EXORCIZING REMAINS Architectural Fragments As Intermediaries Between History and Individual Experience

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EXORCIZING REMAINS Architectural Fragments as Intermediaries between History and Individual Experience

MÉLANIE VAN DER HOORN Research Institute for History and Culture, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands

Abstract How can a long undesired piece of architecture all of a sudden become an attractive souvenir for tourists, a talisman, a valuable object? Often relegated to the role of witness most individuals passively watch the large-scale transformation of their built environment. The situation can, however, be totally different with fragments of buildings. In two cases, the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the deserted national-socialist seaside resort of Prora (Germany), alienating associations and large-scale phenomena are concretized and individualized through active personal handling. The circulation of architectural remains from one owner to another is charged with meaning; stories told about these objects are a means to give sense to a more complex history and the ruins themselves function as valuable intermediaries between history and individual experience. The social life of architecture does not always end with its destruction, quite the contrary. Slashed into pieces, recycled, transformed, it continues to live in fragmented form.

Key Words Berlin Wall commoditization exorcizing national- socialist undesirable architecture

INTRODUCTION The social life of a piece of architecture does not always end with its destruction, quite the contrary. Slashed into pieces, recycled, transformed, it can continue to live in fragmented form and act as an intermediary onto which people can project their memories, frustrations or

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experiences with regard to the object that used to occupy an important place. One of the most striking examples I encountered during my investi- gation into the meaning and fate of so-called undesired architecture, is perhaps the post-war biography of the national-socialist seaside resort of Prora, on the island of Rügen in northern Germany. This nearly 5 km- long building was not entirely destroyed, but its ‘active life’ came to an end (temporarily) in 1991 after both the national-socialist initiators and the later communist occupants had left the building. Partly in ruins, partly abandoned to progressive dilapidation, only a relatively small part is today still in use for small-scale initiatives, waiting for an overall concept to be developed and realized. In the media, Prora has often been lauded for its ugliness, its monstrosity and its uncanny aura (Figure 1). A website for tourist information about Rügen states: ‘This beach is handicapped.’1 Numerous articles refer to Prora in those or similar terms: ‘a monstrous leisure complex’, ‘the monumental relic of dark days’, ‘a foreign body’, ‘a gaping wound’, ‘materialised antithesis of culture’, ‘megalomania in concrete’, ‘repulsive memorial’ (Mikuteit, 1994; Nickel and Spitza, 1994; Knöfel, 2000). Nevertheless, each time the place was left to new occupants, as in 1945 and 1991, the building was plundered and remains were brought away, stolen and recycled (Rostock and Zadnicek, 2001: 90, 101).

FIGURE 1 Prora, the national-socialist seaside resort. Photograph: Mélanie van der Hoorn

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This raises a number of questions. Knowing Prora’s origin and recent history, as well as its actual reputation as a revolting architectural monster, would it not be rational to expect that people would refuse to soil their hands with the remains? If not, what is it exactly that makes these dubious remains simultaneously rejected and attractive? Have they been, in the course of plundering, ‘exorcized’? Or, in more general terms, how can undesired pieces of architecture suddenly become attractive once they have been (partly) dismembered? How do people try to exorcize architectural remains? A series of interviews about the meaning of Prora’s remains for various people concerned was preceded by a comparative analysis of the literature produced since 1989 with regard to the fall of the Berlin Wall – perhaps the most famous and best documented contemporary example of a ‘recycled eyesore’ in Europe. In terms of the Wall’s own biography since 1989, one object in particular attracted my attention: the so-called ‘clip-card’, that consists of a little plastic holder with a Wall fragment inserted into a postcard (see Figure 2). Some of these postcards are photo- graphs of the Wall, usually of a similar colour as the integrated fragment, emphasizing a metonymic relationship. Others are authenticity certiﬁ- cates, stating that the piece of rock in the transparent plastic case is really ‘an original Berlin wall brick, a piece of German history’. This peculiar object touches similar issues to the Prora case: How can such a long lasting undesired element in the built environment all of a sudden become an attractive souvenir for tourists, a talisman, a valuable object? How does it acquire a value similar to a piece of antique, whereby not just the symbolic relevance but also its true authenticity seems to be of major importance?

VISUALIZING DISMEMBERMENT Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, people started gathering fragments of the, once so detested, object. In the following weeks, pickaxes were even offered for rent on the street to allow people to choose their own fragment and hack it away by themselves. The following year, a few sections were listed for preservation, and large segments of frontier Wall, richly decorated with graffiti, had been preserved by the East German export firm Limex to be sold by auction all around the world. After then, some remaining 50,000 tons of concrete, largely attacked by the so-called Mauerspechte or ‘wallpeckers’, were shattered by the Border Troops (commissioned by the Minister for Disarmament and Defence) and reused for the construction of roads (Hertle, 1996: 278; Feversham and Schmidt, 1999: 66). The fact that such a controversial object could become so fiercely desirable once it had been brought into fragmented form might be

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FIGURE 2 Clipcard with original Berlin Wall brick. Photograph: Mélanie van der Hoorn

surprising at ﬁrst instance but is not an unprecedented phenomenon. More than two centuries ago already, sculpted bricks of the French Bastille, fallen during the 1789 revolution, were spread through the country by the revolutionary Pierre-François Palloy as three-dimensional testimonies to the end of the monarchy and the beginning of a new era

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(Lüsebrink and Reichardt, 1990: 150–1). Following Linda Nochlin in her book The Body in Pieces. The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity (1994), it was the ﬁrst time that architectural fragments appeared ‘as a positive rather than a negative trope’. Indeed,

the fragment, for the Revolution and its artists, rather than symbolizing nostalgia for the past, enacts the deliberate destruction of that past, or, at least, a pulverization of what were perceived to be its repressive traditions. Both outright vandalism and what one might think of as a recycling of the vandalized fragments of the past for allegorical purposes functioned as Revolutionary strategies. (Nochlin, 1994: 8)

