Granta 165, page 18
High hopes for rapid growth soured quickly in Berlin: in fact, the city even shrank for a while. More people were leaving than moving in. West Berliners lost the sumptuous subsidies that had been paid to everyone for holding out in the ‘front town’ of the West. East Berliners, previously privileged among East Germans, were hit with mass unemployment and poverty. The Olympic Games Berlin had applied for were lost to Sydney. If the nineties are remembered today as one of Berlin’s most flourishing eras in terms of culture, that was due to the low cost of living, the low rents, and the empty space in the inner city. It was a great time for artists and bohemia. For real estate developers – not so much. But most of the projects on Friedrichstraße were already under construction by then.
When I spoke with Stimmann on the phone in 2021, he was admirably combative in the defence of his record: he told me he wanted to ease the crushing pressure of the waves of capital breaking on Berlin; he wanted to ‘break down’ large-scale investments to get closer to the grid and plot structure of the pre-war city; and he wanted to correct the mistakes of his predecessors, who allowed wholesale developments in old building districts and green-lit inner-city autobahns running through anti-historical, late-modern ‘urban landscapes’.
Hans Stimmann told me he particularly regretted how the area around the Tiergarten, once favoured by the Jewish haute bourgeoisie, was being razed and replaced with a free-form arrangement of modern buildings called the ‘Kulturforum’. He now thought he might have been able to prevent similar destruction of the historic centre of Berlin by enlisting the descendants of the former owners of the buildings. He believed his mission was to keep the history of streets and plots from being swept away by developers.
Stimmann was responsible for the strict realignment of Friedrichstraße. Under his supervision, the street lost almost all the spatial extensions accrued during the war, some of which had been turned into green squares under Communist administration. Stimmann had always wanted the street to return to its pre-war glory. He has often been blamed for the fact that that’s exactly what didn’t happen.
Philip Johnson did eventually build something on Friedrichstraße. What became the Philip-Johnson-Haus was the worst design he ever did. His hatred for the building is on the record. In 1995, when a Berlin journalist asked Johnson how he envisioned Friedrichstraße in five years’ time Johnson is famously reported to have replied: ‘Empty.’ When I scoured the issues of local daily Der Tagesspiegel, I found a report of an uproarious meeting at the Akademie der Künste: intellectuals mainly from East Berlin protesting ‘architectural banalities’ in Berlin’s centre. ‘In Mitte, they are building bankruptcies,’ one man shouted. It had become apparent that things were not working as planned.
Today Stimmann could argue that even Cobb’s art deco follies didn’t save his luxurious building from bankruptcy and vacant stores. There was a rumour that Nouvel’s shiny Galeries Lafayette only survived on Friedrichstraße because the French state did not allow it to retreat from such a prestigious address. But, as announced this August, Galeries Lafayette will be gone by next year. The French department store chain is closing all of its branches abroad. Berlin’s cultural minister, Joe Chialo, has suggested using the building for housing the city’s central library. The local trade association immediately endorsed the idea. The future epigraph of Friedrichstraße may yet read: ‘Silentium!’
Symbolism is all that Friedrichstraße has left to offer. It was once an emblem for the golden days of pre-war Berlin, until it became a symbol for Berlin’s division in the Cold War. Today Friedrichstraße is the symbol of the New Berlin with a capital N. Or more precisely: it is the symbol of the New Berlin trying – and failing – to resemble Old Berlin with a capital O. Social Democrats like Stimmann and Klein shared a romantic love for the big city, the metropolis, even at the price of glorifying a social stratification that their Social Democratic forefathers once fought against. The German Greens, by contrast, the rebellious offspring of Social Democracy and German Romanticism, and the culturally dominant force in most parts of Berlin’s inner city, often harbour a passion for the small town, the village, the countryside. Thirty years after the Berlin Greens had tried and failed to turn Potsdamer Platz into a landscaped garden park they tried to turn Friedrichstraße into a landscaped village square – a pedestrian zone with makeshift wooden patches and benches spread across the road. Not even enough of their own constituencies really wanted to stroll let alone sit down here and stare at empty shop windows and grimly gridded facades. In the last elections the Greens were turfed out of office in Berlin. Even by their own account: because of Friedrichstraße.
It’s difficult to say what Hanno Klein would make of this today. The area around Friedrichstraße is no London, no St James’s. In the rest of the city, however, he was astonishingly prescient in the prognoses for which he may have been killed. Today, Berlin’s population is growing drastically and at great speed. There are almost no more crumbling old buildings with low rents left for less affluent people in formerly bohemian neighbourhoods like Prenzlauer Berg. They are being renovated and painted white and have become dazzlingly expensive. Even in the ‘vacuum cleaners on the edge of the city’ things are getting tight now. Berlin is, once again, considering a bid for the Olympic Games.
