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Home , Frohnau, Hansaviertel, Oberbaum Bridge

CHAPTER 4 WEST (1949-1989)

In May 1949, the three sectors of governed by the Western Allies (France, England, and the U.S.) merged into a single entity: the Federal Republic of Germany. Considering itself merely an interim, provisional state with a provisional Grundgesetz (a Basic Law instead of a constitution inscribing nationhood), the Federal Republic chose Bonn, a small city rather than a metropolis, as its provisional capital.

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) was founded in October 1949. was pronounced its capital, a step that indicated, despite official protestations to the contrary, that and the Soviets (who were behind its every move) had already abandoned the goal of a unified Germany. Viewing itself, more or less, a bona fide nation, the GDR refused to call its capital “East” Berlin, a designation implying a . To avoid association with a stunted capital, it expediently removed the word “East” from its title. After 1961 it went further: it eliminated West Berlin from its maps, substituting it with a white spot. For the GDR, then, there was officially no Berlin other than its own Berlin. Whereas East Berliners were taught to call themselves citizens of the GDR and had passports that validated them as such, West Berliners—still living in French, British, and U.S. zones—were not permitted to consider themselves West Germans, a fact reflected in their special passports. But, the Federal Republic did extend most of its laws and also its currency to West Berlin (the latter a bygone conclusion after the Airlift). In addition, though the Federal Republic did not grant West Berlin voting rights, West Berlin’s political representatives could at least be seated in the Bonn Parliament. Despite lacking West German status, “the island in the Red Sea” was expected to be ’s staunchest representative in the —this illustrative of the countless paradoxes associated with West Berlin. In the harsh competition between the two radically different German systems, each waged propaganda attacks against the other, grimly and unrelentingly. The east railed against what it regarded a selfish, decadent, consumer-oriented society manipulated by big business, the west against communism and its abridgements of personal freedoms. In Berlin, the only location where east and west had contact with each other, at least until the went up on August 13, 1961, loyalties to one’s own system were to be demonstrated, not merely asserted. Thus, if one Berlin did something well, the other tried to outdo it. Since this pertained to topographical matters as well, we will start our walk at a West Berlin site that arose from the competition of the two systems: the (northwest of No. 53).

In response to the GDR’s efforts to turn the heavily bombed Frankfurter Allee (renamed Stalinallee) into a grandiose boulevard in the Stalinist neo-classical manner, West Berlin— within the framework of , the international architecture exhibit of 1957—rebuilt the severely war-damaged Hansaviertel into an ensemble of 36 starkly modernist high-rises, each designed by a renowned architect. All face the street, but in a slanted manner—as if in unanimous defiance of the unimaginative rectangular buildings lining so many of Berlin’s central streets. Close to the River (always a plus), the Hansaviertel boasts its own stores, restaurants, church, and since 1969 the youth theater Grips.

Propaganda battles with the east extended to demolitions of buildings representative of unsavory German history. Particularly the GDR’s destruction of the war-ravaged but still reparable palace in Berlin- in 1950 reverberated in West Berlin. The GDR demolished the palace due to its unwelcome reminders of Prussian militarism; soon afterward West Berlin razed the similarly damaged Kroll Opera across from the Reichstag (No. 81) because of negative historical connotations (after the Reichstag fire, it had served as the seat of the Nazi government). From the Hansaviertel, though, our walk will take us to a location where the leveling of a history-laden building proceeded far less smoothly: to the site of the Anhalter Bahnhof, once Berlin’s most important train station (off the map, close to No. 102). Though the demolition of the castle prompted decisive steps to raze the Anhalter Bahnhof, the strong objections of West Berliners prevailed, at least temporarily. Thus it was finally torn down in 1961, even then, however, not without the protests of those outraged at yet another erasure of the past. As a concession to them, the portal of the Anhalter Bahnhof was left standing, providing a gateway for entering the past at least in one’s imagination. Public opinion against the demolition of at least Prussian history triumphed with palace (No. 4); though more damaged than Berlin-Mitte’s palace, it was reconstructed in the early fifties.

From the Anhalter Bahnhof, we will walk to a building that was also resurrected: the KaDeWe (--No. 68). This consumer paradise was one of the first major buildings restored by West Berlin after the founding of the Federal Republic—in 1950 its first two floors, in regular periods afterwards its additions. Even in the minimally prosperous early 1950s, its gourmet section could boast of almost 1000 cheeses. By 1964, it was again the largest department store in continental Europe. However, in contrast to its unabashed self-promotion, the KaDeWe does not surface positively in literary works of the Cold War period, for West Berliners, continuously admonished in the fifties and early sixties to flaunt their economic well- being in the east/west propaganda war, often reacted with revulsion to the crass materialism continuously expected from them. Across the street from the KaDeWe, we notice a large rectangular board fastened to a metal contraption embedded in the Wittenbergplatz (Nr. 69). On its front we read “Orte des Schreckens, die wir nie vergessen dürfen” (Sites we should never be allowed to forget), followed by “Auschwitz… Theresienstadt… Buchenwald… Dachau”— one concentration camp after another. Placed on the Wittenbergplatz in 1967, the plaque was meant to counter the many memorial plaques in West Berlin dedicated to all casualties of war, these of course including Nazi perpetrators. By contrast, the one on the Wittenbergplatz recalls Nazi Germany’s specific crimes and thus remembrance of its victims. That its proponents were able to place such a shocking message in such close proximity to West Berlin’s grandest consumer haven was a feat—one that signaled more honesty for West Berlin’s memorial culture.

