Berlin Chapter Formatted

GLOBAL HISTORY OF GLOBAL CITIES October 31, 2016 Sebastian Schmidt Fellow, Weatherhead Initiative on Global History PhD Candidate, History, Theory & Criticism, MIT Architecture [email protected] Note This paper is part of a larger project studying the relationship between WWII and cities. Specifically, I look at the ways in which urban thinking changed in response to the global scale of the war, and develop an approach of writing post-WWII urban history as global history. This paper uses the case of West Berlin to address these issues. On October 31, before the paper discussion, I will give a brief introduction explaining some of the historiographical stakes of the project. 1 Draft – do not cite or circulate Schmidt INTRODUCTION Fig. 1. Fred Thieler, Rotierend, 1959. Fred Thieler used only four colors for his 1959 painting Rotierend (Rotating)—red, white, black, and blue. (Fig. 1) The colorful contrasts, especially between the black and the brighter white and red, play an important role in revealing the mechanics of the painting’s production. Only the blue has largely sunk into the background, emerging in a few spots as a mere trace of a former 2 Draft – do not cite or circulate Schmidt participant in this labyrinthian discovery of the canvas. There is complexity at play in the relationship between color and the explorative—that is, rotating—means of its distribution. The painter’s actions on the canvas seem to work against the distinct presence of color, but they are also rendered all the more visible through the color contrasts that emerge. Color and motion are here fake opposites in that they don’t struggle with each other for domination of the canvas, but are instead intertwined in a struggle which, if it continued, has the potential to erase both of them. In other words, the struggle is not so much between color and motion, but it has engulfed them. Conflict, then, is not unfolding within the boundaries of the canvas, but it is produced out of the exact moment at which the activity of painting was ended—resulting in a powerful moment of suspense. Tension is here produced temporally, not physically. Thieler had studied painting in Munich after WWII, and in the early 1950s became a member of the group ZEN 49 that had made it its goal to educate the public about the merits of non- figurative art. These artists were painting in an abstract style associated with the movement of informalism (Informel in German) that could be traced back to the French art critic Michel Tapié who advocated for non-geometric abstract art. For example, informalism was distinct from the precise execution of geometric forms as in the works of the Dutch De Stijl movement or the German Bauhaus tradition by artists such as Piet Mondrian and László Moholy-Nagy, respectively. Instead, Thieler and like-minded painters were seeking opportunities for gestural expression of the artist’s existential take on reality, and of their experience of the act of painting itself. Needless to say, this work shared some of these tenets with abstract expressionism, and the influence of Jackson Pollock in particular was felt clearly in the early 1960s.1 Thieler himself wrote about non-figurative art that to me, being a painter means leading the existence of a contemporary who spends the majority of his life with the attempt to represent in painting—or to gain through painting—the impulses, stimulations and depressions, intuitions and calculating considerations, and reactions based on individual experiences as well as chains of experiences.2 1 Angela Schneider, "Berlin Nach Dem Krieg," in Berlin Tokyo, Tokyo Berlin: Die Kunst Zweier Städte, ed. Angela Schneider, et al. (Ostfildern, Berlin: Hatje Cantz; Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen, 2006), 208. 2 “Maler sein heißt für mich, die Existenz eines Zeitgenossen zu führen, der den Hauptteil seines Daseins in dem Versuch verbringt, die Impulse, Anregungen wie Depressionen, Intuitionen wie berechnenden Überlegungen, Reaktionen aus Einzelerlebnissen wie Erlebnisketten aufzuzeigen - oder im Malvorgang zu gewinnen.” Fred Thieler, Fred Thieler: Monographie Und Werkverzeichnis, Bilder Von 1942-1993, ed. Andrea Firmenich, Jörn Merkert, and Sigrid Melchior (Köln: Wienand, 1995), 70, my translation. 3 Draft – do not cite or circulate Schmidt Thieler here positions painting as both the result of experience, and the production of it. Thieler joined the faculty of the Universität der Künste (Berlin University of the Arts, then Hochschule für Bildende Künste) in 1959, four years after the architect Karl Otto had assumed stewardship of the institution. Otto was a follower of the Bauhaus maxims of integrating architecture with the arts, arts with crafts, and craft-based design with industrial manufacturing processes. He favored abstract forms of expression and representation, and the appointment of professors such as Thieler, informalist painter Hann Trier, and abstract sculptor Bernhard Heiliger during his tenure is a testament to this artistic direction. Otto’s directorship of the university thus seemed to be a decisive turning point in Berlin’s iteration of a debate that was a widely and internationally shared phenomenon of the postwar era—the debate over whether the future of art was to be found in abstraction or realism.3 Both the aspirational purity of artistic expression described in Thieler’s statement above, as well as the ideological rejection of socialist realism (and the identification of realism with communist leanings in general), helped gain momentum for abstract art in West Germany, and West Berlin. 