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1Our big cities are "laboratories of
civilization", "lived Utopia and suffered
destruction of Utopia in one", to quote Ulrich Beck,
a German sociologist (1). The future of our world is
dealt with, planned, made and eventually lost in our
cities. In contradiction to or in creative adaptation of
their concrete claim for eternity, our cities are
phenomena of constant change being the mirrors of our
ever changing societies. What is more, cities are and
will increasingly be the arenas where the fundamental
mutations will take place and become visible that we are
the actors and victims of our cultural codes and that we
are used to name their changes the shifting of paradigmas.
2Perhaps that Berlin is a particularly
rewarding object of investigation - eine Stadt, die
niemals ist, sondern stets wird: a city that never is,
but always becomes or changes, as one of the Berlin
slogans goes. lt represents, sometimes simultaneously,
the major antagonistic agents and movements of the 19th
and 20th centuries - bourgeoisie and proletariat;
nationalism, internationalism and cosmopolitism; monarchy
and democracy; capitalism, and fascist versus communist
absolutism. Not to forget: Berlin has been and continues
to be an ´artslab´ of that periods creative
movements from romanticism and naturalism to
post-modernism.
3Following a period of suffered
Cold-War-immobility and standstill of history, the
miracle of the collapsing Wall has just called forth a
period of hectic activities about to thoroughly transform
Berlin within the years to come. We are still in the lull
before the storm, Berlin still shows the features of a
self-conceited, provincial community blocked between two
mentalities with the Wall surviving in the Eastern and
the Western heads - but the muscles are tense already for
the dash into Berlin's future.
4Berlin has been considered as one of the
centers of Modernism and its mania of progress. Indeed,
Berlin has that label of a capital city of
"surprise", this peculiarity of European
civilization since World War I which on its part has been
labeled as the "Big Surprise". Berlin has been
proud to be the capital city of the shock, of the
"épater les bourgeois", of the
"revaluation of all values", of an insatiable
eschatological urge for newness, of "a culture of
the event, of action, instead of a culture of
significance or of moral command". (2)
5But, to begin with, I would like to speak
about a stabilizing factor in history: about myth or
mythology. In this, I think, I can count on the sympathy
of an American audience, "because" - I am
quoting Leslie Fiedler - "as long as Americans have
been American, theyve been inhabitants of a
mythology and not of history..." (3) And in the
context of mythology, I will come to speak about some
aspects of the ongoing debate on center and periphery.
6The notions of the myth and in
particular the myth of the center may be helpful to the
analysis of the actual situation of metropolitan
agglomerations in general, and especially to the
understanding of Berlins specific fate and to the
question of how this city may recover its lost urbanity.
"The Wall in our heads": is that not a
marvelously picturesque metaphor concerning the present
psychological state of Berlin? We are all inhabitants of
mythology. According to the historian Egon Friedell all
present times are "an optical illusion".
Referring to that incredible year of 1989, the year of
total surprise and unexpected miracle, Peter Handke
speaks of "history as the great fairy tale of the
world, of mankind." (4)
7I am speaking of the functioning of our
perception in conflict with the perceivable, constituting
what we name reality. By myth I
understand all we are carrying with us as our mental and
physical baggage, as our ancestral or genetic
inheritance, as the heritage of our real and fictional
past, of past creative acts and collective inventions, as
the fruits of our own imaginations, introspections and
projections into the future, of our fears and hopes. Our
mythological constitution allows us to speak
of the present of the past. We may compare ourselves to
time tanks accumulating history adapted as
our personal legend. This forces us to question to what
extent our thinking and acting, how far our consciousness
of ourselves and of the others are at all determined by
visible or invisible presence or absence, to question the
essence of reality...
8It seems obvious, indeed, that our lives are
dominated by our ideas and expectations, by our need for
permanence and continuity, Our myths, arent they at
least as real as the conditions of our real
existence? Platos Cave has a concrete substance to
us, how else could we be in a position to deal with a
fictional world obviously under the rules of relativity,
immateriality and virtuality.
