What Do We Do With This Future? An Examination of Tempelhof Airport 06 Elizabeth Krasner Elizabeth Krasner received her undergraduate degree in the history, theory and criticism of architecture from MIT in 2008. She has been working as an editor and writer at Volume Magazine in New York and is currently studying architecture in Berlin as a fellow in the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Program. Next year she will start an MArch abroad as a Rotary Ambassadorial scholar.
Since the fall of the wall, architecture in Berlin has come to play the roles of both relic and resistance—legally protected, but hotly contested. Buildings that celebrated now-defunct regimes are woven into the urban fabric but as their continued use is put into question, they become temporally stuck—simultaneously representing visions of the past and future. Tempelhof airfield and airport, fenced off since its closure in 2008, is a perfect example of the disparity between a collective, living memory of history and the directives of a modern European capital.
To understand Tempelhof’s difficult temporal presence, it is necessary to see it as the battleground for two different kinds of futures, conceived at different times and for different ends. The first is the future that the Nazis envisioned for themselves, in which Tempelhof became a monumental first representation. Designed in the 1930s by Ernst Sagebiel under the direction of Albert Speer and built as an assertion of architectural permanence in a newly technological world (the structure is clad in limestone), the architecture is both grandiose and severe—lacking in ornamentation and dominated by the geometric rhythm of flat, narrow windows. Though never fully completed (unrealized plans for the building included a ballroom, beer garden and stadium1), it was planned as the first step in a new Nazi city center, abutting a square and surrounded by new ministries. Designed to be visible from space, its arcing hangar resembles the spread wings of an eagle in flight and is more than a mile long.
The second vision for the space is conceived of from a contemporary perspective: how will German legislators develop this problematic space, which has consistently been a drain on the local budget? Unsure of how to answer this question, the city has left the building empty since the closure, prompting a slew of citizen responses. Though the popularity of Tempelhof as a subject for debate among Berliners and the international press continues to mount, Berlin government officials have yet to make a decision about what to do with it. Instead, it has stood completely inaccessible, behind a chain-link fence in the center of a major European capital, a locus of denial. It is as if by acknowledging its presence, the city would somehow have to acknowledge the possibility that the Nazis could have won. Rather than acknowledge this power, its emptiness is apocalyptic and celebrated – its functional sterility is a testament to the victory and prevention of the historical (unrealized) future. Equivalent to an entire Berlin neighborhood (an entire city locality, in fact), its sheer size is visionary and futuristic. By containing and fencing the area, the city denies even this: the building’s ability to exert the power of its size.
An element of policy change also contributes to the heated debate. When the Berlin Wall came down, the Eastern districts of Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain were in terrible condition; many of the buildings lacked central heating and personal
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toilets. Soon after, the newly-unified city invested public money into the 3 Behutsame Stadterneuerung (‘Careful City Renewal’) mandating three levels of preservation: to maintain the physical space, to preserve the social composition of the building, and to design in consultation with the community. But most of these regulations had twenty-year statutes, and on the anniversary of the fall of the wall buildings are being bought by private investors, rents are rising, and neighborhoods are changing. There is a push to develop neighborhoods across the city as quickly as possible, to try to aid the economy of what is now the poorest capital city in Europe. Simultaneously, squatter groups are re-emerging as a form of civic resistance to the lapse in renewal laws.
Political resistance is complicated by the fact that Berlin is both a city and a Bundesland, which makes for conflicting interests at different levels of power. Tempelhof is centrally located, situated among neighborhoods formed while the Berlin Wall was still standing (Neukölln 1, 2 Posters Promoting the “Squat Tempelhof and Kreuzberg, respectively) and that developed geographically and 20.06.09” Protests ideologically on the fringe. Many residents are self-described political Photo by Elizabeth Krasner radicals, activists and anarchists. Closing Tempelhof seemed like a 3 Poster Promoting the “Squat Tempelhof relatively uncontroversial idea—to relieve the national government of 20.06.09” Protests in Neukölln operational costs and to open up the possibility for the local government Photo by Elizabeth Krasner to bring in foreign investors in the form of commercial development. These political aims did not take into account the desires of the local population, or the history of citizen activism in the area.
Within these neighborhoods, two protest groups have formed to address Tempelhof’s future. The first, Tempelhof für Alle, has tried to work within the framework of the neighborhood associations (BergerInitiatives), leading community walks around the fences, soliciting media attention, and petitioning the district government. Their flyers, scattered across Berlin, proclaim: STOP GENTRIFICATION / TAKE YOUR RIGHT TO THE CITY. A second faction, Squat Tempelhof, advocates a literal squatting; redefining the airport as habitable through physical reclamation. This group resists gentrification more broadly with Tempelhof as a priority —their posters across Berlin proclaim: “first squat Tempelhof, then
Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/thld_a_00174 by guest on 28 September 2021 squat the rest.” Flyers are how they communicate with the city they hope to expand, to bring in the public in whose interest they claim to act; this is their propaganda. They take a step towards reclaiming and repurposing this space (“Take your right to the city!”). Their actions propel the physical space into the discourse of today, and strip it of the future it represents and never saw. It is both a movement against another future (a commercial development) and a point from which to understand the complete rejection of once-celebrated futures.