It seems that people confer on these fragments some inherent metonymic qualities, as if the parts could stand for the whole and the fate of the pieces would seal the fate of the complete building; dissect- ing the Bastille would irrevocably disrupt the monarchy. Of course, these stones do not possess such strength in themselves, but they can be strategically used to convey symbolic messages in this direction. The same is true of dead bodies whose political life is not finished with their (first) burial, as was shown by Katherine Verdery in her book The Political Life of Dead Bodies (1999): ‘unlike notions such as “patriotism” or “civil society”, for instance, a corpse can be moved around, displayed, and strategically located in specific places’ (Verdery, 1999: 27). The main motives for gathering fragments of Berlin Wall were expressed in the following, or in similar, words: ‘I wanted a memento of something I had lived with my whole life. There was also a need to feel that I was somehow a part of dismantling the Wall, that I was involved in its end.’2 Fragments thus were seen as ‘relics’ in the double – historic and religious – sense of the word. In the first, historic sense, a relic is either a historic object or an object that belonged to a loved or worshipped person, and which is considered very valuable by its owner. We could also speak of reminders, mementos or souvenirs; indeed, these objects evoke memories, help us to remember a certain period, an event or a person. In the second, religious sense, the term ‘relic’ either refers to the mortal remains of a saint or to an object that has been in contact with Christ or a saint, in both cases worshipped by a community of believers. When a corpse is treated as a relic, it means that not only its political life, its (political) post-mortem handling is important, but it is also attributed some intrinsic qualities: the power to bring luck, healing or purification. The same can be said about certain architectural remains: when a fragment gets the character of a (secular) relic, the object in itself – owning it, touching it – has a major relevance and the belief in the relic’s inherent qualities determines its further social life. In The Ghosts of Berlin. Confronting German History in the Urban Land- scape (1997), Brian Ladd writes:

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First Berliners, then tourists hacked away at the Wall. They contributed in a minuscule way to the removal of the concrete, but more significant was their ritual participation in the removal of the symbolic barrier. It was in this carnival atmosphere that the concrete was divested of its murderous aura and invested with magical properties. (Ladd, 1997: 8) This quotation underlines the essential relevance of public dismemberment and fragmentation as a means to exorcize the Wall. In order to guarantee the symbolic effectiveness of these rituals, a layer of spray paint soon became an indispensable certificate of origin, emphasizing a pars pro toto relationship between fragments and the complete Berlin Wall from which they were issued. Perhaps even more important than how authentic the fragments allegedly were, the paint testified to their owners’ authentic participation in the collective dismemberment ritual. In his article ‘The Berlin Wall: Production, Preservation and Consumption of a 20th-Century Monument’ (1993), Frederick Baker pays specific attention to the spray paint on the circulating fragments and points out their ‘one-sidedness’. He emphasizes the difference in experience for Easterners and Westerners, the former facing the Wall as a barrier, the latter as a façade. Painting murals on the Wall was something inconceivable in the East, thus the circulating fragments, painted on one side, are referring to the Western experience of the Wall; they are Western relics. Naturally, Baker is right in these statements, especially when one thinks that when all segments with graffiti had been taken, pieces of grey hinterland Wall were spray painted and then gathered, to answer the persistent demands for coloured fragments. Baker further believes that this has largely influenced ‘the dominant European memory of what the Wall was like’ (Baker, 1993: 721). Nevertheless, surely this was not of major relevance shortly after the fall – neither was the question of whether the fragments were really authentic or not. More important was, in itself, the circulation of fragments, this collective ritual that sealed the end of the Wall’s dividing role. It was a unique oppor- tunity for an immense number of people on both sides of the Wall to leave their role of witness and become actively involved as co- performers in the destruction of the Wall and what it was symbolizing. The assumed authenticity of the fragments was an important condition for the ‘success’ of this ritual, but it did not really matter to what extent the pieces were really authentic, as long as people believed (or pretended to believe) that they were, and as long as people could easily recognize them as ‘true’ remains of the Wall. More than certificates or stamps of authenticity, it seems that a layer of spray-paint had become a commonly accepted proof of so-called authenticity. In the words of Katherine Verdery: ‘It is not a relic’s actual derivation from a specific body that makes it effective but people’s belief in that derivation’ (Verdery, 1999: 28). It is mainly in this reliquary form – small, fragmented and tangible

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– that the Wall could function as an intermediary between history and individual experience. Furthermore, the symbolic strength and signiﬁ- cance of such collective rituals is due to the fact that every individual can freely interpret relics. As Verdery writes: ‘Remains are concrete, yet protean; they do not have a single meaning but are open to many different readings’ (Verdery, 1999: 28).

SHARED EXPERIENCES The national-socialist seaside resort Prora, built between 1937 and 1939, was meant to host 20,000 people at any given time and allow German workers cheap holidays in shifts of 10 days. The 4.5 km-long, six-storey building was divided into eight 500 m-long blocks with an enormous square and a huge reception hall in the middle. Its mad dimensions can still be experienced nowadays, as one needs almost an hour to walk along its complete length. The size of each of the 10,000 double rooms is less impressive, however: about 2.75 m by 4.5 m for two beds, a washbasin, a table and a cupboard, but all of them overlooking the sea. At the end of the war, as construction had been interrupted, seven blocks out of eight and part of the main square were structurally complete. The site was taken over by the Red Army, and parts of it were used as accommodation for refugees; the Red Army probably left in 1947, but used a small part of the building again in 1956–62. From 1950, the East German Kasernierte Volkspolizei (People’s Police) transformed Prora into barracks and declared it a no-go area; it took up ofﬁce there the next year. Its successor, the Nationale Volksarmee or NVA (People’s Army), stayed in Prora from 1956 to 1989 and opened a holiday resort for NVA ofﬁcers in the most southern block, the so-called Walter Ulbrichtheim. Houses for employees were put into use and became what still is the village Prora. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the West German Bundeswehr was stationed there, while the former Walter Ulbrichtheim functioned as a hotel until 1991. Finally, in 1992, after all these occupants had left, Prora opened its gates to a larger public again (Lichtnau, 2000: 30–40; Rostock and Zadnicek, 2001: 90–8). Rostock describes how, after 1945, Russian occupants forced the German population to help them with dismantling the building: doors, windows and radiators were taken off, then turbines, heating systems, wood and rails. Afterwards, the site was released for gathering construction material and plundering; people even came from the continent to get tiles or mortar. Plates and bedclothes designed especially for Prora, blankets, bathing trunks and deck chairs were also taken away (Rostock and Zadnicek, 2001: 90). Kurt Ott, farmer in the nearby Lubkow, has lived near Prora for over 70 years. His father helped to build the site; he himself had to