9The fall of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain
has made us realize the mental borderline that we are
referring to as "time wall". Decades of
confrontation with the myths of the European East and of
the West are responsible for mental deviations even
within individuals of the same nation which are resulting
- within the period of maybe several generations - in
another rhythm, in a different color of their memories,
moods and emotions.
10Another most relevant example is
"Mythos Berlin", the very mythology of
modernist Berlin focusing on the climax of its urban
culture in the 20s whose essence has been that
unique and irretrievable German-Jewish symbiosis. lt is
the myth of the city-machine, yet seen by the
expressionist poets and painters as a jungle - Moloch
Berlin. Destroyed and lost forever, the myth of those
splendid years on the brink of desaster is still haunting
our imagination and our desire. lt haunts the imagination
and desire of many of those who are, in one way or
another, involved in reshaping the new capital city as if
just its scattered elements would have to be put together
again to restore Berlins erstwhile urbanity and
modernity. lt is the myth of the center.
11Berlins myth of the 20s
corresponds to that dream of a complex metropolis - not
deprived, though, of the coherence and unity of the holy
polis - whose paramount qualities are the excellency of
its ruling class and its intelligentsia, the wealth of
its business class, the perfection of its industry and
craft, the diverse of its cultures, the attraction of its
institutions, the magnetism and glamour of its nightlife
and world of pleasures, the superiority of its criminals
and forces of order, the boldness and pertness of its
common men and women, the charm of its cityscape and the
grandeur of its skyline, in a word - the beauty and
intensity of life it promises. This vision of a
metropolis is nothing else but the dated myth of the
center in opposition to its peripheral (or provincial)
counterparts. The cliché, believe me or not, cannot be
simple-minded enough to sneak its way into collective
mythology.
12The notion of the center has its
natural origin in the theo-geo-centric cosmologies since
long done away with by natural sciences and even by
theology. Yet, this ideal continues to resist its
cancellation since it seems to correspond with an
inveterate nostalgia of mankind. The myth identifies
Center and Significance, Center and Value.
13From the roi soleil to his many
followers, from Inquisition to Stalinism, from the
bourgeois milieu and juste milieu
to Euro-centrism and to the fascist Millenium - there are
endless attempts of reestablishing the bygone theocracy -
attempts to set one binding measure, one truth for all,
exiling or annihilating all that does not fit into that
biased view of a world. We have to do with the ideology
of the Either - Or. Primeval dualities show themselves in
a fresh disguise: center or periphery, metropolis or
province, First or Third World, mainstream or fringe, the
medium or the excentric, the scene or the obscene, etc.;
14The philosopher Gilles Deleuze gave us a
colorful illustration of what the Western code identifies
as the "measure" - "human being, white,
occidental, male, adult, reasonable, heterosexual,
inhabitant of a city and speaking a standard
language" - opposing this central
position to the peripheral one of "mosquitos,
children, women, black people, peasants,
homosexuals,etc.". (5) Beyond this irony, Jean
Baudrillard states the end of obscenity, there being no
scene anymore allowing the
"ob-scene" to exist. (6) There is indeed ample
evidence of the final, if slow decline of that world of
the Either - Or, of those opposites conditioning each
other.
15Let me remind you of one of its more
elaborate swan-songs.