Turning left from the Wittenbergplatz, we find ourselves on the Tauentzienstraße, a street showcasing West Berlin as “the display window of the West.” This message is at its most emphatic in the Europa Center (No. 64), which houses approximately 100 businesses—stores, restaurants, bars. When opened to the public in April 1965 by Willy Brandt, then West Berlin’s mayor, the Europa Center was touted as a spectacular city within a city, a one-of-a kind building capable of providing inspiration for urban architects. Above all, though, the ten-ton, 14 meter high, rotating Mercedes star on the roof of the 21-story building left no doubt about the agenda of its proponents: to broadcast West Berlin’s economic miracle and, by implication, the towering success of its political system. East Berlin was meant to see and envy the shining, rotating star, but certainly not to emulate it. On a small scale, this is nonetheless what happened when the BE sign on top of the Berliner Ensemble, the legendary Bertolt Brecht theater, started rotating as well. Stepping out of the Europa Center, we join the crowds headed in the direction of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (No. 62). It is a symbol both of the Berlin damaged by the 1943 bombs and fires and of the horrors the Third Reich unleashed. Yet none of the passersby pause to gaze at the landmark so reminiscent of a horrific past. The disinterest is in marked contrast to the passions the Memorial Church had aroused in the 1950s—when the city council, preferring to divert high restoration costs into the construction of an entirely new church building (scheduled for completion in 1956), planned its complete destruction. Unlike West Germans, ever anxious to remove reminders of Nazi atrocities, West Berliners were prone to retaining them, even in the midst of their most commercial areas. Thus the imposing ruins of the neo-Roman Memorial Church, soon affectionately labeled “hollow tooth,” remained the centerpiece of the minimalist buildings comprising the new church ensemble on the Breitscheidplatz.

Much as West Berliners tacitly accepted ruins, most adjusted to the Wall in their midst, which arose because of Cold War politics beyond their control. Drastic measures had been dreaded since 1958, when Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev started insisting that the Western Allies leave West Berlin and allow it to govern itself (in the doublespeak of politics, this signified Kruschev’s desire to annex West Berlin to East Berlin). But, rather than annex one Berlin to the other, the Wall, which went up on August l3, 1961, cemented their division and that of Germany—by extension also that of the capitalist and communist worlds. Though the Western Allies moved their tanks to the border between East and West Berlin, they were wary of triggering a war (in contrast to the Blockade days, the Soviets now had the atom bomb). A war was indeed averted because the three points U.S. President John F. Kennedy had posed, not long before, as a sinequanon for avoiding U.S. intervention had not been violated—above all, the demand that West Berlin remain free. In fact, behind the scenes the U.S. lamented the Wall far less than it did in public, for the Wall signified that the Soviets had decided against spreading communism throughout Europe. But, the troubled West Berliners needed strong assurances that, if need be, the West would stand at its side, all the more so when the Soviets continued to voice their desire to have West Berlin govern itself on its own.

Two years later, in June 1963, Kennedy finally provided the needed pledge of support with his powerful “” speech. From the Memorial Church we will therefore proceed to the site of Kennedy’s historic speech, the Rathaus Schöneberg (off the map, south of Nr. 68). This building was chosen not only because it had turned into the city hall for all of West Berlin during the Cold War but also because it boasted the Freiheitsglocke, the replica of the Liberty Bell of Philadelphia given by the U.S.in 1950 in commemoration of the Airlift. Each Sunday thereafter (until 1993), Berliners in the American sector heard this bell ringing in the tower of Schöneberg’s city hall, if not in its vicinity then in the noon program of the U.S.-sponsored radio station RIAS, its motto likewise resonant with the concept of freedom: “A free voice of the free world.” Berlin thus became a symbol of freedom, both of the inhumane restrictions on freedom imposed by the Wall and of defiant, fervent affirmations of freedom. For many West Berliners, though, the Wall was less a symbol than an all-too-real incursion into their everyday lives. Personal tragedies resulting from the Wall—such as family separations—eased only with Chancellor Willy Brandt’s call to “risk more democracy” and his Ostpolitik. For his efforts at rapprochement with Poland, the Soviet Union, and the GDR, he received the l971 Nobel Prize for Peace. Particularly the Four Power Agreement on Berlin, signed in 1972, lifted many travel and communication restrictions between East- and West-Berliners.

To obtain a sense of the distances depicted on the map, we will walk at least one stretch of the Wall—from the Oberbaum Bridge, the border crossing reserved for West Berlin pedestrians (off the map, southeast of Nr. 102) to the (Nr. 102). Behind the Gropius Building (off the map, close to Nr. 102), we will be able to examine the actual Wall. There, on the Prinz- Albrecht-Terrain, members of the Berlin group Aktives Museum (one of several dedicated to finding and maintaining traces of Berlin’s Nazi past) had unearthed Gestapo torture chambers in 1986. But, to gain more understanding of the significance of the Wall, we will seek out the Wall Museum at (off the map, close to Nr. 102). Opened two years after the Wall went up, the museum aims to present the definitive history of all events pertaining to the Wall (for example, escape attempts from the GDR and retaliatory shootings by East German border guards). But we need to be aware of a caveat: the crowds of “Wall tourists” respond far more positively to its exhibits and their pathos-laden accompanying texts than the generally ironic West Berliners.

