Tracesdavid Hasselhoff to Leftist Activists

Scott Krause Learning From David Hasselhof: Te Frustrated Desire for Historical Authenticity in Berlin Opponents to the disfigurement of the East Side Gallery ranged from tracesDavid Hasselhoff to leftist activists. March 2013 protests gave “the Hoff” his largest audience since the early 1990s. (Photo by Scott Krause.) On March 17, 2013, Berlin’s legendary party crowd rose unusually early to attend a political demonstration. More than 10,000 people gathered to protest the partial destruction of the “East Side Gallery”—the longest remaining, art-bedecked section of the Berlin Wall—to make way for an upscale apartment complex. Protesters could count on prominent celebrity support from David Hasselhof. Addressing the crowd in front of a counter-culture club, with a slurred speech denouncing the sell-out of culture, “the Hof” found his bearings 263 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History Since the late 1960s, GDR Plattenbauten have occupied Fischerinsel, for which the Old Town was razed. (Photo courtesy of Manfred Brückels.) when he capped his address with an acapella rendition of his German reunifcation-era hit, “I’ve Been Looking for Freedom.” Te alliance between a 1980s American consumer culture’s ambassador and lefist critics of gentrifcation, to the joy of thousands of youths born afer the fall of the Wall, made the protest both ironic and bizarre. In farcical fashion, the debate on the East Side Gallery highlights a broader debate taking place currently in Berlin: what place should the city assign to the visible traces of the twentieth century in its cityscape? Te stance of Berlin’s city administration on the future of the East Side Gallery is emblematic of the sorry and confused relationship of Berlin with its own past. Te same local politicians who rushed to voice their support for the East Side Gallery’s preservation had earlier given a building permit for the apartment complex in order to facilitate community development. Granted, coming to terms with the twentieth century cannot be easy in Berlin. Te Holocaust was engineered and coordinated from its premises and World War II was unleashed by orders signed there, ultimately consuming the city as its last European battlefeld. During the course of the twentieth century, no less than fve diferent political regimes attempted to leave their imprint on the city. Kaiser Wilhelm II tried to counter explosive economic and urban growth with pompous displays of imperial splendor, such as the 264 Scott Krause The longest-remaining, art-bedecked section of the Berlin Wall, known as the “East Side Gallery,” became the center of a debate over the preservation of the visible traces of Germany’s twentieth-century history when portions of it were slated to be torn down to make way for an upscale apartment complex. (Photo by Mark W. Hornburg.) Deutsche Dom. Brick stone modernist buildings still stand as witness to the liberal potential of the Weimar Republic. Nazi legacies survive most visibly through the scars the regime inficted, in Stolpersteine commemorating deportees, and in open lots. But the Nazis’ architecture still litters the city as well, exemplifed most famously by the Olympiastadion. During the city’s division through the Cold War, both East and West sought to remake their portions of the city into showcases for their respective systems’ achievements. Te Moscow-inspired Karl-Marx-Allee, the former Stalinallee, still marks the Eastern end of downtown, while the Western end is framed by the modernist, tailfn-compatible architecture of the Kudamm. As of 2013, most of the former deathstrip, a swath of fattened blocks running alongside the Wall, has been reclaimed by hurried construction. Most of the government quarters and the business towers of Potsdamer Platz have been erected there, draped in steel and glass facades, as if to demonstrate to visitors how twenty-frst century Berlin has become an open and cosmopolitan global city. A certain behavioral pattern in Berlin continuously threatens this unique trove of twentieth-century architectural milestones and follies. Since the nineteenth century, a raze-and-build mentality has been closely 265 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History The reconstruction of the Hohenzollern Stadtschloß, the beginnings of which are shown here, will expunge the last traces of the GDR from Unter den Linden Boulevard in the touristic heart of Berlin. (Photo by Scott Krause.) intertwined with municipal politics. Art critic Karl Schefer’s 1910 aphorism that Berlin was “damned to always become and never to be” characterizes to this day Berlin’s cycle of destruction, building, and nostalgia. For example, countless foreign visitors search in vain for an Altstadt, a pre-eighteenth century Old Town deemed quintessentially German. Te explosive city growth of the nineteenth century, a World War, and a Stalinist demolition campaign during the 1950s took care of that. Instead, visitors are ushered into the Nikolaiviertel, Berlin’s closest equivalent to an Altstadt, only to fnd that they themselves are older than the houses built there. With the divided city’s 750-year anniversary looming in 