The well-known study by Hans Sedlmayr, "Verlust der
Mitte" ("The Center Lost", - 7), first
published some 45 years ago, lays out the scenario of a
"gigantic inner catastrophy" in Europe since
approximately 1760, making use of the
"symbolic" character of the art of 200 years of
modernity to unveil the "sickness" of those
times, its symptoms being to the author modern
"purism", its "polarizations" its
"tendency for the anorganic", its
"separation from the soil", and, mainly, its
trend toward "dehumanization". No doubt, the
book is a prophetic anticipation of that endgame-stage of
transcendental modernism and its mise-en-scène, its
projection of a new Golden Age: the artificial paradise
of modern mankind, a world transformed into an allround
artifact by Western man's rational power and superiority,
where history and art would come to an end and Nature -
following the Hegelian vision - be finally and entirely
integrated into the Spirit. An apotheosis of the idolized
Western progress whose purest interpretation can be found
within the realm of Euro-American Modernist Art - conditioned
by Kants philosophy of the Sublime and the Genius,
by Hegels eschatological vision of a goal and final
stage of history, by Schiller's deification of the
artist, escorted by their many successors down to
classical American art-criticism (Clement
Greenbergs "formalist theology", to quote
Thomas McEvilley) - Western art was bound to become a
metaphysical manifestation on the way to the final
integration of Matter into Spirit, naturally claiming
universal hegemony, as Thomas McEvilley convincingly
deduces in his essay of 1987 "Art History or Sacred
History?" (8) The thriving for immaterial purity in
the works of Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Yves Klein is a
perfect example. Yet, the innermost circle of the Sublime
and the Sacred is touched by a number of outstanding
examples of American Land Art: think of the
"Earthworks" of Robert Morris, of his
"Observatory", and of Robert Smithsons
"Spiral Hill" or "Spiral Jetty", of
Nancy Holts "Sun Tunnels", of Walter de
Marias "Lightning Field" or of James
Turrells "Spaces of the Light"...... Art
as a revelation of the Eternal and the Cosmic, Art
entering the order of the Divine, no Ionger being
entirely here below. Looking back to Kandinskys
famous manifesto "Über das Geistige in der
Kunst" ("On the Spiritual in Art",
published 1912) and his reference to "the cosmic
laws" in art: a circle is closing. Modernism
culminates and ends in a transcendental manifestation of
the Center. The myth of the center, withdrawn
into the parochial district of the Euro-American
mainstream, had finally mutated into an etherial
condition - according, maybe, to the second axiom of
thermo-dynamics stating the transformation of energy into
an uncondensed, useless form.
16Returning to our urban borderlands we are
back on earth in the material sphere of the here and now.
Yet, our myth still haunts the imagination. lt lingers in
the minds of the Berlin city planners dealing with
nothing less than the reconstruction of the citys
old center.
17Now, it is hard for us Europeans to imagine
a city without a center. Since the 13th century when our
cities slowly took the shape in which they still inhabit
our minds, they most naturally grew around centers
dominated by the church - a dome, a minster or a
cathedral - neighboured soon by the city-hall and
surrounded by the market place, the citys open
forum. lt is an image resisting the ravages of time. Let
me refer to the example of Amos Oz, an author born in
Israel of parents immigrated from Central Europe, who
told the boy of their hope Jerusalem might one day become
a genuine city, meaning a city with its
cathedral situated next to a river with bridges and
surrounded by dense forests. (9)
18Arent we obliged, though, to become
aware of the highly symbolic meaning contained in the
systematic destructions of Berlin, capital city of the
Third Reich, by Albert Speers planned new
super-center "Germania"; in the systematic
bombing of German cities historical centers by
allied forces: conveyed by Ulbrichts blowing-up of
Berlins City Palace of the Hohenzollern; sensible
in the fact that the remaining historical centers of
European cities are maintained mainly as museums to
exploit swelling tourist crowds? Definitely, the center
is lost.
19Here we have to remind of the particular
situation of Berlin. In his critical distance to the
booming city, the writer and historian Wilhelm
Hausenstein said in the 20s "Paris is a
garden, Brussels blooms, Antwerp thrives - but Berlin is
construed- The city was not born, it manufactured
itself". He designates Berlin as the
"exempt" city - indeed, unlike its European
sisters Berlin has not grown under the influence of the
church or in the shadow of a cathedral. The formation of
"Großberlin", the greater Berlin area, out of
a scattered flock of small independant communities (7
townships and 59 rural communities) not earlier than
1920, has been a secular act creating 20 administrations
under the responsibility of a local mayor and parliament
each: a multi-centered agglomeration.