After the Wall was built, the Charlottenburg district turned into West Berlin’s center, especially the area around the Memorial Church and the long avenue extending northward from it, the Kurfürstendamm or simply Ku’Damm (Nr. 37-45). This heavily frequented boulevard functioned as a particularly elegant shopping avenue, as well as the demonstration/parade site for all important events. The train station Bahnhof Zoo (Nr. 32) also drew many crowds, but its hookers and drug dealers were the wrong kinds of crowds. Still, they largely disappeared after Christiane F.’s description of the drug scene and its teenage victims in We Childrem from Bahnhof Zoo (1981) shocked the city into battling crime more rigorously. For addicted readers, though, the most favored Charlottenburg location was the Savigny Platz (above Nr. 35, to the right). Its many cafés and restaurants were just as hospitable to the reading flaneur as the small and middle-sized bookstores on its side streets. A listening flaneur, on the other hand, was best served at the restaurant Zwiebelfisch, where radicals of the 1968 student movement gathered to discuss works critiquing capitalism, such as the popular One-Dimensional Man (1964) by the political theorist Herbert Marcuse.

From the Savigny Platz we will move on to the Deutsche Oper (above Nr. 13). It was there that Benno Ohnesorg, merely a bystander at the June 2, 1967 student demonstrations against the Shah of Persia, was brutally killed by a policeman while the Shah was enjoying a production of Mozart’s Magic Flute. A photo of another bystander holding up Ohnesorg’s bloodied head in a Pietà-like pose went around the world. In West Berlin it mobilized many for the student movement—at the Technical University in Charlottenburg (Nrs. 55-56) and the Free University (southwest of the map), where Rudi Dutschke held his galvanizing talks against capitalism, the Vietnam war, and the German higher education system. Inspired by Dutschke, many students vehemently attacked German society’s silences about the Nazi past. Soon they confronted their fathers, demanding explanations of their roles in the Third Reich. Above all, they railed against a holdover from the fascist past: the authoritarianism of the state, its educational institutions, and its family life.

Viewing the family entity as destructive to the development of personality and intent on politicizing the personal, one branch of the student movement founded a counter-model to the family, the Kommune I. It became known for its hedonistic life style and its satiric provocations—for example, its April 1967 plan to “assassinate” visiting U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey with bags of pudding. At that time, the Kommune 1 lived at Kaiser- Friedrich-Straße 54 (fourth street west from the Deutsche Oper). We will pass their lodging as we head back to the Ku’Damm—this time to Nr. 140, the office of the SDS (the socialist student organization that helped to form APO, the “extraparliamentary” opposition to Bonn’s CDU/SPD coalition government). This is where a confused ultra-rightist attempted to assassinate Rudi Dutschke in April 1968 (Dutschke remained alive but was incapacitated for several years). Students blamed the incendiary, anti-Dutschke crusades of the Springer Press for the assassination attempt and thus stormed the building of the publishing company, which had moved close to the border in order to taunt the leaders on its other side. This building on the Lindenstrasse (east of map, parallel to Nr. 102) will be the last stop of our walking unit focused on the student movement of the sixties. The Easter Sunday demonstrations protesting the assassination attempt on Dutschke—among the biggest in Berlin’s demonstration- packed history--were held in front of it and on the Kurfürstendamm. But by the end of 1969, the student movement fell apart. Without Dutschke, its iconic center, it could not hold.

For West Berliners, life quieted down by the middle eighties. By then, they barely lamented the reduction of urban topography caused by the Wall. Many reduced their topography even more by restricting their movements to their Kiez, their neighborhood within a neighborhood. Clearly, those restricting their world into ever more manageable fragments and repeatedly walking around in areas they knew so well that there was nothing left to explore lacked the disposition of the urbane, urban flaneur. Yet, because past and future nonetheless remained intertwined in West Berlin, each in continuous, referential dialogue with the other, West Berlin still retained the ability to induce change. We see this best in the ending of Wim Wenders’s West-Berlin film (1987). There we encounter the Homer figure—the only one who has not forgotten the days before, during, and immediately after the war and the only one unwilling to accept the barren wasteland Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz had become. At the end, he has finally figured out how to write a peace epic rather than the war epics that had made him famous. In the last shot of the film, he walks, decisively, confrontationally, toward the Wall. He means business. As we know with hindsight, the film was prophetic.

INGEBORG BACHMANN, EIN ORT FÜR ZUFÄLLE (1964)

Listeners rather than readers were the ones first confronted with Ingeborg Bachmann’s Ein Ort für Zufälle (A Place for Incidents, 1964), for it is the speech she gave in Darmstadt in October 1964 as recipient of the Büchner Prize, the most prestigious of Germany’s many literary awards. None of the academics, writers, media representatives, and political dignitaries in the audience even pretended to understand it. In their view, Bachmann had not followed the directive to talk about the author Georg Büchner (1813-1837), or herself or about both Büchner and herself. Yet, this should not have come as a surprise, for in the comments prefacing her reading, Bachmann had already specified her intent to focus not on an individual but on a singular area, one whose severe physical and spiritual damages preclude identifying it as any other than Berlin. Bachmann, an Austrian, also warned her audience not to expect her to deliver a foreigner’s impressions of Berlin (as recipient of a generous Ford Foundation scholarship initiated to reinvigorate the cultural life of Berlin, Bachmann had already spent more than a year in Berlin). She then attacked the symbolizing that flourished in Berlin during the first half of the sixties— for example, designating Berlin as the “frontier of the West.” She stressed that Berlin’s damages were far too severe for mystifications of any sort, including the tendency to cast Berlin into a symbol. Thus she underlined that she would not be providing yet another inconsequential treatise on the Berlin Wall. Lashing out at the word “Teilung” (division), Bachmann claimed that it was already far too overused, that it was convenient for evading personal responsibility and, worse, that it inhibited thinking. Suggesting neither permanence nor irreparable personal damage, the word “Teilung,” Bachmann emphasized, was incapable of truly jolting anyone. In her view, it did not begin to touch on the illnesses that really matter—those whose causes lie in a more distant past. Clearly Bachmann signaled to her illustrious gathering that she intended to confront the Nazi era—moreover, in ways that had nothing to do with the empty slogans of the Cold War period. How, then, can a depiction of Berlin be commensurate with the experience of its severely damaged essence? Above all, it must be radical, Bachmann insisted.

