Berlin: Topology of Contemplation

2 3 4 5 6 7 Berlin: topology of 8 9 contemplation 10 1 2 Lance Neckar 3 4 522 Semiotics of remembrance and reconciliation The landscape of Berlin has been transformed in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries by spaces of contemplation. The landscape of the city asks a ubiquitous question: what is the role of remembrance of the past in the space of the present, in the everyday discourse and affairs of the city? A person is almost compelled to ask him or herself, shall I reflect today? This can happen almost anywhere in Berlin.1 The imminence of the vast apocalyptic effects of the Third Reich, and the postwar world it engendered, dot the urban and suburban landscape of the city. These places are poignant, painful and sometimes too horrible to be sublime. Mostly these places ask questions, and most of these questions are drawn from the period of the crimes of National Socialism (Nazism). What were the crimes and who were the victims? Who were the perpetrators of the crimes, and can one sort their actions into categories of responsibility? What about the bystanders: what was their role? These questions about the past have led to another level of questions with implications for the future. Berlin asks of us and of itself the most pointed questions of identity: what is remembered, whose memory, who remembers, how shall we remember, and who shall we be? The landscape of the city has become one of the chief media of a larger post-Cold War dia- logue. In this historical moment the landscape broaches fundamental 139 Lance Neckar speculations on the identity of the city, of Europe, of human existence. So recent are the conflicts represented in its spaces of memory that some have asked, how does one get on with things in Berlin, constantly in the presence of questions? Or, by contrast, as advocates of the various memorials have argued, what future exists without some degree of acceptance of the questions and cultural processing of answers? For them the (paradox-filled) acceptance of the horror and inconceivable “otherness” of the historical record is prerequisite to reconciliation. Interest groups and the local and national governments, particularly in the last ten years, have proclaimed in a series of projects that engagement with the historical record and the feelings evoked by such memories are media of reconciliation. And this commitment is evidenced in the processes and forms of a new topology of contemplation, where places of remembrance evoke these most difficult of memories as part of the everyday landscape of the city. Given its intimate relationship with public policy and the intro- spective debates that have led to its making, this emerging topology expresses itself in semiotics, especially morphology and syntax, derived directly from contemporary language. German is a language that is inherently reflexive. For example, in regular German expressions, sentences begin with objects, both direct and indirect, that turn the action back to the actor or the objects of action. This structure and hierarchy lends a certain centering, reflective character to everyday discourse; and when the language becomes a tool of politicians or academics, convolution of the most self-referential order can result. Words assemble into combined forms in German. New and reinvented meaning is made by combination and transformation that makes new names suggestive of metaphysical relationships and synthesis. A counterbalancing aspect of this combinative aspect of the language is dis- aggregation, embodied in syntactical biases to long sentences with multiple dependent clauses. This tendency is overlaid by the free adaptation of posi- tives as negatives with the simple addition of the prefix un. Another particular aspect of naming is the appropriation of verbs to create participial nouns, embodying temporality, action or process in nouns. Like the German language, the post apocalyptic landscape of Berlin has become a reflexive medium that speaks back to us in processes about our place in the world, as it has also combined meanings and opened itself to analysis. The design of commemorative landscapes in the city has adopted this particularly German syntax to impart new ideas using a vocabulary and a morphology of thought, that have generated new spaces through new forms. New identities are suggested in new expressions of mostly familiar and tangible media. This landscape is an experiment, then, reflective of the questions of a historical moment whose designers seek to enable the depth of these questions to be probed in the quotidian space of the city, some- 140 Berlin: Topology of Contemplation 122 times on an individual level, and often, also at a political and cultural level; 2 through historical narrative and locational resonance, and through art and 3 design, sometimes independent of place. 