1987, Erich Honecker, General Secretary of the GDR’s ruling SED, realized to his dismay that his predecessor, Walter Ulbricht, had systematically destroyed prewar blocks in Berlin’s city center in the name of progress. To rectify this absence, Honecker ordered concentrated reconstruction of half a dozen vanished landmark buildings in a single place, peculiarly framed by iconic GDR Plattenbauten, East Germany’s distinctive pre-fabricated concrete housing blocks. Many Berliners still refer to the Nicolaiviertel as “Honecker’s Disneyland,” with characteristic sarcasm. Honecker’s bid to leave his mark on the cityscape in the form of the 266 Scott Krause Excavated remnants of Gestapo prison cells running along the Berlin Wall offer visitors to the “Topography of Terror” the drama of twentieth-century German history in a uniquely condensed fashion. (Photo courtesy of Stefan Josef Müller, Stiftung Topographie des Terrors.) Palast der Republik has found a less forgiving reception. Nicknamed “Erich’s lamp store,” this 1970s steel carcass, which housed the GDR’s toothless parliament and a concert venue, was demolished in 2008. It is being replaced by the reconstructed Hohenzollern Stadtschloß that occupied the lot until 1950. Te fates of Honecker’s two architectural pet projects demonstrate the circuitous nature of Berlin’s breakneck building activity, and suggest that Berlin’s tradition of architectural purges is alive and well. A powerful faction of Berliners would rather erase any trace of the GDR, and by extension of a messy but signifcant chapter of Berlin’s history. It must be acknowledged that the city has made great strides to commemorate the Nazi era appropriately, but it was a long time coming. In 1987, a temporary outdoor exhibition began on an open lot in the shadow of the Wall to complement the 750th anniversary celebrations in West Berlin. On what was slated to be paved over by a road, excavations unearthed remnants of torture cells of the Gestapo headquarters that once stood at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Tese poignant traces of the apparatus of terror in the wasteland along the Wall attracted many more visitors than anyone had projected. Te temporary exhibition had only come into fruition afer popular demand by counter-culture Kreuzberg residents. It took nearly another 267 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History quarter century, until 2010, for the so-called “Topography of Terror” to fnd a ftting permanent exhibition space in situ. Since then it has established itself as one the most popular sites commemorating National Socialist terror in Berlin, again surpassing all expectations. Te exhibition’s success might be attributed, ironically, to its distanced presentation. Referring to itself as a “Documentation Center” instead of a museum, “Topography” shuns prescriptive interpretations and ofers visitors scholarly information. A distillate of the latest historical research on National Socialism awaits those asking how the National Socialist policies of violence were organized and implemented. In an era in which questions on National Socialism remain as urgent as ever, and with its contemporaries vanishing rapidly, this distanced educational ofering appears to ft the interests of Berliners and visitors alike. Te success of the “Topography” exhibition does not mean that the age of memory politics is over. Te efort to channel memory for political purposes is alive and well in other exhibitions, such as the recent “Russen und Deutsche” (Russians and Germans) exhibition in the world-renowned Neues Museum. Tis joint exhibition had the ambitious agenda to “demonstrate the multifaceted contacts between both nations and reciprocal infuences on each other” over 1000 years, and its priorities were signaled with the imprimatur of Presidents Vladimir Putin and Joachim Gauck, and with “the generous support” of German energy corporation Eon and Russian mining conglomerate Severstal. Drawing from the holdings of numerous German and Russian museums, the exhibition boasted many rare pieces and illuminated the intensity of cultural contacts between the German and Russian empires in the last third of the nineteenth century. For all these considerable benefts, however, “Russen und Deutsche” botched the twentieth century through glaring omissions. Conspicuously missing from the exhibition were the people living between the Germans and Russians: Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Latvians, or Estonians. In an exhibition devoted to Russian-German cooperation, the original protocol of the Hitler-Stalin Pact provided a particularly sinister example. While the Cold War was mentioned briefy as a fact of postwar life impeding Russian- German reconciliation, wartime genocides, postwar expulsions, and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Germany did not bear mentioning. While the most representative venues in Berlin are occupied with diplomatically worded, politically minded exhibitions, some of the city’s 268 Scott Krause The abandoned Red Army barracks of Krampnitz, just beyond the Wall, tell a compelling tale of the Russian-German relationship.

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