Multiple Balkan Migrant Identities A closer look into these interactions will not only highlight the city’s unique history but also reveal a set of political, cultural, and socioeconomic transformations long assumed external to issues concerning the hundreds of thousands of migrants coming to the city. Known as the first German state government to appoint in 1982 an Ausländerbeauftragter or commissioner for foreigner affairs, West Berlin’s reputation as the quintessential city of immigration corresponded to a reputation of tolerance and active integration.2 But this did not take place in an environment in which migrants were passive recipients of the Berliners’ generosity; the tensions surrounding the management of migrant labor often directly impacted the evolution of the city’s governance throughout the postwar period. In other words, the foreigners who evolved to become, for instance, the legitimized Turkish Germans (Deutschtürken) by the 1990s were products of a collaborative process between “ethnic clients” and social service providers that may have neglected large numbers of migrants who arrived in Berlin under entirely different circumstances.3 I am able to explain the significance of this process after years of conducting informal and formal interviews with migrants from the Balkans, informants who provided a consistent explanation for why large numbers of migrants were neglected by this system long celebrated as being innovative and reflective of Berliners’ tolerance toward the Other. In the course of revisiting these conversations, I speculate that such systemic failures to appreciate the experiential complexity of Berlin’s migrant population, both in their experiences in their countries of origin and as guest workers in Germany, created unacknowledged tensions with

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long-term consequences both for the way the city was run and how these diasporas engaged with events back in the Balkans. To more productively analyze this process, we must consider West Berlin’s migrant history in the context of an evolving set of migrant labor policies applied in West Germany as a whole.4 This will help us appreciate who was expected to speak for whom, because the federal and municipal governments adopted different strategies to engage the country’s migrants. In part, the strategy stems from a decision to import systematically large numbers of semiskilled male laborers to accommodate a severe shortage of manpower in a reindustrializing country. In order to accomplish these goals, a series of agreements were signed with countries whose governments believed they had an expendable population of largely undesirable “minorities”—they consisted in Yugoslavia of Muslim and Catholic Albanians, Bosnians, and Bulgarians (later Macedonians); in Greece of Muslims and ethnic Albanians; and in Turkey of the large Kurdish, Albanian, and Alevi populations—whose expulsion could be justified through labor agreements signed with Western European states. That such a situation could arise forces us to return briefly to the phenomenon of organized “population exchanges” between Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, and the Turkish Republic after World War I. During the interwar period, the League of Nations set out to “peacefully” redistribute populations based on the criterion of their religious sect, with devastating consequences for millions of people. States that succeeded the heterogeneous Ottoman Empire predicated their development on establishing “ethnic” purity, thus giving considerable power to bureaucratic schemes that sought to formalize the expulsion of unwanted “minority” peoples who had been indigenous to the areas from which they were expelled within Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Turkey. This twentieth-century phenomenon, fully sanctioned by various international bodies such as the League of Nations and later the United Nations, left large numbers of Balkan Muslims and Catholics entrapped by the narrow ethnonational appellations conventionally used by the international community. Therefore, Muslim Albanians, for instance, were systematically labeled as “Turks” by the Yugoslav and Greek states that conquered much of the Ottoman Balkans after World War I. When treaties were signed between Ankara and the Balkan states eager to rid themselves of Albanians, Muslims, and other “minorities,” these “Turks” were shipped off to Anatolia in exchange for “Greeks” (Eastern Orthodox Christians) who lived in Turkey. Ryan Gingeras’s recent work demonstrates that these expulsions of Balkan and Caucasian peoples (who were not ethnically Turkish) created terrible confusion and ultimately led to violence in Turkey over the years.5

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By the time West Germany was seeking new sources for foreign laborers, both Yugoslavia and Turkey were becoming increasingly important in the strategic thinking of the United States and NATO. As a result, the central governments in both Belgrade and Ankara attempted to consolidate power by continuing their interwar policies of discriminating against “minority” subjects, and in a collaborative gesture of support for these governments, West Germany signed treaties with Balkan countries to import those who were often forced to migrate, a policy of complicity in ethnic cleansing that would haunt Germany in the decades to come. In short, many of the same expelled Albanians, Bulgarians, Bosnians, and Circassians ended up being the first to be forced to migrate once again, this time to Western Europe, a process of “second-tier” migration that changes considerably the way we can study so-called Turkish and Yugoslav migration patterns to Berlin in the Cold War.6 Ultimately, this development influenced how migrants (and their state or nonprofit counterparts) hoped to navigate the path to settlement. In other words, the contentious processes of representation, often around inaccurate categories used to describe migrants, meant that Albanians, Kurds, Alevis, and Bulgarians paid a heavy price by being subsumed under terms like “Turks,” “Greeks,” or “Yugoslavs,” especially after German unification in 1989–1990.7 When these largely unacknowledged groups of people with specific experiences of violent migration, and thus specific needs, attempted to orient themselves in a unified Berlin fixated on highlighting its “ethnic heritage,” they experienced debilitating longterm fissures within their poorly formed communities as rivalries formed over who could best speak for the hitherto voiceless population. These rivalries over leadership translated throughout the 1990s into continued violence in the city’s streets and failed activism in the context of political violence in their homelands. In the slow process of rebuilding West Berlin after World War II, the city’s entrepreneurs imported guest workers, primarily from Turkey and Yugoslavia, for their metalworking and textile industries. These semiskilled migrants numbered just under eighty thousand by the early 1970s, ballooning to almost half a million in 2005.8 This migration enabled West Berlin to sustain artificially an industrial base that secured well-paying, middle-class jobs for its German inhabitants, while importing these migrants from the Balkans and Turkey. This much is repeatedly explained in the literature on postwar Germany. Just why these people were available to migrate to Germany, however, is often missing from studies on this process. To ignore this background means that the analytical tools used to illuminate the numerous contingencies that accompany the migrant experience in Berlin will cast shadows on the urbanscape. On the other hand, by studying Yugoslav and Turkish migrants as disaggregated and

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composed of subgroups who compete for resources, I will expand the story of settlement and show how the city-state of Berlin mismanaged the challenges that these many active historical agents presented the city. Through the complex story of the Balkan migrant, in other words, we can monitor the impressive diversity of the city-government’s policies toward migrants more generally. Already in the period prior to the Third Reich, German governments balanced the state’s direct welfare and social service programs with nonprofit partners like the Roman Catholic Caritas, the Protestant Diakonisches Werk, and the SPD-founded Arbeiterwohlfahrt (henceforth AWO). Such partnerships grew in importance after the war when shared responsibility between large nonprofits and the federal government was formalized in 1961.9 By the time the first trainload of imported laborers from Greece and Turkey arrived in West Germany, these three nonprofits had become dominant players in shaping social policies throughout the federal system and thus were given the primary responsibility of engaging with these migrants.10 In other words, the federal and state governments delegated the task of managing these peoples to the three main nonprofits. This proved fateful to the manner in which Albanians, Kurds, and various Muslim “minorities” were incorporated into Germany’s postwar economy. For reasons I suspect were strategic on the part of the nonprofits, the migrants were organized and then apportioned to each agency according to religious affiliation and “national background.” This was implemented in the 1960s without consultation of the migrants themselves. Caritas, for instance, took over social work involving Catholic “Yugoslavs,” even though this group consisted not only of Slavs from Slovenia, Bosnia, and Croatia but also large numbers of non-Slavic Albanian Catholics from Montenegro and Kosovo. The fact that these Catholic Albanians were never identified as such led to their cultural and economic impoverishment. Similarly, when Diakonisches Werk adopted a similar approach in dealing with “Greeks,” they laid claim to servicing the needs of Orthodox Christians from Yugoslavia and Greece (as well as Protestant immigrants) while failing, perhaps in collusion with the source states, to acknowledge that many of these “Greeks” or “Yugoslavs” were Albanian speakers or Bulgarians deserving of cultural and social protection. Lastly, the secular, union-linked AWO also took on workers migrating from Turkey, while disregarding the reasons why hundreds of thousands migrated in the first place. Again, studying migration to Germany in the Cold War cannot be done in a vacuum. Understanding the long history of state violence toward Kurds as well as expellees like Albanians and Bosnians from the Balkans helps us identify who the “Turkish” and “Yugoslav” migrants were, who settled in Berlin.

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How the nonprofits proceeded to manage these migrants throughout West Germany had long-term consequences on the way in which they socialized, organized, and assimilated (or not) even in West Berlin, which extended these measures even further by the 1970s.11 The nonprofits, for example, set up job training services and then expanded to include social counseling offices that advocated on their “clients’ ” behalf for start-up funding and community-building initiatives. At times, lucrative partnerships were forged between certain “representatives” of these communities and the nonprofits, which quickly became the exclusive lifeline between migrants and state funding.12 In West Berlin, this meant various stakeholders in the system of cooperation became dependent on these nonprofits, and their relative influence in immigrant communities was predicated on the system’s perpetuation, expansion, and preservation. Informants interviewed over the last ten years consistently noted that Caritas, Diakonisches Werk, and AWO actively contributed to this process of building dependency by refusing to cooperate with already existing associations that had no “representatives” speaking on their behalf with the nonprofits. Such a situation thus resulted in the exclusion of Berlin’s Albanian, Kurdish, and Bulgarian migrants from much of the social development work implemented in the 1960–1990 period. In other words, the “spokespersons” for Yugoslavs, Greeks, and Turks proved to be imposing an ethnic hierarchy that discriminated against non-Slav and non-Turk migrants for more than 40 years. This relation between “client” and the nonprofits reinforced a self-serving, condescending attitude among the nonprofits’ leadership toward the “helpless” migrants who seemed incapable of surviving without them.13 It also became a source of frustration for reformers, who faced the reality that many migrants never seemed to benefit from the state’s largess. For example, young migrants still failed to perform well in school, joining gangs and apparently “falling through the cracks.” To revisit this decades-long fixation on integration, while accounting for the underlying issue of misrepresentation, helps explain why Berlin’s reforms never seemed to work for large numbers of migrants. Simply put, how funds were distributed benefited “ethnic” gatekeepers who had no intention of extending state funds to non-Greeks, Slavs, or Turks. Albanians, Kurds, or Alevis, in short, were specifically excluded from most of the community-building initiatives aimed at migrants over the decades. Although they modified policies to resolve migrant issues, state bureaucracies, police, and academic circles monitoring migration never introduced a separate category for the immigrants, refugees, or guest workers who populated Berlin. Not only did this prove to be a barrier for state authorities to engage its diverse migrant population—crucial when violence in

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the Balkans erupted in the 1990s—but it also marginalized the unidentified and unrecognized migrants within the communities in which they lived from the 1960s onward. This directly transformed, for example, how Albanian communities evolved and accounts for certain kinds of pathologies—alienation, anger, and a sense of powerlessness—rarely acknowledged in the scholarship on larger Germany.14 The consequences may have considerable importance for understanding the Kurdish, Albanian, and Bulgarian story in Berlin’s modern history. For instance, whereas workers were initially housed collectively to make it easier to manage them (according to official explanations), following a shift in family reunification policies in the 1970s, migrants were forced to seek rental units to accommodate their growing households, leading to new settlement patterns. Lesser paid unskilled workers and their families moved into neighborhoods abutting the Berlin Wall to find cheaper housing, with the result that by 1973, more than 30 percent of migrants originating from Turkey lived in Kreuzberg along with 20 percent of the rest of non-German residents of Berlin. As is well known, the city adopted policies to prevent this population shift. Public housing corporations in charge of managing migrant housing attempted to disperse migrant families throughout the central city area by imposing various rental laws.15 These failed because the authorities used inaccurate ethnic categories to establish settlement quotas. Those ethnic minorities who could, flocked to alternate ethnonational associations, even if that meant denying their own “identities.” In other words, many Albanians whose families were at one time persecuted and forced in the interwar and postwar periods to leave Greece or Yugoslavia prior to migrating to Turkey, now claimed Yugoslav, Greek, or even Italian heritage in order to shed their “Turkish” association. For if one were identified as part of the large Turkish minority, one encountered immediately government imposed residential restrictions regulating the concentration of Turks in the city. As a result of these settlement laws aimed at limiting the number of “Turks” to less than 12 percent in any one neighborhood, informants told me that—as migrants otherwise shut out from settling in Kreuzberg, Wedding, or Tiergarten—they adopted Yugoslav, Italian, or Greek identities. In the end, zoning policies advocated by the nonprofits, their community intermediaries, and ultimately the state created settlement clusters that straddled the city’s district boundaries and thus found Albanians, Kurds, and other unrepresented subgroups living in heavily concentrated areas defined by unrepresentative ethnic categories. While they could live together, such strategies led to further marginalization of these subgroups within the formal system, resulting in their statistical impoverishment. In response to this frustrating and unintended development, Bonn gave considerable leeway to West Berlin to devise better policies to integrate its

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migrants and avoid the ghettos forming along the Berlin Wall. The city government left much of the task to nonprofit associations such as AWO, Caritas, and Diakonisches Werk. By 1971, the primary concern was what to do with the second and third generation immigrants who were growing up in increasingly crime-ridden neighborhoods. It is revealing that the board established to address this problem included no migrants, producing a predictably flawed “needs-oriented” integration model that called for voluntary, long-range planning in the concerned departments. The 1970s thus can be seen as a crucial period for community building among migrants largely arbitrated by nonprofits with a history of misrecognition and confusion as to the real identity of members in the “Turkish” and “Yugoslav” migrant communities. As a result of forcing unrepresented people to adapt to new forms of association, the 1980s saw a consolidation of particularistic Albanian identities in Berlin. Savings accumulated over the years from earnings made in restaurants, and small businesses helped create a strong economic foundation among numerous self-proclaimed community leaders. As tensions increased in Yugoslavia during the 1980s, various and competing personal investments in Albanian political identity emerged within the city’s dispersed Albanian communities. It is important to consider the impact this had on individuals. Older generation Albanian speakers—although insistent that they were the “leaders” of the newly invigorated community facing bloodshed in the homeland—were marginalized as a new generation of Kosovo-Albanian refugees recently expelled from Yugoslavia assumed responsibility for defining the hopes and dreams of Albanians to the outside world. They tried to adapt to the new geopolitical context that produced the Democratic League of Kosova, the unrecognized Republic of Kosova, and later the various groups that funded the Kosovar war for liberation in the mid-1990s. In this dynamic of Yugoslav political change with repercussions for Europe as a whole, the conditions for a fundamental change in how Albanians interacted in Berlin helped reshape a desire to be identified as Kosovo-Albanian.16 But let us return to the 1980s: by the time political turmoil in both Yugoslavia and Turkey changed the political attitudes of Berlin’s migrants, the Christian Democrats (CDU) had taken over city hall from the Social Democrats (SPD). By joining forces with its liberal ally, the Free Democratic Party (FDP), Eberhard Diepgen emerged as the city’s mayor from 1984 until 2001. Under his reign, immigrants’ marginalization worsened, forcing the new coalition to reexamine the entire relationship between immigrant associations and the nonprofits’ ethnic-based social work. Certain members of the category “Turks” gained a voice in this frustrating period by protesting the poor services provided by social work agencies,

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especially those controlled by the AWO.17 While scholars have identified these frustrations, the struggle over who would represent the “Turks” in subsequent negotiations with the state and nonprofits remains understudied. Interviews suggest that for decades well-connected individuals with ties to Ankara and Belgrade monopolized the funding for migrants.18 As Kosovars, Kurds, and Bulgarians could not access these resources, they remained largely self-reliant, isolated, and politically inarticulate in the Berlin context. That being said, with the events in Yugoslavia becoming increasingly known to the German public after the massacre of Albanian students at Prishtina University in 1981, a disaggregated set of Kosovar voices began to be heard.19 At the same time, the West Berlin Senate in 1985 announced a new subvention policy, which brought extensive funding for self-help groups, including those whose work with immigrants directly competed with the nonprofits. Some began to consider the self-help services as more flexible and responsive to the needs of migrants, allowing for freer cultural expression and leading to the emergence of enterprising non-Turkish, nonYugoslav action-groups. According to informants interviewed in the past few years, these groups helped formulate particularistic narratives for some of the marginal subgroups like Kosovars and Kurds as they began to gain a German audience more aware of their specific issues. Their problem was durability. The Senate’s original intention was to cover start-up costs and leave the responsibility for the programs’ future development to the communities themselves. This plan, however, could not be fully implemented because the communities were not in a position to cover the general operating costs as they bickered, sometimes violently, with loyalists to the Yugoslav and Turkish regimes. Until the fall of the Wall there were just too many competing, small-scale operations funded by individuals who saw themselves as the legitimate leader of their respective community. Scholars like Döcker read these early efforts at municipal government decentralization, first adopted in the Wedding neighborhood in the late 1970s, to be innovative gestures toward empowering migrants to fend for themselves.20 At a time when Islam increasingly has become a framework for interpreting events, scholars have also confused the West Berlin government’s attempt to move away from the existing division of labor based on ethnoreligious lines under the domination of the big nonprofits as somehow reflecting a new era of intercultural openness and flexibility.21 In reality, however, due to the growing complexity of the Kosovar Albanian, Bosnian, Bulgarian/Macedonian, and Kurdish problems in the 1990s, the administration had to broaden the scope of its authority. After all, West Berlin had installed a Commissioner for Foreigners in 1981, and Barbara John (CDU) would still be in this office in 2000. Her

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mandate was to inform Senate departments directly, raise public awareness about the needs of her constituents, and oversee the Senate commission that handled immigrant policies. Indicative of the program’s weight in Berlin affairs, Commissioner John’s staff grew to twice the size of the Federal Commission for Foreigners in Bonn. She disbursed funds to selfhelp groups active in immigrant integration, providing resources to some aggressive “community leaders” who could challenge the old hierarchy dominated by allies of the Yugoslav and Turkish governments. There are indications, however, that John’s system did not run smoothly.22 I suggest that the confused struggle between previously marginalized communities and their competing “leaders” contributed to the chaos. Incorporating an ever-growing number of ethnic organizations did not lighten the weight of West Berlin’s bureaucracy. On the contrary, it created once again dependency relations that reduced organizational autonomy on both sides and needlessly raised the stakes for those marginalized by the inner hierarchies that continuing state patronage of official “Turkish” and “Yugoslav” groups only reinforced. In time, the nonprofit associations’ paternalism gave way to the paternalism of local policy-making structures, as always guided by their own interests—at least in the eyes of unhappy associations, churches, and trade unions.23 Turkish and various Yugoslav associations that had struggled to move out from under AWO’s wings were caught in the smothering embrace of the state. By the 1980s, providers and their projects competed against each other for the city’s money, marking a crucial turning point in Berlin’s history. Ethnic divisions widened, organizational finances became unpredictable, and violence broke out at all levels of the city’s diverse migrant society in the form of gangs and more sophisticated forms of organized violence.24 Concerns about frustrated migrant youth spawned a range of programs in the early 1980s to address these pathologies through education. Heterogeneous and not well coordinated, they were once again hampered by the entrenched, ethnic-based involvement of the social welfare nonprofits, which supported only those “community leaders” who had direct access. The city promoted targeted schemes to deal with unique problems, but otherwise it imposed general intercultural youth work that covered over the growing fissures within the generic “Yugoslav” and “Turkish” communities.25 For its part, West Berlin’s school system was still considered unique for its attempt from early on to fully integrate immigrant children. The city started at the district level, in Wedding, for example, and sought to phase out specialized classes that tended to segregate immigrant children in ghetto-like social and developmental settings. By applying and generalizing the curriculum in the neighborhoods, West Berlin eventually put together a new system in the 1980s, even as budgets were slashed; the plan

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to better the lives of immigrant youth actually widened the scope of the city’s interventions, recording some successes in advancing their goal of integrating migrant children in the process. The results, on paper, have long been seen as clear indicators of this successful policy. Over half of the more than 100 million DMs designated in the state budget for immigrant integration at the end of the 1980s flowed into educational programs. As a result, immigrant children were “over-represented” in West Berlin’s kindergartens, and in time this led to a smaller percentage of immigrant youths abandoning secondary school before obtaining a degree—from 39 percent in 1981 to 30 percent in 1987. There was also improvement in the percentage of immigrant children attending the college-prep Gymnasium by 1987, a full 23 percent.26 There remained room for improvement, as the Senate acknowledged. Especially problematic for officials was a drift toward ethnic and religious revival, evident even among better-educated youths.27 What official documentation identified as Berlin’s “Muslim population” was becoming more diverse, and city bureaucracies grew increasingly sensitive to the internal tensions existing within larger ethnonational categories. Ever more aware that Berlin’s previous policies of highlighting “confessions” as a means of distinguishing Christians also had the consequence of strengthening divisions within the so-called “Muslim” community, the Senate’s Department of Schools began talking with representatives of the Christian churches about making religious instruction a public rather than a denominational responsibility. This meant the school administration would offer religious instruction only as an elective rather than a requirement within the normal curriculum. This responded to a court decision that allowed a local Islamic association to oversee instruction for Muslims outside the statefunded system, causing considerable alarm. Subsequent arguments by the city government over the course of the 1990s challenged the ruling, suggesting that any effort to strengthen the autonomy of religious groups would threaten the constitutional rights of women and sectarian minorities. In their efforts to limit the reach of mosque associations, officials struggled to identify appropriate social welfare providers for Muslims who would not strengthen exclusionary sensibilities.28 This is when the politics of representation took a particularly dangerous turn. Many of Berlin’s immigrant residents had seemed to be turning inward, toward their own informal social networks over the previous decade. In response, the Berlin Senate in 1997 called on the social welfare nonprofits to open their ranks more completely to immigrants in order to prevent the increasingly visceral (and reactive) Muslim organizations—the Senate made no distinctions among them—to gain the upper hand in children’s education.29 Over the next few years, smaller groups were able to exert

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more influence on these targeted “time bombs” than the three largest nonprofits, devising innovative avant-garde intercultural projects (especially in their work with youth and senior citizens) that would seem to warrant the approval expressed by outside observers. The long recognized stronghold of “Turkish” migrants, Kreuzberg, was cited as the neighborhood most benefiting from this secular network building. Of course, what constitutes success to monitoring agencies and what actually takes place on the ground are often two entirely different things. Post-Wall Eastern Berlin, for instance, has also been cited as a success story, although pre-1995 settlement by communities-at-risk (that is, Muslims) was nonexistent there. In Eastern Berlin, “aid groups” proved capable of tapping into the federal and European funding designed to build up “social infrastructure” aimed at reducing Muslim isolationism.30 As such, these policies failed to capture the diversity of actors within the immigrant communities. The Senate had hoped in the 1980s that funding immigrant associations would stabilize them, build up their competence and confidence, and enable them to make real contributions to the intercultural opening process. In fact, they were training their attention toward the homelands and presented an uneven, disjointed organizational picture that hardly conformed to the vision of Berlin policy makers. They in turn bemoaned the immigrants’ failure to organize into one or two major associations that could speak for all their assumed members, lobby, and channel public funding and logistical support. Instead, the Senate saw that Islamic organizations ineligible for public funds nevertheless were able to establish by 1988: at least 30 mosques and two Muslim cemeteries. Increasingly, foreign money became a factor in the race to influence this process of rearticulated identity politics in West Berlin, with the Turkish government playing a particularly important role. The Milli Görüş (National View) Movement, for example, was allowed to establish Germany’s first Islamic school in 1989 and developed considerable leverage over a large swath of the public and the Berlin government at the expense of Kurds, Alevis, and Albanian Muslims who did not want to cooperate with this Turkish nationalist organization.31 This dynamic obliges us to reanimate the way we study the city’s evolution in the late 1980s and after unification. Not only did immigrant communities prove to be more diverse, fragmented, and unresponsive to the city government’s attempts to manage them, they also developed important roles in the local and regional economy that proved threatening. Beyond the visible small business entrepreneurs scattered throughout Berlin, awareness of immigrant involvement in the parallel (“Black”) economy, whose profits were often transferred to more “legitimate” sections of the city’s economy, heightened sensitivity to the connection between social

