Impressions of Berlin

Impressions of Berlin

David Jenness, October 2010

I traveled to Berlin, finally, for the first time -- with considerable skepticism. Prejudices had held me back for years. For someone my age, “Berlin” has morbid overtones. I have not been anti-German, but thinking of the capital of the Third Reich is still lancinating. Recently, travel writers and reporters have been talking of Berlin as the “happening” city of Europe, and I am temperamentally contrary enough to resist a place so characterized.

But I had a very good time in Berlin. It impressed and fascinated me. It is very like New York in its capitalist vigor, its energy of daily life, its variegated texture, and in some regards its history. Both cities became economically and culturally dominant in their societies only in the later 1800s. Both experienced an economic boom in the late 2000s, largely owing to business and finance, real estate and construction, and to an influx of young professionals with lots of money and technological savvy. Of course, between 1870 and 2010, the historical trajectories have been dramatically different. Berlin was beaten up, pummeled, punished during the Second World War. It came back to life quite quickly, gradually at first and then with compounded vigor, owing to economic and geopolitical factors. But only in its western sector. After the Wall came down, West Berlin was on the mend, but East Berlin was moribund. It has taken all this time for the necrotic tissue to be stripped away, for it to be possible for Berliners to believe that the city may once again become whole. Even so, the economic and social cost will continue to be high for decades to come, as the eastern portion heals.

Knowing all this, which everyone knows, I had quite a false impression, beforehand, of how the city would look and seem. I expected to see a once-blitzed city, where, in the western part, new buildings, new enterprises, a new prosperity had appeared, like plantings in a renewed garden, while, by contrast, the eastern portion remained a wasteland, perhaps just now showing the first shoots of modern urban life. I had misunderstood what actually happened in the intervening decades. In the western city, revival was part of an international process of European political union and a transnational pattern of urbanization and technological change. For an outsider, there was little distinctively German about this transformation, in terms of the built city. After the Wall went up, a number of Berlin’s historic, civic, and cultural institutions became inaccessible in the east. While some substitutes were necessarily improvised, what was gradually constructed in the west, in the 60s and 70s and 80s, was a new commercial, sub-cosmopolitan Berlin, whose corporate buildings and residential neighborhoods could have been those of Milan or Lille -- though with more beautiful parks.

Meanwhile, behind the Wall, the city did not just remain inert, on life-support, waiting for reunification. Under the DDR, certain distinctive Berlin institutions -- the museums, the opera, the archives, the governmental buildings, the famous churches -- were minimally preserved, while certain others were rebuilt, often in an aesthetically careless or politically cynical fashion. That is, East Berlin made some effort to preserve its history, in terms of buildings and institutions, in order to claim them for itself, to assert that “Berlin” now lay to the east. While this unconvincing effort was under way, an entirely new city sprang up. This is the often ugly and pitiful city one sees today. It is as if a portion of New York had been destroyed, and the projects of the Bronx tried to stand for all that had been. Any visitor realizes that life must have been bleak and demoralizing in the east.

The two portions bent to the arc of different histories, and are only now tending towards each other, leaving a patchwork of contrasts and timelines. West Berlin did rebuild early, but, as has been said, in a rather anonymous fashion. The new commercial creation that is Potsdamer Platz, the rebuilding of the Reichstag -- these definitive steps could not proceed until reunification was in place and the seat of government moved back to Berlin. Similarly, in the east, a blanketing ethos of socialist realism and official classlessness could not begin to be deconstructed until after the Wall came down. Only then could the museums be effectively restored, could neighborhoods take on local color, could stores draw trade from all over the city, could the parks be shared. The revival of a functioning urban eastern sector has largely been funded by West Berlin and, indeed, West Germany, on the basis of a tacit civic claim: we are once again whole, we have regained primacy in our country.

This is not entirely unlike New York’s recent history, though the story in New York is one of commerce and capitalism, not international politics. In the 50s and early 60s, New York was a banal corporate midtown bounded by traditional neighborhoods, some prosperous, some degraded. As the 60s moved on, Lincoln Center was created as a cultural focus and as an experiment in urban renewal (rather like the KulturForum in Berlin), but both remained islands in a sea of blandness. In the 70s an additional downtown corporate zone was created, more or less by fiat, but failed to take off. It was not until the 1980s, after New York almost went bankrupt, that the city began to reassemble itself. Now young professionals might work in midtown (or at the Battery), might shop at Bloomie’s, might take their kids to the Natural History museum or the Met, but live downtown. Attractive stores, chic galleries, fashionable restaurants transformed the Upper West Side, the far East Side, and the areas below 14^th Street. The texture of the city as a whole became more interesting, more locally vibrant. The culmination of change had to wait for a qualitatively new era of sharply increasing prosperity (for the new urban professional class) and the dutiful withdrawal of ethnic groups and the poor to other boroughs or to life on the fringe.