20Berlin has kept its exceptional feature,
city of many particular roles: melting pot and
multicultural Prussian capital, Kaiser-city and "Red
Berlin", biggest German workers and industrial
city, city under the Four Power Status and "front
city", divided city of the Wall and showcase of the
West, capital of the GDR and of the student movement etc;
And, again, the capital city of Germany, contested and
even sabotaged by large groups of the Bonn Federal
Administration.
21Its open, tolerant, multilayered,
prospective, more: progressive character predestinated
the city to become one of the centers of Modernism,
calling strong conservative forces into reacting. An
outstanding example is the elevation of the Berlin Dome
from 1894 on by Kaiser Wilhelm, this identification of
the Prussian Crown with Heaven, being immediately
censored by modernist Berlin as a declaration of war, as
"evil architecture, triumph of the bygone", in
the words of Alfred Lichtwark (Hamburg art historian and
museum man). The meanwhile restored dome is obviously a
fatal prefiguration of Albert Speers Big Hall
(Große Halle) as the culmination of the projected
massive transformation of Berlin into the fascist center
of the world.
22We had to enter the post- and
post-post-modernist areas to become finally aware of a
radically changing mental landscape, In the early
70s already Octavio Paz had announced, with the
death of the avantgarde, the end of modernist Utopia.
(10) Let me quote from a text written 20 years later by
the American art critic Thomas McEvilley: "...the
globalism of the 90s... is based on the recognition
that art history as hitherto promulgated no longer
coincides with the world we live in. To correct the fit,
a fundamental shift in Western modes of cognition seems
to be called for. ... Western culture, taking its
paradigm from its sciences was to be the universal Self:
non-Western culture was to be entirely Other. The idea of
taking an anthropological approach to ones own
culture - treating ones own culture as another -
would have seemed subversive. Now, however, many Western
anthropologists have come to see their goal as to shed
light on their own culture as much as on others, light
that must come, at least in part, from outside. ... The
point of this exercise is the relativization of any one
culture, the perception that it is not an absolute but
just one approach among many to the shared human project
of civilization." (11)
23(Recently, Ronne Heartfield has exposed
similar views on the changing canon in relation to
publication and public education).
The funeral bells of the late myth of the Center are now
heard more frequently, as are the welcome songs of those
new codes of openness and difference, greeting the
rediscovering of a diversified world of cultures,
centers, truths. The production of meaning seems to have
definitely shifted to peripheral authorities, creative
individuals and marginal groups.
24"Never before" observes the French
anthropologist Marc Augé, "has individual history
to such an extent been influenced by collective history,
yet never before have the means of orientation for the
collective identity been as fluid as today. Hence, the
individual producing of significance is indispensable as
never before." (12)
And the British philosopher Michael Dummet is even
doubting the philosophical assumption of a center,
describing his procedure by the image of the Labyrinth
with its many dead-ends and the chance to maybe discover
new unexpected ways. (13)
The secular chances and
challenges of the Berlin city planners are menaced by a
profound disorientation between the center void of
significance, its inexhaustible mythology and the obscure
image of the future of the big city. We live what is
expressed by the Nahuatl, the Mexican-Indian word
"Nepantla", a state of having left behind one
world and not yet having entered another - creative
transitional borderlands.
25Are there ways to still seize the unique
opportunities of the open Berlin situation?
We are witnesses of a rather sad and disturbing panorama.
Not being in the position to go into details for this
brief talk, I will offer here a condensed catalogue of
some of the facts:
- Next to a new urban development plan of the greater
Berlin area (Flächennutzungsplan), done in a hurry after
the fall of the Wall, there is no overall concept or
philosophy for the reshaping of the city on the side of
the many involved in Berlin.
- Since nobody believed in German reunification during
our lifetimes and since the old-new German capital city
has only been lip-service in Western political Sunday
speeches, there are no concepts in Bonn of how to
transfer the political functions to Berlin. Worse: a
large Bonn minority still continues to sabotage Berlin.