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exclusion, crime, and a visible migrant ethos. Such crime networks offer their members self-protection within a social environment characterized by right-wing skinhead groups and by rival migrant gangs that increasingly adopted the nationalist language of their homeland’s political elite.32 In revisiting this process, I suggest there are important parallels with other cities facing similar dynamics in the 1980s. Beirut, like Berlin, saw an influx of tens of thousands of people who could not be integrated owing to a lack of established patronage networks as well as to ideologically informed agents of foreign governments looking for allies. West Berlin appealed to young German men who sought exemption from the mandatory military draft, drawing radicals and adherents of counterculture social movements from other parts of West Germany. Although these groups generally failed to attract migrants, some immigrant gangs nevertheless took part in political violence, such as the rioting in Kreuzberg on May Day 1987, aimed at pressuring the city government to retract proposals to end rent control on older housing units.33 During this period, confrontations with skinheads declined, leading scholars to claim that tensions actually calmed down after the rough late 1980s. A peace treaty was signed between rival groups, and the most notorious gang, the Schöneberg Barbarians, converted itself into the sponsors of a youth center.34 But, as in Beirut, the gang scene simply migrated into areas that did not directly affect the cultural elite (native Germans in Berlin). Post-unification history of Berlin’s street violence became a reflection of the struggles over the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the emergence of a Kurdish voice beyond the reach of the “Turkish” umbrella.35 Immigrants’ Political-Cultural Integration Despite this tumult, under its CDU-led administration, Berlin was earning a reputation for ingenuity in its dealings with immigrants in the politicalcultural realm. The city’s effort to legally protect immigrants by facilitating the distribution of permanent residency permits yielded in the 1980s as much as four times the number of naturalized immigrants in West Berlin than in any other German city in the 1980s. The expectation was that immigrants with citizenship would decrease tensions that persisted among West Berliners of different backgrounds.36 And yet, the 1990s only introduced greater tumult and challenges, I argue, because the fundamental problem of recognition remained in the hands of people and groups that discriminated against Albanians, Kurds, and other migrant subgroups. Not long after unification, Eberhard Diepgen was back at the head of a coalition government left to face the difficult 1990s without substantial federal support. The loss of funding was especially threatening since half

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of the West Berlin government had been financed by federal aid that after unification was channeled into rebuilding Eastern Germany. More dangerous was the fact that industries began leaving to take advantage of cheaper labor in the former Eastern Bloc. Rising unemployment in Berlin especially affected immigrant workers, whose unemployment rate reached 22.3 percent by 1994.37 As a direct consequence of these macroeconomic shifts, the Berlin government was saddled with larger social assistance responsibilities as residents of Kreuzberg, Neukölln, and Wedding were hit hard by economic crisis.38 As the decade wore on, the social fissures that existed among migrant communities throughout the postwar era sharpened, with the wars in the Balkans playing a role in causing added tensions. The financial responsibilities of Kosovar, Bosnian, Kurdish, and Macedonian/Bulgarian immigrants grew in direct relation to the turmoil in their homelands; and those still earning hard currency were expected to subsidize the devastated livelihoods of relatives in the Balkans. Thus, the shifts in public support by Diepgen’s government heightened simmering tensions in Berlin. By 2000, just more than a third of immigrant workers were unemployed, twice the overall Berlin rate. Moreover, almost 40 percent of Berlin’s immigrants met the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s definition of poverty, and more than 17 percent of the immigrant population was on social assistance, compared to only 5.4 percent of all residents.39 These were official statistics, of course. They failed to account for the way Kosovar Albanians, for instance, adjusted to services they needed in their community. Indeed, most Kosovars flooding Berlin as a result of the violence in Kosovo after 1997 relied on community networks that assured jobs for those looking. Many were hired at the pizza shops Kosovar Albanians owned in the city, or they joined the parallel economy. Despite all the indicators available to social scientists and the apparent negative effects of the 1990s, a perceptible number of immigrants were achieving socioeconomic mobility. These channels of success stood in stark contrast to what a majority of immigrants still experienced in Berlin: poverty among the elderly and low educational and training levels among youths. While the long recognized obstacles specific to immigrants—language and cultural difficulties, discrimination—complicated the situation, the political tensions in the Balkans hardened the sense that Germany was failing to step in and resolve the region’s problems (or alternately was taking sides), all of which translated into visible signs of tension on the streets. Berlin officials misinterpreted this tension, fearing that economic stress was becoming ethnic in nature as the media raised the stakes by allowing anti-immigrant hostility to become part of daily television fare.40 As Berlin moved toward its new status as the nation’s capital, new problems arose. Exploding rents, for instance, forced immigrants out of

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gentrifying districts like Kreuzberg, suddenly the “in” neighborhood that saw increasing influx from Berlin’s artistic community. Less prominent was the fact that an emerging immigrant-origin middle class wanted to leave the inner-city neighborhoods for other districts. In turn, immigrant concentrations grew in the parts of the city formally not associated with foreigners. In addition, the explosion of refugees from the Balkan wars expanded the geography of Berlin’s foreign population. In this regard, Berlin was becoming less segregated. That being said, Berliners were increasingly moving to suburbs and exurbs in the surrounding state of Brandenburg, marking a new kind of exodus that improved the housing situation for some but worsened the overcrowding for other immigrant communities, especially those who had traditionally been marginalized by the system, including Albanians, Bosnians, and Bulgarians. Violence in their homelands led to a flood of refugees who increasingly sought shelter among relatives already based in Berlin. A gulf opened between the integrated immigrant elite and a disaffected mass base; already privileged immigrants or naturalized subjects discriminated against those still unrepresented in the Berlin government’s system. Commissioner John commissioned a survey in 1994 and found that 70 percent of the immigrants believed that no association represented their interests. For Kosovar Albanians, this was increasingly a source of frustration that led to the emergence of rival factions who advocated for their brethren back in the Balkans and battled for prestige among each other in Berlin. Moreover, the established, subsidized immigrant associations continued to cultivate a dependency relationship with the city administration that exacerbated the separation from their constituency. It was not spatial segregation, budget cutting, or a worsening structural situation that was generating political-cultural disconnection. Rather, official reinforcement of cultural difference and maintenance of a paternalistic attitude toward immigrant-origin charges pushed the bulk of them into either resignation or confrontation. Apart from youth gangs, then, the ethnic revival of the 1990s was not so much militant as it was defensive. Self-help movements declined and were replaced by ethnic businesses whose owners took on the dual roles of economic guardians and political leaders. By the mid-1990s, they numbered more than 16,000 with more than 2,000 moving into the former East Berlin, and they officially employed up to 45,000 people. In this context, it was largely assumed that migrants, especially those considered impoverished, did not have the wherewithal to organize. Commentators like Ireland and others forget that these people most likely redirected their energies to resolving the violence in their homelands and spent little time dedicated to engaging in traditional associational activity, historically dominated by

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self-identified Turks and Yugoslavs anyway.41 Throughout the 1990s, Berlin’s various migrant agencies were most active in the political-cultural realm. Whether it was the result of a specific agenda or the unanticipated consequence of its policies, John’s Office of the Commissioner for Foreigners sparked ethnocentric activism. Some CDU loyalists, as well as the Green Party and many immigrant groups felt that she pushed her mandate too far at the expense of meaningful attempts to address the diversity of issues facing her “clients.” For many, the resources dedicated to individual cases and the assumption that ethnic identities superseded everything else in an immigrant’s life led to legitimate complaints.42 Berlin’s immigrant integration policies after 1990 continued earlier inconsistencies and favored ethnic-based political-cultural activities that empowered the same partners. Instead of structuring immigrant associations, the city provided enough assistance to encourage ethnic identity formation and interethnic competition at the same time that anti-immigrant forces were targeting certain ethnic groups and triggering their defensive reaction. In 1998, Commissioner John’s budget for approximately 35 Turkish federations and individual associations was 1.5 million DM. That figure appeared significant, yet it amounted to only 10 DM per Turkish resident. Spending for education, job training, and housing continued to drop in the face of fiscal constraints. Global financial support for the “artistic and sociocultural” activities of immigrant associations declined by some 20 percent between 1996 and 2000, however, as did monies channeled through the district councils for the same purposes. Drastic personnel cuts necessitated by the city’s financial crisis inhibited the support of self-help initiatives proposed by emerging community networks that could have proven crucial to revitalizing social policies recently undermined by unification. As a result, Berlin’s policy makers had to figure out ways to promote the coexistence of cultures while doing so with fewer financial resources. In practice, small, street-level projects made the difference for the city government and its activist allies. Indeed, John and her successors tried to prop up activities that could promote cultural awareness with less money in a way that tended to render exotic Berlin’s migrant communities rather than to treat them as legitimate members of the city. Despite their objections to being objectified as “living museum pieces” at whom Germans and other European tourists could gawk, Commissioner John continued to promote events that emphasized immigrants’ exotic qualities until she resigned in 2003. Of course, she also adopted more practical policies, like instituting an immigrant ombudsperson to smooth interactions between the government and a chosen group of immigrant representatives. Here, again, a hierarchy within a misrepresented “body” of immigrants led to

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tensions. Charged with implementing policies that lacked coherence and losing first-time immigrant voters to other political parties, the CDU-led administration could only do so much in the face of fiscal realities. In light of the city’s dire financial situation the many projects that the Berlin Senate hoped to implement in order to introduce “intercultural practices” while simultaneously integrating immigrants at every level of the administration could only be funded by raising money locally.43 As other chapters in this volume confirm, there was a substantial public relations dimension to Berlin’s policies of integrating its generic immigrant. More than in other German cities, officials in Berlin believed in the 2000s that promoting immigrants as a colorful presence with diverse voices, practices, and lifestyles (never fully acknowledging just how different “Turks, Arabs, Balkans” were) provided a real competitive advantage in the international economy. Ethnic businesses, especially restaurants, became an accepted indicator of the city’s multinational and exotic branding. Indeed, the Commission for Foreigners advertised Berlin as a “world metropolis” and continued to link the growing reputation of Berlin as the “party” capital of Europe with the city’s exotic diversity.44 Unfortunately, there are many Berliners who still fail to understand why so many find it offensive to be promoted as an object of tourist curiosity. Berlin’s Balkan communities, especially those historically marginalized by an unrepresentative postwar labor recruitment regime, face new pathologies as Berlin develops a new relationship in the German context, the greater Europe, and the larger world. Conclusion Despite efforts first to improve housing conditions of the tens of thousands of migrant workers coming to Berlin in the postwar era and then to assimilate them once it became clear that they and their families were there to stay, local officials were unable to prevent residential concentrations that created the kind of ghettos plaguing modern cities around the world. Among the policy elite of Berlin, it was long debated whether the crowding of immigrant populations contributed to their disconnection from the larger German population and thus to social conflict. No clear answer was possible at the formal level because the way the government engaged the generic “immigrant” never fully permitted them to express their diversity and parochial needs. As a result, immigrant subgroups emerged that were economically, politically, and socially marginalized, a segregation that for decades produced tensions, frustration, and the failure of the very integration Berlin’s political elite decided was necessary for their city’s future.

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As noted throughout, a partial explanation was the tendency to allow neighborhood-level social work monopolies to develop. Even coordination was decentralized in ways that actually contributed to Albanian, Kurdish, and Macedonian/Bulgarian marginalization. Crude categories simplified or generalized the characterization of legitimate immigrant partners for the city’s elites and allowed designated “ethnic” entrepreneurs to monopolize Berlin’s evolving politics of cultural representation. The irony for Berlin’s much discussed policy of managing its Balkan migrants, predicated on interactive projects that link local agencies and consolidate local actions, thereby harnessing the city’s associational energies and containing crime, actually created generational, regional, and ideological divides within groups like Yugoslavs, Turks, and—more recently—Kosovar Albanians that undermined Berlin’s peaceful unification. From this perspective, Berlin is still a divided city. Notes 1. Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, “Transnationalism: A New Analytic Framework for Understanding Migration” [1992], in Migration, Globalization, and Ethnic Relations: An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Mohsen Mobasher and Mahmoud Sadri (Newark: Prentice Hall, 2004), 213–27; Ayhan Kaya, “German-Turkish Transnational Space: A Separate Space of Their Own,” German Studies Review 30, no. 3 (2007): 483–502; and Nermin Abadan-Unat, Bitmeyen Göç: Misafır Işçiden Ulusötesi Yurtta şa (Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2002). 2. Georg Elwert, “Probleme der Ausländerintegration—Gesellschaftliche Integration durch Binnenintegration?” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie 34 (1982): 717–31. 3. Brackette F. Williams, “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain,” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 401–44. 4. Philip L. Martin, The Unfinished Story: Turkish Labour Migration to Western Europe. With Special Reference to the Federal Republic of Germany (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1991). 5. Ryan Gangeras, Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity and the End of the Ottoman Empire, 1912–1923 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 6. Isa Blumi, “Defining Social Spaces by Way of Deletion: The Untold Story of Albanian Migration in the Post-war Period,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 29, no. 6 (November 2003): 949–65. 7. Even after decades of migration a secret Turkish military report exposed by a Turkish newspaper in 2008 found Turkey had more than 8.75 million Alevi Muslims (a persecuted sect), 12.6 million Kurds, 2 million Balkan Slavs, and 1.8 million Albanians living among the 55 million “ethnic Turks.” See “Türkiye’deki Kürtlerin sayısı!” Milliyet, June 6, 2008, http:// www.milliyet.com.tr/turkiye- deki-kurtlerin- sayisi- /yasam/sondakikaarsiv/03.03.2010/873452/default.htm?ver=72 (accessed July 24, 2010).

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neither eastern nor welcome / 163 8. Kira Kosnick, Migrant Media: Turkish Broadcasting and Multicultural Politics in Berlin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 10–11. 9. Dietrich Thränhardt, “Ausländer im Dickicht der Verbände: Ein Beispiel verbandsgerechter Klientenselektion und korporatistischer Politikformulierung,” Neue Praxis, Sonderheft 7 (1983): 62–78. 10. Klaus-Martin Groth and Johann Müller-Gazurek, Ausländer- Sozialrecht (Frankfurt am Main: Metzner, 1983). 11. Jürgen Puskeppeleit, “Entwicklungslinien und -perspektiven der Sozialdienste,” Informationsdienst zur Ausländerarbeit 1 (1989): 14–19. 12. Patrick Ireland, Becoming Europe: Immigration, Integration, and the Welfare State (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 35–39. 13. Jürgen Puskeppeleit and Dietrich Thränhardt, Vom betreuten Ausländer zum gleichberechtigten Bürger (Freiburg im Breisgau: Lambertus-Verlag, 1990), 125–26. 14. For an example of how this manifests itself in studies of other German cities, see Dieter Filsinger, Franz Hamburger, and Dieter Neubert, “Multikulturelles Nürnberg,” Zeitung des Ausländerbeirates 6 (October 1983): 3. 15. Andreas Kapphan, “Nichtdeutsche in Berlin-West,” Berliner Statistik: Statistische Monatsschrift 12 (1995): 198–209. For the purposes of managing future city development, the government’s various mechanisms to “grade” neighborhoods began to link their poor scores in the social index with the concentration of immigrant families. 16. Blumi, “Defining Social Spaces.” 17. Puskeppleleit, “Entwicklungslinien und -perspektiven,” 14. 18. Nedim Ögelman, “Documenting and Explaining the Persistence of Homeland Politics among Germany’s Turks,” International Migration Review 37, no. 1 (2003): 163–93. 19. Amnesty International, Yugoslavia: Prisoners of Conscience (London: Amnesty International, 1982). 20. Ausländerbeirat des Bezirksamtes Wedding, “Leitlinien zur Ausländerarbeit im Bezirk Wedding,” in Integration von Ausländern in die Regelversorgung eines Wohlfahrtsverbandes, ed. Brigitte Döcker (Berlin: Arbeiterwohlfahrt Kreisverband Wedding, 1992), 213–34. 21. Çiğdem Kağıçıba şı, “Alienation of the Outsider: The Plight of Migrants,” International Migration 25, no. 2 (June 1987): 195–210. 22. Ursula Boos-Nünning and Thomas Schwarz, Traditions of Integration of Migrants in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berlin: Berliner Institut für Vergleichende Sozialforschung, 1991). 23. Peter Grottian, Friedrich Kotz, and Michael Lütke, “Die Entzauberung der Berliner Sozialpolitik,” Leviathan 7 (1986): 201–12. 24. Ayhan Kaya, Sicher in Kreuzberg. Constructing Diasporas: Turkish Hip-Hop Youth in Berlin (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2001), 32–35. 25. Thomas Schwarz, Zuwanderer im Netz des Wohlfahrtsstaats (Berlin: Edition Parabolis, 1992). 26. Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats von Berlin, Zur Lage der jungen Ausländergeneration (Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Inneres, 1991). 27. Ibid. 28. Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats von Berlin, Bericht zur Integrations- und Ausländerpolitik 1996/1997 (Berlin: Senat von Berlin, 1998), 18.

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164 / isa blumi 29. Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats von Berlin, Bericht zur Integrations- und Ausländerpolitik, 17–19. 30. Beauftragte für Migration und Integration, Bericht zur Integrations- und Ausländerpolitik in Berlin 2000 (Berlin: BMI, 2002), 68. 31. Bernhard Trautner, “Türkische Muslime, islamische Organisationen und religiöse Institutionen als soziale Träger des transstaatlichen Raumes Deutschland-Türkei,” in Transstaatliche Räume: Politik, Wirtschaft und Kultur in und zwischen Deutschland und der Türkei, ed. Thomas Faist (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2000), 57–86. 32. Jochen Blaschke, “Die Bedeutung von Flüchtlingen für die Institutionalisierung der türkischen Immigranten-Community in Berlin” (Berlin: Berliner Institut für Vergleichende Sozialforschung, 1987). 33. Hedwig Prey, Die Unruhen in Berlin-Kreuzberg (Berlin: Berliner Institut für Vergleichende Sozialforschung, 1989). 34. Tülay Çinar and Martin Greve, Das Türkishe Berlin (Berlin: Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats von Berlin und Senatsverwaltung für Soziales, 1998). 35. Kosnick, Migrant Media. 36. Helmut Rittstieg, “Einbürgerung als eigene Angelegenheit der Bundesländer,” in Doppelte Staatsbürgerschaft—Ein europäischer Normalfall? ed. Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats von Berlin (Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Soziales, 1992), 131–40. 37. Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats von Berlin, Bericht zur Integrations-und Ausländerpolitik (1998), 51. 38. Statistisches Landesamt Berlin, Sozialhilfe in Berlin (Berlin: Senat des Landes Berlin, 1998). 39. Senator für Gesundheit, Soziales und Verbraucherschutz, Armut und soziale Ungleichheit in Berlin (Berlin: Land Berlin, 2002), 100–02. 40. Ibid., 108. 41. Ireland, Becoming Europe, 108; Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats von Berlin, Bericht zur Integrations- und Ausländerpolitik (1998), 7. 42. Martina Doering, “Keiner wollte den Job,” Berliner Zeitung, November 13, 1996, 3. 43. Beauftragte für Migration und Integration, Bericht zur Integrations- und Ausländerpolitik. 44. Senator für Schule, Jugend und Sport, Handreichung für Lehrkräfte an Berliner Schulen (Berlin: Land Berlin, 2001).

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Ch a p t e r Eig h t Cl a ss of 1989: Who M ade Good a n d Who D rop p ed O u t of Ge r m a n H istory? Po st m ig r a n t D o c u m e n ta ry Th e at e r i n Be r l i n Katrin Sieg

In the documentary play Klassentreffen: Die Zweite Generation (Class Reunion: The Second Generation), Özcan Mutlu, a local politician familiar to many residents of Kreuzberg, remembers growing up in walled-in West Berlin. The fortified division of Berlin, including its public transit system, not only failed to limit the mobility of West Berlin’s immigrant population, who could pass through check-points and strike up relations with East Berliners, but prompted practical jokes on the part of Kreuzberg children who, unobserved by the armed guards patrolling the “dead” subway stations under East Berlin, would throw stink bombs into adjoining wagons and gleefully watch the suffering of nauseous passengers during the interminable ride under East Berlin from Kreuzberg in the south to Wedding in the north. The opening of borders brought together not only ethnic German brothers and sisters separated during the Cold War, but also exposed the existence of extended and unorthodox family structures. As the Wall crumbled, so did marriages in Özcan’s neighborhood: “Many women came over with their kids and said: here we are, or: Dad, it’s me, we’re finally united. Many Turkish families broke up over that, because the wives suddenly realized: he’s had a lover over there—and children! They were the real victims of the Wende, I tell you!”1 In this play, as in other recent novels and dramas by Turkish German authors, tongue-in-cheek stories like Özcan’s serve to complicate the tired binaries of East and West, natives and immigrants that during the year of Fall-of-the-Wall celebrations seemed as stable and monolithic as the politician’s jarringly old-fashioned use of definite (and masculine) singular

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nouns when he talks about the Turk, the Ossi, the Wessi. In this chapter, I take my cue from his anecdote’s discombobulation of social and sexual relations across heavily vested borders and boundaries and try to triangulate the stories of theater in post-Wall Germany presented here. I begin by considering theater as an archive of Germanness that constitutes and continually reproduces exclusionary concepts of identity and community through scenarios of insurmountable difference. Performance scholar Diana Taylor reminds us that “Archive, from the Greek, etymologically refers to ‘a public building,’ ‘a place where records are kept. From arkhe, it also means a beginning, the first place, the government.’ ” She concludes: “the archival, from the beginning, sustains power.”2 The archive not only stores and recycles the mythologies of oriental difference and European cosmopolitanism but also perpetuates orientalist modes of power by its very epistemological privileging of writing and hence the elision of oral, embodied, improvised modes of expression and transmission. While scenarios of differences between self and Other have historically typified ethnonationalist constructions of German identity, both German and European discourse now officially disparage and negatively contrast ethnonationalism to cosmopolitanism. Perceptions of Turkish immigrants, previously constructed through the lenses of class and ethnicity, are now framed primarily in terms of religious difference. As Muslims, they are accused of continually falling short of the cosmopolitan European norm. After reunification, by contrast, East Germans were cast in the position of insufficiently democratic subjects, as media reported about neo-Nazi activities and racist hate crimes in the East German provinces. Paul Cooke’s provocative choice of postcolonial theory as a critical matrix for postsocialist literary and cinematic representations points to the self-perception of the former GDR as a sort of Orient, whereas some Turkish intellectuals sought to portray immigrants as more sophisticated, metropolitan, and culturally tolerant than the denizens of the new German states.3 Anthropologist Jenny White argues that only in the mid to late 1990s did Turkish Germans lose their status as “Westerners,” as they began to be grouped with other poorly assimilated immigrants from Eastern Europe.4 The shift to religion as the preeminent category dividing democratic cosmopolitans from those crippled by an authoritarian mentality has aided the cultural integration of East Germans. Ruth Mandel’s fieldwork in Berlin has demonstrated that Turkish Germans are routinely folded into a parallel, monolithic Islamic world incompatible with Weltoffenheit or cosmopolitanism.5 The grounding of such exclusionary claims in assertions of authenticity and sociological notions of the real brings me to the resurgence of documentary theater in Germany and beyond. I will explore the potential of live performance to contest the sedimented archive of official and subaltern speech and

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imagery and borrow Taylor’s notion of performance as a corporeal repertoire of postnational, cosmopolitan conceptions of identity. I sketch some of the performative tactics deployed in recent Turkish German documentary theater and point out how this theater claims Turkish German biographies and everyday practices as part of the European cosmopolitanism from which they have been evicted.

Official Archives of Germanness 1. German Drama from Strauß to Hübner In the early 1990s, when ethnonationalist sentiments and racist violence surged in unified Germany, I was struck by the scarcity of plots and characters, not to mention playwrights, directors, and actors to represent these burning political issues on the German stage.6 Botho Strauß’s acclaimed play Gross und Klein (Big and Small, 1978), which was produced throughout the 1980s at many German theaters, paradigmatically illustrates the terms of immigrants’ participation in German national culture: in an emblematic scene, a Turkish man whose name, Arslan, means “lion,” roars disconnected words and commands in a military staccato that his German wife repeats in German. Interestingly, her translations of his command to “shut up” ’ and “stop translating” are both faithful to the meaning of his words and unfaithful to their expressed intent. His menacing tone and demeanor bewilder his wife, who, according to the stage directions, “steps aside and regards him like a stranger.” 7 The German woman’s well-intentioned offers of help not only place her in a linguistic catch-22 but are met with ingratitude, even violence. The character’s threatening behavior and communicative incompetence seal his outsider status from the German linguistic community. This perception extended as well to the actor, evident in the published documentation of the rehearsal process, which reveals the discomfort of director Peter Stein and the German cast at the Schaubühne with the Turkish actor cast in the role of Arslan.8 In my book Ethnic Drag, I discussed a public scandal in 1988, prompted by another theater director’s refusal to cast an actor of color in the role of a North African because, he contended, such a casting choice would “erode the homogeneity of the ensemble.”9 These two cases from the late 1980s demonstrate the homology between ensemble and nation, whose cohesion is premised on a shared language as well as the reasoned comportment expected from interlocutors in the public sphere. Arslan is excluded from public discourse not because he speaks another national language, but—in an arch-orientalist move—because his bestial roar and nonsensical speech exclude him from the category of rational humanity altogether.