Today, in Berlin, you can see the same bifurcated pattern slowly blurring. In the center, on the bleak site of a No Man’s Land, Potsdamer Platz is a marvel of corporate glitz; the restored Reichstag and the new government buildings nearby are, often, of architectural distinction. The international hotels are glossy and fun. The department stores (like the famous KaDeWe) hum like commercial beehives, the boutiques flourish. The old residential suburbs are once again elegant, inhabited still by the older and conservative rich.

When you cross the line of the former Wall, everything seems retarded by 20 or 30 years. Unter den Linden is shabby, but filled with construction that promises a copy-cat change. The Hotel Adlon has been rebuilt as before. The Soviet embassy, remains in place, in pompous wedding-cake style. Museum Island is again a functioning entity, though much work remains to be done. The great imperial palaces that once housed state institutions -- both in the imperial era and in the Nazi years -- are being slowly restored for new uses. Some beloved churches have been renovated or reconstructed. Out further from the center of the city, the grand boulevards remain frozen in time, lined with massive ugly Soviet-era apartment blocks, the streets blowing with trash, the bars and restaurants infrequent and far from chic. But you know this will change, just as you know that the affordable housing “cities” in New York will soon disappear, to be replaced by who knows what.

Now, as in New York, young professionals and middle-class families with children are moving into and fundamentally altering formerly lower-class neighborhoods. It is an inexorable sequence. First, the Mitte district, in the old center as its name implies: like Columbus and Amsterdam avenues and Yorktown in the 70s and early 80s. Next, Kreuzberg: like the Lower East Side in that part of it remains an ethnic enclave (Turkish in this case), while other sections become fashionable. Today, Prenzlauen Berg: comparable to the transformation of the neighborhoods around Houston Street in the 90s. The parallels are not exact, but the sociological process is the same. You can see the change from block to block: in Prenzlauen Berg, for example; one side of a boulevard is transformed, the other side largely boarded up waiting for its day to come. These are pleasant urban zones, with delightful stores, teenagers with outrageous hair and clothes, gays holding hands -- and more outdoor restaurants and bars than New York could dream of. They are where a Berliner or a clued-in tourist would go, now, for a Sunday outing or lunch with an exotic cuisine. There are lots of children -- in strollers, in arms, or toddling along -- a good thing, since the prediction of an increase in Berlin’s population since the Wall came down has not come true. In 30 years, all of quotidian Berlin may feel knit together once again, and one will be able to “read” it in terms of function, class, age structure, differential design, the way one reads Manhattan today. [Perhaps by then, smoking will be on the way out. And there will no longer be elderly ladies sitting outside the toilets, collecting half a euro per pee. “Ich habe kein Kleingeld” quickly became one of my best German utterances.]

There are, of course, two enormous differences between the two cities. In the built environment of New York there is an unbroken, if attenuated, historical continuity. You can still order the styles: Georgian (brick) and American colonial (wood) around 1800, the brownstones of the post-Civil War period, the medievalist Richardsonesque (the American Museum, the Dakota) later in the century, the Institutional Neo-Classic of the turn of the century, Art Deco, modernist and International Style, the corporate banality of the 50s and 60s, and so on up to the post-modern and beyond. Although there are examples of genuine Rococo out in Charlottenburg, in central Berlin, historical sequence has been truncated. In general, you can choose between Wilhelmine neoclassic museums and state “palaces” of the turn of the century, serviceable buildings created during the 60s to 70s (there are a few exceptions here, touched on below), Soviet bombast in the East, and the recent corporate glitz of Potsdamer Platz and its surroundings. One of the horrors of the Third Reich is that it obliterated half of German history for the German people.

You can also choose your poison and select ruins as against reconstructions, or the other way round. It is a disconcerting choice. Near the end of Unter den Linden is the beloved Nikolaikirche, but it is a fake: it has been rebuilt in its original style, but it is not convincing. Nearby is the oldest “medieval” wooden house, once a tavern, still a functioning bar, but it is not only ersatz but has been placed on a site it never occupied. The famous Adlon is sumptuous: it was rebuilt, exactly to the model, in the 90s. One wonders what it does to human and civic sensibilities to move through today’s city, recognizing treasured friends but knowing they died and then were brought back to life. An elderly Berliner must feel inflicted with amnesia, a sense of things remembered or heard of, but somehow spurious. Someone younger people may feel, I suspect, the way they would about a beloved spouse who has recently been reconstructed: still the beloved person, but with facial and bodily alterations. This is inevitable. A radical decision, as Germany recovered, to “make Berlin new,” to begin from scratch, might have been admirable in principle, but would have meant giving one generation of architects and planners unlimited power -- always a dangerous bet. It would have been as if all of Manhattan had been handed over tout court to Robert Moses, Wallace Harrison, and Yamasaki.