3 Otto replaced the expressionist painter Karl Hofer as director of the university. Hofer’s resignation had come as the final step in a bitter feud with Will Grohmann, art critic and professor of art history at the University of the Arts. Grohmann was a staunch defender of abstract art and supporter of abstract painters such as Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902-1968), who had himself been one of Hofer’s students in Berlin. 4 Draft – do not cite or circulate Schmidt 5 Draft – do not cite or circulate Schmidt Fig. 2. Georg Baselitz, Pandämonium II, 1962. In the early 1960s, a different frustration with abstraction arose amongst younger artists; they were wary of abstraction’s capacity to obscure history, and to enable their parents’ and teachers’ generation to forget about the dark pasts of national socialism and war. Georg Baselitz was studying painting in East Berlin when his views opposing socialism forced him to continue his studies in West Berlin in 1957, and to relocate permanently the following year. With Trier and Thieler amongst his teachers, Baselitz gained a deep insight into abstract artistic practices and theories, and then resisted them with great specificity. Together with his colleague and fellow exile Eugen Schönebeck, Baselitz exhibited work that caused a great stir, in particular his— appropriately titled—Pandämonium I and II. The exaggerated presence of phalluses in this and other works led to moral outrage and confiscations—precisely the types of responses Baselitz needed to prove his point. His work speaks to what he saw as the great hypocrisy of a nation that could get over the Holocaust, but could not get over sexually explicit art.4 Baselitz’s work was indebted to the German expressionist traditions and its focus on the human figure, using it as privileged form for the artistic expression of discontent and rage. Disfigured bodies and body parts, sexualized in grotesque ways, appear to emerge from darkness, absurd and haunting at the same time. The work of Thieler and Baselitz—and that of many other artists active in postwar Berlin—is easily and rather effortlessly assigned to two opposing sides of an ideological conflict. The narrative of abstraction versus figuration is seductive, and it is not inaccurate. However, looking at these two artists, things get more complicated if we shift our focus away from what is seen to what is at stake, for these are not the same things. For Thieler, his painting is a vehicle of expression and a production of experiences, the success of which can best be measured by looking at the materiality of painting as witness to its production, rather than by looking for a mimetic reference to reality. Baselitz’s work is an expression of his deep discontent with the social status quo, not showing what he would like to see in society, but identifying the obstacles for honestly aligning art with national identity—depicted as a demonic scene of dismemberment that is out of touch with its own past. Both painters are concerned with relative inadequacies of 4 Schneider, "Berlin Nach Dem Krieg," 209. 6 Draft – do not cite or circulate Schmidt conventions of representation, and are exploring different avenues to address those concerns. This, however, questions the usefulness of slotting their work into conflicting positions on a spectrum from figuration to abstraction. Similar to the brief analysis of color and the mechanics of painting in Thieler’s Rotierend above, we may ask where the assumed conflict is actually located. Is it situated between these paintings as positions in an argument, or does it engulf them? This is not to say that artists did not have clearly articulated positions vis-à-vis the roles of art—evident especially in their membership in agenda-driven collectives. However, characterizing postwar artistic production in Berlin as the outcome of larger ideological—even geopolitical—conflicts, and organizing it around corresponding trajectories, runs the risk of silencing many voices in what was more than a two- way street between East and West, socialism and capitalism, figuration and abstraction. This discussion served to show how a historical metanarrative of ideological conflict in Berlin may not be adequate for capturing the ways in which artists challenged representational conventions. This chapter brings together different moments from the planning and imagination of post-WWII West Berlin to similarly question the city’s location in presumed ideological conflicts that very easily push its historical narrative into teleologies of destruction and reconstruction, anti-fascism and anti-communism, and the all-encompassing analyses of Cold War geopolitics.

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