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No wonder, then, that German theater remained largely “Turk-free” for the following two decades. The scene gains poignancy when one considers that several of the actors cast in the role of Arslan were Turkish performers and organizers central to the Turkish German theater and cabaret, including Meray Ülgen and Sinasi Dikmen.10 These men and their companies were anything but inarticulate yet indeed created dramatic and satirical characters and scenarios utterly unlike the representations found on the German stage; moreover, both went on to found their own theaters (Tiyatrom in Berlin and Kabarett Änderungsschneiderei in Frankfurt am Main respectively). To Turkish spectators, critics, and actors, the part of Arslan lacked both depth and verisimilitude. Performers who could afford to, turned it down, and theater scholar Erol Boran calls it an “improbable” character that “lacks credibility.”11 Fast-forward 20 years: in March of 2009, I attended a performance of the play Ehrensache (A Matter of Honor), staged for the annual international, cross-cultural “Diyalog Theaterfest” that took place at the newly reopened Ballhaus Naunynstrasse in Berlin, but independently curated by a Turkish German cultural association. Written by Lutz Hübner and directed by Alexander Brill, two middle-aged, native Germans, and performed by a cast including three actors with an immigrant background, I watched the young amateurs deliver riveting and terrifying performances as two teenage Turkish German teenage boys who first court then kill two adolescent girls, one of Turkish and the other of German descent. The play, we were told in the program notes, was based on an actual event and tried to probe the violent depths of immigrant, Muslim masculinity by framing the boys’ recollections of their fateful encounter with the girls in conversations with a German court psychiatrist, whose dispassionate voice emanated from somewhere in the dark auditorium. At the postshow discussion, spectators, who included a class of theater majors from a local high school, engaged in a spirited argument with the company and its director. The students struggled with the tension between the ostensible authenticity of the performance and the appallingly clichéd plot and characters. They could not contest the production’s claim to truthfulness; moreover, the psychological and cultural verisimilitude of the masculinity in question was warranted by actors fiercely identified with their roles, who repeatedly assured spectators that “this is really what it’s like to be a guy in our culture.” Yet the students, many of whom identified themselves as hailing from Turkish and other immigrant families as well, remained reluctant to enter into a self-critical reflection on gender and ethnicity on terms that were so clearly set in advance by a hostile German press on the one side and the seemingly more empathetic, liberal Germans embodied by the fictional psychiatrist on the other. Their comments expressed a lingering

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suspicion that the performers’ energy was being harnessed by authorities who remained just as much disembodied and shadowy as the voice of the psychiatrist. They professed discomfort with the fact that the performance was less easy to dismiss than a story in a German newspaper because it was brought to them by immigrant performers. The webpage of Theater Peripherie, the Frankfurt company that had produced A Matter of Honor, confirmed that both the casting and the choice of performance venue had indeed been strategic in an effort to reach immigrant audiences and avoid the impression of “us Germans speaking [once again] about the ‘others.’ ”12 The higher degree of authenticity and credibility, director Alexander Brill concluded, will allow “us” to reach “the affected” where they live and catalyze their self-transformation. In view of Brill’s acknowledgment that yet another story Germans tell about immigrants would stall rather than start intercultural dialogue, there is something dubious, even unethical, about his choice of delivery, because it begged the question in what sense this was now no longer a story Germans tell each other about the “others.” It is to the credit of the young spectators that they were not fooled by this Trojan horse school of social realism. Inasmuch as sexual violence is at the core of German perceptions of immigrant men, A Matter of Honor demonstrates strong continuity in German scenarios of cultural identity and difference over the past two decades. However, religion has replaced language as the primary category of framing and explaining cultural difference. It is named as the cause of Muslim men’s violent behavior both in the play and extra-theatrically by the actors, who cite their multinational backgrounds as evidence of sociological truth. Whereas the psychiatrist models cross-cultural empathy and stays calm even when he is goaded by the young felons, Arslan’s theatrical descendants predictably erupt into roaring rage when asked to reflect on the principles guiding their actions and on the murderous consequences of these actions. Their ability to speak German only reveals their inability and unwillingness to accept gender equality and participate in rational discourse in the nonviolent, tolerant, cosmopolitan community. The social drama of the violent Turk has been modified, elaborated, and radicalized but not changed drastically in the arrangement of its basic components on the German stage, as the continuities between Strauß and Hübner illustrate. What has changed is the participation of immigrants as actors and their inclusion in the intended audience—as evidenced by Hübner’s paternalistic wish to inform Muslims about their culture and provoke their self-transformation. Shermin Langhoff, the Turkish German director of the theater that hosted the performance of the play in Berlin, professed to being so appalled by Hübner’s work that she would have walked out, if that had not been disrespectful to the actors. Yet the greater

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degree of verisimilitude achieved both through the resonance between press coverage and drama and through the actors’ strong identification with their roles apparently appealed to some immigrant spectators, including the curators who invited the play to the Diyalog Theaterfest. The play’s divided reception illustrates how difficult the questions of truth and authenticity have become since immigrants have begun to participate in and actively contribute to “stories that Germans tell about the other.” 2. Autobiography as Archive Whereas German authors—most notoriously the journalist Günter Wallraff—initially set themselves up as spokesmen for purportedly inarticulate immigrants, Hübner’s reluctance to place himself in that role reveals that such a paternalistic speaking position has become less defensible.13 Turkish Germans have authored an increasing number of texts representing first-hand the experiences and perspectives of immigrants in Germany. Writers like Saliha Scheinhardt in the mid-1980s, Feridun Zaimoglu in the mid-1990s, and Necla Kelek in the mid-2000s published compilations of immigrant first-person narratives whose format recalls the collective minoritarian voice composed by other socially disenfranchised and/or racially oppressed groups and movements in Germany.14 These range from the oral histories of laid-off industrial workers transcribed by Erika Runge (1968); Maxi Wander’s Guten Morgen, du Schöne (1978), which heralded East German feminism; and the life stories that form the centerpiece of Farbe Bekennen (1986), the key text of the emergent Afro German movement; to Jürgen Lemke’s Ganz Normal Anders about gay men in the GDR (1989).15 These collections, which were crucial to the collective self-articulation of their subjects, not only supplemented the archive of Germanness, but also marked its systematic gendered, sexual, racialized, class-specific exclusions and pushed for reconfiguring and extending the meaning of Germanness. Yet unlike those landmark collections, the books by Scheinhardt, Zaimoglu, and Kelek—while differing drastically from each other in their contents and gist—have been criticized for their tendentiousness, and their claim to collective truth telling has been sharply contested not only by Turkish German readers. One of the reasons for their controversial reception has certainly been the divisiveness of gender in these stories.16 Literary scholar Karin Yesilada diagnoses the stereotypically maltreated “Suleikas” in early immigrant women’s autobiographical and biographical literature as a form of orientalist “Suleikalism,” that is, as Turkish German writers’ uncritical appropriation of images created and passed down by European orientalists. She insists on the heteronomous character of the

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distinct Turkish male and female stereotypes cemented by Scheinhardt and others in order to challenge these writers’ claim to authentic ethnic self-representation. Writing in 1997, Yesilada regarded Suleikalism as a “childhood illness” plaguing immigrant literature, so to speak, which would pass as writers shake off and grow beyond inherited and externally imposed models.17 Her optimism does not seem warranted. In Necla Kelek’s book Die fremde Braut (2006), for instance, we find an intensified form of Suleikalism, which has helped reproduce and buttress the monolithic image of Islam against which other minority self-representations are measured, if they want to count as authentic. Kelek’s central thesis about Muslim parallel worlds, in which male violence and female submission are preserved untouched by Europe’s enlightened democratic values, resonates in the surge of single-authored women’s autobiographies during this decade. While some critics have chided Kelek for being both unscientific and unethical, others have underscored the active role of the media and the political establishment in promoting representations like hers, over and against more soundly researched and nuanced scholarship. Scholars like Werner Schiffauer and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim locate agency in the German public rather than in the professional ethnic and show that the notion of ethnic authenticity is already scripted in advance.18 In short, immigrant autobiography does not so much contest but indeed complements and authenticates German theater’s scenarios of religious exclusion and German cosmopolitanism. Together, the two discourses furnish an archive of Germanness that integrates the nation into transnational European values and principles, thus reconfiguring cosmopolitanism from a discourse opposed to nationalism into one that extends it across Europe. By making cosmopolitanism a European cultural trait and the continent’s central, historically acquired but now immutable characteristic, cosmopolitanism ceases to compel what Seyla Benhabib has termed “democratic iterations” within European societies, including the dialectic of racist, sexist, and homophobic structures on the one side and norms mandating social equality and cultural differences on the other.19 Against that background, I regard the collective autobiographies performed in recent Turkish German theater as a renewed attempt to claim inclusion and participation through personal narratives that oppose the intensification of exclusion, marginalization, and heteronomy since the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, Madrid, and London. They try to salvage and reenergize the claim to Turkish German cosmopolitanism, multicultural competence, and translocal mobility and affinity through autobiography, which has been so central historically to minority activism and art. Their insistence on the ordinary and the everyday counterbalances the media’s focus on sensational criminal cases and attendant,

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exaggerated claims about the nature of the Muslim man. And their emphasis on gendered inclusion and sexual diversity, along with their attention to German society’s decreasing commitment to integration over the past decade, includes Turkish Germans in cosmopolitan norms and exposes what Ruth Mandel calls “Germans’ selective cosmopolitanism.”20 They do so in a form and tone that diverges dramatically from the anthologies I cited above. Documentary drama has risen to prominence in the new Turkish German theater as evidenced by the Beyond Belonging festival (since 2006) and the reopened Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, both in Berlin-Kreuzberg. The ascendancy of documentary theater is part of the genre’s larger, transnational resurgence as well as a response to an important shift in Germany’s liberalization of citizenship (2000) and immigration laws (2005), which helped to normalize and relax relationships between majority and minority Germans to some extent. Yet realist genres and documentary media have long been regarded as hostile to immigrant claims to belonging and representation, as they are seen to reproduce and naturalize the social dynamics of exclusion. One scene in the 1991 play Keloglan in Alemania (1991) by Emine Sevgi Özdamar, one of the most acclaimed Turkish German writers, emblematizes the mistrust of documentary forms and media. The play chronicles the trials and tribulations of Keloglan, a youth born in Germany but with Turkish citizenship, who must find a job or a wife in order to retain his residence permit. The projection of a documentary film clip of protesting foreigners being deported signals the futility of his efforts but is interrupted by the author’s voice over the speaker system announcing: “In reality the foreign youth Keloglan would have woken in the morning, gone back home, perhaps had a glass of tea, then the police would have come to fetch him, and he would have left the country on the first plane. But here . . . ?”21 “Reality” and its mediatized documentation per film clip are emphatically not on the side of poor Keloglan, who receives assistance instead from the collective forces of the European and Turkish imagination, from Shakespeare and Brecht to the Turkish shadow puppet theater, folklore, and modern Turkish drama.22 Of all genres, documentary theater’s notion of script, character, and setting seem most wedded to the archive’s notions of evidence and truth. Why, then, has documentary theater become such an important vehicle for the articulation of postmigrant experience, history, and identity? As I have argued at length in my book Ethnic Drag, mimetic representations of social identity have historically served to dramatize and naturalize essentialist notions of nation, race, and gender in Germany. The documentary theater’s appeal to sociological notions of the real, coupled with the conflation of actor and character

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in some documentary performances, risks laminating social behavior to a particular national psychology or even a racialized anatomy. So my question is: Are Turkish Germans, now eligible for naturalization (German citizenship), co-opted into the logic of mimesis, reproducing therefore the exclusions and hierarchies of the cosmopolitan, European transnation— and at whose expense? Documentary theater brings into view complicated realities in which people have learned to muddle through contradictions, to stake claims beyond the binaries of assimilation or cultural betrayal, and to imagine cross-ethnic, translocal histories and solidarities. But does it make a case for a poetics that insists on the minoritarian, modern subject as a sociological referent, without at the same time reproducing either the racist and sexist ontologies of mimesis or the expunging in realist drama of the nation’s internal contradictions? Documentary Performance at Beyond Belonging and Ballhaus Naunynstrasse In November 2008, the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse reopened under new leadership and with a new artistic agenda. The building, a dance hall dating from the late nineteenth century that housed forced laborers from Eastern Europe during the Third Reich, has served as a cultural center since the mid-1970s. It is located in the center of northern Kreuzberg, a neighborhood historically characterized by a high proportion of immigrants but also by a rich mix of hippie, punk, anarchist, and queer populations and organizations. In contrast to neighboring Neukölln, which epitomizes ethnic tensions and social strife in the popular media, gentrified Kreuzberg aspires to be a multicultural bohemia, where ethnic differences can be pleasurably consumed. The three-story house, located in a courtyard, sports a large space that can be flexibly outfitted with a stage platform and movable risers for the audience, as well as a basement lounge and a second-story gallery used for exhibitions. In addition to seven theatrical productions, the Ballhaus program during its first season included several dance pieces, literature readings, and monthly video evenings called Kiez-TV, during which youth screened their own neighborhood news shows. The Ballhaus is run by a cultural association named KulturSprünge (which could be translated as either “cultural leaps” or “cultural cracks”), and its founder, Shermin Langhoff, serves as the theater’s managing director. Langhoff, who has long worked at the intersection of communist and anarchist political and cultural networks, moved to Berlin in the early 1990s, and is married to Lukas Langhoff, the scion of a dynasty of prominent East German theater directors, who has directed several of the documentary plays I discuss here. KulturSprünge receives financial support

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from an array of funding sources, including both the municipal district Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain and other city and federal agencies. It is worth mentioning that these monies come from cultural budgets rather than from social welfare programs, diverging from a long history of funding by German institutions that have not only categorized minority theater as a form of social work but also allocated only short-term grants.23 Before accepting her position at the Ballhaus, Langhoff curated the annual festival Beyond Belonging, hosted by the Hebbel-am-Ufer Theater in BerlinKreuzberg since 2006, and was able to revive two of those productions at the Ballhaus. The documentary plays produced by Beyond Belonging and the Ballhaus were all assembled in a similar manner yet diverge considerably in their staging. Schwarze Jungfrauen (Black Virgins, 2006) and Schattenstimmen (Shadow Voices, 2009) by Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel; Class Reunion (2007), and Ferienlager: die Dritte Generation (Summer Camp: The Third Generation, 2009), both directed by Lukas Langhoff, as well as Jenseits: Bist du Türke oder bist du schwul? (The Hereafter: Are You Turkish or Are You Gay, 2008) by Nurkan Erpulat und Tunçay Kulaoğlu, are all based on biographical narratives culled from interviews with subjects named in the title (Islamist women, undocumented immigrants, second- and thirdgeneration immigrants, gay men of Turkish descent), subsequently edited and made into scripts that become the basis for performance. While the two Zaimoglu/Senkel plays mostly preserved the monologic, oral history format by presenting performers in direct frontal address to the audience, the two “generational” plays directed by Langhoff, as well as Kulaoğlu’s play about gay Turks, put greater emphasis on reenactment and interaction, requiring performers to assist in another’s scene and thus step out of her or his own role. Most of the plays (with the exception of Shadow Voices) cut and splice monologues into a dramatic structure resembling acts, organized around particular topics, rhythms, and moods. Class Reunion and Summer Camp were performed by the same subjects that gave the interviews. Both were based on the stories of Kreuzberg residents from the theater’s immediate vicinity. For reasons of space, I will focus on Class Reunion and Summer Camp. In each case, the dramatic structure tracks the breakdown of predominant narratives of ethnic selfhood, which traditionally chronicle the journey from oppression to emancipation in gender-specific ways. Class Reunion’s six protagonists are among those who have made it both in the eyes of the Turkish community and of Germans, and some of them have even achieved a certain prominence: Ünal is a successful music producer shuttling between Istanbul and Berlin; Tuna is a cabdriver and former professional athlete; Dilek is a police officer; Özkan is a civil engineer active in Green Party politics; Emel

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is a divorced woman who runs several Islamic kindergartens; and Hülya is happily married and works. All are bilingual and speak accurate, slightly accented German. The first part of the play introduces each character, and the second provides information about their childhood, youth, family situation, and profession. Hülya remembers her father, an alcoholic, and her hardworking mother who raised four kids and supported her daughter’s search for independence. Özcan’s childhood in divided Berlin is shaped by starkly diverging male role models, who either work hard and die early or inflict pain on their families by their sexual adventures. Dilek reveals the troubling details of her first marriage and the tribulations of her training as a police officer. And Emel speaks about her early life as a model daughter, wife, and mother of six, in addition to her work for Islamic women’s associations. The third part, finally, takes a close look at decisive biographical turning points, crises, and catastrophes: we hear of Tuna’s sudden diagnosis of a knee injury, which forces him to give up his dreams of Olympic glory as a handball player; the accidental death of Ünal’s father in his highly flammable stationery and toy shop; the bankruptcy of Hülya and her two sisters after their mother implores them, one after the other, to take out bank loans in support of their drug-addicted brother; and Emel’s earthshattering experience of falling in love and subsequent decision to divorce her husband, a high-ranking Islamic functionary. The play seems interested in accidental, arbitrary, and highly subjective events and decisions as well as in those stemming from shared conditions such as geography and age. Ünal’s professional setbacks as a music producer were caused both by German suspicions about the Turkish market and by Turks’ circumventing of the global music industry; but his greatest losses occurred as a consequence of freak accidents. Emel left her Turkish husband, but her peculiar love story does not fit the parameters of the stereotypical female rescue narrative, which commonly has a German lover or friend help the Turkish woman escape her oppressive family or violent husband. Performing their stories on a set marked as a dance hall, all six might be said to have “stepped out of line” and meandered away from life scripts shaped not only by familiar cultural, class, and gendered constraints but also by other, entirely unpredictable crises. Dancing thus becomes the central trope for the changes that the characters undergo and for the collective experience of playing with familiar scenarios. Like Emel, whose first crossing downstage is performed as a sequence of Aikido moves and who invites the others to join her in Irish folk dancing, all six experiment with new steps and tunes, learn unfamiliar moves, and risk entrusting themselves to others—at least for a time. While the generational portrait that emerges from the stories can hardly count as representative, the very emphasis on elements of luck, misfortune,

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and improvisation deviates from a sociological approach that seeks out the typical and thus reinforces a socially deterministic view of immigrant identity. Instead, the play presents us with “model lives” under complicated and precarious circumstances in which obstacles and contradictions cannot be resolved in any simple sense but are tackled or merely borne with tenacity and ingenuity. Hülya’s striving for independence is a good example. Her story initially sounds much like the familiar tales of feminist emancipation that are predicated on accepting “German values” and attaining distance from one’s family of origin. Yet in her biography, the family—especially the mother—encourages Hülya’s independence. Her gender performance emphasizes a self-confident eroticism along with her ability to set sexual limits. Yet the story she tells of her brother’s drug addiction and of her mother’s prioritizing of her son over her daughters also reveals Hülya’s irresolvable sadness about the destructiveness of familial loyalty as well as her mother’s sexism. The music producer Ünal, shuttling back and forth between Kreuzberg and Istanbul, appears as the quintessential cultural traveler-trader: his connections to the popular music scene in Frankfurt got his band a promising engagement at a large-scale concert in Istanbul, which was, however, foiled by the 1999 earthquake. While he accepted the resulting loss of his investment as an act of fate, his next venture, the marketing of Turkish pop music in Germany, got him a contract with Warner Music, a giant in the global music industry, after he persuaded them that their fears about illicit distribution were founded on prejudice. Yet the sale of Turkish pop music in Germany was indeed foiled by the hawking of pirated CDs through the network of Turkish grocers, leading to Warner Music’s termination of Ünal’s contract. The setback he suffered was not only to his bank account but also to the creation of wider publics for Turkish pop in Europe. Victories thus tend to be fleeting—yet they are sought after and savored, if only momentarily. When Özcan ascends on a platform and waves to his cheering classmates below at the end of the play, their encouraging call “You’ll make it!” is both an expression of hope and contrasts with the precariousness of his swaying perch. All of the characters embody what Mandel calls “demotic cosmopolitanism,” namely, the quotidian engagement with the world beyond the binary of native and naturalized. That engagement emerged in the crucible of immigration and settlement but continues to be denied in the European discourse of cosmopolitanism as the prerogative of frequent-flying elites.24 While the referential “I” of autobiographical speech underscores the specificity of individual experience and tethers character to actor, actors nevertheless weave in and out of roles as they become extras in the stories of others. Folding monologic speech into danced choreographies, Class

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Reunion performs a collective subject; bodies move along with, improvise on, and skip the routines and rhythms of immigrant autobiography. Moreover, the setting of the “class reunion” again unifies what could otherwise be read as disparate and coincidental. The gaudily decorated, improvised stage of a community center or sports facility, where a homemade banner reads “Klassentreffen ‘89,” announces the occasion of this gathering, even though the individuals addressing the audience neither mention this historic date as that of their high school graduation nor is there any indication that they actually went to school together. Class Reunion compounds the retrospection and stock-taking prompted by a reunion with its insistence on including the collective experiences of Turkish immigrants in the reflections and remembrances of a time when Germans encountered each other as strangers, before the dismantled Wall was gradually replaced with less visible ethnic, class, and religious demarcations. The most important deviation from the well-trodden paths of immigrant autobiography might be the performative collaboration of men and women in both Class Reunion and Summer Camp. In Zaimoglu’s earlier work in the collections Kanak Sprak (1995) and Koppstoff (1998), as well as in his documentary play Schwarze Jungfrauen (Black Virgins, 2006), the all-male and all-female casts suggest that experiences diverge too far by gender to be narrated within the same space. In addition, gender becomes a problem addressed exclusively by female characters, whereas men tend to grapple with class oppression, cultural marginalization, and racism. The co-ed situation in these more recent plays means that Turkish German masculinity and men’s relations to women can now be tackled by men. Put differently, men are included in the critique and transformation of gender rather than being cast as obstacles to such democratic iterations. For instance, Özcan reveals his alienation from his family, the physical toll that constant work took on his grandfather, and the pressure he exerts on his own son; these critical reflections are more reminiscent of Western male feminist discourses than the confrontation with male obsessions like honor and violence that Lutz Hübner invokes for Muslim immigrants in particular. By minimizing national or ethnic differences and emphasizing shared problems, including the fraught issue of gender, Class Reunion thus marks Turkish Germans’ “arrival” in the Germans’ and Europeans’ very own contradictions. Moreover, immigrants reanimate the democratic iterations now stalled by Germans’ selective and reified cosmopolitanism. Summer Camp, based on interviews with eight Kreuzberg teenagers, similarly presents itself as a generational departure from predetermined biographical paths, yet biography and documentary are understood very loosely in this play.25 Indeed, we are given little of the kind of sociological information that was deemed important in Class Reunion. We learn

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only that Utku loves basketball, Kader has a German boyfriend, Lale is a cell phone addict, Tamer is perpetually horny, Duygu works in a gym, and Alkim is a math freak. Some characters have almost no story of their own and participate largely in the group scenes; one girl only speaks at the very end. Summer Camp focuses more on dreams and fantasies than on landmark events in the characters’ comparatively short lives. It frames the young people’s aspirations within a transcultural archive of Germanness that hybridizes German canonical texts extending from Goethe’s Faust, via filmmaker Wim Wenders’s wistful 1987 meditation on divided Berlin in Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), to Pina Bausch’s dance theater piece Le Sacre du Printemps (1975), with global literature—specifically Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1988)—and pop cultural references to Westerns, Bollywood musicals, and basketball. It opens with a formal prologue during which the supernatural creatures Gabriel and Scheitan stroll past the sleeping bodies of five girls and three boys stretched out on metal bed frames, recalling a youth hostel or summer camp, and discuss what is in store for each. This framing action amalgamates Goethe’s Faust with Rushdie’s Satanic Verses: in both, angels assume human form to intervene in human lives. Whereas Mephistopheles challenges God to a wager over what choices Dr. Faust would make, Gabriel and Scheitan in Summer Camp already know the (largely depressing) ending of each youth’s life story, raising the question of whether its course can still be altered. The pair also evokes the angels in Wenders’s Wings of Desire because they too decide to meddle in human lives, though in a less benevolent way.26 And while in Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, the devil is taken for an illegal immigrant in the United Kingdom, the roles this cantankerous couple assumes in the course of the play are squarely on the side of higher authorities, such as schoolteachers and integration experts working for the German government. While national high culture amplifies the odds that the youth have stacked against them, some of its more avant-garde forms appear less hostile: the stage floor, for instance, which is covered with loose brown soil, resembles the set in the late Pina Bausch’s famous Le Sacre du Printemps (1975), about the pleasure and terror of awakening sexuality. It facilitates the pop cultural forms through which the youth articulate their desire for recognition, distinction, and, of course, love: it becomes a dance floor for Kader’s romantic Bollywood fantasy; a basketball court for athletic Utku; and cushions the dramatic, drawn-out falls of Tamer, whose dying Western hero aims to elicit communal mourning and adoration. The set’s earthy-smelling floor connects the regimented inside of an institutional setting with the fairy-tale nature outside, from whence supernatural creatures arrive and where whimsical animals amble by at auspicious moments. Most notably, a large cow (played by two actors) crosses