The clashing Berlin images Bachmann then hurled at the audience—most connected with specific sites--were indeed radical. What, in other words, was one to make of women clad in “greased paper” at Berlin’s Lake followed by trembling patients leaning over hospital balconies, terrified of the airplanes flying through their hospital rooms, or of waitresses in the Café Kranzler, their high heels stuck in whipped cream, who were preceded by the assassination of Walther Rathenau, the Weimar Republic’s Foreign Minister, on the Königsallee? Confusing even on their own, particularly since they remain unexplained, the images are not linked to each other, least of all into a traditional speech or seamless, linear narrative. Instead, they seem to have been forcibly jammed together, much as a hurricane might have jammed trucks, baby buggies, limousines, and shopping carts into each other. Bachmann’s jumbling of sites would frustrate a flaneur as well; it does not provide the continuum needed to treat sites like unfolding texts. Her accumulated site constructs are equally useless for the average city walker, who could not possibly plan a walk based on them.

In its most important aspects, Bachmann’s radicalism draws heavily on Büchner’s novella Lenz, posthumously published in 1839. Even the word Zufälle in Bachmann’s title is a direct borrowing from Lenz, where it does not refer to chance occurrences as opposed to fate—that is, not to the popular German dichotomy Schicksal (fate) or Zufall (chance). Instead, the word Zufälle designates Lenz’s incurable illness—a madness resulting from his conviction that a rupture runs through the entire world, dividing both the world and his own self into incompatible parts. Like the excessively sensitive Lenz, Bachmann relentlessly pursues this rupture. Thus her Place for Incidents presents 25 to 28 Krankheitsbilder (images of sickness), the exact number not entirely clear in her pile-up of images.

Juxtaposing discordant sites, incongruous occurrences, and incompatible people, Bachmann creates images with Lenzian ruptures. The opposites—one part generally referencing Berlin in the Nazi era, the other the Berlin of the early sixties—turn into images of sickness or madness when they connect with each other. Their merger is never a seamless joining but always a sudden, aggressive entanglement, much like cinematic collision montages. As the first, unhealthily long sentence of Bachmann’s text highlights (a sentence that is the verbal equivalent of a filmic panorama shot), a certain “it” has infected Berlin and continues to spread, unannounced, over its entire terrain. “Infected” sites thus pop up in the text without warning, occasioning one jolt after another. For example, one sentence suddenly couples Potsdam and —the former widely considered the seat of Prussian militarism, the latter associated with West Berlin’s civilian airport Tegel (built during the Airlift, it opened for regularly scheduled civilian flights only in 1960). In geographical skidding and sliding, the text informs us, the houses of Potsdam somehow end up in the houses of Tegel, much as its pine trees, suffering from similar geographical dislocations, had already become entangled with those of Tegel. From this we infer that Prussia did not simply disappear when the Allies had dissolved it as a territorial entity. In the spirit of Potsdam, its militarism continues to infiltrate Berlin, even its new civilian airport. Tegel’s airplanes, then, cannot help but be reminiscent of the horrifying war planes of the Nazi era.

Many other passages associate similarly incongruous occurrences with jarring couplings of Berlin sites. In one instance, elegantly attired waiters are washing the feet of disheveled, agitated customers in the restaurant of the five-star Hotel Kempinski on the Ku’Damm (Kurfürstendamm) while people are being hanged in the prison of Plötzensee (though both locations are in the district Charlottenburg, they are situated miles apart). Who are the disheveled, agitated customers? Are they the prisoners of Plötzensee—a site associated with the Nazi era—who have resurfaced, dislocated, in the elegant Hotel Kempinski? Or, do they belong to the large cast of mentally ill people populating Bachmann’s Berlin-text who are occasionally allowed to leave their hospitals? Emotionally defenseless, they are the ones attuned to the horrors lurking from the palimpsests that constitute Berlin.

The first excerpt in Berliner Spaziergänge also illustrates Bachmann’s technique of merging past and present in clashing combinations of geographical sites. In a single paragraph, the Lützowplatz is joined to the KaDeWe department store, close to the Wittenbergplatz. Yet the resultant whole is fractured. Other than an occasional human bone, there are no signs of life left on the Lützowplatz. The restored KaDeWe, however, is packed with people unable to control their lust for commodities. Despite their differences, both sites had once been associated with the affluent and both had been bombed and destroyed by fire in WWII. With their raw audio and visual sensibilities, the mentally ill experience the WWII Lützowplatz fire as if it were occurring in the present, whereas the consumers in the recently rebuilt KaDeWe (one that shows no traces of past damages) are so bent on repressing the past that they live only for the unrestrained, bizarre accumulation of unnecessary goods.

The horrors of the past reassert themselves even in the new district described in Berliner Spaziergänge. The rebellion of Kreuzberg’s societal dropouts against the Berlin establishment turns into (military) posturing against “subsidized agony” (the image Bachmann also uses for her own Ford Foundation-sponsored life in Berlin). They too wish to banish rather than confront the past (the text states that a whole age is ordered into the closet), but the past reasserts itself in sudden, seemingly inexplicable violence against others. In the Krankheitsbilder included in Berliner Spaziergänge that jarringly juxtapose West Berlin, the city of agents and spies, and East Berlin, the location governed by the Stasi (the GDR’s “state security” system that had turned into its secret police), Bachmann also stresses the commercialism and the latent violence of the new age predicated on Berlin’s past. Bachmann clearly sides with the damaged people and the radical ways in which they perceive Berlin. Only their fragmented, often aggressive visuality comes close to doing justice to the fractured selfhood of Berlin.