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participate in post-war reparations and later was employed to transform the building into barracks. He remembers the post-war period very clearly, as he was recruited by the Russians to dismantle part of the building. Ott’s perspective shows how the report of personal experiences with regard to these fragments, can be a means to concretize a more large-scale history. Talking about these objects brings Ott to position himself in relation to what happened, to justify certain things and condemn others. First he was a bit reluctant to speak about ‘plundering’; it sounds, perhaps, like stealing. Actually, the point he wanted to make is that everybody took things from Prora at that time. He recalls how they had to remove the radiators and place objects in one-pound-heavy boxes that were shipped off to the USSR, but he insists upon the fact that not only the Russians, but also the English took advantage of it. When he had to do post-war reparations in nearby Baabe, a captain told him that objects were taken to England. However, Ott’s priority when talking was not (only) to show that the occupying forces were sharing fairly, but (also) to prove that everybody was actually doing the same, as a kind of justifi- cation for the plundering by the Germans: ‘It was not only the Germans who plundered these trifles, it was also plundered on a large scale’. He eventually admitted that many inhabitants in Prora’s neighbourhood came to gather remains: ‘Well, everyone from hereabouts helped themselves . . . Many went there and picked up pieces of linen, because plenty was lying around’. Ott’s account further clarifies who had the power during this period of plunder, and who was benefiting from the situation. A local translator, for example, with good contacts amongst the Russians built a complete new house out of Prora material. Nevertheless, it is of note that Ott’s comments are also relatively free from value judgements: refugees also benefited from the Prora plunders. According to Ott, things would have been lost anyway, so it was good if someone could use them. Ott’s account illustrates that, whether a building is partly preserved or not, its progressive dismantlement and the spreading of its remains attract a large number of people; and the consequential scenes of plundering and re-use in this case seem to play a very significant role in coming to terms with the history the building embodies. Prora’s remains occupied an intermediate role in the translation of a large-scale development, abstract themes (such as national-socialist history) and fields of tension (such as occupation by the Russians) on the one hand, and individual experiences on the other. In 1945, although the people involved in the dismantling of Prora had various nationalities, backgrounds, professions and interests, all of them were able to participate in the transition and share the remains. It was important to start with a clean slate and strip the building of most physical references to its evil, national-socialist origin, but it was even more important that this experience would be a collective one. In other

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words, the success of what can only be termed as an ‘exorcism’ was dependent on its public character. In 1991, for example, when the communist occupants left, fragments of Prora were again recycled, divided and re-contextualized. On this occasion, however, things did not go precisely the same way, and accounts of both show that people experienced these two similar events in a very different way. In fact, when new occupants take over everything left by their predecessors, and stop other people from getting involved, then the distribution of remains can become less of an exercise in puriﬁcation, less of an exorcism, and, instead, a very touchy subject capable of evoking deep resentment.

ELOQUENT REMAINS Dismemberment is often associated with forgetfulness, as mentioned notably by Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas in their text ‘Between Remem- bering and Forgetting’: ‘material culture shoulders the larger responsi- bility of our personal and collective memory. The corollary of this, of course, is that the decay or destruction of these objects brings forgetfulness’ (Buchli and Lucas, 2001: 80). Nevertheless, the authors also recognize that: ‘the relation between remembrance and forgetfulness is not a linear process but a struggle, a tension – in every memorial, something has been left out or forgotten, in every removal, something is left behind, remembered’. Perhaps the Berlin Wall in itself was almost completely eliminated, but its remains were not: large Wall segments soon appeared to have a high political potential and were displayed at symbolically signiﬁcant places all over the world, such as the garden of the Vatican or the CIA headquarters in Washington DC. For many people and institutions all over the world, the acquisition, gift or display of a segment of Berlin Wall was a means to participate, at least symbolically, in its dismantling and that of the political order it had come to symbolize. It was a way to exchange, at least apparently, the role of witness for that of co-performer – witnessed by a range of potential clients, business partners, electors or even by an international community. In this respect it is very revealing to look at who bought the large, painted and thus more valuable segments of Wall as well as where they are standing now, as trophies, monuments or (state) presents.3 For example, Berlin’s mayor Eberhard Diepgen gave a section to the former Lenin wharfs in Gdansk, Poland, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Solidarnosc in 2000 (Meyer, 2001). German Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel gave another piece to the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington in the name of the German Senate, ‘in tribute to the success of the German–American partnership and as a symbol of the peaceful end of the Cold War’.4 Not only political actors, also multinationals acquired fragments of the Wall.