On June 20, 2009, at the peak of controversy, the two resistance groups organized the ‘Squat Tempelhof 20.06.09’ protest along the fence of the airfield. The city, concerned about the growing media attention, dispatched approximately two thousand armed police officers in what would become a culminating battle between city government and activists. The riot police stood guard against a mere four thousand protestors, waiting behind the fence with tear gas and water cannons. There were accounts of inciting violence from both sides, and several incidents of police brutality were reported. No one got over the fence. Given the anti-establishment bent in these areas, sending out 2000 riot police only served to fuel the fire; public attention turned towards Tempelhof’s future.
The idea of squatting an airport extends the longstanding tradition of squatting in Berlin. After all, most of the people who squatted East Berlin tenements after the wall came down became their eventual, legal owners. Squatters exist (and succeed) today in empty warehouses and lots across the city. Tacheles, a twenty-year-old, visiting artists’ community, cultural landmark and tourist destination, is the result of some very persistent squatters. Berliners have a history of claiming space as their own and, for the most part, of succeeding. More generally, fighting for prohibited space has an historical precedent in Berlin that is echoed in the demands of protesters today. At the root of the Tempelhof Airport conflict, its very cause for contention is the fact that it currently stands empty and unusable. Emptiness, and the sheer abundance of empty spaces, is a recurring phenomenon across the city (an estimated 100,000 apartments stand empty, according to a study earlier this year in Prospect Magazine). The fact that the city itself is so large, and so sparsely inhabited, is the legacy of two cities which became one; all across Berlin, empty voids are the markers of history.
Tempelhof exists today as locus for denial – of the protestors, of the civic desire to use the space and of what it was built to represent. There it stands, in the middle of the city, inaccessible, untouchable, uninhabitable, while the city government refuses to allow it to become a part of contemporary Berlin life. There have been small attempts to use the airport space, though largely unsuccessful. For example, in July 2009 Berlin hosted their annual Bread+Butter Fashion show there, hoping to use the long hangar as the runways of German Fashion Week. The private event was diminutive in the Poster Promoting the “Squat Tempelhof massive space, dwarfing the thousands of onlookers. The public pressure 20.06.09” Protests to develop Tempelhof, or at least to appear to, is finally beginning to take Photo by Elizabeth Krasner effect: as of 2009, the state-funded Adlershof Projekt GbmH, known for
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A view of Tempelhof airfield in June 2009. Photo by Elizabeth Krasner
building a high-technology center that generated thousands of jobs, had been put in charge of developing a concept proposal. By focusing on the program of the airfield (the developers are unable to touch the airport building under architectural historic preservation laws), the government has once again ignored the problematic existence of Tempelhof airport. Moreover, Tempelhof is hardly the last frontier; Tegel Airport will be closed in the next five years. In an eerily similar situation, it is to be replaced by the new Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport, a monolith that is being touted by city officials as the salvation of Berlin, “a symbol of their dream for Berlin.”2
Tempelhof is just one of several sites in Berlin on which the ideological battle for democratic space is fought. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall two decades ago, the city’s attitude about public space has changed, and with it, a resistance has grown among Berliners. Public money that was invested to preserve and modernize East Berlin with special attention to community planning and social responsibility has since run out; the rent limits for tenants who have kept their apartments for the last twenty years have been lifted; the city now faces the largest inner-city peacetime migration in Europe. All of these factors have created a context in which urban spaces have become a kind of contested public right in Berlin; a right that is enunciated, demanded, and sometimes even seized. Tempelhof airport, at the center of the city, has come to serve as the symbol of this struggle.
Ultimately, the debate over the use of public spaces in Berlin is about much more than physical terrain. Tempelhof, as an unprogrammed space, is an example of the problematic monuments littered across German cities, “Shared vessels of memory overflowing with conflicting views of the past.”3 But Tempelhof, as a building, is much more complicated: it represents the power that the Nazis once held, the freedom of West Berlin, the fiscal problems of an underdeveloped capital, and a placeholder for gentrification more broadly. It represents a future so powerful that is has invoked responses of fear, violence and collective denial in Berliners.
Within the category of abandoned, futuristic cities, what are we to make of architectural visions of the future once the buildings themselves become outdated? The development of Tempelhof Airfield and Airport is a useful point from which to examine what happens when visions of the future shift dramatically, and what to do with architectural relics that blatantly celebrate our past expectations. It is a space that belongs alternately to a nostalgic past, and a horrifying, prevented future. Its various temporal presences are precisely what make it a problematic site. It has become so bound up in the battle between current and historic visions of the future that there is virtually no room left to imagine a present use for it. Protestors have attempted to overcome this by proposing a populist future, reclamation of the space as both historic and civic. Conversely, by ignoring its future, the city government has equated the building’s inaccessibility (and, by extension, uselessness) with its irrelevance as a usable space. The incredible potential of an empty, undeveloped neighborhood is short-circuited by a complete denial of its existence and power. It is as if the city thinks that by closing it off, everyone will forget it is there. More importantly, they will forget that the future it represented ever existed t
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