STEN NADOLNY, EIN TAXIFAHRER DANKT DER ZENTRALE (1981)

In 1980, Nadolny was the recipient of the Ingeborg-Bachmann-Preis, a prestigious Austrian award granted since 1976 for an unpublished work of German prose. At the public reading in Klagenfurt (Bachmann’s birthplace), Nadolny read a chapter of a book he was to publish only in 1983, but one that instantly made him even more famous than the Bachmann Prize did: The Discovery of Slowness. His praise of slowness went counter to the prevailing scientific and technological currents of the times, much as the Weimar flaneur went against those of his era by slowly strolling through cityscapes, not allowing the distractions of urban life to interfere with his careful examination of his surroundings.

Slowness and rejection of purposeful behavior—both enduring qualities of the flaneuer—were already important aspects of Nadolny’s first published novel, Die Netzkarte (1981), a book often mentioned as the paradigmatic example for a type of reinvented flaneur: the railroad flaneur. Its protagonist buys a train ticket that allows him to travel around in Germany for several weeks. For much of the journey, he is lost in thoughts triggered by people he does not wish to speak with and by landscapes he has no urge to explore. The train no longer represents the speed of modernity, as it had in Walter Ruttmann’s Sinfonie einer großen Stadt (1927); rather, it is the vehicle to evade progress while enabling the kind of associative, imaginative thinking that has long been the hallmark of the flaneur. Because the taxicab in Nadolny’s Ein Taxifahrer dankt der Zentrale (published in the same year as Die Netzkarte) has the same kind of function, it is possible to claim that Nadolny resiliently invented the taxicab driver as yet another type of flaneur.

On a winter day, on dangerously icy roads, a cab driver takes a passenger from , a locality in the southeastern part of Berlin, to , in Berlin’s northeastern part. Frohnau is as rural as the “garden city” Rudow, but West Berlin’s most famous urban sites are located on the taxi route. These include old historic sites such as the Reichstag and the Siegessäule, as well as West Berlin’s signature , an ensemble of cultural sites (e.g., the Philharmonic Hall and the New National Gallery) designed by the architect Hans Scharoun (1883-1972) that was meant to be West Berlin’s equivalent of East Berlin’s Museumsinsel (). The route thus seems ideal for the passenger from West Germany who had not been in Berlin for ten years (the text conveys no other information about him).

The cab driver’s ironic playfulness with concepts and words is evident even at the beginning of the ride when he proclaims that for once a trip will proceed from top to bottom. On a map, Rudow is of course at the bottom and Frohnau at the top, but the cab driver is referring to the state of things in West Berlin, which often seems to go downhill instead of upward. Yet he himself neither longs for nor expects changes of any sort. He is satisfied with his life in the midst of an ossified population that treats him well as long as he makes no demands on it. As a section reproduced in Berliner Spaziergänge informs us, the cab driver is not criticized in West Berlin for not having made something of his life. After years of turbulence, Berlin has become like a grandmother who either doesn’t see well or prefers to close her eyes to unpleasant things. This pertains to the political front too. Even when there are provocations, each side tends to look the other way rather than risk a war through belligerence.

Much like the flaneur of the past, the cab driver perceives magic in street names and often uses them as springboards for his flaneur-like discursive commentaries. In the second paragraph of Nadolny’s text, included in Berliner Spaziergänge, the driver remarks that all side streets on one side of the Neukölln Street are named after flowers, causing him to curve around in them like a bee would (in all likelihood, he is offering this excuse for his taxi skidding on the treacherous ice). In another section, one not excerpted in Berliner Spaziergänge, he guesses the meaning of a street name, first inferring that it stands for a particular flower but then suggesting that it could just as well be the last name of a Huguenot, the Jewish Huguenots having populated large areas of Berlin in 1685, when Elector Friedrich Wilhelm of offered them a safe haven from the anti-Semitic persecutions prevalent at that time in France. Whether he interprets the name of the street correctly or not does not seem to matter to the driver, as long as the site enables him to slip into a historical discourse.

Well-versed in history like Nadolny (who received his doctorate in history and had once also been a taxicab driver), the driver attributes Berlin’s days of exemplary urbanism to the Huguenots and Berlin’s lack of metropolitan significance in the postwar period to their absence, calling this the revenge of history. Talk of the Huguenots awakens associations pertaining to anti-Semitism. Based on personal experience, he knows that the horrible things that happened in the Nazi era will not go away: at various times he catches himself wondering what people looked like when they did not open their mouths to protest. In typical flaneur-fashion, the taxi driver’s reflections highlight the primacy of the optic. He is not, however, interested in the highly profiled landmarks of Berlin. Rather than talk about the Wall when the cab passes the part running along the Teltowkanal, the cab driver perfunctorily points out only the Teltowkanal. When the cab reaches the area of the Reichstag, he mentions simply that it is to the right (a building that the passenger surely would have recognized on his own) and then immediately deflects his passenger’s attention to a building that interests him far more: the Kongresshalle (a conference center).

He does not refer to its history (that it was given as a gift by the U.S. in 1957 and that it was meant to be the” lighthouse of freedom”), but he relishes telling a visually-based joke about it. The “rim of its hat” simply fell down, he says incredulously, thereby obliquely referring to 1980, the year when its unusually protruding roof had caved in. This is the kind of statement the driver regards as “the voice of the people” (rather than the empty Wall-slogans tourists mistake for “the people’s voice”). In general, though, the cab driver does not engage with the passenger more than the solitary flaneur engaged with those around him. He has, moreover, found a way to continue his incessant talk in his leisure time as well.

