City of Displacement: on the Unsteadiness of Berlin Sites and Sights1

WEIMARPOLIS, Multi-disciplinary Journal of Urban Theory and Practice Vol. 1, Issue 2, pp. 53-64, ISSN 1869-1692 City of Displacement: On the unsteadiness of Berlin sites and sights1 Marc Schalenberg Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies Email: [email protected] Abstract This essay starts from the observation that the city of Berlin, throughout the 20th century, has been particularly prone to shift buildings in their entirety or in parts to other sites. These shiftings have to be seen against their specific backgrounds, such as war destruction, technological refurbishment, myth making, symbolic or memory politics by the respective political regime, resuming the “spirit” or name of a place for reasons of identification or marketing. But beyond those, the disposition to translocate can be understood as symptomatic in a city whose narratives, images and practices have been explicitly oriented towards the “new”, “unsteady” and “shiftable”. Attempts to remove material objects – not less than their meanings – are to be found in completely diverse political and cultural contexts. It seems an interesting challenge, therefore, to transcend the level of individual instances of displacements and try to test some concepts recently suggested in Urban Studies, like “habitus” or “intrinsic logic” for Berlin. Zusammenfassung Der Beitrag geht von der in Berlin vor allem im 20. Jahrhundert auffallenden Bereitschaft aus, Bauwerke oder Teile von ihnen an andere Orte der Stadt zu versetzen. Jenseits der konkreten Hintergründe (z.B. Kriegszerstörung, technische Modernisierung, „Mythenbildung“, Symbol- und Erinnerungspolitik des jeweiligen politischen Regimes, Anknüpfen an den „Geist“ eines Ortes bzw. Namens aus identifikatorischen oder kommerziellen Gründen) wird diese Disposition als symptomatisch verstanden für eine Stadt, deren Narrative, (Selbst-) Bilder und Praktiken stark am „Neuen“, „Unsteten“ und „Verrückbaren“ orientiert waren und sind. Da sich Bemühungen um die Translozierung von materiellen Objekten - und damit von Bedeutungen – in ganz verschiedenen politischen und kulturellen Kontexten finden lassen, scheint es eine reizvolle Herausforderung, die reine Fall- und Ereignisebene zu überschreiten und etwa die in der neueren Stadtforschung vorgeschlagenen Konzepte wie „Habitus“ oder „Eigenlogik“ für die „Verschiebungen“ der deutschen Hauptstadt auszutesten. Keywords: Berlin, capital cities, shifted monuments and buildings, symbolic politics, memory politics, intrinsic logic/”habitus” of cities, materiality 53 Copyright © WEIMARPOLIS 2009 M. Schalenberg: City of Displacement One of the recurring topoi in descriptions and interpretations of Berlin is the protean and unfinished state of that city, irrespective of the changing political and cultural context. Being chronically “on the move”, more oriented towards the future than the past, is certainly an undue personification of a cityscape containing about 900 square kilometres and 3.4 million people, but it appeared and appears plausible just the same. As a city of restless “change”, of “becoming” (Karl Scheffler), of new scenes, Berlin has laid claim to be part of a global metropolitan (or Weltstadt) discourse for well over a century now. In fact, the notion of creative unsteadiness and free development has constructed an identity in its own right, noticeably more so than in more “established” metropolises, producing a plethora of narratives, slogans and images. It has also – so this paper will argue – found an expression in the city’s physical space, which strikingly often saw the translocation of buildings and monuments, and not only for reasons of engineering problems with the notoriously unstable sandy and watery soil. Alert to the importance of both politics and culture for such translocations, this essay aims to build upon the by now extensive literature on memory politics (Erinnerungspolitik, Geschichtspolitik), which has gained attention and plausibility in post-reunification Berlin (see Ladd 1998; Huyssen 2003; Nolan 2004; Frank 2009). It deserves to be complemented by recent attempts by urban sociologists to ascertain the “habitus” (Rolf Lindner, Lutz Musner) or the “intrinsic logic” (Helmut Berking, Martina Löw) of cities. Besides, more culturalist approaches assessing the implications of translocations for the city’s image/s and identity/ies should be heeded in their essentially constructivist understanding of the interplay of various practices, discourses and interests (see Biskup & Schalenberg 2008; Färber 2005). Focussing on material manifestations, this paper finally wants to take up the recently renewed interest in “things” and “evidence” throughout the social and cultural sciences (see e.g. Böhme 2006; Miller 2006; Harrasser et al. 2009). Within