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the outside terrace visible through tall French doors in the back wall of the stage, gleefully derailing a scene in which a student is disciplined by his literature teacher. The interruption of the lesson, which revolves around the familiar juxtaposition of Turkish honor and German promiscuity, seems to take us back to Özdamar’s Keloglan in Alemania, in which, as I noted above, the documentary form and its relentless repetition of cultural difference was spurned in favor of stage magic. Yet that play made its political point through the witty deployment of ethnic drag: its characters cycled through the costumes, masks, and props of European high culture to demonstrate the virulence of orientalist scenarios, refuting their claim to truth while exposing their power to constitute reality. Young Keloglan’s baldness served to withhold any anatomical truth anchoring Germans’ assertion that some cultural differences are more different—and less assimilable— than others. Summer Camp, along with the other recent documentary plays I mentioned, does not deploy ethnic drag in that way: when Emel hops and skips to an Irish tune, she is not in Celtic drag; nor does Kader do Indian drag in her Bollywood number; or Tamer do whiteness as drag in his Western bits. To read these moments in the plays as drag, as a heightening of the disjunction between actor and character, or body and social role, would solidify precisely a notion of cultural incommensurability that the plays aim to unsettle. While not all cultural discourses can be harnessed by the Kreuzberg kids, cultural bricolage is clearly the normative practice of performing German or European citizenship. At the same time the racialized or religious body, whose otherness constitutes the limits of integration and whose peculiar absence of anatomical markers therefore became the ground from which Özdamar launched her critique, disappears from view in this normative performance of a transcultural European subject.27 The new postmigrant documentary theater, specifically the plays by Feridun Zaimoglu and Günter Senkel, thematizes those otherwise excluded from the realm of the cosmopolitan European subject, namely, religious fundamentalists and undocumented, non-European immigrants. Black Virgins goes to great lengths to integrate those constituted as Other to the European subject into the “democratic iterations” that drive the process of increasing political participation, legal rights, and acceptance of cultural differences in Europe. The play thus exhibits an admirable impulse of solidarity with the demonized that also underlies the collected portraits of undocumented laborers in Shadow Voices. However, both Black Virgins and Summer Camp perform their own telling exlusions: of the five Islamist women in Black Virgins, the only one who threatens political violence is singled out and isolated in the play’s final tableau; in Summer Camp, the silent and uninvolved figure of young Cidem reveals her yearning to return to the Turkish village where her grandfather died and is removed from the

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group by Gabriel and Scheitan during the play’s final scene. Her nationalist longing to “return” to an ancestral home that she has never known and that no longer exists because the village has been abandoned, in any case, propels her outside the play’s parameters of cosmopolitan settlement and belonging to and in Germany. In these moments, the documentary plays concede the preestablished limits of democratic participation, even as they contest the collective exclusion of Muslims from European cosmopolitanism. Indeed, Cidem’s expulsion on the grounds of nostalgia seems much more punitive than Black Virgin’s isolation of the would-be terrorist, revealing the intensification of disciplinary regimes after the train bombings of Madrid (2004) and London (2005). The new documentary theater champions the inclusion of migrants and minorities in European cosmopolitanism and positions these groups as the drivers of democratic iterations stalled by the quasi-national discourse of European community. I sympathize with documentary theater’s dramaturgy of cosmopolitan normativity, which translates into theatrical terms the normalization of Turkish German lives and relations since the change of citizenship and immigration laws. At the same time the documentary plays at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse make an effort not to abandon those who are the new outsiders, the “homo sacers” included under the law, as Giorgio Agamben writes, only to be excluded: refugees, boat people, undocumented immigrants.28 Yet I wonder whether that particular dramatic form, organized around the autobiographical, humanist self, fully endowed with the capacity to reason among equals and persuade without recourse to violence, as cosmopolitan thinkers in the Enlightenment tradition have envisioned it, is actually able to register conditions of living under the contemporary structures of absolute sovereignty and bare life described by Agamben. European playwrights such as Elfriede Jelinek, René Pollesch, and Caryl Churchill have dramatized their plight and have done so with greater attention to the structural debilitations of race, gender, and global capital than Agamben. In their “postdramatic” plays, characters are put on display whose bodies are violently perforated by Eurocentric discourse, yet lack all the perks of individual consciousness, including the articulateness that is required to perpetuate the cosmopolitan myth of nonviolent discourse among equals.29 Jelinek’s recent choric plays about the Iraq war (Babel; Bambiland), the trafficking of women across Europe’s Eastern borders (Über Tiere), and finance capitalism (Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns), for instance, show the “zones of indistinction,” where those excluded from sovereignty die, alongside their mirror other, the terrorizing and tyrannical absolute power emblematized by the Coalition of the Willing, Wall Street, and the European Internal Security complex.30 This doubling of the homo sacer into outcast and tyrant has, in Agamben’s somewhat pathos-laden

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words, produced “the camp”—from Guantanamo Bay to the CIA secret prisons and refugee camps proliferating in Europe—“as the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.”31 As I wrote in Choreographing the Global, the Vienna Burgtheater’s productions of Jelinek have channeled state funds into profound and powerful critiques of European selective cosmopolitanism. Perhaps the long overdue inclusion of postmigrant theater in the funding logic of German national culture has, in this initial phase of production, contributed to its succumbing to the country’s (and the continent’s) most cherished myth. The global resurgence of documentary theater since the 1990s, which has been chronicled and analyzed in special issues and scholarly anthologies, demonstrates that the genre is not intrinsically wedded to humanist notions of the subject or to the archive’s notion of evidence and truth. The editors of the anthology Get Real view the strength and significance of documentary theater in its potential to critically “explore the status and stability of ‘the document’ . . . and investigate . . . the representation and presentation of ‘truth’ in an environment where media technologies not only reflect, but also constitute the ‘real.’ ”32 Theater thus becomes a site to fan “archive fever” (Jacques Derrida) and foster epistemological skepticism. The work at the Ballhaus resonates with the politics of post-1968, “postdramatic” documentary theater: the sum of its efforts, comprising the documentary work I have discussed here, the local news produced by video-savvy youth, and collaborations and cooperations with allied groups in Berlin and Istanbul, is to experiment with new modes of storytelling that critically engage with mediatized truths about European cosmopolitans and inassimilable immigrants. Provided there is money, the experiment will continue. Notes 1. Klassentreffen: Die Zweite Generation (Class Reunion: The Second Generation), 17. Unpublished manuscript, produced by Hebbel-am-Ufer, 2007, dir. Lukas Langhoff; all translations from the unpublished script are mine. Many thanks to Shermin Langhoff for generously providing me with scripts as well as DVD recordings of all plays discussed here. 2. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 19. 3. Paul Cooke, Representing East Germany since Unification: From Colonization to Nostalgia (Oxford: Berg, 2005); Sanem Kleff, “Wir sind auch das Volk! Die letzten zwölf Monate des geteilten Berlin aus der Sicht deutsch-deutscher Berlinerinnen,” in BRD–DDR: Alte und neue Rassismen im Zuge der deutschdeutschen Einigung, ed. Sanem Kleff, Edith Bronzinsky-Schwabe, Marie T. Albert, Helga Marburger, Marie E. Karsten (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1991), 3–17.

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182 / katrin sieg 4. Jenny B. White, “Turks in the New Germany,” American Anthropologist 99, no. 4 (1997): 762. 5. Ruth Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 6. Erol Boran’s dissertation demonstrates that the short-lived Türkenprojekt at Peter Stein’s Schaubühne in the early 1980s and two Turkish run theaters in Berlin and Cologne are the exception to the rule of immigrants’ exclusion from the publicly subsidized theater. See Erol M. Boran, “Eine Geschichte des deutsch-türkischen Theaters und Kabaretts,” Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 2004. 7. Botho Strauß, Gross und klein (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1978), 81 (translation by the author). 8. Boran, “Eine Geschichte,” 102. 9. Katrin Sieg, Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 6. 10. Boran, “Eine Geschichte,” 102, 216. 11. Boran, “Eine Geschichte,” 21. 12. The 2009 website on Ehrensache is no longer accessible. For the current version see http://peripherie2.strolchen.de/20102011/ehrensache (accessed on July 22, 2010). 13. For a critical discussion of such a paternalistic speaking position, see Gail Wise, “Ali im Wunderland,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996; Arlene Akiko Teraoka, “Talking Turk: On Narrative Strategies and Cultural Stereotypes,” New German Critique 46 (Winter 1989): 104–28; and Sieg, Ethnic Drag. It is worth noting that, despite fierce criticism of Wallraff ’s book Ganz unten (At the Bottom, 1984), based on a year of masquerading as the undocumented Turkish worker “Ali,” Wallraff recently produced a sequel of sorts, reporting in blackface as the Somalian refugee “Kwame Ogonu” in the documentary Schwarz auf Weiss (Black on White, 2009). 14. See Saliha Scheinhardt, Drei Zypressen (Berlin: Express Edition, 1983); Feridun Zaimoglu, Kanak Sprak: 24 Misstöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1995), and idem, Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1998); Necla Kelek, Die fremde Braut: Ein Bericht aus dem Inneren des türkischen Lebens in Deutschland (Munich: Goldmann, 2006). 15. Erika Runge, Bottroper Protokolle (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968); Maxie Wander, Guten Morgen, du Schöne: Frauen in der DDR (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1978); May Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye, and Dagmar Schultz, eds., Showing Our Colors: Afro- German Women Speak Out. Trans. Anne V. Adams (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); and Jürgen Lemke, Gay Voices from East Germany. Trans. Steven Stoltenberg et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 16. For a more detailed analysis of Turkish women’s autobiographies, see Beverly M. Weber, “Freedom from Violence, Freedom to Make the World: Muslim Women’s Memoirs, Gendered Violence, and Voices for Change in Germany,” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture 25 (2009), 199–222, and Tom Cheesman, Novels of Turkish German Settlement: Cosmopolite Fictions (Rochester: Camden House, 2007). This

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17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

section is an abbreviated version of a much longer discussion in Katrin Sieg, “Black Virgins and the Democratic Body,” New German Critique 109 (Winter 2010): 147–85. Karin Yesilada, “Die geschundene Suleika. Das Eigenbild der Türkin in der deutschsprachigen Literatur türkischer Autorinnen,” in Interkulturelle Konfigurationen: Zur deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur von Autoren nichtdeutscher Herkunft, ed. Mary Howard (Munich: Iudicium, 1997), 95–114. Schiffauer quoted in Miriam Lau, “Gefährliche Gutmenschen: Mit ihrer Kampagne gegen Necla Kelek wollen Migrationsforscher eine notwendige Debatte verhindern,” Welt online, February 8, 2006, www.welt.de/print-welt/ article196428/Gefaehrliche_Gutmenschen.html (accessed July 25, 2010); and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Wir und die Anderen: Kopftuch, Zwangsheirat und andere Missverständnisse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 82. Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 72. Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties, 14. Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Keloglan in Alemania (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1991), 24. For an extensive discussion of the play, see Sieg, Ethnic Drag, chap. 6. Boran, “Eine Geschichte,” 79. Mandel, Cosmopolitan Anxieties, 50. Ferienlager: Die Dritte Generation (Summer Camp: The Third Generation). Unpublished manuscript, produced by Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, 2009, dir. Lukas Langhoff. The production poster makes the reference to Wenders explicit: an angel and a devil look out over Berlin from their perch on the landmark high-rise building near the rundown Kottbusser Tor, a hangout for drug dealers and addicts. Moreover, the young people’s reliance on global pop culture to articulate their longing for recognition, romance, and success also recalls hapless Keloglan, whose transcultural web of references could not ward off the orientalist script of Madame Butterfly, that tragic oriental other whose unrequited love for Europe results in her “Liebestod.” Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Hans-Thies Lehmann coined the term “postdramatic” theater, which is now widely used. See Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New York: Routledge, 2006). For a discussion of Jelinek’s war plays, see chapter five in Katrin Sieg, Choreographing the Global in European Cinema and Theater (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Agamben, Homo Sacer, 181. Alyson Forsyth and Chris Megson, “Introduction,” in Get Real: Documentary Theater Past and Present, ed. Alyson Forsyth and Chris Megson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 3.

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Pa rt I V R e- Ne g o t i at i ng Eu rop e ’s Ce n t e r

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Ch a p t e r Ni n e O n Ita l i a n Br i d g e s: Nav ig at i ng Roc k s a n d H a r d P l ac e s i n Po st- Wa ll Eu rope Lina Insana

In a 1999 interview, Francesco Renda made the following provocative statement: I would like to preface my comments starting with a fundamental consideration: that is, that the geopolitical position of Sicily has changed. . . . This geopolitical change coincides with the end of the second millennium, the last years of which have seen two fundamental events. The first is the fall of the Berlin Wall. The second is the birth of the European Union. Taken together, these two events have given rise to a new general condition for the Mediterranean and for the nations and peoples that look out into it.1

Renda’s fundamental consideration and the inextricably interrelated “fundamental events” to which he links Sicily’s changing geopolitical status underpin this chapter. Sicily’s geographical situation—paradoxical as that may seem—is currently in a state of flux, shaped and reshaped by the dynamic reconfigurations of its various political, geographical, and cultural contexts, reshaping and reflecting in its turn the geopolitical situation that surrounds it. Specifically for thinkers like Renda, the fall of the Berlin Wall represents a paradigm shift in the way that fields such as human geography and social philosophy understand the place of the Mediterranean with respect to a newly reconfigured Europe. Once physically and politically ruptured along the East-West trajectory of the Berlin Wall, Europe’s borders in the aftermath of the Wall’s fall must now be reconsidered—as must the neighbors, the others, and the orientations that those borders imply. When “fundamental events” such as these change the very nature of what it means to be central and peripheral in geopolitical

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configurations, the determinism of cultural and political fault lines must also be questioned. How does the fall of the Berlin Wall inform the ways that countries like Italy (and their most peripheral and contested constituent regions) “belong” to broader geographical and political contexts, such as Europe, the European Union (EU), and the Mediterranean? In other words, in the wake of the destruction of a Wall dividing East and West, does a bridge linking North (Europe) and South (Mediterranean) acquire an even greater symbolic charge? To begin to address these questions, my comments will focus on a bridge that is currently not a bridge but rather a long-imagined architectural link connecting the Italian peninsula to the island of Sicily (or vice versa, depending on your geographical and ideological position) over the 5 km-wide Straits of Messina.2 This is an architectural wonder that has never been built but that has existed—and continues to exist—in political and creative discourses as a metaphor for Sicily’s position within larger geopolitical contexts and thus within the configuration of extended political and geographical systems: Italy, Europe, the EU, the Mediterranean. If it has become trite in the historiography of Sicily to note its oscillation between geographical centrality and marginality as an explanation for centuries of foreign domination, plundering, and abuse, it is also true that, as Ferdinand Braudel and Franco Cassano have written, it is a matter of no small import to be “a mere geographical expression.”3 Sicily’s new position, or rather its new orientation that responds to demands and anxieties of the EU and a post-Berlin Wall reevaluation of the Mediterranean as geopolitical agent, bears the centuries-long burdens and riches of shifting geographical symbolisms. This shift from burden to wealth is the subject of this chapter. Classical imaginings of the space between the island of Sicily and the Italian peninsula date, of course, to Homeric legends of the “the island of Thrinakia” and the monstrous Scylla and Charybdis commonly thought to be a mythical representation of the treacherous Straits.4 Though the Greeks colonized Sicily in 748 B.C. (Naxos) together with a good deal of Southern Italy, the first indication of a real desire to link Sicily to the mainland does not come until Roman accounts of plans devised both by the Roman Consul Metellus in the First Punic War and Carthage in the Second to link the two land masses for the transport of war elephants.5 The rich body of legends surrounding the project of building a bridge over the fretum siculum has been, as might be expected, consistently linked to narratives of military expansion, geopolitical strategy, empire-building, nation-building—and not only for the ancients. Indeed, when Italy’s nationhood and Sicily’s place within it comes under greater scrutiny, so does the bridge: a flurry of such proposals characterized the first ten or

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so years of the Kingdom of Italy. Giuseppe Garibaldi, the heroic military leader of Italian unification, reportedly approached the newly crowned King of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II, in 1860 with a request to link Sicily to the mainland, as did a number of statesmen throughout the first decade of unification; and Mussolini is said to have imagined a similar structure during his 20 years of fascist rule. The most recent plan and Italians’ reaction to it, however, reveal anxieties that go beyond nineteenth- and early twentieth-century preoccupations with the fixed national body politic. Today, just as the area around the Straits is ever prone to geographical frictions that radiate both north to Europe and south to the Mediterranean basin, the controversy over the Bridge of Messina points to deep and shifting tensions along local, national, and transnational fault lines of identity construction in contemporary Europe at precisely the moment when Europe considers both its internal divisions and the nature of its relationship with the Mediterranean.6 The Bridge of Messina and Its Discontents The current proposal to build a bridge over the Straits of Messina is the culmination of some 40 years of planning in the wake of technological developments that have not only made the bridge a civil engineering possibility, but indeed given the project a kind of “eighth wonder” appeal, particularly attractive in a chronically underemployed Italian South looking for growth in economic sectors such as tourism. Serious talk about a bridge over the Straits began to circulate in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the national Italian Rail Service was entrusted with the task of a feasibility study; these years saw the legislation and creation respectively of the Società dello Stretto di Messina, an incorporated government agency meant to oversee research, development, and the eventual implementation of the Bridge project. Throughout the 1980s, the project was linked in public discourse and policy formulation to long-standing Southern development initiatives but was caught up in round after round of competitions, proposals, and feasibility studies essentially without the necessary funding to realize any of the various plans to link the two shores.7 Not until Silvio Berlusconi’s 2001 electoral campaign did the Bridge acquire a position of prominence in national debates, becoming a screen onto which politicians and electorate alike could project anxieties about the loss of Italian and regional identities in the wake of European unification, and becoming a vehicle for its proponents’ attempts to symbolize Italian national strength on grand architectural—even geographical— scales. Though the EU government was at first reticent to fund the Bridge, Brussels eventually decided in 2004 to reverse itself and commit significant

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financial support to the project.8 And so it was that the construction of a suspension bridge over the Straits of Messina became that rare legislative initiative associated with the names of both über-capitalist Silvio Berlusconi and his Left-center arch-nemesis Romano Prodi, during a time when the former was prime minister of Italy (2001–2005), and the latter was ending his term as president of the European Commission (1999–2004). In this unlikely alignment of the European stars, the Trans-European Transport Networks (TEN-T) priority umbrella—a vast program of European integration through transportation infrastructure—came to accommodate the Bridge of Messina, appropriating it into a coherent and funded EU logic of infrastructural and symbolic integration. Indeed, from the perspective of the Italian center-Right coalition, the Bridge had already become a symbolically important component of the plan to fill vital gaps in the country’s system of rail, land, and water passages, and an even more central policy plank of Berlusconi’s government and its so-called “great works” program. The EU imprimatur allowed Berlusconi to attribute a sense of (manifest?) destiny to the project in his public comments and to construct the Bridge in the Italian public’s mind as an essentially “European” endeavor and thus progressive, forward looking, and essential to Italy’s integration into more advanced, industrialized economic and political frameworks. Over the next few years, battles between Berlusconi’s pro-Bridge government and Left and environmental groups began to heat up under the umbrella of the so-called No Ponte (No Bridge) movement, culminating in the World Wildlife Federation’s formal protest to the EU, citing environmental negligence on the part of the Italian government. When Romano Prodi eventually returned to the leadership of the Italian government in May of 2006, his new transportation minister’s (Alessandro Bianchi) very first public statement after being sworn into office was on the matter of the Bridge—calling it “useless” and “damaging”9 —and the political rhetoric circulating during the first few days of Prodi II was rife with jabs that consistently used the Bridge as an ideological litmus test for the policies to come. As Berlusconi said just days after the confirmation of Prodi’s new government (May 23, 2006), “They [the members of Prodi’s center-left coalition] take office and say no to this historic project . . . saying no to the Bridge is practically an ideological matter.”10 In this climate, Berlusconi famously began to declare that once the Bridge over the Straits was completed, Sicilians would become 100 percent Italian, at the same time claiming that the Bridge was a European project on which the Italians had no right to renege.11 Looking past the apparent contradictions of this position, it is clear that the project’s realization had become central to Italy’s perceived strength as both a national entity and

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Figure 9.1 Trans-European transport network: priority project No. 1 (Rail axis Berlin—Verona/Milano—Bologna—Napoli—Messina—Palermo). © European Commission, 2005; administrative boundaries © EuroGeographics, 2001.

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an EU member state. Not only was it a matter of economic importance to tap into EU coffers for significant infrastructure projects, but as Roberto Dainotto (a Sicilian himself) notes in the Introduction to his Europe (in Theory), the question of Italians’ ability to “become European” has always been intrinsically linked to (more or less) changing notions of free movement and all they entailed in the way of transportation systems, border controls, and the like: If “feeling European” was really a matter of “travel[ing] constantly across [Europe] on cheap interrail tickets” (Byatt 50), it meant that only then could I finally feel part of the imagined community of other faraway creatures, holding, like me, a European passport. I say “finally” because the citizens of France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands had already been circulating freely across their borders since 1985. . . . In fact, even some non-EU members—Norway and Iceland—were let into the passport-free zone, which looked rather like a Nordic alliance. The Italians on this side of the Alps . . . had not been invited to join at this time. . . . So, when in 1995 Italy . . . finally made it to the borderless Europe, signs of elation were palpable: “Champagne was on offer at Milan and Rome airports to mark the country’s full membership of Schengen,” the Economist reported (“Europe: Those Fuzzy Frontiers”). The euphoria, however, did not last long. European clerks in Brussels soon started referring to the Giovanninos-come-lately with an unflattering acronym: Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain—the PIGS.12

Just as in the 1990s, Italy’s future solvency was rhetorically linked to ratification of the Maastricht Treaty and the attainment of its economic and border control benchmarks, so in the early part of this decade did the construction of the Bridge of Messina come to stand for a chain reaction of integration: Sicily’s into Italy, Italy’s into the EU. According to the syllogism implicit in the Berlusconi government’s rhetoric on the Bridge, only if Sicily were concretely linked to the mainland could Italy’s place in the new Europe be solidified. Bridging Italy and Europe The tensions and vicissitudes of this phantom link figure exactly the kind of in-between space I am exploring in the post-Wall context: the Bridge over the Straits is a structure of uncertainty, a figure of ideological, historical (even physical, to hear some civil engineering experts tell it) oscillation between very different visions of what Sicily is, where it should and can be situated, and what kind of cartographies and perspectival politics might govern them. By the same token, Sicily currently finds itself in an in-between space in terms of its own identity and of the identity that the

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larger political and cultural communities—imagined or not—of which it is a part would have it occupy.13 Similar in some ways to the dynamics of walls and ambiguous border spaces, Sicily’s geographical position as an island has always marked a point of passage, exchange, and conquest, of migration from Africa to Europe and vice versa, a space of separation as much as of approach. It has also always been fraught with the symbolism of dangerous and impossible choices and their treacherous navigation. Sicilian identity is today caught between equally difficult options, between engulfment and conflict, between its identity as the State’s eternal “question”—and as an agent of autonomous, Mediterranean “thought.” As we shall see, the Straits have also spawned a second, equally compelling mythological narrative, that of the Fata Morgana. As such, the passage that separates Italy from its most outlying Mediterranean region is not only an overdetermined site of difficult choices, but also, according to an ancient legend, a space of mirage and spatial distortion in the service of political power. Sicily’s status as a “question” (“questione meridionale” or “Southern question”) for the Northern ruling class was born with the Italian state. Just as the great European powers had constructed Italy as southern, backward, and lacking a national raison d’ être (Metternich’s infamous “mere geographical expression”), so did the Piedmontese center of power (Italy was unified under the Crown of Savoy with the 1860 invasion of Sicily) construct Sicily as somehow foreign: an object to be studied, a topic to be explored by the intellectual power of the new, modern Italian state, a problem to be solved, an ill to be cured. It is no coincidence that among the new Italian nation’s first and most visible responses to the “Southern question” was an investigative report by two Tuscan intellectuals and politicians, Franchetti and Sonnino.14 The political discourses of the period in fact equated the problems of the South with those of Sicily, leaving very little space (so to speak) for the peninsular regions making up the continental South. As the scholar Nelson Moe writes: Franchetti had [first] restricted his focus to Sicily over the course of his analysis or, to be more precise, had restricted his comparisons to those between Sicily and central-northern Italy, effectively blotting out the continental south. If one were to draw up a map of Italy based on Franchetti’s observations, it would consist of an Italian peninsula truncated somewhere below Tuscany, across from which would lie the island of Sicily. Franchetti’s study is therefore written as if southern Italy did not exist, and this clearly serves to reinforce the image of Sicily’s insularity and isolation from mainland civilization. [Then], without any further explanation, continental southern Italy comes to form part of that same downtrodden world.15