By the end of the narrative, the driver is at one of his regular sessions with a psychiatrist, uninterruptedly examining why he stays in Berlin when he’d actually like to leave, apparently his main psychological ailment. His perfectly “normal neurosis” is normal for the West Berlin of the early eighties. Certainly his psychiatrist shares it, a guarantee that the driver need not fear a cure. Debating Berlin-related issues back and forth has become a pastime that expresses the political standstill in West Berlin, much as it reflects the standstill in the taxicab driver’s life. As flaneur, then, the taxicab driver does not represent an alternate way of approaching life but the dominant mode of behavior in West Berlin.

PETER SCHNEIDER, DER MAUERSPRINGER (1982)

Peter Schneider’s Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper, 1982), the only noteworthy West German literary treatment of the Berlin Wall, consists of a loose mixture of hybrid components: anecdotes, news articles, TV commentaries, fictitious tales, documentary evidence, and self- analysis. They focus on a nexus of complex east/west national and personal identity questions, most arising from behavior predicated on the political system people had lived in during their formative years. Like the narrator in Schneider’s Lenz (1973)—a significant treatment of Berlin’s student movement—the Mauerspringer-narrator learns to doubt views he had previously regarded unassailable. This time, however, not abstract concepts but a very concrete structure (the double entendre is intended) provides Schneider with his focal point. How the narrator perceives Berlin and the Wall within it thus begins the Schneider-selections in Berliner Spaziergänge.

The airplane bringing the narrator to Berlin circles the entire city three times, turning him into a temporary “airplane flaneur.” The narrator is every bit as fascinated by what he sees from above, at a considerable distance from the city, as he would have been by sites scaled to more human proportions on city streets. Like the flaneur, he responds associatively to what he experiences visually. Since there is no companion at his side—this too in keeping with the image of the flaneur—he expands ideas without interruptions, eventually casting them into literary prose forms. What, then, does he see?

From afar, he perceives an undivided area of regulated linearity. The view indicates unity. But, due to the endlessly reproduced rectangular buildings dominating the center of the city terrain, unity becomes synonymous with uniformity. At the outskirts of the city he sees even less attractive buildings. They seem more like cement blocks hurled down at the city by either the Soviets or the western Allies than the outcome of imaginative architectural designs. Their most striking feature is also uniformity. The narrator’s panoramic view from the skies erases distinctions. There are no signs of spatial discord and certainly none suggesting two different political spheres. The duplicate structures in east and west—such as the two television towers, sport stadiums, and city halls--suggest identical tastes rather than divergent political views.

When the plane descends, the narrator of course detects the Wall, but its outward appearance does not indicate a ruptured world. Rather, from the sky the Wall appears to be the most creative, most attractive structure of the city. Similar to the way art protests rigid, established norms, the anarchically zigzagging Wall seems to protest the existence of so many unimaginative, endlessly multiplied, severe rectangles. For the flaneur in the sky, the Wall is an aesthetic experience. That the Wall is in reality a construct of division becomes apparent to him only after the plane lands at the Schönefeld-Airport (in the southern border of the eastern sector). There, from separate waiting lines, East- and West Germans are directed into their own half of the “Siamese” city and therefore into one of the two national identities preordained by the two differing German Cold War systems.

Like Nadolny’s cab driver, the narrator is typical of the members of the young generation who began arriving in Berlin soon after the Wall was built in 1961. While some came because of customary reasons (to join a friend, to escape provincial life), others, including the narrator, came because of a new policy instituted to attract the young generation to West Berlin: by moving to West Berlin, men could escape mandatory enlistment in the armed services. Strangely, exemption from the military was sanctioned only in West Berlin, which remained the most dangerous Cold War territory in the west even after the Wall reduced the risk of military confrontations. Thus, as representatives of big business fled in droves, the particularly pacifistic and creative young flocked to West Berlin, where they shaped the many pockets of alternative life styles that contributed so immensely to differentiating the Cold War island from the Federal Republic of Germany. Many stayed for the reason Schneider’s narrator also underlines in Berliner Spaziergänge: Berlin seemed far more authentic than West German cities because its multilayered past remained inscribed in its topography.

The endless talk of unification prevalent in official speeches, along with the constant reminder that each Berlin was only one half of a desirable whole, might have prompted the narrator to reflect on nationhood and on his own ruptured personal identity. Thus, in direct contrast to his former avoidance of the Wall—when it had been reduced from a massive, intrusive, corporeal structure to a wispy metaphor comfortably housed in the recesses of his mind—he concerns himself with the Wall more and more. Somewhat similar to the way that Walter Benjamin gathered his vast store of citations, the narrator collects anecdotes about Wall jumpers, one of these the fictional tale of Mr. Kabe included in Berliner Spaziergänge. Why Mr. Kabe feels the need to scale the Wall and jump to its other side, which in his case happens to be west to east (perceived as an anomaly even by East Germans) never becomes clear, not even to him, but jump over it he must. Both East- and West Berlin authorities are able to interpret his deed only by ascribing political motives to it. In this instance, as in many others, east and west interpretations of the same incident diverge widely, along with the meanings of the words used to explicate them (for example, there is no agreement on the meaning of the word “freedom”). Because the Wall stories offer the narrator too many differing perspectives, they ultimately do not supply him with the key to unlock the secrets of personal and national identity.

In the process of accumulating more and more Wall jumper stories, the narrator increases the frequency of his own “Wall jumping”—that is, crossing the border for one-day trips to East Berlin. But, his encounters with easterners prove how very much he too is conditioned by the western state and they by the eastern one. This insight leads him to utter, in 1982 (!), the sentence that has become the most prophetic German sentence on post-Wall Germany: “To demolish the Wall in the head will take longer than any demolition company will need to dismantle the visible Wall.”