its confines, however, neither extensions nor the “mere” demolition of buildings or monuments and possible replacement by new ones (of which there were many) can be considered in the following. As a sort of running theme throughout urban history, and emphatically so in modern times, such instances of conversion or Denkmalsturz are less specific than the phenomenon to be considered here. So, what fruits can a history of conspicuous displacements in Berlin reveal? There are a number of interesting cases for the premature dismantling of public buildings in early modern times, like the fortifications devised by Memhardt in the mid-17th century, which soon became an unwanted barrier for the westward expansion of the city from the later 17th century onwards; or the failed mintage tower (Münzturm) conceived by Schlüter as a new landmark in the early 18th century which eventually lost him his job as royal architect. Ephemeral buildings for official court events, such as marriages or coronation ceremonies 54 WEIMARPOLIS, Multi-disciplinary Journal of Urban Theory and Practice Vol. 1, Issue 2, pp. 53-64, Copyright © WEIMARPOLIS 2009 M. Schalenberg: City of Displacement were another case in point. But for reasons both of technological means and of political culture, the deliberate translocation of entire building structures was still unheard of. The trail was blazed more effectively with the dismantling of Schadow’s Quadriga on top of the then recently constructed Brandenburg Gate by French troops in 1806; especially Vivant Denon, Napoleon’s influential art councillor and “eye”, contrived this coup for the Louvre, where the massive sculpture was sent by ship Fig. 1: Quadriga on top of Brandenburg Gate (Cullen & Kieling 1999, p.41ff.). Maybe no other single item encapsulated the reverse of fortunes in the Napoleonic Wars more aptly than the return of the Quadriga in June 1814. Hailed as an essential symbol of victory (and hence no longer of peace, as intended before), it was to play a pivotal role in Prussian and later German history and mythology. The female figure acting as central charioteer of the sculpture was given an additional staff with an iron cross encircled by an oak wreath and topped by the Prussian eagle with crown, all of which were designed by Schinkel [Fig. 1]. Apart from everything else, this was a major leap forward for the capital city of Berlin, as a politically coded urban space; the experience and very possibility of removing crucial parts of that space, in any case, was to have repercussions. The 19th century saw a burgeoning of memorial culture, which also manifested itself in a growing number of monuments in public urban space. The identity politics of the Prussian monarchy proved largely defining for Berlin up to the First World War. It is revealing in social historical terms how the number and range of individuals remembered by monuments expanded: from members of the royal family via the higher echelons of the military and statesmen to authors, scientists and scholars, engineers and beyond in the 20th century; their selection and positioning often proved highly Fig. 2: Royal Colonnades controversial.2 Once in place, however, a translocation was a rarity. For much of the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the frenetically growing city of Berlin, capital of the German Kaiserreich since 1871, resembled a single construction site, with large-scale interventions in its physical appearance above and below ground, notably for traffic improvements or extensions, including manifold demolitions of historical structures. One of the more complex translocations in that context was the shifting of the Royal Colonnades (Königskolonnaden), a representative structure of 55 WEIMARPOLIS, Multi-disciplinary Journal of Urban Theory and Practice Vol. 1, Issue 2, pp. 53-64, Copyright © WEIMARPOLIS 2009 M. Schalenberg: City of Displacement colonnades designed by Karl von Gontard errrected in the late 1770s. As part of the ambitious measures to turn Alexanderplatz into a truly modern traffic and business hub, they were displaced in their entirety in 1910 to adorn – without any obvious bearing to the site – the new Kleistpark in Schöneberg, itself a replacement for the Botanic Garden, which was about to be transferred to more spacious premises. The Prussian superior Court of Justice, whose stately neo-Baroque building adjacent to Kleistpark was completed in 1913, may have borne a vague stylistic resemblance to the colonnades, but it has remained a curious juxtaposition ever since [Fig. 2]. An even bolder step was the displacement of the Victory Column (Siegessäule) by the Nazi government in 1938-39. A monument to the three successful Prussian “unification wars” against Denmark (in 1864), Austria (1866) and France

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