Germany
>Memory is not a voluntary act
>
Joshua Ellison explores the presence of the past in Berlin @ Habitus.
Memory is everywhere in Berlin, but history is curiously absent. There isn’t much to see that’s especially old. A few churches, a few grand buildings and statues, a few ominous relics, but otherwise the post-war and post-wall city is gray and mute. There are lots of places where significant things used to be: a cheerless park where Hitler’s bunker used to be; tidy streets that used to be bisected by the wall; endless holes in the ground and scaffolding and cranes.
A hundred years ago, the journalist Karl Scheffler famously wrote that Berlin was a “city condemned to becoming and never to being.” Even now, nothing looks quite finished. Berlin is always becoming something else, but it’s condemned precisely by what it had been before.
Even where the past has been all but erased, Berliners are constantly recording and remembering. Monuments, large and small, are everywhere. Berlin is perpetually retelling its own story. It’s how the city brands itself, in both senses of the word.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Engrossed with self-accusation—sometimes touching and sometimes a little smug—the city also seems to be aching for redemption. Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum is easily the most iconic public memory project in the city. It’s not a Holocaust memorial, technically, but rather a requiem for and tribute to German Jewry. Still, it is so full of tragic portent, even melodrama, that it reads more like a passion play (the wing devoted to contemporary life is called the “Axis of Continuity”) but feels like a resurrection myth. Libeskind leaves little to the imagination; you feel the architect over your shoulder at all times, tapping and pointing. On the other hand, the institution has created a vibrant public presence. On my visits, the museum was packed.
>Walking the trail of the Berlin Wall
>
Millay Hyatt writes of the journey along the fallen wall in 13 parts @ Design Observer.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )I. Early last year, I made a pilgrimage. I’d been thinking about something none of us in Berlin, where I’ve lived for a decade, thinks much about any more, until an anniversary comes along anyway: the fact that half of us were once enclosed by a wall that kept the other half out. Motivated less by the background noise of cultural commemoration than by an impasse in my personal life, I wanted to test myself against the Berlin Wall. Breathe some fresh air, feel in my calves and the balls of my feet the great curving length of that two-way trap that held millions of people in its grip for 28 years. Impasse indeed. The Berlin Wall Trail marks both the historical path of something as preposterous as a wall dividing a city as well as the astounding fact of its bloodless demolition. Something worth paying homage to; and perhaps performing the ritual of walking it would give me some creative ideas for how to get rid of my own little Berlin Wall. So, on a crisp February morning, my 36th birthday, I packed my map and a thermos of water and set off.
II. Carving its way through urban center and periphery for just under 100 miles, the Berlin Wall created a host of unlikely enclaves, exclaves, cul-de-sacs and impossible conundrums. It kept apart friends and lovers, doctors and patients, libraries and overdue books. (Peter Schneider tells a wonderful story in The German Comedy: Scenes of Life after the Wall, of an East Berliner who borrowed books from a West Berlin library the day before construction of the Wall started on August 13, 1961, and returned them the first chance he got: November 10, 1989.) On one side covered with snide and sweet graffiti, on the other sternly blank, the wall not only divided Berlin; it seemed also to take semiotic hostage of the city, which became a symbol of the hard division — the iron curtain, as Churchill called it — between the warring interests of East and West.
But then, twenty years ago, it “fell,” as if it were an old man or an autumn leaf. The two cities melded together again and the chunks of the Wall still standing, like smudges the eraser missed, are there for tourists to photograph and locals to hurry past. I cross its former path many times a week, often several times a day, without thinking about it. My neighborhood was one of those odd protrusions that gave the Wall its lumpy, upside-down-Christmas Tree shape. It used to encase this section of Kreuzberg, in what was once West Berlin, on three sides — West and East being ideological terms in Cold War Berlin more than geographical ones: if you were to head southeast, northeast, north, or northwest from my apartment, you would be on your way to “the East,” or at least to the barrier that marked where the East once began. This made for a certain coziness, or so those who lived here then like to tell it: punks, squatters, draft dodgers and mainly Turkish immigrants left to fend for themselves in a parallel, anti-bourgeois universe unthinkable in most parts of West (or East, for that matter) Germany. Before the party ended — or began, depending on your point of view — in November 1989, they used to picnic on Schlesische Strasse, today a noisy thoroughfare, then an asphalt playground blocked by the Wall at its eastern end and the river Spree to the north. My walk officially begins where the Landwehrkanal (which translates as defensive canal; a defensiveness, however, that predates the Wall) crosses under Schlesische Strasse and empties into the Spree.
>Germany, 1968
>
Yascha Mounk reviews a new book on the politics and culture wars in Germany in the fall of 1968 @ n+1.
1968 was experienced by many as the beginning of a global revolution. That revolution never came—or perhaps, as Zhou Enlai said of the consequences of the French Revolution, “it’s too early to tell”—yet the sense of international solidarity was real. Students occupying buildings in Berlin were in contact with antiwar marchers in Berkeley and London; actions at Columbia seemed to be in sympathy and concert with those at the Freie Universität. But one thing set German youths apart from their counterparts in the US or the UK. Young Brits and Americans may have challenged their parents’ authority, but they also had to pay grudging respect to the “greatest generation.” Even if angrier members of the student left were given to calling their reactionary elders “fascists” in fits of pique, they nonetheless had to acknowledge that many members of their parents’ generation had fought to save much of Europe. Young Germans, by contrast, had to come to terms with the fact that their immediate forebears had committed unimaginable crimes. Their parents really had been fascists, and their rebellion accordingly targeted what they called the “Auschwitz generation.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )More than elsewhere, the 1968 protests in Germany were a means of reckoning with the country’s past as well as a rebellion against the present. This has made German debates about the legacy of 1968 uniquely divisive. In Germany, right-wing detractors do not just hold 1968 responsible for the usual litany of sins from sexual lawlessness to moral vacuity; they also blame the 1968 generation for making impossible a healthy patriotism and for permanently disgracing the German nation. Meanwhile, far-left defenders of 1968 go well beyond thanking the movement for doing away with oppressive social norms; they also credit it with Germany’s transformation into a truly democratic and pluralistic society.
altimoniere 