Another passage from the book, this one a succinct question, has become almost as famous as the above quote: “Wo hört ein Staat auf und fängt ein Ich an?” In other words, what aspects of one’s personal self are one’s own and what aspects of the self are conditioned by one’s political system? Though appearing toward the end of Schneider’s narrative, this important identity question could very well have motivated it. Not surprisingly, Schneider’s assiduous explorations of topographical and mental borders, along with border crossings pertaining to both, highlight it as a question resistant to a satisfactory answer.

SVEN REGENER, HERR LEHMANN (2001)

In the many interviews Sven Regener has given since his first novel Herr Lehmann (Berlin Blues, 2001) turned into an instant bestseller, he consistently emphasizes—increasingly with irritation—that Herr Lehmann is not a novel about West Berlin’s Kreuzberg district (where most of the action takes place). Perhaps Regener, the founder, songwriter, singer, and trombone player of the Berlin rock group Element of Crime, feels compelled to repeat this so often because no one believes him. Regardless of his assertions, the book is viewed as the quintessential novel about the Kreuzberg of the 1980s, representative of the unique “Kreuzberg mix” and the “Kreuzberg feel.” Since Regener refers only to existing Kreuzberg locations (e.g., Wiener Straße, Lausitzer Platz, Urbankrankenhaus) and to existing Kreuzberg establishments, such as the Einfall (inspiration/ idea) and Abfall (refuse/garbage/waste), it was not long before “Mr. Lehmann was here” signs cropped up and tourists of every ilk were walking through Kreuzberg on “Mr. Lehmann Tours.”

It is ironic that the Kreuzberg sites mentioned in Herr Lehmann have assumed such an important life of their own, for the book rarely comments on them. The locations simply contextualize Mr. Lehmann in a real environment. We are informed of the street name whenever Mr. Lehmann first appears on it, and we know the name of the streets where he turns right or left and, often, how many blocks he walks on each particular street. The precise locations and the fact that he can walk to all of them denote a well-defined, secure life. In the course of the novel, however, Mr. Lehmann’s stable life becomes completely unmoored.

The entire first chapter points to the probability of imminent changes. At the outset of the novel, as Mr. Lehmann heads home from a serious drinking bout in the Einfall (where he is a bartender), we learn of his irritation at everyone other than his mother suddenly addressing him as “Mr. Lehmann” rather than calling him by his first name. He correctly assumes that the last name and the title “Mr.” prefacing it signify that others have lost patience with his arrested development and are signaling that it is time for him to become an adult—moreover, at the very latest on his impending 30th birthday. Unexpectedly, Mr. Lehmann’s homeward careening is interrupted at the Lausitzer Plaza: a particularly ugly, ferocious dog suddenly plants itself in front of him. For the first time during his nine years in Kreuzberg, Mr. Lehmann is unable to continue walking in a trusted neighborhood location. Danger—in the form of a dog that has no name—bares its teeth at him, arresting his physical mobility (his inner mobility had been arrested long ago). How the terrified Mr. Lehmann averts the danger, negotiating with the dog in a myriad of unsuccessful ways before finally getting the dog drunk with the brandy he had stolen from the bar, must certainly be one of the most humorous episodes in modern German literature. This same dog does turn friendly only in a passage in which Mr. Lehmann assumes responsibility.

In the first Herr Lehmann-excerpt of Berliner Spaziergänge, we encounter Mr. Lehmann on the way to meet his staid parents—a meeting he mightily dreads not only because he is afraid that they will call his unimpressive life into question. His parents, having come to Berlin with a tour group from the Federal Republic, are staying in a hotel at the corner of Charlottenburg’s Schlüterstraße and Kurfürstendamm, an area of Berlin that Herr Lehmann detests—because of its consumer temples, commodities, large numbers of tourists—in short, because it is everything that Kreuzberg was not. Understandably, therefore, everything not only seems wrong but also goes wrong on the way to his parents’ hotel. Exiting the subway at the Wittenbergplatz, he catches sight of the most famous West Berlin tourist attractions: the KaDeWe department store immediately in front of him, the “senseless” shopping paradise Europa Center at a distance, and beyond that the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which he considers even worse (in terms of crowd pleasers), and in-between, on the Tauentzienstraße, all the mass-replicated shoe stores bearing mass-produced names such as “Leiser” and “Stiller.”

Only the thought of walking to the hotel calms Mr. Lehmann somewhat (here, as elsewhere, walking represents the individual’s confidence in the ability to maintain control, a conviction that proves to be illusory). Not included in our excerpted selection: the semi-disastrous meeting with his parents and his dinner with them in the Einfall—a highly humorous episode because his girlfriend Katrin and his “best friend Karl” pretend that Herr Lehmann is the manager of the place and treat both him and his unsuspecting parents with utterly fake, servile deference.

Despite her willingness to humor his parents, Katrin has no sympathy for Mr. Lehmann’s lack of ambition--a character trait that had generally been welcomed rather than criticized among the many artists and societal dropouts who populated Kreuzberg, the rather poor, southeastern part of West Berlin encased by the Berlin Wall on three sides. Unlike Mr. Lehmann, we are not surprised when she leaves him for another man. This occurs on Mr. Lehmann’s 30th birthday.