Friedrichstraße might now offer a reason for hope, even excitement. To have a such a site of high-end decay in the very midst of an otherwise brutally booming town is astonishing. Dancing on the ruins was once seen as the new Berlin’s recipe for success. It created much of the cultural capital on which the city still subsists. Who’s to say that that wouldn’t also be possible with the investment ruins of Friedrichstraße and Potsdamer Platz?
Investors will be able to write off their losses. (Much of the profit of Berlin’s allegedly high-yield construction in the centre came from tax breaks anyway.) If the people of Berlin paid for outside investors’ enrichment from ghost buildings, they should at least be permitted to dance in them, play music, open up artists’ studios and rehearsal rooms. Everything that has no affordable room elsewhere in the city could find a new haven in the centre. There are hardly any residents to complain about the noise. The ghost of Hanno Klein probably wouldn’t even raise objections, except to specify that, in this part of town at least, it would need to be top-notch noise.
OUT OF THE WOODS
Elena Helfrecht
Introduction by Hanna Engelmeier
translated from the german by peter kuras
If I’m unlucky on my way to work, I sometimes end up stranded at the central train station in Wanne-Eickel, a small town in the Rhineland. There’s not much to do there. There’s a DM, a Lidl, a Hornbach. So you can shop, at least there’s that. The only thing I know about Wanne-Eickel is that Heinz Rühmann’s parents once ran a pub in the train station, most likely serving hearty broths behind heavy curtains. Heinz Rühmann – the so-called actor of the twentieth century, Germany’s cinematic everyman (starring in ninety films) – died in 1994 at the age of ninety-two. He was a little too old to be Elena Helfrecht’s grandfather. Great-grandfather, that would be about right. The people’s actor. Our grandpa, Germany’s grandpa.
In the film Die Feuerzangenbowle (1944), Rühmann plays the mildly insolent middle-aged writer Johannes Pfeiffer. Sometime around 1900 (we never learn when, exactly), his friends convince him to pass himself off as a schoolboy at the local Gymnasium. Among the weird old hacks teaching alcoholic fermentation and other arts, the young and pithy Dr Brett stands out. A perfect nationalist pedagogue, he compares his students to saplings: young trees need to be bound to stakes in the ground so that they don’t sprout in every direction. Discipline is the tie that binds them.
Despite the film’s celebration of discipline, it wasn’t enough for Nazi censors in 1944. The teachers in the film – apart from Dr Brett – were a bit too easily lampoonable as figures of authority. The film was not permitted to be shown publicly. Teachers couldn’t be disparaged when they were in such short supply. On a January night in 1944, Heinz Rühmann boarded a south-bound sleeper train out of Berlin with a copy of the film. When he arrived at the Führerhauptquartier near Görlitz (present-day Gierłoż) in East Prussia, Rühmann hoped to convince Hermann Göring to allow the film’s release. Göring’s officers were given a private screening, which they greeted with cheerful enthusiasm. Cheerful enthusiasm being at least as rare as teachers at the time, Hitler green-lighted the film, which he had not seen; it opened in theatres the next day.
Some of the film’s actors never lived to enjoy its lasting success. They were conscripted as soldiers in the Wehrmacht as soon as they finished their gigs as pupils in the fictitious Babenberg Gymnasium. Dr Brett’s rendition of the film’s core symbol for German discipline didn’t include the purpose for which the young saplings were raised: to be cut down as needed. Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power (1960) refers to the forest as a potent symbol of the Germans:
The mass symbol of the Germans was the army. But the army was more than an army. It was the marching forest. There’s no other modern country in the world where feeling for the forest has remained as alive as in Germany. The rigidity and parallelism of the upright trees, their density and their number fill the heart of the German with a deep and mysterious pleasure. Even today, he seeks the forest where his ancestors lived and feels himself united with the trees.
That was how it was supposed to be. In 1936, the German forest made its star turn in the propaganda film Ewiger Wald (Eternal Forest), a moody black-and-white cinematic hymn to the German woods, with a voice-over to match it: ‘The “Die and become” of the forest is woven through history. The Volk, like the forest, stands in eternity. We come from the forest, we live like the forest. From the forest we craft Heimat and space.’ The film is now only available in state archives. Heimat, Volk: ideology-laden words, which are today best avoided. Space. Forest. It’s hard to find words in German to substitute for them. As phenomena, they persist. How can we do without them?
Elena Helfrecht’s images don’t depict horror, crimes or violence. And they don’t contain any people. They present the forest as people left it. It’s not a forest into which the sun shines brightly or where lilies extend heavenward. There is snow and it is night. These images don’t know Christmas. Helfrecht’s forest is a place where dead wood has taken on the form of a woman, where we stare wild animals in the eye, where we suspect body parts may be hidden under the snow. Icicles descend – but from where? From the roof of a barn where a cat seeks sanctuary? Maybe there was a hunt nearby. Two wings (from a swan?) hang from hooks in a tiled utility room. The stories that took place here might only have their full effect if they were intoned by Werner Herzog.