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The global technology company Daimler-Benz AG gave a section to Microsoft’s chairman Bill Gates as a first milestone in a ‘long-term strategic partnership’.5 Finally, in the Main Street Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, shrine of capitalism, some segments serve as an anchor for a row of urinals in the men’s bathroom, thus ironically criticizing the decades of socialist rule in Eastern Europe.6 In these examples, segments of Wall acquired a metaphoric, more than a metonymic value: they have been used as signifiers to refer to a range of different ‘signifieds’, sometimes directly, sometimes very indirectly connected to the Wall’s initial function and meaning. It must be added here that these larger segments, as opposed to the smaller fragments mentioned before, served as a canvas for artworks by renowned artists such as Thierry Noir or Keith Haring, which outbalances the relative importance of the Wall segments as important objects in themselves. A few large segments have remained at their initial location in Berlin as undeniable references to the vanished Wall, a metonymic relationship further emphasized by the irrevocable and deep scars left by the wallpeckers. Apart from a possible counter-action of forgetfulness by consciously displaying architectural remains as a form of monument, the Wall case also shows that both the dismantling of a construction and the consequent collective memory of that event are sometimes tightly inter- woven when the broken remains themselves, deeply affected by numerous scars, embodying even their own elimination, continue to function as constant reminders of a vanished past. Marita Sturken writes about this subject with regard to the bodies of surviving veterans in her article ‘The Wall, the Screen and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial’. Her remarks can easily be translated to ‘architectural casu- alties’: ‘These veterans’ bodies – dressed in fatigues, scarred and disabled, contaminated by toxins – refuse to let historical narratives of completion stand. Memories of the war have been deeply encoded in them, marked literally and figuratively in their flesh . . . The wound gives evidence of the act of injuring’ (Sturken, 1991: 133). In Prora, scarred remains are also present (Figure 3). Indeed, at the end of the 1940s, the occupants at the time tried to blow it up – with limited success: the most southern block was eliminated but two northern blocks were ‘only’ severely damaged; the rest remained intact. In the north, ruins in various phases of decline are still visible today. It is difficult to find reliable information about this destruction and especially about the reasons why the other five blocks were not blown up at that time. Several accidents happened when the building was dismantled under the orders of the Soviets, probably between 1945 and 1947. It is for this reason in 1948–49, that the German authorities probably decided to blow up the northern blocks, instead of tearing them down. The quality of the reinforced concrete made it difficult to

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FIGURE 3 Ruins in various phases of decline. Photograph: Mélanie van der Hoorn

accomplish this task completely (Lichtnau, 2000; Rostock and Zadnicek, 2001). Still, there continues to be a range of explanations for why the whole building was not demolished. Specifically, the ruins in the north, still very visible despite the dense vegetation, constantly raise questions: What happened? Who did it? Why was the work not finished? Ques- tioned by tourists and pushed by the constant presence of these three- dimensional reminders, people in and around Prora try to make sense of what happened in the early post-war years. A striking aspect in these stories is that the attempted destruction of three blocks is often attributed to the Soviets, although the German authorities in all likelihood actually commissioned it (Lichtnau, 2000; Rostock and Zadnicek, 2001). Mr Kaufmann for example, a former NVA-officer and guide at the Museum Prora, is adamant that when the Russians first arrived in 1945, they wanted to destroy everything that belonged to the Nazis. All remaining munitions, he says, were brought together and lit but the ‘Wotan concrete’, out of which Prora was constructed, appeared to be inde- structible and several people lost their lives in these attempts. Accord- ing to Kaufmann, the failure to demolish the building mainly demonstrates Prora’s unprecedented solidity or even endless persis- tence:

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It was decided to let Nature take its course with that building . . . After all, plants grow even on runways at airports after a few years, but here in Prora Nature doesn’t stand a chance. . . . Yummy yummy yummy! . . . When a demolition expert sees this Wotan concrete, his heart starts beating wildly, and he says: ‘Take care of it without my help, this is hopeless!’7 Kaufmann took a certain pleasure in describing Prora as an unbeaten colossus – perhaps these exciting stories confer on the area a uniqueness or even a certain identity. Furthermore, it may be seen as an illustration for the ambivalence of evil as mentioned by David Parkin in his Anthro- pology of Evil: ‘The essential contestability of notions of evil and the many perspectives on human maleficence and suffering point metaphysically in two main directions: imperfection and over-perfection, between which mankind tries to strike a balance’ (Parkin, 1985: 13). Apprecia- tions of the seaside-resort – and of other architectural eyesores as well – as an imperfect, or as an over-perfect, object often appear side by side: formulations such as ‘a handicapped beach’, ‘a gaping wound’ or ‘a monster’ are pointing to physical incompleteness, while Kaufmann’s and several others’ descriptions, on the contrary, emphasize the building’s strength and durability. The simultaneous attribution of imperfection and over-perfection translates combined feelings of admiration and repulsion towards an architectural object, which is publicly considered to be rejected but can be, simultaneously and unofficially, considered to have a certain appeal. Kurt Ott approaches the matter of destruction from a different perspective, although he also remembers very clearly that accidents happened out of ignorance. Nevertheless, this, he says, was not the main motive to stop elimination: Ott clearly recalls a meeting with students from Potsdam, probably in the late 1940s, which took place in Prora in the presence of Wilhelm Pieck, first president of the GDR. He himself had to lend a helping hand at this meeting and witnessed a discussion that, in his opinion, would have far reaching consequences for the future of Prora: . . . and then these students said: ‘Comrade Pieck, why does this have to be torn down, after all the Trans-Siberian Express, which the Czar built, still exists in Russia under the Communists . . .’ And then Mr Pieck went back home and nothing else was torn down, instead it was rebuilt . . . How easily things can change . . . Pieck was really quite a forgiving president, he must have really thought about it.8 It is not very relevant here, to consider to what extent the meeting with Wilhelm Pieck really influenced further decision-making. Much more than that, this quotation shows the wider implications evoked by the fate of the local building. Indeed, Ott touches upon themes that reach further than the pure demolition of certain blocks: a comparison with the