For an American outsider, what one understands about the local history does not map onto what one sees. The gap is closed, to an extent, at the site of the old Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche on the Ku’damm. It was originally a triumphalist erection of Gothic revival, comparable to High Victorian, dating from 1895, almost completely destroyed by bombing. Only a burnt-out tower and the vestibule and porch remain, the former containing some very beautiful original mosaics in German Medieval style. Next to the shell of the church, in 1961 Egon Eiermann built a sanctuary and a campanile on opposite flanks of the old structure. The new sanctuary is octagonal, composed (as seen from the outside) of a honeycomb of small recessed concrete squares, with dull blue glass at the back of each recess. Seen from the inside, the space is calm and beautifully laid out and furnished. The light that comes through the hundreds of small glass squares is, magically, not a dull but a glowing blue, its color ambience inside not cold, as one might expect, but trance-like, ethereal, as befits a place of contemplation. There is a magnificent cantilevered organ loft at the back, with translucent panels defining the space for the choir. The organist’s seat floats serenely above, illuminated, a throne for St Cecelia. The campanile is closed to the public, and I do not know if it contains bells.

This is in some ways an ideal solution. The Berlin of Kaiser Wilhelm I, we are forcefully reminded, is smashed, as we have to believe is right; a remnant of worthy historicist artistry is preserved; and an eloquent new space is created next to the ruin, barely ecclesiastical (it is not a functioning church) but secularly beautiful. As indeed was the old church, that spoke more about the Kaiser’s earthly power than religious doctrine. As a permanent history lesson, it is clear and yet ambiguous, since in the courtyard between the old and new structures and all around the edges is a hubbub of activity, with postcard sellers, ice cream stands, Wurst vendors, loud voices, cell phones, blowing rubbish. Thus, there is notice given to the old along with a serious statement of the new; and daily life, noisy and messy, flows on. This is hardly to be deplored: it is how cathedrals stood early in the second millennium.

There is one facet of German history that is definitely not occluded: signs and symbols of the meanings of the period 1933 to 1945. These are omnipresent. The recognition is clear-eyed, sober, and without the blend of denial and paranoia that afflicts some societies. That Germany has “dealt with” this past is a commonplace observation, but true enough. In Berlin, dozens and dozens of sites have plaques or posters or photomontages communicating what happened in this place. The language is straight-forward and blunt: here the Nazis did a horrible thing, this is a house lived in, a painting made by a person sent to a camp and there “ermördert” -- no euphemisms involved. A blunt example is the elegant villa out in Wannsee where, in 1942, high Nazi bureaucrats met to plan the logistics of the Final Solution. The villa was not bombed. The walls that once heard horror now speak truth. A certain irony insinuates itself: next door is a pretty restaurant and bar, with outdoor terrace. It is filled with happy folk.

What, really, is wrong with this? I have never put any stock in the notion that there are or were elements in the “German character” that brought Germany to disaster. The grave but unsentimental tone of today’s memorials tends to disprove it. The fact is, at any time, a few evil humans can bring doom to humankind. There are several famous new buildings that testify to a realistic, healthy remembrance of what lies now in the receding past. One is Daniel Liebeskind’s Jewish Museum. Like his museums in Toronto and to a lesser extent in Denver, the outside of the building is striking: an assemblage of jagged elements, interlocking but tending apart at acute angles, clad in a light-reflecting metal and broken with many irregular wedge-shaped or slit-like windows. It is said that, from the air, the set of wings and enclosures looks like a deconstructed Star of David; and that the angular light-crazed exterior is meant to read as a reference to Kristallnacht. [Perhaps so, though Toronto looks very much the same] Inside, I find the handling of spaces overly rhetorical, and the many objects, mostly without great intrinsic impact, are overwhelmed by photomontages, mock-ups, and panels of verbiage that I find didactic but uninformative. One reason for the remote impact of what is on display is, I think, that by the time this museum was built, Jewish history museums elsewhere had received from survivors and their families their most significant artifacts. Few Jews who returned to Germany after the war had anything significant to contribute: personal memories, of course, but as to telling objects, small mementos that stop one dead in one’s tracks, no. Ultimately, why would one come to a museum to read?