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In other words, Sicily has from the beginning of unitary Italy been a lightning rod for explorations and projections of the Italian Southern question and Northern anxieties, rhetorically standing for the entire “Southern question.” More recently, however, a group of Southern intellectuals—the writer and activist Vincenzo Consolo, the sociologist Osvaldo Pieroni, the historian Francesco Renda, and most notably the cultural theorist Franco Cassano (whose landmark Pensiero meridiano, or Southern Thought, was first published in 1996)16 —have begun urging a reconsideration of the position of the Italian South that places it not at the margins of paradigms of culture, history, and power, but at the center of an essentially remapped and Mediterranean-centric worldview: not a site that, removed from the center of progress, is defined by delay and thus backwardness, but a central point of exchange, migration, and intercultural fertility; no longer someone else’s problem, but rather autonomous and active thought. Cassano begins his 2005 reexamination of Southern Thought with a theoretical statement on Southern—and not merely Sicilian—“autonomia”: “The main theoretical move of the book, then, is a breaking with the hierarchy implicit in the historical disconnect [of Southern ‘backwardness’], a radical reversal of perspectives: the South as an autonomous point of view, not as a not-yet-north.”17 Unlike what I will call “Bridge-centric” views of Sicily’s position as fixed within Italian and European contexts of identity, thinkers such as Cassano have tended since the mid-1990s to shift the conventional paradigm for Sicilian identity from European- to Mediterranean-oriented. As such, they reject cultural and economic overtures originating from Sicily’s north that would exert centripetal force on the island in order to link it to a clearly defined and monolithic European political framework and, in turn, to draw Italy’s and Europe’s most marginal regions into relationships of dependence on centers of economic power. The alternative—or better, the simultaneous possibility—is to tap into Sicily’s more centrifugal impulses, toward those areas of the Mediterranean with which Sicily has traditionally enjoyed rich cultural and economic exchanges; to focus on Sicily’s historical importance as a cultural gateway, a point of passage for ideas, products, and peoples. To see Sicily not as a society of “or” but of “and” is the way Osvaldo Pieroni puts it, citing Kandinsky and Ulrich Beck: not Scylla or Charybdis but Scylla and Charybdis.18 To allow for the possibility of Sicily’s multiple belongings is by definition to resist what is often seen as a unilateral drawing in of the island to the mainland; it is a pushing off to break exclusive links in order to create and maintain more flexible ones, much like a ship at sea. As Cassano writes in his Paeninsula, while “the island isolates, the peninsula allows for a leaning out, but it

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Figure 9.2 “La Sicilia fugge” [“Sicily is escaping”] © Franco Donarelli.

is never a departure: the link is never interrupted, one is always holding hands with the surrounding earth, an umbilical cord connected to Mother Earth. Islands are ships on the open sea, even if always already anchored.”19 The Bridge and its entire symbolic apparatus—how and where it symbolically links Sicily to the Mediterranean, to Italy, and beyond—tells us much about Sicily’s place between the “question” it has always been and the “thought” it now hopes to enact as an active geopolitical and cultural protagonist. Yet it also underscores the broader centrifugal and centripetal forces acting on Europe and the Mediterranean region. I argue that Sicily’s bridge trouble can also illuminate Italy’s own “bridge trouble.” According to the thinkers of the Pensiero meridiano group, Italy is indeed its own kind of land bridge, fraught, at least in a modern Western history that has privileged the strong nation, with tensions and problems regarding the orientation of its traffic, the perspectives from which it is seen, and the cultures that it is seen to link together. The specific expression of Italy’s geography, to rephrase Metternich, is as historically specific as the nation-state itself, and Italy’s position between Europe and the Mediterranean is one that not only forces Italy to reconsider its own South, but prompts all of Europe to reconsider value- and ideology-laden assumptions regarding borders and a (perhaps) outmoded nationalist impulse: [W]hat if . . . in [Italy’s] Catholic-classical heritage there existed a hint of the peninsula’s geopolitical vocation of aperture, something that precedes and

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196 / lina insana explains the Roman Empire and the Church, that imposes an ecumenism, that evokes a “catholic” desire, a thrust to contain the world within it, a universalistic idea of the civitas, a critique of nationalism that comes from those weak borders, from that ancient blending of stories, names, and colors that the sea has deposited on the long shores of the peninsula? Is it forbidden to ask whether the idea of nation-state is, instead of being too “high,” simply too narrow to contain that ancient vocation, and whether rediscovering this vocation might be, instead of nostalgia for the past, a thought towards the future? . . . Italy is in its own way a center, a crossroads between cardinal points, with a sea to the east, one to the south, and one to the west, with a Sicily that extends out to just a few dozen kilometers from Tunisia, just as Otranto is a step away from Albania and Corfù. This is the peninsula that descends from the Alps down to the Ionic Sea, that moves from the northern heart of Europe down to the sirocco and the winds of Levant. Only an extraordinary cultural primitivism could see this singularity as a misfortune.20

The political context in which the importance of Italy’s land-bridge role is consistently evoked refers to migration and Europe’s need to come to terms with its own frontiers’ porosity. Linking Sicily to mainland Europe is a way (through the overcharged symbolism of unilateral connection) to seal Europe’s southern border to large-scale human migration and at the same time break Southern Europe’s natural ties with North Africa (as Cassano says, Sicily “announces” the landscapes of Africa) and the rest of the Mediterranean world. On the “centrifugal” side, instead, these thinkers of the Pensiero meridiano group are consistently linking Sicilian identity politics to acceptance of Mediterranean migration into Sicily, to a hospitable alternative to the language of xenophobic danger that underlies and drives the centripetal forces of EU integration policies. Osvaldo Pieroni, for example, opens his discussion of sustainable economic development with an anecdote of successful Kurdish immigration into Calabria in the late 1990s.21 And it is telling that only two years after the publication of Cassano’s Pensiero meridiano, the Sicilian writer Vincenzo Consolo published an essay entitled “The Bridge over the Sicilian Canal,” framing modern Italian migrations within the context of Italy’s proximity to Tunisia.22 In this essay, Consolo starts with Boccaccio’s Decameron to illustrate the centrality of the Mediterranean context in the medieval imaginary. He then traces his way from Cervantes to the slave trade and eventually to the nineteenth-century Italian emigration to Tunisia, a lesser-known aspect of the post-unification flight that brought almost 100,000 Italians to reside legally in Tunisia by 1911.23 He concludes with what he calls a “parallel story,” that of a modern Tunisian immigration into Sicily that dates to the 1960s, when Italy finally saw the end of its decades-long population decline

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with a massive North African influx into Sicily—and thus Italy—and thus Europe. Consolo’s point is that such migrations continue today “without provisions, without planning, without any government agreements,” but with all of the racism of sixteenth-century slave markets. Consolo’s choice of topic is just as striking as his choice of title, which uses the term “bridge” precisely to polemicize the notion of Sicily’s position vis-à-vis historical and contemporary patterns of human migration, to shift the perspective from which Sicily is viewed and views, to resist integration and turn in potential new directions. The South of these intellectuals is an unassimilable south, and their Sicily an unassimilable Sicily whose geography represents not isolation but multidirectional potential. By the same token, the Italian peninsula and the Sicilian island are no more assimilable into European frameworks, but as such are all the more suited to perform mediating functions between the Mediterranean and the EU and thus to negotiate their relative positions: “One doesn’t go to the Mediterranean to seek the fullness of an origin but to experience one’s own contingency.”24 In an earlier essay on the “Views of the Strait of Messina” (1986), Consolo’s view of Sicily’s position and belonging emerges in all its complexity, a complexity that not only overwhelms the constraints of any simple architectonic link between Sicily and Calabria but also threatens to explode the neat parameters of the very essay form in which Consolo usually so thrives.25 In this essay, Consolo takes us on a literary and folkloristic itinerary of the Straits, ranging from Homer to Greek creation myths (is it the “real” site of Scylla and Charybdis?), to the legend of Colapesce, a legendary boy-fish who holds up the Messinese corner of Sicily, to the founding of the city of Messina, to the traditions of swordfish fishing, and ultimately to the Sicilian poet Bartolo Cattafi’s musings on the centrifugal (or, as he puts it, distancing) energies that characterize the space between Sicily and the peninsula: Sometimes the Strait of Messina becomes an unfathomable ocean, Sicily and Calabria like two people that brush up against each other, but remain distant within themselves; adjoining, but far, far apart in their very being. It makes you want to rip these two coasts apart with a great force, to give topographical validity to a spiritual truth; or alternately to violate that spiritual truth by welding one coast to the other, just to burst out of the restlessness, to break the enigma. The northward current that Sicily pushes against Calabria and the southward current that follows the inverse route are swathes of energy that the two lands exchange across the Straits. Like the arms of two bodies pushing each other away; not hostile, but yearning for distance.26

Consolo disagrees, turning briefly to the legendary trope of the Fata Morgana to argue for a bond between the two sides of the Straits, a collective

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and cross-channel desire to rejoin what Poseidon rent asunder that is strong enough to result in an optical illusion. The fatamorgana, of course, refers to that peculiar optical illusion that occurs in specific meteorological conditions such as those across the Straits of Messina: looking from Calabria to Sicily, the viewer in these conditions sees the 5 km distance diminished, and the city of Messina appears as a city—within human reach—full of crystalline, elongated, and distorted castles. The local Messinese legend that explains the illusion tells that the Norman king Ruggero, standing at the edge of Reggio Calabria in 1060, heard music and smelled fragrant lemons wafting across the straits from Sicily. In response to his curiosity, he was told that these were the sounds and scents of the Arab domination of Christian Sicilian slaves, once noble but now in abject and unholy captivity. With his army in tatters and his resources depleted, Ruggero then encountered a beautiful fairy, the Fata Morgana of Arthurian legend. To tempt him to cross the Straits and conquer Sicily, Morgana fashioned an illusion from the Calabrian side of the Straits that made Sicily seem closer than it really was and that produced the appearance of a magical city within reach of the peninsular mainland. Ruggero demurred, recognizing the deception and telling Morgana that he would come back to conquer Sicily for and with the aid of another Lady, the Virgin Mary. The optical illusion, then, is a political deception; he who crosses the Straits does best to consider its real distance and to evaluate the tools at his disposal. Consolo, though, turns away from this register of legend in his discussion of the optical illusion and its meaning, opting instead to trace the documentary evidence of the phenomenon via the correspondence of two Jesuit priests, one writing from either side of the Straits in 1643. Consolo’s unresolved view of Sicilian belonging cannot be constrained by the logical and documentary argument by which his essay has proceeded up to this point, however, nor by the essay form itself. He concludes “Views of the Strait of Messina” with a story (republished from a 1988 coffee table book of photographic views of Messina) that ends up problematizing the illusory transparency of the fatamorgana, telling of marital discord between a Sicilian fisherman and his Calabrian wife, discord that might have real, irreconcilable differences at its heart or that might be instead based on an illusion as flimsy as the fatamorgana itself: here an illusion of the difference between the two regions, not their desired homogeneity. At the end of Consolo’s ambiguous story of a perhaps imagined jealousy that damns the cross-Strait couple to unhappiness, the dying wife asks her husband, “Oh Placido, how is it possible to live a whole life without understanding?” Already in 1988, when the Bridge had not yet become so thoroughly engrained in contemporary ideological battles, Consolo understood the

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multiple potentialities of his “space in between” and the complexities of desire, even writ geographically large, as it seems to be here. He also understood the powerful simultaneity of space in the Straits, the infinite openness of their textuality, and the way they must be read: If only these Straits of ours were a time machine, a film that registered every shadow that passes over it, we would see infinite vessels, infinite sails of every shape and color, merchants and soldiers of every race, we would read infinite histories, the history that has gone by on those waters, through that minute geography where nature chose to conceal all of her traps, all of her wicked intentions, reveal her ruinous invasions, but also the fruits of her glorious conquests.27

As Consolo’s essay–short story pair reveals, the matter of Sicilian position and belonging is much more complex (historically, politically, culturally) than the Bridge proponents would admit. An illustration of this difficulty in contemporary political life demonstrates how official Italy cannot seem to manage precisely the navigation of complexity within matrices of belonging (Italian, European, Mediterranean). Performing Bridges In April of 2009, when he attended a NATO summit that was to commemorate in a variety of ways the sixtieth anniversary of the 1949 founding of the Treaty Organization, Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi was in the middle of a season of internationally publicized gaffes: announcing Barack Obama’s “tan” immediately after his inauguration; arranging to have showgirls added to his party’s electoral list; and then right before the summit, annoying the Queen of England with his photo-op grandstanding.28 He capped this season in grand style with a symbolically charged refusal to cross the equally symbolically charged bridge linking France and Germany at Strasbourg and Kehl, “Passerelle de deux rives.”29 When called to task for his gaffe, Berlusconi claimed that he was unable to participate in the ceremonial greeting by Chancellor Merkel (who was accompanying the heads of state to meet Nicolas Sarkozy on the French side) and cross the bridge with the others because he was doing important work for NATO. Widely circulated video footage of the episode shows Berlusconi getting out of his car only to wander around the shore near the “Passerelle,” but without crossing it with his NATO counterparts; this same footage cuts regularly to an obviously vexed Angela Merkel, first waiting for Berlusconi to finish and then throwing her hands up in resignation and walking away to cross the “Passerelle” herself. On the line via cell phone, Berlusconi said later, was Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan with whom Berlusconi

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had to deploy his high-level bargaining power lest NATO crumble amid Turkey’s lone opposition vote against the rising Danish Secretary-General of NATO, Anders Rasmussen. It is now generally acknowledged that an agreement was eventually reached through the intercession of Barack Obama, who secured high-level NATO posts for at least three Turkish military figures in exchange for Turkey’s vote in support of Rasmussen’s secretariat. Political showboating aside, the episode, for me, demands that we ask the following question: What does it mean for Berlusconi to refuse to cross the bridge? We cannot read the space between Berlusconi and Merkel in this episode without noting that the April summit was meant not only to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of NATO’s founding but also to mark France’s full reintegration in the NATO fold. The crossing of the Treaty Organization’s member-states’ leaders from Germany to France thus had particular weight on this day, as NATO, its goals, and its European power center were confirmed and solidified. All of this, however, took a backseat to more pressing concerns in which Berlusconi sought theatrically to promote his own role in mending a East-West rift that dates to what the Turks saw as the Danes’ anti-Muslim stance on the infamous 2005 Mohammed cartoon controversy. Berlusconi had more important things to do than cross this ceremonial bridge; he had to save NATO by politically performing Italy’s role as a land bridge between the Mediterranean and Northern Europe. As Franco Cassano has written, Italy, with its position at the center of the Mediterranean, has always been, by necessity and not by choice, a land of connection, marked by a universalizing vocation that seeks to respond to the harshness of conflict and division with a unifying push that goes beyond existing borders. This universalism, whose heritage has been the cause of delay and weakness for an entire historical epoch of our country, has the potential to turn itself into an advantage, in its capacity to see more freely beyond the narrow confines of the national state. Think, just once, without any inferiority complexes, of the construction of Europe: while stronger countries will rid themselves with more difficulty of the scaffolding of their national states, Italy will bear a smaller burden and its weakness, if used with intelligence, might become a strength. . . . Europe needs an Italy that is capable of thinking in terms of high mediation, a peninsula that knows how to salvage, from its own traditions, not the rhetorical primacy of the past, but the concrete tasks of the future.30

Cassano’s insight about Italy’s role as land bridge between what some might call “Old Europe” and the Mediterranean thus gains spectacular urgency and relevance in the political sphere: pressed and pulled upon like seafarers of ancient times, Berlusconi is caught between the expectations of the old guard, the need to be seen as a vital agent in a Muslim-Christian rapprochement

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(made even more difficult, considering his own government’s stance on immigration), and the exigencies of political theater. A media-mogul-turnedpolitician, Berlusconi is of course no stranger to the spotlight, and it has often seemed that, for him, the brighter that spotlight, the better. His delay in this case was the product of a miscalculation: that the media-filtered audience for his cell-phone diplomacy would garner more political capital than the potential capital to be gained by following protocol within the NATO-inflected European structures that were being symbolically staged that day. Like the Bridge he so advocates over the Straits, Berlusconi’s position on this day requires an impossible commitment. He cannot locate himself (Italy) fully at the center of conventional power structures (NATO, the EU) while spanning the Mediterranean to position Italy as the natural land bridge that it really is, to navigate and negotiate new configurations of power that not only include the Mediterranean but also feature Italy as a new power broker within it. Instead, Turkey’s presence within the machinations of power, even or especially within the highest echelons of NATO power, must remain off-screen, off-script, off-bridge. Its central role in authorizing NATO’s continued relevance is simply unacceptable in the highly choreographed, symbolic affirmation of “old European” power. As for Berlusconi and his attempt to stage Italian diplomatic power that day within NATO structures and symbolic strictures, his inability to multitask on the “Passerelle” bridge—to cross a symbolic European bridge while performing a Mediterranean one—is telling and indicates a fixity, a stasis, that does not bode well for Berlusconi’s Italy. Berlusconi would rather not admit the fixity of his predicament at Strasbourg, the bind of finding himself caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of NATO politics at precisely that moment when he had hoped for a good dose of theater-on-the-bridge (or just before it) to carry the day. Perhaps—instead of denying that he has ever committed any gaffes, as he recently did in a CNN interview—Berlusconi would do well to see this last episode as a cautionary tale to learn the lessons that bridges teach.31 Regarding the Bridge of Messina, as he looks out to the Mediterranean from his peninsular perch, he might heed the lessons of contemporary Sicilian writers such as Vincenzo Consolo, writers whose vision of the Straits is fundamentally shaped by the tale of Ruggero and the Fata Morgana. As a latter-day Ruggero trying to “civilize” Sicily, rein it into the European fold, Berlusconi should remind himself that the Straits are not only treacherous to pass through but also to pass over, and thus guard against falling into Morgan’s illusory promise: the facile conquest of a utopian land that seems just within reach but in truth lies beyond a deadly abyss. Objects, to play on the words etched into to the standard side-view mirror, may in reality be much farther than they appear.

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As for the larger question of belonging in geopolitical frameworks, Italy and her Straits have lessons to teach here as well. The debate over the Bridge and its impact in the areas of the environment, human geography, and economic development underscore the importance of contingency in post-Wall European society and of considering bridges not so much for what they achieve in the way of fixity (for example, European structures of power like those projected by the TEN-T infrastructural umbrella), but for what they suggest in the way of possibility. If Italy can better actualize its own position as a land bridge linking Europe to the Mediterranean—rather than an end-limit at which Europe ends and something else begins—then the paradigm change brought about by the events of 1989 might truly move beyond the idea of Europe. Notes 1. Francesco Renda, Sicilia e il Mediterraneo. La nuova geopolitica (Palermo: Sellerio, 2000), 11. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Italian are by the author. 2. The distance between Messina and the mainland is about 5 km, though the bridge would be built at a more narrow point of the Strait where the distance is only around 3 km. 3. Ferdinand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 164, and Franco Cassano, Paeninsula. L’Italia da ritrovare (Bari-Roma: Edizioni Laterza, 1998), Chap. 1, “Paeninsula: geofilosofia dell’Italia.” 4. Homer, Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 1996), 12.127 and 307–21. 5. According to Pliny the Elder, the Roman Consul Metellus built a temporary bridge across the Straits to more easily transport the war elephants captured in 251 B.C. from Carthage for display in Rome; according to Polybius, Hannibal used the same route to bring troops and animals into Italy. See Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938–63) and Polybius, Histories (New York: Putnam and Sons, 1922–27). 6. On the seismic risk of the bridge project, see Nella Ginatempo, “Per una valutazione dell’impatto sociale del progetto di ponte sullo Stretto di Messina,” Sociologia urbana e rurale 66 (2001): 9–29. It is impossible to address this risk without mentioning the Messina earthquake and tsunami of 1908, still the deadliest in European history. This disaster and its handling by the still young Italian government has been increasingly linked to public and artistic discourses on Sicilian identity (vis-à-vis Italy, Europe, and the Mediterranean), as was the case with Claudio Fava and Ninni Bruschetta’s recent theatrical production protesting the bridge, Lavori in corso. See also Bruschetta’s commentary on the Teatro di Messina’s website, at http:// www.teatrodimessina.it/htmver/opera.asp?idopera=330 (accessed March 1, 2010).

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on italian bridges / 203 7. The most notable of these, of course, was the Cassa del Mezzogiorno (or Southern Development Fund), established in 1950 in an atmosphere of postwar reconstruction. 8. At the time of the European Union’s commitment of support for the bridge project construction, cost was estimated at approximately six billion dollars, no more than 20 percent of which was to come from EU financing. See Mario Centerrino, “Quanto costa il sogno sullo Stretto,” La Repubblica. it October 4, 2006, http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2006/10/04/quanto- costa- il- sogno- sullo- stretto.html (accessed February 26, 2010), and_g. Ion., “Fondi Eu a rischio per il Ponte sullo Stretto,” La Repubblica, October 26, 2005, http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2005/10/26/fondi-ue-rischio-per-il-ponte-sullo. html (accessed February 26, 2010). 9. Francesco Merlo, “Le rissose comari del centrosinistra,” La Repubblica. it, May 26, 2006, http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2006/05/26/le- rissose- comari- del- centrosinistra.html (accessed February 26, 2010). 10. “Arrivano loro e per un’opera epocale dicono di no . . . Il no al ponte è un fatto quasi ideologico.” Silvio Berlusconi, cited in the news update section of La Repubblica.it, May 22, 2006, 19:15, www.repubblica.it/ 2006/05/dirette/ sezioni/politica/nuovogoverno/lunedi22/ (accessed July 31, 2010). 11. Berlusconi famously made the statement during an interview with host Bruno Vespa on the television talkshow Porta a porta, cited in the Italian Television RaiTre “Report: Operazione Ponte” on the Messina Bridge: “Report: Operazione Ponte,” RaiTre. http://www.rai.tv/mpplaymedia/0,,RaiTreReport%5E23%5E85919,00.html (accessed February 26, 2010). 12. Roberto Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham, Duke University Press, 2006), 1–2. 13. On Sicily’s place within the unified Italian nation, see John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999) and Jane Schneider, ed., Italy’s Southern Question: Orientalism in One Country (Oxford: Berg, 1998). This latter text, a collection of essays that cover Sicilian identity within Italian political and cultural contexts from Unification to the late 1980s, explores the idea of Sicily as Italy’s eternal and internal Other. The thesis has interesting implications for the historical relationship between Sicily and the mainland but fails to recognize the possibility of other configurations of political and cultural belonging for Sicily, as the “Pensiero meridiano” group has done. 14. Leopoldo Franchetti and Sydney Sonnino, La Sicilia nel 1876 (Florence: Tip. di G. Barbéra, 1877). Rpt. as Inchiesta in Sicilia [Investigation in Sicily] (Florence: Vallechi, 1974). 15. Nelson Moe, View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 247–48. 16. Franco Cassano, Il pensiero meridiano (Bari-Roma: Edizioni Laterza, 2005). English translation Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean, ed. and trans. Norma Bouchard and Valerio Ferme (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011). 17. Cassano, Pensiero, viii.

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204 / lina insana 18. See Wassily Kandinsky, “And, Some Remarks on Synthetic Art,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, ed. and trans. Kenneth Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1994), 708–16, and Ulrich Beck, The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order, trans. Mark Ritter (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1996), Introduction, 1–10. 19. Cassano, Paeninsula, 4 (my emphasis). 20. Cassano, Paeninsula, 7–8, 10. Cassano’s phrase in the second to the last sentence is “poche decine di chilometri dalla Tunesia,” suggesting a much smaller distance than the 155 km that actually separates Tunisia from Sicily. 21. Osvaldo Pieroni, Tra Scilla e Cariddi. Il Ponte sullo Stretto di Messina: ambiente e società sostenibile nel Mezzogiorno (Caltanissetta: Rubbinetto, 1999). 22. Vincenzo Consolo, “Il ponte sul canale di Sicilia,” Il Messaggero, 9 August 1998. Rpt. in Di qua dal faro (Milano: Mondadori, 1999), 217–22. In English, “The Bridge over the Channel of Sicily,” trans. Felice Italo Beneduce, in Writing and Reading the Mediterranean, eds. Massimo Lollini and Norma Bouchard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 241–45. 23. Following the unification of Italy in 1871, factors such as high unemployment and the lack of a promised land reform led millions of Italians mostly from the South to emigrate to other parts of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Americas. See Jerre Mangione and Ben Monreale, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). 24. Cassano, Pensiero, xxiv. 25. Vincenzo Consolo, “Vedute dello Stretto di Messina,” in Di qua dal faro (Milano: Mondadori, 1999), 67–91. In English, “Views of the Strait of Messina,” trans. Mark Chu, in Writing and Reading the Mediterranean, eds. Massimo Lollini and Norma Bouchard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 188–209. 26. Bartolo Cattafi and Alfredo Camisa, Lo Stretto di Messina e le Eolie (Roma: Automobile Club d’Italia [LEA], 1961), Introduction. 27. Consolo, “Vedute dello Stretto di Messina,” 71. 28. On Berlusconi’s gaffes with various heads of state, see “Berlusconi Says Obama Is ‘Tanned,’ ” BBC News, November 8, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/europe/7715016.stm (accessed February 26, 2010), and “Queen Is Not Amused by Berlusconi,” BBC News, April 4, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/uk_news/7980912.stm (accessed February 26, 2010). On his political and personal relationships with showgirls, or veline, see Giuseppe d’Avanzo, “Le dieci domande mai poste al Cavaliere,” La Repubblica, May 14, 2009, http:// ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2009/05/14/le- diecidomande-mai-poste-al-cavaliere.html (accessed February 26, 2010). 29. “Berlusconi Call Puts NATO on Hold,” BBC News, April 4, 2009, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7983043.stm (accessed February 26, 2010). 30. Cassano, Paeninsula, vi–vii, 12 (my emphasis). 31. Silvio Berlusconi, interview by Paula Newton, CNN, May 25, 2009. See “Berlusconi: My Work Is a Burden Free of Gaffes,” CNN.com, 25 May 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/05/25/berlusconi.interview/ index.html?iref=allsearch#cnnSTCVideo (accessed May 12, 2010).