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remains of another totalitarian regime, the relation between Pieck and ‘the people’ as well as his own opinion about Pieck. In this explanation for Prora’s further destiny, Ott uses his personal experience as a starting point to place Prora in a broader, (inter)national framework. Nowadays, five of the original holiday blocks are still in a relatively good state but most of them are empty and their future is uncertain. In the 1990s, several small-scale initiatives came into being in Prora: a youth- and a family hostel, a skating hall, a theatre (all of them have since disappeared), workshops, museums, art galleries, second-hand shops and a disco. Nothing was done to revitalize the building however; indeed, it is still unsure how long the current tenants can stay there. The owner, the Federal Republic of Germany, is trying to sell the building but has experienced significant difficulty in finding an investor with enough financial capacity. The remains of destroyed blocks present a permanent threat to the rest of the building in the possibility of total demolition, which hangs like the sword of Damocles over the whole site. The ruins in the north display successive stages of decline, as if pointing to the possible future for the other five blocks. There are parts where paint is peeling off and windows are broken, blocks where most of the walls have been removed, skeletons without anything else, accumu- lations of large bricks and fragments with steel pins, and finally parts that have already been covered with earth. Although the building was listed for preservation in 1994, this is no guarantee for complete main- tenance (Ilyes, 1998: 307). Actually, the threat to the still existing parts is twofold: both progressive dilapidation and active destruction are possible destinies. The fear of the former is expressed in a constant watching of the state of the building, as expressed for example by Ursel Steinberg, a former teacher and municipal representative living in Prora since 1966: ‘Look at how the trees are already growing on the roofs. It’s getting more expensive for the investors, it continues to crumble and it’s still being wrecked. People take away the ornamental shrubbery, beauti- ful slates, the terraces . . .’ In short, a certain personal attachment to Prora appears in various stories about the ruins: a kind of admiration for the building that, steady as a rock, survived turbulent times and radical breaks; the occasion to evoke a sensible president who, apparently, stood close to the people; a sentiment of becoming accustomed over many years to a familiar environment. After almost 70 years, Prora has come to belong to the identity of this area. Talking about a possible elimination of the complete complex, Mrs Ott, Kurt Ott’s wife, simply says: ‘Actually, Prora doesn’t bother us, we would really miss it if it were to go. It belongs here’.9 We could go even further and see the prominent presence of scarred ruins in Prora as a nuance to the monumental, permanent and impressive character of the building, or even as a kind of ‘safety valve’.

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The affected remains seem a necessary condition for the preservation of the rest of the building: they point to the limits of its strength and durability, they emphasize its ephemeral quality, they show that it is possible to revolt against its presence. Ironically, the remains simultaneously point to its imperfection and over-perfection. The ruins embody Prora’s imperfection, but their raison d’être is its over- perfection; an over-sized character of the building, going ‘beyond the limits’ both literally and figuratively, makes this nuance or relativiza- tion indispensable.

THE DESIRE TO POSSESS As soon as the Berlin Wall was brought into fragmented form, it became a highly desirable item. This boom in demand was reflected in the Wall’s new economic value: a process of commoditization followed the fall of the Wall, as defined by Igor Kopytoff in his article ‘The Cultural Bio- graphy of Things: Commoditization as Process’ (1986). Following Kopytoff, the term ‘commodity’ refers to ‘a thing that has use value and that can be exchanged in a discrete transaction for a counterpart, the very fact of exchange indicating that the counterpart has, in the immedi- ate context, an equivalent value’. The ideal opposite type is an item that is ‘uncommon, incomparable, unique, singular, and therefore not exchangeable for anything else’ (Kopytoff, 1986: 68–9). In the introduction I mentioned my amazed reaction on seeing fragments of the Wall sold in the form of clip cards. This astonishment can be explained if we apply Kopytoff’s concepts to our specific case – indeed, it is partly due to the fact that we would not intuitively qualify the Wall as a commodity. In general, it is unusual for ‘the symbolic inventory of a society’ to be commoditized. Especially just after the fall, we still perhaps thought of the Wall as something uncommon, unique and singular, or at least as a so-called ‘terminal commodity’, that is: ‘in which further exchange is precluded by fiat’ (Kopytoff, 1986: 75). Nevertheless, the Wall had at least once been subject to commoditization, evidenced by the recorded production costs for each segment. To be precise, one segment of the so- called Grenzmauer 75 – erected in 1975 – code UL 12.11, 360 cm high, 120 cm wide, 12–22 cm thick, had a monetary value of exactly 359 GDR mark (Meyer, 2001). Whether the Wall could still be called a commodity at the time of its fall or not, it became subject to a process of commoditization as soon as pieces of it started to be sold. As early as half way through November 1989, the American multimillionaire Barry Stuppler had offered the GDR 50 million US dollars for the complete Wall (Thomsen, 2001). A few months later, on the occasion of a big auction in Monaco, the firm Lelé Berlin Wall sold 81 segments for an average price of 20,000 DM.

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(10,000 €). The commoditization of the Wall also appears in the merchan- dizing of smaller fragments by Volker Pawlowski, the inventor of the clip card. He still sells small pieces for a few euros – tens of thousands of them every year since 1990. As he says, it is impossible to imagine Berlin tourism today without his clip card: ‘It’s the same with pieces of the Wall as it is with the Berlin Bear – you can’t imagine the local souvenir shop without some’ (in: Schubert, 1999). Finally, the most numerous, but economically speaking not the most interesting pieces, have to be mentioned: tons of Wall were reduced to rubble and recycled in road- building programmes. These pieces, without murals, mainly belonged to the hinterland Wall. ‘Due to the top quality mixture of concrete and bitumen and to the attractive price of 23 DM. per ton of granules, demand was high’ (Feversham and Schmidt, 1999: 70). Nominally, the Wall was the property of the GDR, who commissioned the state-owned import–export ﬁrm Limex-Bau to do the market- ing. Sales would raise short-term funds for both medical and environmental concerns and for historic preservation. Nevertheless, the chaos following the fall of the Wall allowed many people to appropriate segments – some people, who directly recognized a gap in the market, built up sufﬁcient supplies for the next decades. A similar transitory period occurred in Prora after 1945 and gave many people the oppor- tunity to take part in dismantlement of Prora. But the situation was very different in 1991: objects from Prora were inaccessible to people who had lived or worked next to, or in the building, for many years. Not only did the new occupants keep the site under their control, but – after appro- priating the most valuable objects – they also burnt down or threw away most of what was left. Nowadays, a minuscule percentage of the objects from the GDR period are for sale every weekend in a nearby second- hand shop. Another small percentage is displayed in the NVA-Museum (one of the three Prora museums) – reducing any personal experience of these show-cased remains to a purely visual one. Most objects from the GDR period, however, did not survive the spring-cleaning of 1991. Harro Schack, formerly employed in Prora, now working in Museum Prora and in the second-hand shop, recalls the situation in 1991 after all divisions and military academies had left. Apparently, things were sorted out very quickly and either brought away or destroyed.