Much worse, though, than his loss of Katrin, is the loss of his “best friend Karl,” who suffers a nervous breakdown and sinks into madness. Seeing no other recourse, Mr. Lehmann has him committed to a mental hospital—moreover, on the same day that Katrin leaves him. As if those calamities were not enough, on that very same day—November 9, 1989—the Berlin Wall comes down. The last Herr Lehmann passage of Berliner Spaziergänge shows how Mr. Lehmann experiences this event. Late in the evening, he is finally having his birthday drink in a bar. When the bartender informs the customers of the fall of the Wall, no one seems particularly interested. But, after Mr. Lehmann and a friend drink another beer, they do decide to investigate the novel event at Kreuzberg’s two border crossings—first at the Oberbaumbrücke, then at the Moritzplatz, close to the Heinrich Heine crossing. Mr. Lehmann’s reaction differs vastly from the spontaneous outpouring of joy that satellite systems spread around the world. He feels only profound emptiness. He senses that West Berlin will no longer be an island and Kreuzberg no longer its most comfortable enclave—in short, the fall of the Wall signifies the end of Mr. Lehmann’s life as he had known it. With the loss of borders and the influx of people from the east, Mr. Lehmann’s streets, plazas, and bars would also change their character. In an unpredictable world, they too would become unpredictable, incapable of providing him with the firm anchoring he had come to take for granted.

Whether the final line of the novel, also excerpted in our selections, connotes hope or immense sadness has proven to be a matter of contention among critics. Those who sense sadness tend to classify Herr Lehmann as a novel of nostalgia or Westalgie, the western variant of the Ostalgie that gripped the eastern part of Germany several years after unification. But, it becomes difficult to affix the Westalgie label to Regener’s novel if one remembers Mr. Lehmann’s depression after Katrin’s “defection” and how devastated he was at the severe mental breakdown of his “best friend Karl.” In addition, as Herr Lehmann stresses in two seminal passages of the novel, life in Kreuzberg had somehow stopped being any fun. For a Kreuzberg without fun nostalgia is simply out of place.

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

1. Both East Berlin’s Frankfurter Allee and West Berlin’s Hansaviertel were heavily damaged in WWII. The architecture of the rebuilt Hansaviertel (1957) was a direct response to the urban rebuilding on the Frankfurter Allee, renamed Stalinallee in 1949 and Karl-Marx-Allee in 1961. Each of the rebuilt areas were meant to reflect the political/social system of its “new” Berlin. To obtain an impression of their new architecture please, examine the Bundesarchiv (Federal Archive) photos on the following websites http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Karl-Marx-Allee and www.berlin.de/geschichte/historische-bilder/suche/index.php?place=Hansaviertel. Mention two differences between the buildings on the Stalinallee and those in the Hansaviertel. How does the Hansaviertel project reflect democratic principles? For help in answering this question, you may turn to the article “The Hansaviertel vs. the Karl-Marx- Allee” on the following website http://architectureinberlin.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/the- hansaviertel-vs-karl-marx-allee/

2. Unlike the Prussian castle in Berlin-Mitte, the Prussian Charlottenburg Palace was reconstructed in the 1950s. For views of this palace, turn first to an interactive video at the following site: www.earthpano.com/germany/Berlin/charlottenburg/charlottenburg.htm. Then go to this site: www.spsg.de/index.php?id=134. How does this castle fit into the image of West Berlin as the “frontier of freedom?”

3. Starting with the early fifties, debates on WWII and Holocaust remembrance surfaced frequently in West Berlin. Which buildings mentioned in this chapter provided a focus for these debates in the 1950s? Still, debates on remembrance became far more widespread with the 1968 student movement. What traces of these debates do you see in the Sten Nadolny and Peter Schneider selections?

4. In Ingeborg Bachmann’s view, West Berliners—including politicians—found it much easier to talk about the Berlin Wall than about the Nazi era. Why was the one topic much less threatening than the other?

5. In your opinion, why did Bachmann choose to present the West Berlin of the early sixties through the perceptions of the mentally ill? Why did she feel that only they could do justice to the reality of Berlin?

6. Do you agree or disagree with the statement that Bachmann’s presentation of Berlin is radical?

7. The student movement of the 1960s not only originated in West Berlin but was also at its strongest in West Berlin. Given the strong American presence and influence in West Berlin, does that make sense?

8. In 1996, a part of Kreuzberg’s Lindenstrasse was renamed Axel-Springer-Straße; in 2008, after four years of heated debates, a part of the Kochstrasse was renamed Rudi Dutschke-Straße. As the photo on the following site shows, these two streets intersect www.flickr.com/photos/linksparker/2456851472. Based on West Berlin history of the late sixties, why is the combination of these two names at one intersection surprising? Read the texts on the following sites http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/rudi-dutschke- strasse-from-our-man-in.html and www.toytowngermany.com/lofi/index.php/t95050.html. Also watch the You Tube video of the street party held on the day when the Rudi-Dutschke- Straße street sign was put up. What represents surprising new information to you in regard to naming a street after Rudi Dutschke?

The website of the Axel Springer publishing company includes the following in the car directions to its Berlin premises: “The publishing house is in Axel-Springer-Strasse, on the corner of Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse, in the Berlin Mitte/Kreuzberg district, not far from Friedrichstrasse and Checkpoint Charlie” (the italics are ours). www.axelspringer.de/en/artikel/How-to-Find-Us_96642.html. Was it necessary to mention the Rudi-Dutschke-Straße in the directions?

9. Compare Nadolny’s cab driver, Schneider’s wall jumper, and Regener’s walking Mr. Lehmann. Why is each representative of the West Berlin of the 1980s? Which two have the most in common with each other?

10. Each of the following websites focuses on the Berlin Wall. How are they similar and how do they differ? www.berlinermaueronline.de, www.mauer-museum.com, www.berliner-mauer-dokumentationszentrum.de/eng/index_dokz.html.