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Ch a p t e r Te n Br e a k i ng Dow n t h e Wa ll s: Th e Eu rop e a n Li br a ry P roj ec t B. Venkat Mani

In the last lines of the poem “Transatlantische Elegie,” the poet Günter Grass relies on the figure of a very special kind of librarian to convey historical and cultural redress of Germany’s Nazi past: “Hear the legend from over there: / There was a thousandfold librarian, / who preserved the literary legacies / of those whose books had gone in flames back then.”1 The poem recounts a meeting with German emigrants whom Grass met during a social gathering in New York City in 1965. In the poem’s earlier stanzas, his new acquaintances—Jewish and non-Jewish Germans who fled to the United States during the Third Reich—find expression primarily through interrogation. Germany seems as distant as their memories associated with it: “How does it look over there?” they ask, “And your young people? Do they know? Do they want to?” . . . “Should one go back?”2 Grass’s lyrical I responds with a report of things getting better, and he mentions the upcoming national elections in the Federal Republic of Germany in September 1965. In fact, the poem made its way into an election campaign speech that Grass gave in the same year. The speech, “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland? (“What is the German Fatherland”), owes its title to the nationalist poem “Des Deutschen Vaterland” (1813) by Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860), a poem that strategically lists German-speaking regions: Prussia, Bavaria, Westphalia, Saxony, but also Austria and Switzerland as fragments that constitute the totality of an imagined “fatherland.”3 Starting with the citation of the entire poem in his speech, Grass rearranges the memory of German cities and states in East and West Germany to highlight the artificiality of Germans’ geographical and ideological division. He admits to having learned the poem during his school years but quickly distances himself from its nationalist import, stating: “I certainly hope the memory

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banks of our newest voters are not being clogged with such multi-stanzaic nonsense.” Instead, he mobilizes the last line of the poem—“Das ganze Deutschland soll es sein” (“Let the whole Germany belong to thee!”)—to imagine possibilities of a functional peace, a mode of coexistence between the peoples of East and West Germany in a time of accelerated ideological bifurcation of the two nation-states.4 In addition, there exist two moments in the speech when Grass’s conceptualization of the German fatherland emanates from a transnational and transcontinental vista point—literally and figuratively. Toward the second half of the speech, he admits to having outlined it in New York City; and at the end, he returns to Arndt’s question by referencing German immigrants in the United States: “In New York, getting a sense for that province of German emigrants I’d like to see included in the German fatherland, I wrote this ‘Transatlantic Elegy.’ ”5 The speech, the memory of Arndt’s poem, and the creation of Grass’s poem—all originate in a faraway geographical location. New York City becomes the site of reappropriating “das ganze Deutschland.” Grass’s speech, when revisited today, invokes the gravity of the historical moment of the Berlin Wall’s construction and its immediate political consequences. Through the incorporation of Arndt’s poem, he spotlights the civic construction of nationalism through cultural artifacts. The national “memory banks,” as history witnessed, often outweighed the socalled Lastenausgleich (equalizing the burden) between the official formula of “Two States, One Nation” during the existence of the Berlin Wall.6 Through a brief—albeit by no means undue—reference to the preservation of literary legacies, Grass draws our attention to histories of books that became sacrificial objects in the pogrom against free speech. The discourse of freedom that is emerging in the post-Wall world is still open for debate. The speech from 1965, made four years after the construction of the Berlin Wall and about a quarter of a century before its fall, privileges a marginal moment in the text about a librarian. Accentuating faraway places where Grass’s evaluation of the German fatherland takes place might come across as a temporally disrupted, spatially dislocated, and ideologically disjointed preface to looking back at the Berlin Wall, but it appropriately initiates questions about the process of remembering: Whose past am I trying to reconstruct, whose archives am I trying to access from a temporal and spatial distance? I cannot find an easy answer to these questions in the techno-financial formulation of Thomas L. Friedman: “The Berlin Wall came down, the Berlin mall opened up, and suddenly some three billion people who had been behind walls walked across the flattened global piazza.” 7 Equally inadequate seems to me the onto-political sloganeering of Germany’s Foreign Office: “Mauerfall und Wiedervereinigung—Der Sieg der Freiheit”

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(Fall of the Wall and Reunification—The Triumph of Freedom; English equivalent: Freedom without Walls), which bears an eerie resonance with Friedman’s formulation.8 In this chapter, I approach these questions by exploring the institution of the library as a text in the lived political realities of the contemporary world, seeking to demonstrate how it acquires the role of a memory bank, transforms the media of future public and state memory, and is in turn transformed by the public sphere through the course of its historical existence. The Berlin Wall becomes a signifying marker in my investigation. In fact, its compelling topography, the alluring mythography of its fall, and the fascinating cosmography of pre- and post-Wall European cultural politics create new contexts and grant new meanings to a “virtual” bibliography of a very special kind of Bibliothek. I focus on the figural reincarnation of a “thousand-fold librarian” in a library without walls: the European Library Project (henceforth referred to as TEL), an Internet portal that gives access to the holdings of 48 “national libraries” across the continent of Europe.9 TEL is a transnational cultural institution, conceived, designed, and executed as an international conglomerate of multiple national institutions in the post-1989 era of panEuropeanization through policies of the EU. If the fall of the Berlin Wall serves as an important historical and political marker for TEL’s origins, the progress made in the last 20 years in information technology facilitates its execution. However, instead of naively trying to establish a direct genealogy between the fall of the Berlin Wall and a library without walls, my discussion of TEL seeks to unravel the transnational construction, the cosmopolitan ambition, and the purportedly universal mission of digital libraries. The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, I situate TEL and EDL (European Digital Library) in the recent history of the transformation of print cultures and libraries. Second, by elucidating several constitutive elements of TEL and EDL, I evaluate TEL’s politics of construction and selfrepresentation. Finally, I return to questions of accessibility, spatiality, and temporality in private and public libraries through a discussion of literary representations of two nonvirtual libraries. *

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In their seminal work, L’Apparition du Livre (1958), Lucien Febvre and Henri Martin marked the turn of the fifteenth century—with the invention of movable type and the appearance of a new kind of manuscripts “impressed on paper, sometimes on vellum”—as the eponymous “Coming of the Book.”10 Their understanding of the book was predominantly that of the codex—books with pages to be turned, as opposed to scrolls that are rolled. Even as we expand this definition to include Egyptian hieroglyphs,

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Indian Prashasti (inscriptions carved into stone), palm leaves and scrolls, and then codices, and think of “the book” as a shorthand term for objects published with mechanical and/or digital devices (invoking both human/ manual and electronic connotations), it is not an exaggeration to state that the early twenty-first century is the moment of the forthcoming of the book. Books are migrating into a virtual space, where they can be housed, accessed, organized, classified, catalogued, and tagged for searches by titles, terms, and phrases within their virtual covers; marked on the margins; and in some cases, productively manipulated for format and readability—especially to assist the visually handicapped. The Google Books Library Project continues to appropriate old and new published books into its database. By 2009, Amazon had sold a total of about 945,000 units of Kindle compared with 525,000 units of the Sony Reader; Amazon’s Kindle 2.0 went global, and Barnes and Noble launched the “Nook.”11 The virtual migration of books through technology demands an understanding of print culture’s materiality as well as associated issues such as reading habits, reading strategies, and reader accessibility. Most important, the virtual migration of books is changing the position, role, and function, and indeed, the very definition of the library, the house of books: the Bibliothek. As the book historian Robert Darnton reminisced in his essay “The Library in the New Age”: To students in the 1950s, libraries looked like citadels of learning. Knowledge came packaged between hard covers, and a great library seemed to contain all of it. To climb the steps of the New York Public Library, past the stone lions guarding its entrance and into the monumental reading room on the third floor, was to enter a world that included everything known. In colleges everywhere the library stood at the center of the campus. It was the most important building, a temple set off by classical columns, where one read in silence: no noise, no food, no disturbances beyond a furtive glance at a potential date bent over a book in quiet contemplation.12

As knowledge comes in .pdf and other formats, the library comes to the laptop, and the image of the library building—as the citadel, a building with steps guarded by stone lions, temples set off by classical columns, where the rituals of silent and solemn reading have taken place for centuries—is turning sepia. The part of the library most affected by this change is, of course, the rare book collection. In the same essay, Darnton asks the question, “Aren’t rare book collections doomed to obsolescence now that everything will be available on the Internet?” James Cheng, one of Darnton’s colleagues at the Harvard Libraries, provides one possible answer in his comments on a recent agreement between Harvard College and the National Library of China to digitize one of the largest collections

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of rare Chinese books outside of China: “We need to change the mind-set that rare materials must be kept behind closed doors,” says Cheng, adding, “A library is not a museum.”13 While Darnton’s architectural references allude to the iconic—even though diminishing—status of the library on the cultural-intellectual landscape of a university or a city, Cheng’s pithy declaration is even more aggressively iconoclastic. Cheng’s brief statement immediately prompts a reevaluation of Michel Foucault’s comparison of libraries with museums in his essay, “Of Other Spaces.” Among the several heterotopias that Foucault discusses, the library and the museum categorically connect space with time: Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit. . . . By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity.14

Foucault identifies history as the “the great obsession of the nineteenth century” and references “ever-accumulating past” as a feature salient to a nineteenth-century understanding of the world, while the “present epoch”—of the late twentieth century—is one of space, simultaneity, and juxtaposition. More specifically, he expresses interest in certain sites that “have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (24). Utopias thus become sites with no real place; heterotopias become the “Other” spaces of utopias, “effectively enacted utopias,” in Foucault’s terms, which simultaneously represent, contest, and invert all the other real sites found in a culture (24). In other words, museums and libraries are spaces where the crossreferencing of time and space to designate the relational existence (the propinquity) of sites calls upon us to think about sites of collective cultural constructs—real and/or imaginary. This constellation of positions taken by Darnton, Cheng, and Foucault serves well to illuminate the transformations in the function and structure of the library in the Western cultural space. The accumulative instinct that Foucault ascribes to the nineteenth century does allow for the possibility of seeing libraries and museums as having intersecting, if not identical functions. Libraries have long served as the sources of dissemination of knowledge, resources for learning and research, and physical depositories for collection and accession of books and other

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“readable” objects. In addition, they have played the role of representative institutions of local, regional, and national cultural heritages— repositories, curio cabinets, and showcases—of “national memory” in all its contested and contestable significations. Along with museums, they have also served as treasure chests of dubiously acquired objects: memorabilia and souvenirs of a nation’s imperialist and colonialist past. Access to these objects for the general public has been through thematically organized exhibitions; alternatively, serious researchers have been able to gain access to them in rare books and special collections rooms. The transformation of print culture is changing that “look-but-not-touch policy,” at least in virtual space. Yet Cheng explicitly states that the digitization of library collections detaches the library from its function as a museum. The process of detachment, it can be argued, starts with the transformation of the meaning of “virtual space” that books and libraries now inhabit. Virtual space is no more a “conceptual” space—the opposite of physical and material space as Foucault imagined. Through advancement in electronic technology, digital space has created its own set of rules and regulations as well as terms and conditions about accessibility and inaccessibility. Extant scholarship in the field of library and information studies engages with the infrastructural, technological, and organizational aspects of digital libraries. Gary Marchionini describes digital libraries as “logical extensions and augmentations of physical libraries,” distinguished by a focus on the integration of services through “a holistic treatment of interface, location, time language, and system.”15 Donald Waters defines them as “organizations that provide the resources, including the specialized staff, to select, structure, offer intellectual access to, interpret, distribute, preserve the integrity of, and ensure the persistence over time of collections of digital works so that they are readily and economically available for use by a defined community or set of communities.”16 This definition echoes ideas central to those of the Association of Research Libraries, which defines a digital library as “a group of entities—not a single entity—that uses technology to forge and maintain transparent links to the resources and services of multiple entities.”17 Christinger Tomer succinctly states that digital libraries are “little more than a loosely organized collection of digitized images and text.”18 While scholars in the humanities and cultural studies have recently tried to fathom the role and function of digital libraries, their understanding has largely been centered on changes in the habits of scholarship in U.S. universities. In a recent issue of Deadalus (2009) historian Anthony Grafton comments on the radical change in “the styles of great libraries,” identifying “a strange kind of war . . . between styles of repository, reading,

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and research.”19 He starts his evaluation by outlining distinctions between “old” libraries such as the those at Columbia, Harvard, and Yale “with their allegiance to old cultural traditions” and newer libraries such as in Seattle and Salt Lake City that “scream their modernity” with “[g]leaming banks of computers” (88); he ends with the conclusion that “(physical) browsing remains a vital, irreplaceable form of research” (98). To be sure, Grafton does ask questions about—and provides a number of suggestions for—collaboration between university departments and libraries to “enable America to remain the land of the great democratic library for generations to come.” However, his initial restraint concerning the entry of multinational capital into digitizing library resources inflects his evaluation with a profound sense of loss. Google and Starbucks therefore become part of the same equation, wooing students and scholars away from the library. In the same issue of Daedalus, classicist James J. O’Donnel comments on the “digital humanities,” declaring at the very outset that “we speak seldom of the electrical, the automative, or the aeronautical humanities” and that the term someday will fall out of use.20 While O’Donnel conveys more optimism in his evaluation of digital libraries, he aligns himself with Grafton in the dissociation of multinational capital and research libraries, asserting: Access to resources, technical and human, that support scholarly ambition is a battle to be fought at the local level, but one to be supported by wise public funding nationally and internationally. . . . In the end, the work is ours. Do we have the right questions to ask? Do we have the right disciplinary alignments? Are we making the new (including the very products of cyberspace) a part of our own sphere of study and interpretation as responsibly and carefully as we maintain the old (and link the study of the old and the new)? (104)

If Grafton and O’Donnel’s insights are to be engaged with seriously, questions asked of digital libraries must go beyond just a pessimistic evaluation of multinational commerce’s entry into the business of digital libraries. To this end, a romantic celebration of the past of “older” libraries, pitting them against “new” and modern libraries will not suffice. Equally inadequate will be a reductive reading of digital libraries as mere “augmentations” of physical libraries or as tools and resources whose impact is mostly on research in various fields of academia. The challenge lies in considering digital libraries as institutions with their own emerging set of rules of collection, classification, and cognition, and in extending the investigation of such questions to publicly funded mega-digital library projects. It would be productive, for example, to formulate questions of publics/patrons/end users vis-à-vis political representation and self-representation, especially in

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the case of the so-called national libraries, which so far remain largely unarticulated. As books, audio, video, and other materials are digitized, Internet-based libraries become sites of virtual migration, not just of the materials, but also of the users, the readers. Who has the claim to propriety over these materials? In what ways are we to rethink the definition of borrowing privileges? Furthermore, what are the implications of decoupling the library from the museum through the digitization of objects? If publics are at the center of these digitization projects, what discernible political purposes do they serve? *

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These questions inform the following discussion of virtual libraries such as TEL and EDL on the information highways. In 1987, representatives of 11 European “national” libraries—I will explain this term shortly—met for the first time in Lisbon to form the Foundation Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) with the following countries represented: Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, and Vatican City. As the CENL website reports: Topics on the agenda were the interconnection of computerized systems of the national libraries, acquisition policies, preservation and conservation, and financial issues of national libraries. The national librarians continued to meet annually and the group grew steadily. In 1991 CENL organized the first East-West conference with national libraries of Eastern Europe in Vienna in order to establish closer links and a defined partnership. It was a very successful meeting with concrete results leading to an ongoing dialogue. In 1998 CENL adopted its statutes and was transferred into a foundation under Dutch law.21

In 2001, the CENL and nine national member libraries became founding partners of TEL: The European Library, Gateway to Europe’s Knowledge. The national libraries involved in the project were those of France, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, United Kingdom, Finland, Slovenia, and Switzerland. Funded under the Fifth Framework Programme of the European Commission, TEL was conceived as a consortium to facilitate electronic access to the collections at participating libraries by users all over the world, as a public service measure. In 2005, the European Commission released its i2010 communication on “The European Information Society,” which was strongly endorsed by Jacques Chirac and five other heads of state in a letter to EC President José Manuel Barroso.22 Vivienne Reding, the EC member responsible for Information Society

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and Media, used this letter to accelerate the European Library Project, stating: There is an emerging political will to make this happen. . . . He [Mr. Barroso] called for the Heads of State to support him in the European Commission’s approach to safeguarding and adding value to Europe’s cultural heritage, the mirror of our cultural diversity. But it is not going to happen automatically. It will require a real commitment of all involved, not least from the national libraries.23

In response to Reding’s speech and popular interest in the initiative, EDL was launched in 2005. It had a total budget of 2,114 million euros, of which one million was contributed by the European Commission’s eContentplus program. The project started in September 2006 and was completed in February 2008 as follows: 1. TEL-ME-MOR (2004–2006) brought in the national libraries of Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Malta, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Slovakia. 2. EDLproject (2006–2008) worked toward integrating into The European Library the bibliographic catalogues and digital collections of the national libraries of Belgium, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain, and Sweden. 3. TEL-plus (2007–2009) brought in the national libraries of Bulgaria and Romania by 2008. 4. FUMAGABA (2008–2009) enlarged The European Library by adding the national libraries of Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan as well as of the former Yugoslav Republic— Macedonia, Albania, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.24 The European Digital Library 2.0, launched in 2008, was conceived as “a free service that gives users access to the resources of the 48 national libraries of Europe in 20 languages.” The latest version, EDL 2.2.0, was launched on October 19, 2009 at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It expands the linguistic offerings by 15, with collections available in 35 languages. The European Library currently provides bibliographic access to 150 million entries across Europe.25 New participating libraries include the National Library of Turkey in Ankara and the Russian collections in Moscow and St. Petersburg, among others. The grandiose future of the European Library Project is Europeana, a digital portal launched in 2008 that will double the number of accessible entries in the most technologically advanced, compact formats.26 Europeana’s description states that it will also include “museums, archives, and other holders of cultural materials.”

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To understand the nuances of self-constitution and self-representation through the European Library Project, it helps to juxtapose it with two other entities similar in scale but different in scope. Across the Atlantic Ocean, the U.S.-based Universal Digital Library (also known as Ulib) went online in 2005.27 With Carnegie Mellon University’s Million Book Project serving as the prototype, Ulib is a collaborative of about 50 research libraries in Canada and the United States, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, and about 30 participating libraries in India and China. Its website incorporates the Gutenberg Project, the oldest digital library that was conceived by Michael Hart in 1971.28 Financial and infrastructural support for the project comes from Carnegie Mellon, some participating libraries, UNESCO, the Library of Congress, and governments of the United States, Canada, China, and India. The second example is the World Digital Library (WDL), supported by UNESCO and James Madison Library at the Library of Congress.29 Publically launched in April 2009, it provides bibliographic access to partner libraries from over 40 UNESCO member countries; its financial sponsors include Google Inc, Microsoft, and the Library of Congress, among others. All of these projects identify themselves as noncommercial service portals aimed at digital preservation and collection of materials in literature, science, and many other fields. Their resources are digital or bibliographical (including books, posters, maps, sound recordings, videos, etc.), and provide open access to the worldwide community of Internet users. However, there are significant differences between these projects. Ulib necessitates, at least for now, literacy in English for access to its materials, which cover most European and some Asian languages; WDL is developing prototypes for multilingual usage; TEL requires literacy in English or the respective language of the participating European library for access to its materials, which range from Arabic to Sanskrit. Ulib identifies digital technology as the medium to conserve “all the significant literary, artistic, and scientific works of mankind” and aims at creating a library “which will foster creativity and free access to all human knowledge . . . without regard to nationality or socioeconomic background.” WDL’s principle objectives include promotion of “international and intercultural understanding” and “build[ing] capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.”30 TEL, on the other hand, “provides a vast virtual collection of material from all disciplines and offers visitors with interest a simple access to European cultural resources.” At Ulib, clusters of national, regional, and international libraries form the collaborative; the website categorically mentions that the Library of Congress is not the national library of the United States. TEL operates with a clear definition of a national library: “A national library is the library specifically established

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by a country to store its information database. National libraries usually host the legal deposit and the bibliographic control centre of a nation.”31 This definition is not a convenient fiction adapted by TEL. As mentioned in its foundational documents, it is an adaptation of the constitutional definition of a national library in most European countries, wherever it exists. The definition of a national library cannot be brushed off easily, first, because it is at the core of TEL’s construction and self-representation; second, because it draws attention—especially in the contracts—to internal discrepancies and uneven power structures between various European member nations; and third, because the very definition of “national” holdings of a European nation are immediately questionable due to Europe’s colonial and imperial histories intertwined with other parts of the world. A few examples illustrate these three points. The four contracts between member nations for various stages of TELME-MOR, EDL, TEL-plus, and FUMAGABA replicate the definition of “national libraries” in many ways. The revised 2006 EDL contract (original 2001) explains the value of Europe’s national libraries as “worldclass institutions with a vital role as holders of the national memory of the member states.” Extending this definition, the document continues: “EDL creates a pan-European platform and is a strategic investment in European content enrichment.” Among the functions it mentions are that EDL will “help European citizens, students, researchers, business users, and other users and re-users . . . to find and use digital content, irrespective of language and location.” The project ascribes adjectives such as multicultural and multilingual to its “essential nature”; it lists as its service “aggregation of digital cultural objects and collections across borders”; and it explains the use of TEL as “a single access point” so “informed citizens in any country can utilize the resources . . . of his or her national library . . . and other partner national libraries.”32 Two pages later, this fictitious end user, the European citizen, transforms briefly into a “worldwide end user” only to return to his/her original form as a “European citizen” (5). A search for the eternal recurrence of the European subject might be attributed to the following statement: “National Libraries are aware of the European identity of their collections alongside their national identity” (7). The section on “Community added value and contributions to EC policies” begins with the line: “Building the European Library is an inherently European undertaking,” and includes the statement: “The EDL Project is also inherently European and not national” (13). These inaugural formulations in the EDL’s foundational document reveal three tendencies. First, in the post-Wall Europe of territorial expansion, regional integration, and financial collaboration, national-cultural particularities become the ultimate frontiers of collective difference.