They started on it right after reuniﬁcation. One day – everything was just lying there – I came home and my wife asked: ‘What? Didn’t you put anything aside for us?’ ‘No,’ I replied, because everything had already been divided up, wood and metal and everything. ‘You have to go back tomorrow ﬁrst thing and look around,’ she said . . . That was 1991 and we are still searching!

Recalling these events still provokes deep indignation. Ursel Steinberg,

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for example, deplores what happened and crystallizes her regrets in the unforgettable image of pianos that were simply thrown from the ﬁfth ﬂoor into big containers. Kurt Ott’s brother, who was working in Prora at that time, had to burn masses of things for many days:

First of all came them from over there, the West Germans, and they pocketed the best things: linens, carpets, everything . . . the ﬁnest, the newest . . . All the rest was burnt . . . Mountains of it, for days on end things were burnt, brand-new things, mountains of ashes . . . they were like madmen, grabbing and dismantling things and for days they just burnt stuff . . . And with so much poverty in Germany! They could at least have given it to the many poor people . . . My brother could only shake his head and [he] said: ‘You’ll never believe what we are burning up there! Such a shame!’

The brothers Ott are overwhelmed with incomprehension in the face of so much waste as well as the inequality between those who appropri- ated the nicest things and the poor people who did not get anything. Not only were people not allowed to take things away, but they had also no possibility to buy things. A local newspaper reports that a filmmaker wanted to buy old projectors, but the financial management in Rostock told him that it was state property. The projectors wound up on the scrap heap – this seems to be symptomatic of what happened to military estate on Rügen in general (Der Rüganer, 1994). Those active in the plunder of 1991 are clearly identified in Kurt Ott’s account: ‘them from over there, the West Germans’. Not only is there an undeniable incomprehension between East and West, but former residents and workers have also been, in this context – and contrary to the situation in 1945 – relegated to the status of powerless witnesses, condemned to watch other people carrying out massive destruction. Puzzled and indignant, some of them try to understand the plundering, destruction or rejection of the former occupants’ remains as something inherent with any change of regime. The enormous frustrations provoked by this insensitive disposal and what for many was a massive waste, can further be explained by the fact that East German material culture played a very important role in the expression of an East German identity after the Wende. Paul Betts has devoted an extensive article to the analysis of this phenomenon, titled: ‘The Twilight of the Idols. East German Memory and Material Culture’. He writes that: ‘ex-GDR consumer objects . . . have emerged as new historical markers of socialist experience and identity. . . . Where GDR goods once served as a source of perennial dissatisfaction and embar- rassment, they later became emblems of pride and nostalgia’ (Betts, 2000: 734, 741). This is all the more relevant, as the expression of socialist cultural identity in the GDR had shifted, by the late 1950s, from the realms of housing, architecture and city planning to commodities and

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domestic spaces. Everyday objects have, since that time, ‘assumed their role as new privileged sites of emotion and memory, narrative production and unbetrayed intimacy’ (Betts, 2000: 744). Although Betts’ comments are focused on GDR material culture, it also reminds us, in more general terms, that ideas about the (un)desir- ability of speciﬁc material culture are very subject to change, particularly in periods of political or cultural transition. Objects that ﬁrst embodied dissatisfaction may suddenly embody a valuable stability in times of change and uncertainty. Even in relation to the Berlin Wall, Polly Feversham and Leo Schmidt have suggested a concept of emotional comfort and quoted Auguste Comte: ‘. . . our intellectual equilibrium is largely and primarily derived from the fact that material objects with which we come into contact every day do not change, or only do so to a slight degree, and offer us a picture of permanence and constancy’ (Feversham and Schmidt, 1999: 124). The desire to be surrounded and reassured by the objects from a vanished past is particularly striking in the NVA-Museum, with its redundant and saturating display of souvenirs from various military academies.

POSSESSING IN ORDER TO TAKE POSSESSION It was mentioned before that many people wanted to acquire a fragment of Berlin Wall as a historic relic – a memento, or souvenir. The Wall became a historic relic, not in a museological context, but mainly in the private sphere, as many people displayed fragments of it on their mantel- piece. Two conditions were necessary to the privatization of this well- known public symbol: first, ‘. . . the events it witnessed can be viewed vicariously from a position of safety and distance’, and second ‘their importance lies in the fact that we can interact with the past by both personalizing and actually handling them’ (Feversham and Schmidt, 1999: 128). In other words, the new, private context in which the fragments are brought takes away their threatening aura and offers the possibility of a tactile, individual experience. Thus the exorcism of the Berlin Wall – and possibly other architectural eyesores as well – did not only occur through its collective dismemberment and appropriation, but most importantly through the tactile and individual experience that the possession of fragments made possible. When people own the remains individually, the latter can come to ‘serve as repositories of private histories and sentimental reflections’ (Betts, 2000). In Prora, this phenomenon finds a perfect illustration in Mrs Ott’s comments about her Prora tea towels (complete with initials of the national-socialist Deutsche Arbeitsfront) inherited from her mother-in-law. Indeed, what Prora’s remains evoke to some, does not necessarily have political conno- tations – while the same remains for others are inherently political.

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Talking about the tea towels, Mrs Ott first mentions their excellent quality – something unequalled nowadays. It brings her to widen the scope and describe Prora in the same terms: See, nowadays everything is worn out, these little cloths they use as towels . . . That was so fine! It’s lovely, isn’t it? This quality! All of Prora consists of the same quality . . . All of the other houses will fall down before Prora does. When her grandchildren started to study and she wished them good luck, she wanted to give them one of these towels. Her grandson took one, but her granddaughter refused, as she feared that other people in the student residence would perhaps not have such an apolitical view on the three DAF-initials. When a three-dimensional object cannot be owned physically, then stories, anecdotes and reflections about the remains can be a means to take possession of it and of the history it embodies in a more symbolic way; this was illustrated by the various accounts about Prora’s ruins. Another way to take possession of Prora is to reduce the place to its own icon and by that means, to integrate it into something completely new. This is exemplified, notably, by Prora baseball-caps, on which the building appears as a simplified picture with a sulky sun as an ironic addition. Or, like in the logo of Museum Prora, the building is almost unrecognizably blended with a rainbow. Finally, the place is even further disconnected from its history in the playful naming of the Proraner disco: Diskoloss, derived from the denomination ‘Der Koloss von Rügen’ (Figure 4). Posters, matchboxes, T-shirts have been used to promote Diskoloss, whose etymologic and historic origin becomes, in the plethora of advertising, hardly traceable.