Helfrecht does not depict the orderly forest that Canetti describes as an effective German mass symbol. There’s nothing rigid and parallel here. Not a single tree grows straight and tall, as Dr Brett would have insisted. In Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), the young Siegfried rides to his fate between enormous, straight trees, grown parallel to one another. The most German of all German forests is a stage, a fantasy that promises death.
Helfrecht’s alternative imagery of brush and undergrowth are fostered by the knowledge of this dreamworld. Time and again, crosses appear in her photographs – perhaps more than are strictly necessary to understand that, for Helfrecht, these are spaces of death and trauma.
The forests in these images are crime scenes. Helfrecht’s subjects – the roots of a tree, a cat, the wings of a dead bird – all appear caught by the flash of her camera. The proverbial deer in the headlights is here, too, and apparently sees everything that the images only indirectly reveal to us. One of the signature features of Helfrecht’s work is that it tracks a past that she herself did not have to experience. The sense of menace unfolds quietly, its effect only heightened by its invisibility. The images make viewers, however unwillingly, into hunters, following the traces that Helfrecht has set out for them in the thicket of the past. But she does not guide us; there is no sense that we will make our way out.
IN THE MOVIE BUNKER
Lutz Seiler
translated from the german by martyn crucefix
1
It started with the poster – the wording framed in black, not unlike an obituary. Year after year, it was displayed at railway stations, at bus stops and on trees along the streets. The headline read musterung, followed in bold by the year of birth of those who were being summoned. As a child, I thought I knew well enough what the word Musterung meant – ‘pattern’. For me, it was a word almost entirely associated with the plastic cloth on our kitchen table, with its dull sheen and pale blue check pattern that every morning took my tired eyes hostage. But for what or for whom was this ‘pattern’ being announced on the poster?
Then the posters would vanish; I forgot about them and, one year on, they would reappear, displayed on the churchyard wall beside the path I had to walk along at least once every day. There was some obligation here that no one was able to escape – that much I’d already understood: something was going to be unavoidable, but the years being referred to (the 1950s) were unimaginably distant in the past. It was only when the year 1960 showed up on one of these posters – and thus my own decade had been broached – that I persuaded myself to stop and stand in front of it. ‘Attendance is due on . . .’, ‘You must bring with you . . .’, ‘In the event of failure to attend . . .’, and so on. The words had the kind of seriousness that frightened me: no chance of escape. From an early age, I was disposed to believe in such a possibility – a system of repression that made it possible for me to feel pretty much carefree for long periods of time. Because of this my mother often used to say I was ‘happy-go-lucky’, but that was not really true because, fundamentally, I sensed the threat perfectly clearly, yet my home-spun insouciance sought to draw an immediate veil over it. She was mistaken – but the unreasonable demands of the real world could actually be made to vanish for remarkably long periods of time with the help of this cloak of invisibility.
One of the phrases on the poster – the District Conscription Office – impressed me (it still impresses me today). It had the ring of a genuine military operation. I was seventeen years old when the year of my birth, 1963, appeared on the posters. On 6 April 1981, I walked into the District Conscription Office, thereby obeying the very first command of my time as a soldier.
I can see the date in my health record. The health record book was begun on the day of recruitment and – this was the intention – it was updated throughout the remainder of my military career. Stages in your life were recorded there according to phases or categories of fitness. As a soldier in the National People’s Army, you progressed through various kinds of deployment appropriate to your age and physical condition. On 4 April 1986, at the time of the final entry, twenty-seven of the thirty-eight possible service categories still remained available to me.
In some ways, the brown card-bound health record is my very first diary. Although strictly military and medical in character, some of the entries contain details that I find astonishing today. Entry for 7 February 1984: ‘On 31.1 several slabs fell on the pat.’s lower back / lumbar x-ray / urinalysis.’ What slabs? I remember none of it.
When soldiers were discharged from military service, the health record was entrusted to them ‘for personal safekeeping’ until the next call-up. To ensure nothing untoward occurred, there were ‘Instructions for the Safekeeping of the Health Record’ printed inside its card cover: three paragraphs in small font and three more on what you were expected to do, divided into further points and sub-points, including the proper treatment of what was referred to as ‘medical resources’, which included the gas-mask goggles that were supposed to be retained by their owner after active service and be appropriately maintained, protected and kept at the ready. According to Section 3, Sub-section 2, Paragraph a), the gas-mask goggles were to be ‘brought with you to each new call-up to military service’. Otherwise, any use of them was prohibited, though some of my friends disregarded this because the little plastic frames with straps to go round the ears, reminiscent of rubber bands, would never slip off your head when you were playing football. When we caught sight of a striker wearing gas-mask goggles, it was impossible not to think of Wolfgang Borchert, who we read enthusiastically in our first year at university: ‘You call those spectacles? I think you’re being deliberately odd.’