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Second, such collective cultural difference manifests itself ideologically: in, through, and despite the new set of European cultural policies endorsed by member nation-states. And finally, the EU’s attempts at regional cultural governance collide with member nations’ historical conceptualization of cultural self-definition and self-representation. From TEL-ME-MOR and EDL to FUMAGABA, the inherent differences in cultural and linguistic histories, political structures, and everyday operative realities between Western and the new Eastern European libraries subject to integration become painfully clear. EDL as a model platform for “coordination of national initiatives” seems to need more groundwork in the context of post-1989 nation rebuilding. The subtlety of the section “Assessment of risks and potentials” is worthy of mention: Risk in this project is increased by the following factors: 1) TEL Office has no track record of collaborating with the 8 target libraries on operational levels; 2) working personal relationships on operational levels between TEL Office and each target library still need to be set up; 3) some partners of the project might lack experience in international projects; 4) the potentially poor level of English spoken and written in the target libraries.33

The solution, provided in the section that follows, is “good communication”—not specifying the language in which this good communication will take place, certainly not one of the many languages of the EU’s new Eastern European members. The geographical vicinity and cultural intersections of these Eastern European nation-states with Asia, or even their intertwined histories with Asian countries, is a fact that is subject to amnesia in all the TEL contracts, but particularly noticeable in FUMAGABA. A resolution of this neglect cannot be expected in a working contract on libraries; however, it must be pointed out owing to the primacy of the national paradigm to define libraries. Insinuations of national memory, national heritage, European memory, European heritage, European cultural content, European citizens, and the European nature of these projects—all of these factors seem to defy the grounds of cooperation and accessibility that TEL and other projects portend to achieve. To further underline the significance of this tension between “national” and “European” in the contracts, let us consider briefly a related theoretical discussion. In a 2007 co-authored study on Cosmopolitan Europe, Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande evaluate the conditions of cosmopolitanism through the European Union (EU). In the introductory chapter, they propose cosmopolitanism as a solution that overcomes the “European Malaise,” which they attribute to the primacy of nationalism in European political history and to the neglect, if not entire

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eradication, of difference in European cultural politics. Highlighting the “dissolution of difference” as the mark of practiced universalism in Europe, declaring “nationalism” as an essential element of “first modernity,” Beck and Grande propose the necessity of cosmopolitanism for Europe’s contemporary and future existence. Recognizing and mobilizing internal and external differences bereft of hierarchical orders or divisions, that is, in the service of egalitarianism among citizens and other residents, emerge as significant advantages of the cosmopolitanism that they identify for Europe. The promise of this premise is worked out in their evaluations of European history, national histories, and EU policies. In the last chapter, “Cosmopolitan Visions for Europe,” they propose the following as the first and foremost provisional standard for European cosmopolitanism: “European Cosmopolitanism can no longer take its orientation from the principle of national self-determination and of nation building . . . but rather from the principle of regional cosmopolitanization.”34 Thinking with Beck and Grande while investigating cultural manifestations of EU policies in pan-European cultural institutions, it is evident how principles of national self-determination and nation building from the nineteenth century dominate the execution of regional cosmopolitanization. The politics of selective multiple affiliations remains a function of cultural and political representation of institutions. TEL, EDL, and Europeana are not just products of innocent and enthusiastic conversations among cultural bureaucrats and technocrats. They are attestations of the EU’s cultural policies in action, funded by public money to facilitate the transformation of EU publics in an information society. Yet while the digital divide and linguistic barriers still place the idea of equitable access to knowledge through virtual libraries in a distant future, universal ambition, democratic mission, and worldwide reception are at the heart of these projects. In the case of TEL, the chase after these lofty principles comes to a screeching halt rather quickly. The definition of a national library draws our attention to basic principles of organization, acquisition, collation, classification, location, and dissemination of resources. A critique of national libraries also demands an internally differentiated understanding of any national library. The German context serves as an excellent example. At the 1987 CENL conference in Lisbon, two years before the Berlin Wall fell, “Germany” was represented by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Frankfurt am Main. The Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig, one of the most important centers for documentation of German cultural history, especially print-cultural history, was not represented, not because it somehow did not contain documents befitting German national memory, but because it was located in the erstwhile GDR. Founded in 1913, the Deustche Bücherei’s primary responsibility has been the

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collection, cataloguing, and bibliographic indexing of all printed publications issued in Germany. Currently the collections exceed 19 million units. In 1931, the Bücherei published the first Deutsche Nationalbibliographie in two series: A) with lists of books published by members of the Deutsche Buchhandelsverein, and B) with books published by nonmembers. In 1942, the Nazis expanded the Bücherei’s function for the first time by law. It was charged with collecting translations of German works into world languages and works on Germany published around the world. The Deutsche Bücherei remained the center for German print-cultural history until 1944, when it was shut down due to air raids. It reopened in 1945, when the second and last version of a united Deutsche Nationalbibliographie was published in Leipzig. However, with the division of Germany into two states on the horizon, it was clear that the Deutsche Bücherei would be the library of East Germany. In 1947, with American money and the collaboration of Frankfurt’s Stadtbibliothek and the Frankfurt Universitätsbibliothek, a new library was proposed as the future (West) German National Library, and the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek was born. Since then, two different national bibliographies were produced every other year until 1990. With Germany’s reunification, the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig and the Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt—which since 1970 has included the Deutsches Musikarchiv (Berlin)—were unified under the name Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.35 If this brief outline proves anything, it is that history has more than once rendered questionable the notion of a single bibliographic control center—a single “national” library or a “national” memory bank in the German context. On the EDL website, this complex history is reduced to a set of factoids that indicate a teleological progression from 1913 to 1945 to 1990 to 2005, when the EDL was launched. The reduction, however, does not help to circumvent the historical circumstances that inform the selection of objects to be integrated into the European Library Project. Moreover, as members of the worldwide community—historically connected with Europe through imperialism and colonialism—become the target users of projects such as TEL, one cannot avoid questioning the clear geographical and geopolitical demarcation of cultural resources in insular terms, the very identification of cultural resources as European or belonging only to a specific European nation. Another example illustrates this point. The State Library in Berlin (fondly known as the Stabi or officially as the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz, the State Library of Prussian Cultural Property) is linked to TEL through the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Frankfurt. It houses one of the world’s largest collections of things un-Prussian. In the second half of the nineteenth century,

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the Royal Library, precursor to the Stabi, was buying major collections as well as single items in the international marketplace. As Hartmut-Ortwin Feistel explains, important libraries were acquired, such as those of Sir Robert Chambers, judge of the British East India Company in Calcutta; Baron Heinrich Friedrich von Diez, Prussian ambassador to the Ottoman empire; Johan Gottfried Wettzstein, Prussian consul in Damascus; and many others.36 Orientalist philologists encouraged these acquisitions and were strongly influenced by them. The role of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (German Eastern Society) was indispensable for identifying these collections. Founded in 1845 with the goal of “supporting from all directions knowledge about Asia and countries in its close proximity as well as expanding participation in this endeavor to wider circles,” it first collaborated with the Royal Library in Berlin and then started acquiring its own holdings.37 It signed a contract with the University of Halle, which since then has housed its collection. The outcome of these developments, combined with the complicated politics between the Academies of Sciences in Berlin and Munich, the Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen, the Royal Asiatic Society in London, and the Asian Society in Paris, led to the foundation in 1919 of a separate Orientalische Abteilung (Asian Department) at the Stabi, which is today the Orientlesesaal (Asian Reading Room). Its bibliographic control center is Germany, but that it is part of Germany’s legal deposit is a claim best open to interpretation. *

*

*

The multiple contexts of print-cultural transformations, new media developments, public interactions with readable objects, and the blurry distinctions between the sacrosanct and the secularized must be understood in conjunction with the political formation of publics that are the “end users” of such products. A legal deposit, a bibliographic control center, an institution purloined through cultural history, only to reemerge as a cultural icon, a historical building with national significance for a national or regional polity—these are the many meanings of a library that have been central to my critique of the European Library Project in this chapter. Instead of promising “Freedom without Walls,” it demonstrates how confining and limiting systems of nomination, categorization, and classification persist, even when the walls are metaphorically brought down. As a new definition of “virtual” spaces is rapidly transforming the collective cultural construction of libraries in the twenty-first century, the libraries’ old functions still hold precedence over suspicion, neutralization, and inversion. The European Library Project and the European Digital Library may have the

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bold ambition of decoupling the museum from the library, but they are to an extent replicating the nineteenth-century obsession with the everaccumulating pasts, albeit now in virtual space. This inadequacy is not a consequence of shortsightedness of planning; libraries themselves cannot be disembedded from their convoluted histories of collection, acquisition, and accession. Yet the ideological implications of the library should not blind us to their spatial and temporal constitutions on the one hand and propriety and accessibility on the other. If the topography, mythography, and cosmography of the Berlin Wall was inscribed into the European Library Project, a different kind of library topography becomes visible from the perspective of the patrons who reside within the walls as subjects of their own cosmography and mythography. One of the most claustrophobic images of a library in European novels from the twentieth century is offered by Elias Canetti, the German-language author of Sephardic-Jewish heritage who was born in Bulgaria and died in Zurich. In his novel Die Blendung (1936), translated into English as Autoda-fé (1947), he takes his readers on a tour of the protagonist’s library.38 The library takes up all four rooms in Peter Kien’s spacious Fin-de-siècle Viennese apartment on the top floor of 24 Ehrlich Straße. Kien, the readers are told, is the greatest living Sinologist and expert of several linguistic and literary traditions of the “Orient.” Unwilling to compromise his intellectual autonomy for financial gains, he regularly declines offers of employment from prestigious universities across Europe. In the pursuit of his collection and accumulation, he seeks to emulate Eratosthenes, the head librarian of the library at Alexandria. Unlike Eratosthenes, however, Kien is not only the curator, cataloger, and organizer, but also the sole and principle patron, with exclusive access to his 25,000 volumes. His personal isolation manifests itself through the library’s architectural insulation. The windows in all the rooms have been sealed shut and skylights have been installed, not only to assure maximum possible surface area for bookshelves and natural lighting respectively, but also to ward off the “time-wasting and immoral habit” of watching what goes on in the street (23). Organized by subject and language on the floor-to-ceiling shelves, the books are easily accessible with the movable ladder that glides on rails through all the rooms. The furniture in the apartment—before matrimony alters his existence—are Kien’s large desk and chair and a divan in another room. In short, the entire library is designed to make sure that “no single superfluous article of furniture, no single superfluous person could lure him from his serious thoughts” (23). By giving the novel’s readers partial access to Kien’s library through description of its contents, Canetti promotes them to the status of visitors, only to demote them at once when they realize that their lack of access to the specialized knowledge of Sinology makes them as superfluous

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as people on the streets or, for that matter, as burdensome as Therese, who is promoted to the status of his wife and shortly thereafter demoted to her original position of housekeeper. The privileges of the library’s upkeep of are taken away from her. Let us juxtapose this image with another literary representation of a library that stands in the leading commercial center of the Germanspeaking world, this time from Orhan Pamuk’s Kar (2002, English translation, Snow, 2004).39 Scoped by the narrator’s probing eyes—also named Orhan—who has come to investigate the murder of the exiled Turkish poet Ka, the Frankfurt Stadtbibliothek (city library) stands in sharp contrast to Kien’s private library. The architectural description is sparse: the narrator characterizes it as “a modern and anonymous building” (252). The number of volumes, systems of cataloging, and the arrangement of books and other materials are perhaps too vast to explain and therefore remain unmentioned in the novel. Instead, the narrator chooses to comment on the multiple and heterogeneous body of users: “Inside were the types you always find in such libraries: housewives, old people with time to kill, unemployed men, one or two Turks and Arabs, students giggling over their homework assignments, and all other manner of stalwarts ranging from the ranks of the obese, the lame, the insane, and the mentally handicapped” (252). Everyone whom Kien considered superfluous and tempting is present in and an integral part of the Stadtbibliothek. Unsurprisingly the library is Ka’s public refuge from the isolation he experiences in his decrepit, tiny apartment in Frankfurt. This public space is his last stop before he is murdered on the street, so the readers enter it with Orhan for a forensic investigation. While Kien’s library is a space where no time is wasted, Orhan, while opening copies of collections of poetry in the library’s English section, “shed[s] tears for him [Ka] and for the years he’d wasted away in this library” (252). Unlike ancient Chinese scriptures, out-of-print editions, and scholarly commentaries by other distinguished scholars that Kien owns and has mastered, Ka’s readings comprise poetry by W. H. Auden, Robert Browning, and Samuel Coleridge. Instead of bookplates that demonstrate the permanence of the Viennese native’s propriety over “Oriental” knowledge, checkout slips with signatures of the exiled Turkish poet become identifiers of his temporary possession of volumes, indeed of his poetic borrowings. There is little to be owned in the exilic subject’s life, one that is characterized by borrowed time, space, and, as the novel emphasizes, the materiality of intellectual stimulation. The linguistic, national, and cultural differences between Canetti’s Die Blendung and Pamuk’s Kar are significant. The dust jacket on Kien’s world is the map of early twentieth-century Vienna; folded in the jacket flaps is ancient Chinese and Japanese calligraphy that only Kien can decipher.

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Ka’s world is covered with snow and the dust of several geographies. The dog-eared map of Kars—a small-town on the Turkish-Armenian border— carries smudges and fingerprints of many Frankfurt Stadtbibliothek patrons. The libraries depicted in these novels, when considered in tandem, offer for consideration another dimension of difference through transformation, namely, the difference manifest in the spaces that hold and contain these novels, these “books.” Semiotically and symbolically, the transformation is the house of books itself—the Bibliothek—as well as the virtual bibliographic space that writes (graph) itself through books (vivlion). The bibliographic inventory of this Bibliothek at the millennial turn bears marks of human migration and signals the necessity to recognize the meanings of bibliomigrancy: the bearing across of books. Thinking through this bibliomigrancy with Foucault’s directionality of space, simultaneity, and juxtaposition assists us in pursuing a new reading of the inventory of books that create new shelf spaces for themselves in the libraries of “Others,” in the readers’ many “Elsewheres.” The space of reading—the physical and metaphorical space of the library—demands an account of the owned and the borrowed, the shared and the unshared, the agreed upon and the contestable. As much as through acts of reading, shelf lives of books are created beyond their points of origin in libraries without walls. When the act and space of reading are considered in tandem, borrowing privileges acquire new meanings. The inventory of the Bibliothek, once outsourced, becomes a new resource. The conceptualization of a library—with or without walls— becomes space-based and space-bound: spatial and directional, locative and ablative. The thousand-fold librarian is a virtual reality today. Whose real or imagined past he/she is preserving, memorizing, remembering, and/or commemorating must be subject to reasoned scrutiny. Notes 1. Günter Grass, “Transatlantic Elegy,” from “What is the German Fatherland,” in Two States—One Nation? trans. Krishna Winston and A. S. Wensinger (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 90; in German: “Hört die Legende von drüben: / Es war ein tausendfältiger Bibliothekar, / Der die Nachlässe jener verwahrte, / deren Bücher gebrannt hatten, damals,” from “Was ist des deutschen Vaterland,” in Deutscher Lastenausgleich: Wider das dumpfe Einheitsgebot: Reden und Gespräche (Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand, 1990), 121. 2. Günter Grass, “What is the German Fatherland,” 89. 3. For a discussion of Arndt with special reference to “Germania” in relation to Europe, see Alfred G. Pundt, Arndt and the Nationalist Awakening in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935). A recent study by Walter Erhart and Arne Koch, Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860): Deutscher

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4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Nationalismus—Europa—Transatlantische Perspektiven (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007) situates Arndt in contemporary discussions on nationalism and transnationalism. Grass, “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland,” 110, and “What is the German Fatherland,” 78. The speech is neither bipartisan nor ideologically unbiased. To give one example, Grass juxtaposes Walter Ulbricht with Willy Brandt and accentuates the significance of the East German workers’ uprising on June 17, 1953, to underline “Stalinist” dimensions of the GDR. Grass, “What is the German Fatherland,” 88. Grass, “Lastenausgleich,” in Deutscher Lastenausgleich, 7–12, and “Equalizing the Burden,” in Two States—One Nation? 8–14. Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005), 182. See German Missions in the United States, “Freedom Without Walls—20 Years Fall of the Wall,” http://www.germany.info/Vertretung/usa/en/09_ Press_InFocus_Interviews/03_Infocus/04_Without_Walls/_Main_S.html (accessed March 29, 2010); Bundesregierung, Auswärtiges Amt, “Merkel, Gorbatschow, Bush Sr. und Kohl am 31. Oktober in Berlin,” October 22, 2009, www.premiumpresse.de/merkel-gorbatschow-bush-sr-und-kohl-am-31oktober-in-berlin-PR593509.html (accessed July 25, 2010). For archived information of the European Digital Library Project, see http:// www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/organisation/cooperation/archive/edlproject/ (accessed March 29, 2010). Lucien Paul Victor Febvre and Henri Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800 [French 1958], trans. David Gerard, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and David Wootton (London: N.L.B., 1976). On electronic readers, see Motoko Rich, “A New Electronic Reader, the Nook, Enters the Market,” October 21, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/ technology/21nook.html?_r=2&ref=books (accessed March 29, 2010). Robert Darnton, “The Library in the New Age,” New York Review of Books 55, no. 10 (June 12, 2008), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 (accessed March 29, 2010). Rachel Lee Harris, “Rare Chinese Books,” October 12, 2009, http://www. nytimes.com/2009/10/12/books/12arts- R ARECHINESEB_BRF.html (accessed March 29, 2010). Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 26. Gary Marchionini, “Overview of Digital Libraries,” School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina (1999), http://www.ils. unc.edu/~march/overview_slides/index.html (accessed March 29, 2010). Donald Waters, “What Are Digital Libraries?” CLIR Issues 4 (July/August 1998): 4. Association of Research Libraries, “Definition and Purposes of a Digital Library,” October 23, 1995, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ARL/definition.html (accessed March 29, 2010). Christinger Tomer, “Digital Libraries in Public Libraries,” in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, ed. Miriam A. Drake (New York: Marcel Dekker, 2003), 1: 884–91.

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224 / b. venkat mani 19. Anthony Grafton, “Apocalypse in the Stacks: The Research Library in the Age of Google,” Daedalus 138, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 87. 20. James J. O’Donnel, “Engaging the Humanities: The Digital Humanities,” Daedalus 138, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 99. 21. Foundation Conference of European National Librarians, “About CENL,” http://www.cenl.org/about.php (emphasis added, accessed March 29, 2010). 22. European Commission, “i2010—A European Information Society for Growth and Employment,” Communication from the Commission to the Council, the European Parliament, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions {SEC(2005) 717}, http://eurlex.europa. eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:52005DC0229:EN:NOT, and European Commission, “Europe’s Information Society Thematic Portal,” Letter of April 28, 2005, COM(2005)465, http://ec.europa.eu/information_ society/activities/digital_libraries/doc/letter_1/index_en.htm (both accessed March 29, 2010). 23. European Commission, “EDL: The European Digital Library,” ECP-2005CULT-38074, 13 (version of July 19, 2006). Document made available by Aubrey Escande, ed., The European Library Newsletter. 24. Reconstructed as per the document “Project FUMAGABA” (December 2007), 1. Document made available by Aubrey Escande, ed., The European Library Newsletter. 25. The European Library 2.3, http://search.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/en/ index.html (accessed March 29, 2010). 26. Europeana: Think Culture. “About Us,” http://europeana.eu/portal/aboutus.html (accessed March 29, 2010). 27. Universal Digital Library, “The Universal Digital Library. Million Book Collection,” http://www.ulib.org/ (accessed March 29, 2010). 28. Internet Archive, “Welcome to Project Gutenberg,” http://www.archive.org/ details/gutenberg (accessed March 29, 2010). 29. UNESCO, “World Digital Library,” http://www.wdl.org/en/ (accessed March 29, 2010). 30. UNESCO, “About the World Digital Library: Mission,” http://www.wdl. org/en/about/ (accessed March 29, 2010). 31. “What is The European Library?” http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/portal/organisation/about_us/aboutus_en.html (accessed March 29, 2010). 32. European Commission, “EDL: The European Digital Library,” ECP-2005CULT-38074, 2–3 (version of July 19, 2006; further citations refer to this edition). 33. Reconstructed as per the document “Project FUMAGABA” (December 2007), 6. Document made available by Aubrey Escande, ed., The European Library Newsletter. 34. Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007), 257. 35. Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, “Geschichte,” http://www.d-nb.de/wir/ueber_ dnb/geschichte.htm (accessed July 25, 2010). For a recent history of the German national libraries, see Kathrin Ansorge and Deutsche Bibliothek, Die Deutsche Bibliothek: Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsche Bibliothek, 2004). Michael P. Olson, The Odyssey of a

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36.

37.

38. 39.

German National Library: A Short History of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Deutsche Bücherei and the Deutsche Bibliothek (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996) declares: “A single German National Library is unnecessary and unrealistic now and in the future” (104), echoing the bittersweet moment of unification of German libraries as characterized by Franz Georg Kaltwasser, “German Libraries Reunited,” trans. D. L. Paisey, Times Literary Supplement, September 25, 1992, 18. Hartmut-Ortwin Feistel. “A Brief History of the Oriental and East Asian Collections Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin.” http://staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/ fileadmin/user_upload/zentrale_Seiten/orientabteilung/pdf/history.pdf (accessed March 29, 2010). The original German reads: “die Kenntnis Asiens und der damit in näherem Zusammenhange stehenden Länder nach allen Beziehungen zu fördern und die Theilnahme daran in weitern Kreisen zu verbreiten.” Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, “Zielsetzung,” http://www.dmg-web. de/? page=8 (accessed March 29, 2010). Elias Canetti, Auto-Da-Fé, trans. C. V. Wedgewood (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984). All citations are from this edition. Orhan Pamuk, Snow, trans. Maureen Freely (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2004). All citations are from this edition.

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Abadan-Unat, Nermin. Bitmeyen Göç: Misafır Işçiden Ulusötesi Yurttaşa. Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2002. Adam, Horst, et al. Handbuch zur Jugendweihe, eine Anleitung für Mitglieder der Ausschüsse für Jugendweihe und Jugendstundenleiter. Berlin: Volk und Wissen, 1974. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Allan, Sean. “1989 and the Wende in East German Cinema. Peter Kahane’s Die Architekten (1990), Egon Günther’s Stein (1991) and Jörg Foth’s Letztes aus der Da Da eR (1990).” In 1949/1989: Cultural Perspectives. Edited by Clare Flanagan and Stuart Taberner, 231–44. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Allendorf, Gerhard. Gewerkschaften und Jugendweihe. Berlin: Tribüne Verlag, 1959. ———. Die sozialistische Jugendweihe und die Aufgaben der Gewerkschaften. Lehrmaterial für das Fernstudium. Berlin: Hochschule der deutschen Gewerkschaften “Fritz Eckert, 1964. Allinson, Mark. Politics and Popular Opinion in East German 1945–1968. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000. Amnesty International. Yugoslavia: Prisoners of Conscience. London: Amnesty International, 1982. Ansorge, Kathrin, and Deutsche Bibliothek. Die Deutsche Bibliothek: Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin. Frankfurt am Main: Deutsche Bibliothek, 2004. Association of Research Libraries. “Definition and Purposes of a Digital Library.” October 23, 1995, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/ARL/definition.html (accessed March 29, 2010). Augé, Marc. Non-Places [French 1992]. Trans. John Howe. New York: Verso, 2008. Ausländerbeauftragte des Senats von Berlin. Zur Lage der jungen Ausländer generation. Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Inneres, 1991. ———. Bericht zur Integrations- und Ausländerpolitik 1996–1997. Berlin: Senat von Berlin, 1998. Ausländerbeirat des Bezirksamtes Wedding. “Leitlinien zur Ausländerarbeit im Bezirk Wedding.” In Integration von Ausländern in die Regelversorgung eines Wohlfahrtsverbandes. Edited by Brigitte Döcker, 213–34. Berlin: Arbeiterwohlfahrt Kreisverband Wedding, 1992. Baehr, Ulrich, Freya Mülhaupt, and Eberhard Knödler-Bunte. Mythos Berlin Concepte. Katalog zur Werkausstellung “Mythos Berlin” 1987. Berlin: Mythos Berlin Ausstellung GmbH, 1986.

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works cited / 245 Weidenfeld, Werner. Außenpolitik für die deutsche Einheit: Die Entscheidungsjahre 1989/90. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998. Welch Guerra, Max. Hauptstadt Einig Vaterland. Planung und Politik zwischen Bonn und Berlin. Berlin: Verlag Bauwesen, 1999. White, Jenny B. “Turks in the New Germany.” American Anthropologist 99, no. 4 (1997): 754–69. Wicke, Lutz, Lothar de Maiziere, and Thomas de Maiziere. Öko-soziale Marktwirtschaft in Ost und West: Der Weg aus Wirtschafts- und Umweltkrise. Munich: dtv, 1990. Wilderotter, Hans. Das Haus am Werderschen Markt. Von der Reichsbank zum Auswärtigen Amt. Berlin: Auswärtiges Amt, 1999, http://www.auswaertigesamt.de/diplo/de/AAmt/VirtuellerRundgang/Uebersicht,navCtx=21922.html (accessed December 17, 2009). Williams, Brackette F. “A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain.” Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 401–44. Wirth, Louis. “Urbanism as a Way of Life.” American Journal of Sociology 44 (1938): 1–24. Wise, Gail. “Ali im Wunderland.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996. Wise, Michael Z. Capital Dilemma. Germany’s Search for a New Architecture of Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Wolf, Christa. Der geteilte Himmel [1963]. Munich: Luchterhand, 1999. Wolle, Stefan. Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR 1971– 1989. Berlin: Christoph Links, 1998. Wrage, Henning. Die Zeit der Kunst. Literatur, Film und Fernsehen in der DDR der 1960er Jahre. Eine Kulturgeschichte in Beispielen. Heidelberg: Winter, 2009. Yesilada, Karin. “Die geschundene Suleika. Das Eigenbild der Türkin in der deutschsprachigen Literatur türkischer Autorinnen.” In Interkulturelle Konfigurationen: Zur deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur von Autoren nichtdeutscher Herkunft. Edited by Mary Howard, 95–114. Munich: Iudicium, 1997. Young, James E. “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today.” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (Winter 1992): 267–96. Zaimoglu, Feridun. Kanak Sprak: 24 Misstöne vom Rande der Gesellschaft. Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1995. ———. Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft. Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1998. Zelikow, Philip, and Condoleezza Rice. Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Zschokke, Helmut. Die Berliner Akzisemauer. Die vorletzte Mauer der Stadt. Berlin: Berlin Story, 2007. Zwahr, Hartmut. Ende einer Selbstzerstörung: Leipzig und die Revolution in der DDR. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993.