FIGURE 4 Prora reduced to its own icon. Photograph: Mélanie van der Hoorn

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What makes architectural remains particularly attractive and suitable intermediaries between large-scale history and individual experience, is the fact they are, in terms of Susan Stewart, ‘souvenirs of death’, that is: ‘They mark the horrible transformation of meaning into materiality more than they mark, as other souvenirs do, the transformation of materiality into meaning’ (Stewart, 1984: 140). I would like to add that this peculiar character is the core relevance of architectural remains, as their possessors are left completely free to transform the remaining materiality into a completely new meaning. In that sense, some of the most interesting Prora objects nowadays are to be found in Klaus Böllhoff’s atelier, an artist who came to Prora at the end of 2000 together with Rosa Russo, a photographer. At the entrance of his workshop, named Proradies, Böllhoff has displayed a whole collection of works of art based on Prora (Figure 5). He is not just a normal painter; he is also a word painter. The starting point for his work about Prora is always a word, distilled from a personal experience of, or with, the place. The name of his workshop, Proradies, gets its full signiﬁcance when pronounced in English: it is not just the two German words ‘Prora’ and ‘Paradies’ blended together, suggesting that Prora is a paradise. It is also ‘Prora dies’: Prora needs to die, to be a paradise. Here we may recognize a combination of repulsion and admiration as mentioned before.

FIGURE 5 Prora artworks by Klaus Böllhoff. Photograph: Mélanie van der Hoorn

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Böllhoff’s artworks hardly need any explanation to get a deeper signifi- cance; they are in themselves carriers of deeper meanings, perhaps because they are, actually, words in a three-dimensional form and most of them are made of Prora material such as old curtains or floor-clothes. Other examples are: Proramus (we, the people from Prora), Prora et Labora, Proradox, Proraletarier aller Länder, Insproration, Prorakel or Proradiator. Böllhoff’s work does not just consist of the capricious lines of thought of a highly imaginative artist; it is a well-considered reflection on, and interaction with the site, that he is sharing with a large public. When Böllhoff and Russo arrived, they organized a cleaning day: Prora Putzen, for which they invited a whole range of people: friends, neigh- bours, politicians, journalists. The place had to be cleared before something new could come into being. A large Prora Putzen wall segment, displayed near the entrance, remains from this cleaning action. Wonder- ing what he would give people as a small thanks for their help on that day, Böllhoff decided to give them a small fragment of Prora with Prora Putzen as a signature – an interestingly symbolic echo and physical resemblance to the dispersal of the Wall fragments. One room, however, as Rosa Russo explained to me, remained very problematic in Proradies.10 She and Böllhoff later baptised it Konti, because it was, in their opinion, contaminated: it had been a medical room during NVA-times and stank terribly. Russo is not the only one to report about a weird ‘Prora-smell’, which is, apparently, part of the Prora experience. In a newspaper article about the former youth hostel, located in the same block as the Walter Ulbrichtheim, one can read the following description of a ‘total Prora experience’:

It stinks of FDGB, the coffee tastes of it. Nevertheless, the hotel can be recommended, or perhaps because of it. Ordinary citizens can complain here about the hideous things which ten years ago decorated their own bedroom: eggshell-coloured wardrobes, art prints on press board. That’s the Prora principle: your feelings rush delightfully from enthusiasm to shudder as much as on the roller coaster. (Rehlein and Härtel, 1999)

Unfortunately, the article does not mention how the FDGB or Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund – the GDR holiday organization – smells. Perhaps it is the smell of Wofasept, another name given to the ‘Prora- smell’ on a website about GDR-related themes.11 One can read about a typical GDR-product for personal hygiene and – with a slightly different chemical formula – about an all-purpose cleaner with exactly the same name! The smell of Wofasept is described as a stale, suffocating vapour. This was not the opinion of the producers in Wolfen, as we can read in the advertisement from 1951: it shows a ﬁctive woman, who is the pride of the factory where she works, because she proves that it is not just a

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man’s thing to find better and new production methods. Nevertheless, despite her ‘almost masculine’ decisive force, she manages to keep her feminine appeal thanks to Wofasept, the nice, new antiseptic. Briefly: ‘Wofasept-spezial leaves you feeling fresh, clean and germ-free. The modern woman should always have it at home.’ A comment on the website states that many women were using Wofasept for want of anything better. Whether it was the smell of Wofasept or not that contaminated Böllhoff’s workshop, if I believe Rosa Russo, it was extremely difficult, necessitating the employment of almost magical skills, to get rid of it. She recalls how she and Klaus Böllhoff met a man on the occasion of a later Prora Putzen: a professional cleaning person, but also in a symbolic sense: ‘He also cleans symbolically.’ He spent hours in the contaminated room – where other people could not stand for more than a few minutes – scratched the floor and the walls, took samples, mixed them with other liquids . . . and finally managed to get rid of the smell! The whole description sounds like a secular exorcism. With the bottles the cleaning expert had used, Klaus Böllhoff created his work Prorasept (Figure 6). Rosa Russo concludes: ‘And when they are reopened, the Prora spirit will come out’. Böllhoff has chosen to live and work in, and with, Prora – he has opted for a direct confrontation and fight with the ‘colossus’. His objects are interesting because they are the direct offspring of an individual experience – a combination of fascination and sober mindedness, interest and humour, straightforwardness and subtlety – out of which the artist creates something new that he is sharing with others. His objects are made of Prora remains and some of them, even literally, embody something that happened in, and to, Prora, for example, Prora Putzen and Prorasept. With, or in, these objects, Böllhoff – or his offici- ator, the ‘symbolic cleaner’ – really faces the colossus and articulates (his) life in, and with, Prora. The example of Prorasept shows how many different levels of experience can be associated with such an object: the direct reference to a famous GDR product, Wofasept, and the range of cultural meanings connected to it, as expressed in the advertisement; its olfactory experience, that probably all people who ever lived or worked there will remember as an essential element in the ‘Prora experience’; the purification ritual carried out in Böllhoff’s workshop and the fear of an eventual come-back if anybody would dare to open the bottles.