Peter Eisenmann’s uncompromisingly abstract Holocaust monument [the official name translates as Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe] is far more moving, though it took me some time to realize it. Located near the iconic Brandenburger Tor and in view of the Reichstag, it consists in a couple of hundred gray stone slabs, set into one city block of ground that gradually slopes down and then up on the two cardinal axes. The height of the slabs -- markers might be the better term -- vary above the ground, from barely ankle-high to above one’s head. The markers are tilted toward and away from each other, but are spaced so that one can easily pass between any two of them. There is a mysterious runic force to the ensemble. It changes in appearance as the light changes, and as you move through it and around the perimeter. The steles are blank; nothing is said in words; nothing is personalized.

At first I resisted the expressive message of the monument, because immediately I noted that, looking into the monument, one sees quite through it, to office buildings, a bit of park, advertisements across the perimeter streets, and the daily pattern of pedestrians and cars. I thought, how much better it might be if you came to the monument across a wide meadow and, once inside, could see nothing but sky above and beyond. It also put me off that children were larking about, jumping from stone to stone, while teenage girls strolled arm in arm, cell phones in use. These were mostly Germans who had come to the site on tours or brought by their parents, and that they were simply behaving as young people do. Obvious foreigners were more sober, the way you behave when you go to someone else’s church. Businessmen were walking briskly through the thicket of markers: this was probably their normal route, and no doubt they varied their particular paths randomly from day to day. Well, after all, why not? A complex monument, inscrutable as to explicit meaning, loses expressive force unless humans can move freely within it and register its impact, sometimes head-on, sometimes subliminally. The magic of Stonehenge has diminished now that one can no longer step within it. It is right, I think, that while inside, whatever your mood, you can look to the periphery and see that the life of the city goes right along.

My thoughts turn again to the expressive meaning of the cicatrix of the Gedächtnis- Kirche adjacent to a glowing new devotional space. I reject the “national character” hypothesis, but I do give some credence to the conception of Lebensraum as a historical factor. I accept as approximately valid the idea that Germany, as a newly amalgamated European nation superseding a collection of small historical states, came into the late Industrial Revolution at an unfortunate period. To become the industrial and military power it wanted to be, it needed -- it felt it needed -- to be larger, more populous, and in possession of an overseas empire that would provide raw materials and, at the other end of the productive cycle, a market for goods. Germany did not suddenly revoke its own humanity in 1933. The relevant historical dynamic goes back to German unification, Bismarck and the first Kaiser. In that interpretation, the Third Reich not only erased prior history, but, unintendedly, caused nationalism in Germany to re-set, to be conceptualized anew. From what I observe, historians and Germans themselves understand it this way, better than the French or the Italians interpret their national histories during the same period. If so, it allows Germans today to disengage from a horrible past, and it explains why Berlin itself seems so confident and forward-facing, in a way that I do not sense in Paris or Rome. Residents of Munich or Dresden or South Germany may live their lives today within a darker cultural narrative. But the people of Berlin, at least, show no signs of authoritarian attitude or excessive rectitude like that which used to ascribed to Germans as a people.

I infer a lot about a city, probably too much, from its buildings. A number of obsolete rail stations in Berlin have been turned into bustling markets, surrounded by cafes and small parks. The residential neighborhoods within the central city have delightful farmers markets. The new HauptBahnhof is a dizzying contemporary version of a multilayered transport hub, with long-distance trains running at the lowest levels and the S-Bahn light rail threading right through the building several stories up. A number of churches have been deconsecrated and turned into specialized museums; one such commemorates Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), the best of the Greek- (sometimes Gothic-) revival style architects, whose smaller buildings especially have grace and elegance.

The biggest museums, those on MuseumInsel and in the KulturForum area, have undergone extensive renovations. They are architecturally a mixed bag, Schinkel’s enormous Altes Museum being the best, but most of the smaller museums, housed in former mansions or small Rococo palaces, are a pleasure to visit. For my interests, the two greatest museums are the Gemäldegalerie, an undistinguished but workable building that houses what may be the finest collection of Old Master paintings and sculpture in the world, and the Neue National Gallerie, in the KulturForum, The latter displays modern and contemporary art, primarily German but with many European reference points. It is the last important work of Mies van der Rohe, and it is the apotheosis of his elegantly reserved, perfectly proportioned style. It is notable that Mies agreed to be part of fashioning the new Berlin, since he had been shabbily treated before the war and had to establish his pre-eminence abroad.