Of the ups and downs of that interminable debate only two
decisions are coming out clear. A good number of
ministries and their employees will stay in Bonn to
comfort that city although everyone knows that this can
only be a heavily cost-increasing provisional measure.
The moving ministries will occupy the historical center
of Berlin, transforming it most probably into a heavily
guarded security area.
Will the democratic sovereign, excluded of all
co-decision in the process, welcome the new hierarchy of
its ruling class? All is more likely than this.
- Berlins historical center is the general object
of desire. A nucleus of some powerful architects,
assisted by the one responsible director of public city
building (Stadtbaudirektor) sets about to restore the
"historical ground-plan" by a method of
"critical reconstruction". Avoiding any
conceptual prospective, this power-team of
"Berlins second Gründerzeit" relates
openly to the first one, the years of Berlinss
rapid expansion between 1874 and 1914. The news of the
plannings feed all our apprehensions of a prevailing
uniformity and monotony of the citys general
aspect. All the more since other more inventive
architectual concepts are excluded from competition and
participation, particularly those which correspond to the
openness and freedom of expression, to pluralism and
decentralisation suitable for Berlin and its future urban
development.
- These planners manoeuvres - baptized as a
movement "back into the future" - are a sort of
concerted action with the new self-confidence of the
greater Germanys political class, with its desire
for order and national representation, with its lack of
imagination and its need for security. This is the most
alarming aspect of the alliance: an architecture for the
new European superpower.
- A more burlesque character has the debate around a
definition of the citys very core: the site of the
former City Palace built by Andreas Schlüter from 1699
on, damaged during the war and destroyed by the communist
authorities in 1950, replaced by the GDR "Palace of
the Republic" which awaits, unbeloved, its turn to
be broke up. At one time the minister of Foreign Affairs
had a flirt with the privileged site - too much Mister X,
after all...
Some chances, apparently, has the lobby for the
reconstruction of the Schlüter Palace - "a gigantic
deception package... Outside baroque, inside big
business" commented the press.
There are plans for a "Stadthaus", a City
house, without defining its contents - for whom and for
what purpose shall it be there?
26The helpless conflict around this innermost
center of the city reveals more clearly than any other
aspect of the city planning the impossibility to define a
meaningful Center of our complex communities and their
diffuse identities.
City-planning directed by the worn-out paradigms of
hierarchy and hegemonial significance will only result in
creating ensembles of solitary blocks and buildings void
of genuine life and meaning and surrounded by empty,
inhospitable spaces, "espaces courant d'air" as
the French architect Gagès once complained, thinking of
La Defense in Paris. Why should Berlin not grasp the
chance to reinvent espaces de flanerie,
spaces for the flaneur we mentioned yesterday. Why should
Berlin repeat the mistakes made by American, French,
Japanese architects and city planners?
27Are there any easy ways out of the dilemma?
Hardly, if we consider human nature, its infiltration
with mythology, its trend of powergames, its
voluntary blindness in front of the future.
Hardly, considering the muddle of competences on the
building sector, the obstacle-race through the building
bureaucracy and its inflated legislation, considering the
lack of networking among the interested agents and
administrations on the municipal and federal sides, the
political, social and aesthetic areas.
Hardly, if we think of the shrinking German population,
and the lack of a genuine law relating to immigration,
granting to the majority of the 7 million non-German
inhabitants (whereof 382 800 live in Berlin) the status
of second-class citizens, and if we think of a persistant
xenophobia in my country: Are those the elements to
rebuild a cosmopolitan metropolis?
Well, the challenge is enormous our societies are facing
following the collapse of the systems, of the East-West-,
Right-Left- Order of the World, of the commodity of
confrontation suspending any doubts about ones own
position.
28To conclude, I would like to make you aware
of an author I have quoted already, the sociologist
Ulrich Beck, whose analysis of our present situation I
find particularly enlightening.