CONCLUSION Beyond the relevance of destruction in itself I have drawn attention to the relationship between architectural remains and the whole object they used to constitute. Still, the remains can also start to lead a life of

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FIGURE 6 ‘Prorasept’ by Klaus Böllhoff. Photograph: Mélanie van der Hoorn

their own. After a building has been dismantled, its pieces can continue to refer to its history – at the same time, individuals can and do transform and reinterpret them. As such, the pieces of dismembered constructions constitute very relevant intermediaries between history and personal experience. Architecture can function as a symbolic marker for a whole community: groups of people can project their claims, hopes or frustrations with regard to the development of their environment onto the fate of a three-dimensional object. Changes to a building can visualize power relationships, radical breaks, and ﬁelds of tension. But, if most individuals are not in the position to alter entire buildings and are thus often

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condemned to witness these changes, the situation is totally different with remains of buildings: they allow further concretization of abstract themes and large-scale phenomena as well as further individualization through personal handling. As exempliﬁed by the Berlin Wall and Prora, even if they have their origin in one and the same building, remains can be handled and interpreted differently by various people. Their circulation and the passage from one owner to another is thus charged with meaning; stories told about these objects are means to give sense to a more complex history, whereby the objects function as valuable intermediaries. The making, circulation and recycling of objects enable a local and personal experience of Prora. In the anecdotes told about these remains, Prora does not at all appear as the embodiment of perverted dictator- ships or a military megalomania. It is important to recall here, that the national-socialists never put Prora in use: except for its construction, there was no national-socialist history in Prora. During the GDR period, people in Prora belonged to a certain elite; these people will thus also not recall Prora as something negative (Ilyes, 1998: 304). Nevertheless ‘non-Proraners’ started to invent myths about Prora and refer to it in increasingly negative terms – which can be partly explained by its 40 years of history as a no-go area and the subsequent mystery and ignorance surrounding the site. Whatever kind of uncanny aura has been attributed to Prora as a mysterious, negative or haunted place, the biography of its remains embodies quite a different signiﬁcance. There is no exorcism of Prora’s remains occurring here: the remains have never been evil in themselves and people in Prora who handle them, own them and talk about them do not express repulsion or disgust towards them. At most, other people, mainly outsiders, can attribute to the objects an evil character for what they represent in their opinion. Thus it is more correct to say that in the biography of these remains which includes their appropriation, circulation and integration into another context, the original site of Prora is dissociated from the evil that people have afterwards attributed to it: remains are not exorcized; they are exorcizing.

Notes 1. See: http://www.die-insel-ruegen.de/html/regionen/prorer_wiek.htm 2. See: http://www.cnn.com/specials/2000/germany/stories/where.isthe.wall/ 3. Segments with their actual locations are listed on several websites, for example: http://www.berlinwall.ws/berlinwall/guide/berlinwall_us.htm or http://www.time.com/time/daily/special/photo/berlin2/2.html On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Wall, the Berliner Morgenpost published a series of 18 articles, entitled ‘Spur der Steine’, about the fate of various segments spread around the world. 4. See: http://www.berlinwall.ws/berlinwall/guide/berlinwall_us.htm 5. See: http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/artcollection/exhibitions/august/story. htm

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6. See: http://www.time.com/time/daily/special/photo/berlin2/4.html 7. Mr Kaufmann, guided tour Museum Prora, 2 May 2002. 8. Interview with Kurt Ott, 5 May 2002. All other statements by Kurt Ott come from the same source. 9. Mrs Ott during an interview with Kurt Ott, 5 May 2002. All other statements by Mrs Ott come from the same source. 10. Rosa Russo in an interview with Klaus Böllhoff, 4 May 2002. All other statements by Rosa Russo come from the same source. 11. See: http://www.ddr-im-www.de/Berichte/MWulf/Prora/3.htm

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Newspaper articles Der Rüganer, (1994) ‘Gruseln und Zähneknirschen’, 23 November. Knöfel, Ulrike (2000) ‘Surfen vor Hitlers Bettenburg’, Der Spiegel 45. Mikuteit, Hanna-Lotte (1994) ‘Hitlers “Bad der 20,000”. Doch niemand mag investieren’, Hamburger Abendblatt, 8 March. Nickel, Marlies and Spitza, Oliver (1994) ‘Die unendliche Geschichte von Prora’, Ostsee Zeitung, 17 November. Rehlein, Susann and Härtel, Christian (1999) ‘Miami auf Rügen’, Das Magazin 7. Schubert, Peter (1999) ‘Die Mauer als Massenware. Ab fünf Mark sind Sie dabei: Mauerspecht hat kleine Bröckchen und ganze Segmente im Angebot’, Berliner Morgenpost, 22 May. Thomsen, Jan (2001) ‘Fleischers Mission. Ein “Mauerspecht” kaufte 1990 vier Segmente und will sie wieder am Potsdamer Platz aufstellen’, Berliner Zeitung, 14 August.

MÉLANIE VAN DER HOORN (1975) studied Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Since 2000 she has been working on her PhD at Utrecht University, ‘Indispensable eyesores. An anthropology of undesired architecture’ with various cases in Austria, Germany, Hungary and Bosnia- Herzegovina. Address: Dorpsstraat 172 2391 CH Hazerswoude-dorp, The Nether- lands. [email: [email protected]]

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