Norman Foster’s great glass dome that caps the renovated Reichstag is ultimately, for me, banal. The building was hollowed out, first by the Nazi-instigated fire in 1933 and then by bombing during the war; the massive exterior walls and corner towers remained, and no one knew what to do with a structure that was fairly monstrous in its physical aspect and its symbolism. Now it is once again the German Parliament. Foster’s dome is too large to be simply a serviceable way of bringing light into the interior, too small to make a definitive statement of civic purpose or pride, as seen from afar. One reaches the dome level via elevators, and then proceeds up a broad double-ramp to the top level, which affords fine views. Ramps are fun, in the way they carry paired runnels of people, one on top of another but moving in opposite directions. But in the end a transparent half-circle with a cat’s cradle structure inside it, is a tired trick. By contrast, on the huge grassy mall outside the Reichstag or just beyond are some fine contemporary government buildings, nicely spaced, postmodern in style without being twee.

Hans Scharoun is the other great architect of the KulturForum, conceived in the 1960s as an alternative to the older great arts edifices that lay behind the Wall. His Philharmonie is a triumph. It was the first postwar orchestral hall designed in the round, with seating embracing the stage and extending behind it. Most of the 2400 seats are ranged on huge raked cantilevers, set at irregular vertical intervals and in a variety of horizontal orientations, which fan out into the main space of the hall so that no seat is very distant from the orchestra. It brings to mind an odd image: this ensemble of flying surfaces, each structurally and decoratively plain, is in its total effect comparable that of High Baroque churches or Tiepolo paintings where clouds carrying angels veer and swerve at each other in a celestial version of Go-Kart.

The acoustic of this hall is the finest I have ever experienced. I defy anyone to hear one of the world’s greatest orchestras playing in this magnificent room without being viscerally seized. [Acoustic experts still insist that the best orchestral sound results from shoebox-shaped enclosures, but the Philharmonie casts that analysis into doubt, as does the Gehry concert hall in Los Angeles.] Outside the auditorium, the lobby and promenades, again arranged in non-rectilinear fashion on multiple levels, are beautifully fashioned, visually startling in relation to each other but, in the doing, easy to navigate. The new Gehry concert hall in Los Angeles is obviously a descendent of this building. I judge the sound of Gehry’s hall to be as good as Scharoun’s (and similar visually, in that the organization of space is that of a fan, not a box), but Gehry’s entrance lobby and pedestrian spaces are far less well handled.

Across the street, midway between the KulturForum and the new Potsdamer Platz, is another large Scharoun building, the Stadtsbibliotek. When the Wall went up, the old state archives, housed in a Wilhelmine palace on Unter den Linden, became inaccessible, so another such had to be formed. Today, the earlier archive is scabbed with scaffolds, crumbling, clearly inefficient today for its purpose, while Scharoun’s building is spectacularly good. The ground-level entry and public areas are exuberant, and the stairs leading up from the lobby are the grandest contemporary version of a grand staircase that I know of. Scharoun was able to work for both the GDR and the DBR, I do not know how. I find him to be one of the greatest architects of the 20^th century. That he is not more famous probably owes to his early death.

A few blocks distant, the Potsdamer Platz, entirely created since 1992 on a derelict wasteland, surely then the most valuable rubble in the world, is a roaring success, an international hub of commercial activity. The closest rival, in terms of cost, density, recency, and dazzle, may be Century City in Los Angeles. One might wish that the world were different, that corporate wealth were differently deployed, but it is mighty impressive. Helmut Jahn’s Sony Center is in principle deplorable, an enormous gaudy structure with a huge interior atrium set with fountains and waterfalls and capped by a Disney dome. In all fairness, Jahn’s dome is more suitable to his purpose, I think, than Foster’s less vulgar one, and the Sony Center is hugely popular as an urban playground. The wish to make new urbanism refer somehow to the past brings many ironies. Enclosed somewhere within the Sony Center is the Kaiser’s private dining room, part of the former Grand Hotel, where the Kaiser could mingle with the important burghers. It has been reconstructed; much is made of that in the brochures. But it is still inaccessible to hoi polloi, since it is now the private dining room of a corporation. Sic transit ….

There is a large film and television center, a Las Vegas-style arena, and a theater named after Marlene Dietrich. Much of the rest of the Platz has been overseen by Renzo Piano, and executed by Piano and architects of his choice. Collectively, it is the home for Daimler, but interestingly distributed: it consists in a pleasantly meandering complex of rather modest buildings, mostly in discrete red brick, each with interesting formal properties. Outside one of the buildings are some funny Jeff Koons creations, and in a pool within one of the enclosures sits a gorgeous, brooding di Suvero.

All told, Berlin is, simultaneously, an acme of contemporary urbanity and a palimpsest of a unique history. London may come close, but I know of nowhere quite like Berlin in the world today.