4 Current public debates about the nature and position of remem- 5 brance in postwar Berlin have created a specific vocabulary of discourse, 6 some understanding of the key terms of which is necessary to comprehend 7 the nature of the cultural foregrounding of recent contemplative space- 8 making in the city. 9 10 Gedenkstaette 1 Generically, all spaces and structures of remembrance are today called 2 Gedenkstaetten, plural of Gedenkstaette, literally a place of thinking and 3 memory, a term that further suggests the reflective activity of remembering 4 by being in a place where something significant happened. This newer term 522 has mostly subsumed the more traditional term, Denkmal (literally “thinking 6 sign” or “thinking moment”), as the program of documentation and the aes- thetic tone of these places has departed from traditional nineteenth- and early twentieth-century celebratory, literal and, often, monumental modes of expression. Cloaked by this more neutral term is the concept that many of these contemporary places, once experienced, inevitably incorporate in the visitor: the paradoxes of a horror-filled and divided past, sometimes defying the rational explanation implied by the term “thinking.” An important dis- tinction about place and time has occurred in the shifting semiotic of these terms, and it illuminates a central debate about the place and form of contemplative space. Gendenkstaette focuses on place (Staette), on the authentic connection between events and people and a location/space. Denkmal, still sometimes used both in places of actual events and more abstract locations of commemoration (but increasingly given the subject matter of victimization, more often transformed to Mahnmal, see below), pre- serves the fusion (or ambiguity?) of time and sign embedded in the suffix, Mal. None of these terms, interestingly, has a direct translation in English. Versoehnung At the center of the syntax is the hope of the contemporary Gedenkstaette, that the studied acceptance of the events of the past will engender Versoehnung, the reconciliation with the past that is the presumed basis for the future. Berlin tests the proposition that encounters with the past in the space of the present must involve reflection, and reflection is hypothetically a function of engagement of the mind by both reason and the senses. In the sensual mode, ordinary time is suspended. Thinking combined with the posi- tioning of the body in a space of self – and other – reference merge as experience. Arguably necessary to create this realm of affect, is the fusion 141 Lance Neckar of narrative, image, association and space so powerful that it simulates a space of “otherness,” that resets one’s direction. This effect is the essence of Betroffenheit. Betroffenheit What Americans might loosely and blandly term “impact,” is the Germans’ sense of an empathetic response resulting from being struck in a manner to defy words and reason. Historians understand that Betroffenheit is induced intellectually by the engagement with the incomprehensibility of acts remembered. Artistic interpretations of the spatial syntax of Berlin, which in many places was so badly bombed as still to have open sites, sometimes carry this weight by the contraction of space, the extreme sense of being bounded. It as if the closing of the horizon simulates the bounding of the future, as if to pick up on the idea of the concentration camps, and the Berlin Wall, but also allowing a certain sense of sublimity, as in a walled garden or in the skylit void of an empty, darkened room. In some of these and other places in more open landscapes there is simply no ordinary reference to location. Such voids, where there is no clear destination, makes a presence of the transmutation of the familiar. In many of these places of simple emptiness, bounded or unbounded, there is only you, yourself stricken, Betroffenheit. Mahnen The concept of admonition, or warning, the normative playground of the artist and the designer, is perhaps the most difficult semiotic for historians since it involves an abstraction from the memory of facts and empirical academic processes of research, teaching and learning, a certain body of judgments against crimes and their perpetrators.2 The moral and ethical message is thus clarified, and, at the same time, made ambiguous. One asks, for example, by what process the rational mind, first, incorporates what for many is the unthinkable and, second, develops a revised normative position to- ward the world? A cognitive process of learning from admonition seems to depend, in the minds of some historians, on the authenticity of experience of the visitor, a condition by which the authenticity of a site and its associa- tions underpin the reception by the visitor.3 The zone of “authenticity” of the admonition based in historical empiricism, and authentic experience is where the line between the cognitive and the affective, between intellectual preparation and emotions, blurs. Mahnmal The evolution of German language with its peculiarly additive richness under- pins a double entendre in the semiotic of remembrance in Berlin and endows the landscape with particular, sometimes ambiguous, qualities of twenty-first 142 Berlin: Topology of Contemplation 122 century meaning.

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