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I n de x

Academy of Sciences, Berlin, 219 Academy of Sciences, Munich, 219 Adenauer, Konrad, 21 aerial bombardment, 80 Agamben, Giorgio, 180–1 Alexanderplatz, Berlin, 11, 16, 51, 84 Alliance for Germany, 21 antifaschistischer Schutzwall (antifascist protection bulwark), 50, 65 see also Berlin Wall antifascism, 3, 26, 68 antifascist foundational myth, 64–5, 66 Appadurai, Arjun, 136 Arbeiterwohlfahrt (Workers Welfare / AWO), 149–50, 152, 153, 154 Arndt, Ernst Moritz “Des Deutschen Vaterland,” 205–6 Asian Society, Paris, 219 Association of Research Libraries, 210 Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Ministry), Berlin, 88–90, 93 authenticity, 84, 166 in documentary theater, 168, 169, 170, 172–3, 181 in literature, 171 as opposed to simulation, 83, 84–5 compare Critical Reconstruction autobiography, 170–2, 176–7 Balkan wars, 150–1, 152, 153, 159 Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, 168, 172, 173–4, 180, 181

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Barroso, José Manuel, 212–13 Barthes, Roland, 81 Basic Law, 3, 21–2, 23, 30 Baudrillard, Jean, 71 Bauer, Josef Martin So weit die Füße tragen (As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me), 66 see also Umgelter, Fritz Bausch, Pina Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), 178 BBI (Berlin Brandenburg International Airport), 5, 85, 86 Berlin Airlift, 2, 60 Berlin blockade, 2, 59–60 Berlin Republic, 26, 29, 82, 86 Berlin Wall as “antifaschistischer Schutzwall,” 50, 65 construction, 1, 5, 39–42, 44, 206 cost, 42, 43 as factor in identity formation, 2, 3 fall and consequences, 1, 7, 11, 12, 25, 29, 92, 187–8, 206–7 immigrant neighborhoods along western side, 151–2, 165 as object of commemoration, monuments, and memorials, 5, 6–7, 11, 51–6, 80 rationale for, 5, 15, 37, 59–62, 64–5, 66, 69, 73 as subject of art actions, 50–6

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248 / index Berlin Wall—Continued as symbol of Cold War division, 7, 37, 55 viewing platforms along western side, 99, 100 Berlusconi, Silvio, 189, 190, 192, 199–201 Bernauer Straße, Berlin, 40, 48–9, 54–5, 70 Beuys, Joseph, 50 Beyond Belonging festival, 172, 173, 174 Bibliotheca Alexandrina, 214 Blaesius, Christoph, 51 bloc parties, 18–19, 21 see also opposition in the GDR Bonatz, Karl, 80 Böttcher, Jürgen, 73 Die Mauer (The Wall), 71–2 Boulanger, Etienne Plug-in Berlin, 109 Single Room Hotel Berlin, 109, 110 Brandenburg Gate, 45, 46, 49, 51, 61, 92–3 in film and television, 67–9, 72 Brandt, Hans-Jürgen Flucht aus der Hölle (Escape from Hell), 66 see also Korbschmitt, Hans-Erich Brandt, Willy, 17, 223n4 Braunfels, Stephan Alsenblock / Paul-Löbe-Haus, 90 Brecht, Bertolt, 14 Brezhnev doctrine, 15, 29 compare Sinatra doctrine Brill, Alexander Ehrensache (A Matter of Honor), 168–70 see also Hübner, Lutz British East India Company, 219 Bund Deutscher Mädel (Association of German Girls / BDM), 124 Bündnis 90, 21 see also opposition in the GDR

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Burgtheater, 181 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 22, 23 Canetti, Elias Die Blendung (Auto-da-fé), 220–2 Catholic Church Caritas, 149, 150, 152 Confirmation versus Jugendweihe, 124, 125, 140–1n21, 141n22 Cattafi, Bartolo, 197 CDU (Christlich Demokratische Union / Christian Democratic Union), 22, 30, 152, 157, 160, 161 Chambers, Sir Robert, 219 Checkpoint Charlie, 65 Chirac, Jacques, 212 Christo Running Fence, 43 Churchill, Caryl, 180 citizenship laws changes to, 172, 180 East German refugees, 15 City Beautiful movement, 79 Cold War Berlin as focal point of, 60, 73, 81 end and consequences, 7, 11, 12, 23, 25, 165 onset, 2 role of television, 64 Conference of European National Libraries (CENL), 212, 217 Consolo, Vincenzo, 194, 201 “Il ponte sul canale di Sicilia” (“The Bridge over the Channel of Sicily”), 196–7 “Vedute dello Stretto di Messina” (“Views of the Strait of Messina”), 197–9 consumer culture, 6, 135–7, 138 East German desire for Western consumer lifestyle, 22, 26 and tourism, 5, 84, 87 Corbusier, Le, 79

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index / 249 cosmopolitanism demotic, 176 European, 6, 166, 167, 171, 179, 180, 216–17 selective, 172, 177, 181 Turkish-German, 171–2 Critical Reconstruction, 54, 85 see also Stimmann, Hans and Kleihues, Josef Paul currency union, East and West Germany, 23, 24

Dikmen, Sinasi, 168 Diyalog Theaterfest, 168, 170 Döblin, Alfred Berlin Alexanderplatz, 84 Domröse, Angelika, 62 Dresden demonstrations against East German government, 15–16, 20, 22 post-unification growth, 27 Durkheim, Emile, 127, 130

DEFA (Deutsche Film AG / state-owned film company), 62, 63, 70, 73 democracy democratic centralism, 24 East Germans’ demand for, 13, 16, 18–19, 21, 24 immigrants as drivers of democratic progress, 7, 177, 180 as represented in architecture, 86, 88–9 transition from dictatorship to democracy, East Germany, 23, 24–5, 28, 166 Demokratische Aufbruch (Democratic Awakening), 19, 20 see also opposition in the GDR Derrida, Jacques, 181 detente, 3, 12, 30 Deutsche Bücherei, 217–18 Deutsche Buchhandelsverein, 218 Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 219 Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, 217, 218 Deutsche Volkspolizei (German People’s Police / DVP), 25 Deutsches Musikarchiv, 218 Diakronisches Werk, see Protestant Church Diepgen, Eberhard, 152, 157, 158 Diez, Baron Heinrich Friedrich von, 219

East Side Gallery, 52–4 emigration forced expulsion, 147–8, 152 from the GDR, 2, 15, 18, 24, 37, 49, 60, 62 from Italy, 196, 204n23 Eppelmann, Rainer, 20 Erdogan, Recep, 199–200 Erpulat, Nurkan Jenseits: Bist du Türke oder bist du schwul? (The Hereafter: Are You Turkish or Are You Gay?), 174 see also Kulaoğlu, Tunçay European Commission (EC), 190, 212–13 European Digital Library (EDL), 207, 213, 219–20 integration of Eastern European libraries, 216 as a manifestation of the EU’s cultural policies, 217 and the question of “national” libraries, 215–16, 218 European Library Project (TEL), 7, 207, 212–15, 219–20 integration of Eastern European libraries, 216 as a manifestation of the EU’s cultural policies, 217 and the question of “national” libraries, 218

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250 / index European Union (EU), 7, 216–17 and the Bridge of Messina, 189–90, 192, 203n8 expansion, 4, 26–7 integration of Italy, 192 policies, 207 and Sicily’s geopolitical position, 187–8, 197 Europeana, 213, 217 Fata Morgana, legend of, 193, 197–8, 201 FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei / Free Democratic Party), 152 Federal Chancellery, Berlin, 84 Morphosis design entry, 90 Schultes-Frank design, 90–1 see also Schultes, Axel and Frank, Charlotte Flächennutzungsplan (Land Use Plan), Berlin, 85 Foster, Lord Norman Reichstag dome, 86 Foth, Jörg, 71 Letztes aus der DaDaeR (Latest from the Da-Da-R), 70 Foucault, Michel, 209, 210 Frank, Charlotte Band des Bundes (Federal Ribbon), 90–1 see also Schultes, Axel Frei Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth / FDJ), 64, 126, 128, 138 Friedrich Wilhelm I as “Soldier King,” 38, 39 Fühmann, Franz, 62 FUMAGABA, 213, 215, 216 Gagarin, Yuri, 63 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 189 Garton Ash, Timothy, 12 Geertz, Clifford, 127 Gellhorn, Alfred, 81

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Genscher, Hans-Dietrich, 23 gentrification, 84, 158–9, 173 globalization, 82–3 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Faust, 178 Google, 214 Google Books Library Project, 208 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 14, 15, 17, 20, 23, 29, 129 Grass, Günter “Transatlantische Elegie,” 205, 206 “Was ist des deutschen Vaterland,” 205–6, 223n4 Green Line, Cyprus, 117 Green Party, 17, 21, 160 Grösch, Wiebke New Borders / Neue Grenzen, 108–9 see also Metzger, Frank Grünbein, Durs “Schädelbasislektion,” 110 Grundgesetz, see Basic Law Gundermann, Gerhard, 131–2 Günther, Egon Stein (Stone), 70 Gutenberg Project, 214 Habermas, Jürgen, 82 Hamm, Manfred, 49 Hauptbahnhof (Main Railway Station), Berlin, 84, 85–6 Haußmann, Leander Herr Lehmann, 72–3 Hebbel-am-Ufer Theater, 174 Hermlin, Stephan, 62 Heym, Stefan, 14 Hildesheimer, Ludwig, 79 Hitler, Adolf, 90–1 Hitler Youth, 124 Hoffmann, Matthias, 49 Hoheisel, Horst Aschrott Brunnen (Aschrott Fountain), 115 Holocaust, 26, 88, 89

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index / 251 Honecker, Erich, 13, 14, 19 and the Berlin Wall, 40, 46 resignation, 16, 20 struggles over succession of, 18 Horst, Philip Glühbirne / Lightbulb, 107–8 Hübner, Lutz, 177 Ehrensache (A Matter of Honor), 168–70 see also Brill, Alexander Humanistischer Verband Deutschland (Humanist Association Germany), 124, 131, 133, 138 Hungary, 12, 15 East Germans’ exodus over Hungarian-Austrian border, 15, 18 identity, 3, 4 German, 1, 6, 166 among immigrants to Germany, 6, 151, 160, 166, 168, 169 as represented in theater, 172 Sicilian, 189, 192–3, 194, 196, 202n6 urban, 82, 83 immigrants, see minorities immigration, 146, 147, 148, 149, 176 laws, 172, 180 Tunisian immigration into Sicily, 196–7 integration, 145, 146, 150–62 isolationism, 155–6 of Italy into EU, 192, 197 as a theme in Turkish-German theater, 172, 179, 181 Interessenvereinigung Jugendweihe e.V. (Interest Group Jugendweihe Inc.), 124, 128, 129, 131, 133 see also Jugendweihe Berlin / Brandenburg e.V. International Building Exhibition (IBA), 85

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Jahn, Helmut Sony Center, Potsdamer Platz, 87 Jakobs, Karl-Heinz Beschreibung eines Sommers (Description of a Summer), 63–4 Jelinek, Elfriede, 181 Babel, 180 Bambiland, 180 Die Kontrakte des Kaufmanns (The Business Man’s Contracts), 180 Über Tiere (On Animals), 180 John, Barbara, 153–4, 159, 160 Jugendfeier (Youth Celebration), 131–4, 137 Jugendweihe Berlin / Brandenburg e.V., 124, 138 see also Interessenvereinigung Jugendweihe e.V. Junge Pioniere (Young Pioniers), 125, 126 Kahane, Peter Die Architekten (The Architects), 70 Kaltwasser, Martin Turn It One More Time, 99–102, 108 see also Köbberling, Folke Kant, Hermann, 18 Kaprow, Allan Sweet Wall, 50 Kasprzik, Hans-Joachim Gewissen in Aufruhr (Conscience in Commotion), 65–9, 73 see also Reisch, Günter Käutner, Helmut Himmel ohne Sterne (Heaven without Stars), 70 Kelek, Necla, 170 Die fremde Braut, 171 Keller, Herbert “Unsere Heimat” (Our Homeland), 67 Kennedy, John F(itzgerald), 60, 61, 62

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252 / index Kertzer, David, 130 Khrushchev, Nikita, 60, 61, 74n9 Kleihues, Josef Paul, 85 see also Critical Reconstruction and Stimmann, Hans Klein, Gerhard Sonntagsfahrer (Sunday Drivers), 62, 69 Köbberling, Folke Turn It One More Time, 99–102, 108 see also Kaltwasser, Martin Kohl, Helmut, 12, 79 Alliance for Germany, 21 Aufbau Ost program, 27 role in German unification, 22, 23, 30, 79 Kohlhoff, Sven, 54 Kollhoff, Hans, 88 Koolhaas, Rem, 43 Korbschmitt, Hans-Erich Flucht aus der Hölle (Escape from Hell), 66 see also Brandt, Hans-Jürgen Krenz, Egon, 16, 29 Krug, Manfred, 62 Kulaoğlu, Tunçay Jenseits: Bist du Türke oder bist du schwul? (The Hereafter: Are You Turkish or Are You Gay?), 174 see also Erpulat, Nurkan Land Use Plan, see Flächennutzungsplan Langhoff, Lukas, 173 Ferienlager: die Dritte Generation (Summer Camp: The Third Generation), 174, 177–80 Klassentreffen: Die Zweite Generation (Class Reunion: The Second Generation), 165, 174–7 Langhoff, Shermin, 169, 173, 174 Lee, Eun Sook

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Vanished Berlin Wall, 51 Lefebvre, Henri, 82, 120n16 Leipzig demonstrations against the East German government, 16, 19, 20, 29–30 Nikolai Church, 16 post-unification growth, 27 Lemke, Jürgen Ganz Normal Anders (Gay Voices from East Germany), 170 Library of Congress, 214 Luhmann, Niklas, 76n30 Maastricht Treaty, 192 Main Railway Station, Berlin, see Hauptbahnhof Maiziere, Lothar de, 22–3, 24, 28 Melitopoulos, Angela Möglichkeitsraum I / The Blast of the Possible: A Transnational Space Montage, 117–18 memory art against forgetting, 89–90, 115 collective, 1, 102, 117 libraries as “memory banks,” 210, 215, 217 nostalgia, 25, 28, 179–80 politics of, 2, 12 process of remembering, 206 and the Reichstag dome, 86 Merkel, Angela, 199, 200 Messina Bridge, Straits, 7, 188–92, 193, 197–9, 201–2 cost, 203n8 distance between Messina and mainland, 202n2 seismic risk, 202n6 Metternich, Klemens Wenzel Lothar von, 193, 195 Metzger, Frank New Borders / Neue Grenzen, 108–9 see also Grösch, Wiebke

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index / 253 Michaelis, Dirk, 132 Mielke, Erich, 17 migrants, see minorities Migration, 148, 193, 194, 196–7, 222 virtual, 208, 212 compare emigration and immigration Million Book Project, 214 Ministerium für Staatssichterheit (Ministry of State Security / MfS / Stasi), 20, 28, 138 minorities, Germany, 6, 145–62, 165–81 Albanians, 147, 152, 153, 158, 159 Kurds, 149 Turkish-Germans, 146, 165–81 Mittag, Günter, 16 Mitterrand, François, 22 Modrow, Hans, 19, 20 Mohr, Ulrike Neue Nachbarn / New Neighbors, 111, 112, 113 Restgrün, 111–12 Momper, Walter, 56 Monday demonstrations, see Leipzig monuments counter-monuments, 115 see also East Side Gallery Morphosis, 90 Mouffe, Chantal, 117 Mueller-Stahl, Armin, 62 Müller, Thomas Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Ministry) façade, 89–90 see also Reimann, Ivan museums The Active Museum, 115 as related to libraries, 209–10, 213, 220 Topography of Terror, 115 Muslims isolationism, 155 masculinity, 168, 169, 171, 172, 177

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religious revival in Berlin, 155 see also religious difference Mussolini, Benito, 189 Mutlu, Özcan as character in Klassentreffen, 175, 176, 177 as Green Party politician, 165 see also Langhoff, Lukas Naipaul, V.S. The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections, 127–8, 141n27 nation essentialist notions of, 172 as homologous to an ensemble, 167 nation-building, 188–9, 217 National Library of China, 208–9 National Library of Turkey, 213 nationalism construction through cultural artifacts, 206 ethnonationalism, 6, 166, 167 German hypernationalism, 2 among minorities in Germany, 157, 180 as opposed to cosmopolitanism, 171, 216–17 opposition to right-wing nationalism, 29 revival after end of Cold War, 26 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) defense of West Berlin, 60 expansion into Eastern Europe, 22, 26 integration of West Germany, 3 and Silvio Berlusconi, 199–201 and Turkey, 148, 199–200, 201 Neues Forum (New Forum), 19, 21 see also opposition in the GDR Neuss, Wolfgang, 51 Nicosia, Cyprus, 117 Nikolai Church, see Leipzig

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254 / index No Ponte (No Bridge) movement, 190 normalization, 26, 82, 88, 116 of Turkish-German lives, 172, 180 NVA (Nationale Volksarmee / National People’s Army), 25, 42–3 Obama, Barack, 199, 200 Oguntoye, Katharina Farbe Bekennen (Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out), 170 see also Opitz, May and Schultz, Dagmar Ohler, Norman Mitte, 84 Opitz, May Farbe Bekennen (Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out), 170 see also Oguntoye, Katharina and Schultz, Dagmar opposition in the GDR, 12, 18, 23, 24 demonstrations against the regime, 1989, 15–17, 20 mass exodus to the West, 1989, 15, 18 oppositional groups, 14, 16, 19, 20–1 Round Tables, 21, 24 uprising of June 17, 1953, 14, 22, 29, 223n4 see also Protestant Church Orff, Carl Carmina Burana, 129 Ostpolitik, 17, 22, 23, 30 Özdamar, Emine Sevgi Keloglan in Alemania, 172, 179, 183n27 Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic), 86, 99, 100, 104, 111 Pamuk, Orhan Kar (Snow), 221–2

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Pau, Petra, 137–8 PDS (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus / Party of Democratic Socialism), 20, 21, 28, 138 Peschke, Valeska Und er kommt nicht allein (And He Doesn’t Come Alone), 109–11 Petro, Wolfgang, 49 Piening, Günter, 145 Poland, 12, 21 concern about German unification, 22 Solidarnosc, 15, 17 Pollesch, René, 180 postdramatic theater, 180–1 Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, 84, 87, 106 Prodi, Romano, 190 Protestant Church Confirmation versus Jugendweihe, 124, 125, 140–1n21, 141n22 Diakronisches Werk, 149–50, 152 role in the GDR, 14, 15, 16, 20 Prussia, 37–9, 218–19 public art, 50–4, 99–105, 106–14, 115–18 see also Berlin Wall and East Side Gallery Rasmussen, Anders, 200 Red Army, 14, 20, 25, 29 Regener, Sven Herr Lehmann, 72–3 Reichsbank, 88–90 Reichstag, 86–7 Reimann, Ivan Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Ministry) façade, 89–90 see also Müller, Thomas Reisch, Günter Gewissen in Aufruhr (Conscience in Commotion), 65–9, 73 see also Kasprzik, Hans-Joachim

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index / 255 religious difference, 7, 147, 166, 169, 171, 179, 180 reunification, see unification Richter, Roland Suso Der Tunnel (The Tunnel), 69 Ries, Henry, 49 Ritt, Martin The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 70 ritual, 127–31, 134, 135, 138 Royal Asiatic Society, London, 219 Royal Library, 219 Royal Society of Sciences, Göttingen, 219 Runge, Erika Bottroper Protokolle, (Bottrop Protocols), 170 Rushdie, Salman Satanic Verses, 178 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 199 Scharoun, Hans, 80 Schaubühne, 167, 182n6 Scheffler, Karl, 79, 82 Scheinhardt, Saliha, 170, 171 Schnitzler, Karl-Eduard von Die Grenze (The Border), 64, 65 Schnock, Frieder Hänsel & Gretel and the Gold in the Reichsbank, 89 see also Stih, Renata Schultes, Axel Band des Bundes (Federal Ribbon), 90–1 see also Frank, Charlotte Schultz, Dagmar Farbe Bekennen (Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out), 170 see also Oguntoye, Katharina and Opitz, May SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands / Socialist Unity Party of Germany)

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concessions to protesters, 19–21, 23, 24, 29–30 control of the arts, 63, 64 and emigration out of the GDR, 15, 60 internal confusion, 16, 17–19 loss of confidence in socialism, 14 public resentment against, 27 Senate Department for Urban Development, Berlin, 85, 103–5, 119n10 Senkel, Günter, 179 Schattenstimmen (Shadow Voices), 174 Schwarze Jungfrauen (Black Virgins), 174, 177, 179, 180 see also Zaimoglu, Feridun Simmel, Georg, 90, 93 Sinatra doctrine, 15 Sindermann, Horst, 63 Social Democratic Party, see Sozialdemokratische Partei Soviet Union and Berlin, 60 dissolution, 11, 25, 26 and the GDR, 14 and German unification, 22 Sozialdemokratische Partei (Social Democratic Party / SDP), 19, 20 see also opposition in the GDR SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands / Social Democratic Party of Germany), 22, 23, 145, 152 Speer, Albert, 79, 80, 90–1 Spreebogen (Spree River bend) government quarter, 90–1 see also Federal Chancellery Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz (State Library of Prussian Cultural Property / Stabi), 218–19 Stadtschloß (City Palace), 86

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256 / index Stasi, see Ministerium für Staatssichterheit Stein, Peter, 167, 182n6 Stih, Renata Hänsel & Gretel and the Gold in the Reichsbank, 89 see also Schnock, Frieder Stimmann, Hans, 85 see also Critical Reconstruction and Kleihues, Josef Paul Stolpe, Manfred, 28, 138 Strauß, Botho Gross und Klein (Big and Small), 167–8, 169 Strauss, Franz Josef, 46 Strittmatter, Erwin, 62 Ole Bienkopp, 64 Taut, Bruno Die Auflösung der Städte (The Dissolution of Cities), 80 Taylor, Frederick, 60 TEL, see European Library Project television, 3, 5, 16–17, 64–8 TEL-ME-MOR, 213, 215, 216 TEL-plus, 213, 215 Ten Point Plan, 22 Thatcher, Margaret, 22 Theater Peripherie, 169 Thiel, Heinz Der Kinnhaken (Punch to the Chin), 62, 69 Third Way, 21, 23, 24 Tiananmen Square, 16, 17 Treuhandanstalt (Trusteeship Agency), 24, 27 Trotta, Margarethe von Das Versprechen (The Promise), 69 Tunisia, 196–7 Turkey, 147–8, 151 influence on German immigrant affairs, 153, 154, 156 and NATO, 148, 199–200, 201

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Turkish-Germans, see minorities, Germany two-plus-four talks, 22 Ulbricht, Walter, 13, 61–2, 74n9, 223n4 Ülgen, Meray, 168 Ullmann, Hermann, 82 Umgelter, Fritz So weit die Füße tragen (As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me), 66 see also Bauer, Josef Martin unemployment, 27, 136–7, 158, 204n23 UNESCO, 214 unification, German, 11–12, 19, 21–3 Anschluss metaphor, 25 consequences, 26 fate of Berlin Wall following, 52 impact on German national libraries, 217–18 impact on Jugendweihe, 123–39 transition difficulties, 28, 30 unification, Italian, 189, 193, 196, 204n23 United States of America, 22, 148, 205, 206 Universal Digital Library (Ulib), 214 urban planning, 5–6, 79–93 and artistic intervention, 99, 102–18 Berlin Wall, 44–50, 54–5 following unification, 85, 99, 104, 106 see also Zwischennutzung and public art USSR, see Soviet Union Varosha, Cyprus, 117 Virilio, Paul, 92 Vittorio Emanuele II, 189 Vogel, Frank Und deine Liebe auch (And Your Love Too), 62, 64

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index / 257 Wagner, Martin, 80 Wallraff, Günter, 170 Ganz unten (At the Bottom), 182n13 Schwarz auf Weiss (Black on White), 182n13 Wander, Maxie Guten Morgen, du Schöne (Good Morning, Gorgeous), 170 Warsaw Pact, 15, 25, 60 Weizsäcker, Richard von, 115 Wende, 2, 3, 4–5, 11–30 in film, 70–3 immediate effect on Jugendweihe, 124 compare unification Wenders, Wim Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), 178, 183n26 Wettzstein, Johan Gottfried, 219 Wilder, Billy One, Two, Three, 68–9, 73 Witt, Katarina, 28

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Wolf, Christa Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Heaven), 63 Wolf, Markus, 16 Wolff, Heinrich, 88 World Digital Library, 214 World War II, 11–12, 80 World Wildlife Federation, 190 Wowereit, Klaus, 51, 103, 145 xenophobia, 26, 166, 196 Yalta Conference, 59 Zaimoglu, Feridun, 170 Kanak Sprak, 177 Koppstoff, 177 Schattenstimmen (Shadow Voices), 174, 179 Schwarze Jungfrauen (Black Virgins), 174, 177, 179, 180 see also Senkel, Günter Zwischennutzung, 104–6

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