To introduce his recent book, "The lnvention of the
Political", (14) he refers to Vassily Kandinsky who
has published in 1927 an article with the simple title of
"und" - "and". Herein, Kandinsky
explains that - while the 19th century had been dominated
by The Either - Or - the 20th century shall work at and
elaborate the "and".
29Division, specialization, striving for
order, evidence, control, and a linear, calculable image
of the world there - here: the global and the
multiple, uncertainty, the experiment of exchange, of the
included third, of synthesis and ambivalence. "...
the world of the Either - Or", Ulrich Beck states,
"in which we think, act and live (I am underlining, still
think, act and live) becomes wrong"- However our
attitude is - receptive of or rejecting the globality,
diffuseness and openness of the "and" - we are
already engaged in the conflicts and experiments of a
world beyond the Either - Or... What Kandinsky had seen
as the task of the 20th century, will thus be handed over
to the next one: the question of the "and".
30In an article for Süddeutsche Zeitung in
July, titled "The Open City"(15), Ulrich Beck
is applying this view to the actual state and development
of our urban agglomerations. Let me give you some
elements from this article:
The author is pleading for an alternative architecture of
the public domain, of the in-between-spaces,
to create a new identity of the social. The issue is to
renew the idea of community within the public
space and its breakdown. In order to revitalize the dead
centers of our cities, the city of the "and"
will have to create "hospitable spaces" (Renate
Schütz) making possible what is now excluded: intimacy and
anonymity, community and freedom. The city of the
"and" sets out to develop radical modernism,
meaning a new definition of the social in a world being
at the same time globalized and individualized. The city
of the "and" will have to offer the means for
creating community in a city of
individuals, for creating urban democracy, lt will
have to provide "open-minded spaces", as the
American scholar Michael Walzer has proposed to say. And,
last not least, the task is the reconciliation of
technological modernism and ecology in order to develop
future urbanity.
31lf Berlin and its open-minded potentials
would have the upper hand against the fatal tendencies of
exclusion and national pomp, of a mentality of apartheid,
of an architecture of high-security and emergency etc. -
the city would indeed, by its very traditions, be
predestinated to become a workshop for the renewal of
urbanity, for discovering the elements of a future
mythology of our cities we may be eager to identify with.
lt is my deep desire that Berlin shall surprise us all in
a most positive way.
Bibliographical References
1) Ulrich Beck, "Die
offene Stadt", Süddeutsche Zeitung, July 2/3, 1994
2) Modris Ecksteins
"Der Große Krieg", in the catalogue "Die
letzten Tage der Menschheit", Berlin 1994
3) Leslie Fiedler,
"Cross the Border, Close the Gap"
4) Peter Handke,
"Versuch über die Jukebox", 1990
5) Gilles Deleuze,
"Philosophie et minorité", in
"Critique" 369, 1978
6) Jean Baudrillard,
"La scène et lob-scène"
7) Hans Sedlmayer,
"Verlust der Mitte - Die bildende Kunst des 19 und
20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit",
Salzburg 1948, 17th edition 1991
8) Thomas McEvilley, in
"Art and Discontent - Theory at the Millenium",
New York 1991
9) Amos Oz, "Brief
aus Arad", in "Bericht zur Lage des Staates
Israel", Frankfurt/Main 1992
10) Octavio Paz, "The
Death of the Avantgarde" 1972 - "Der Tod der
Avantgarde", in "Die andere Zeit der
Dichtung", Frankfurt/Main 1992
11) Thomas McEvilley,
"Art & Otherness - Crisis in Cultural
Identity", New York 1992
12) Marc Augé, "Orte
und Nicht-Orte - Vorüberlegungen zu einer Ethnologie der
Einsamkeit", Frankfurt/Main 1994
13) "Un entretien
avec Michael Dummet" by Roger-Pol Droit, "Le
Monde", October 11, 1994
14) Ulrich Beck, "Die
Erfindung des Politischen", Frankfurt/Main 1993
15) U.B., "Die offene
Stadt", see there
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