Representation and the Recurring Past in Post-Unification Berlin
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CONJURED SPACES: REPRESENTATION AND THE RECURRING PAST IN POST-UNIFICATION BERLIN by KIMBERLY JEAN PHILLIPS B.A. (Hons.), The University of Victoria, 1997 M. A., The University of British Columbia, 2000 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Fine Arts) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA September 2007 © Kimberly Jean Phillips, 2007 11 ABSTRACT Behind the mask of new architecture rapidly transforming Berlin's visage in the years following Germany's reunification in 1990 lie profound anxieties over the nature and implications of the city's reconstruction in the face of an irresolvable past and an unclear future. A disenchanted and destabilized eastern population, resurfacing questions over the definition of "Germanness" and the German nation, and the sudden collision of two very different official narratives of the National Socialist and communist pasts frustrate the city's desire to present a unified identity in the first years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. To access this difficult terrain, my dissertation departs markedly from the focus of much of the published literature on the post-unification city and looks not to Berlin's new building projects themselves but rather to the more unstable spaces between architecture: those more marginal or unresolved sites and surfaces which, in states of flux, paralysis, or neglect, are more vulnerable to (and revealing of) the possibilities of appropriation and disturbance. This study considers three temporary, site-specific installations that for brief moments haunted such sites in Berlin during the first volatile years after 1990: Shimon Attie's 1991-1992 photographic projections entitled The Writing on the Wall, the 1993 simulation in canvas of Berlin's demolished Stadtschloss, and Christo and Jeanne- Claude's famed wrapping of the Reichstag in 1995. Visible only fleetingly amidst the solidity of the city's built landscape (and the heaviness of it's history), it is the very impermanence of such representations, I contend, that afford them their critical power. Ill Drawing upon theories of memory, trauma, and desire, I argue that these installations can be brought to bear directly on the contentious politics of memory and identity that permeate Berlin's social and spatial practice in the years following the fall of the Wall, exposing anxious edges of "Germanness," desires to recuperate (and repress) certain historical narratives, and ambivalent sites of fixation in a city negotiating its new role as once again capital of a unified German nation-state. In this way, such interventions provide narrow windows through which we might glimpse the uncertain, unquiet space that operates behind a redefining city's scripted surface, and the pasts that lie in wait there. The task of this dissertation is to explore this space. IV TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 11 Table of Contents lv List of Figures v List of Abbreviations XX1 Acknowledgements xxn INTRODUCTION Encounters 1 CHAPTER ONE Visitations *3 CHAPTER TWO Exhumations 94 CHAPTER THREE Fixations CONCLUSION Returns 212 Figures 227 Bibliography 369 V LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Page from Tacita Dean's Die Regimentstochter, 2005. Source: Tacita Dean, Die Regimentstochter (Germany: Steidl, 2005), no pagination. Page 228. Figure 2: Max Ernst, Thursday, collage from Une Semaine de Bonte, 1934. Source: Max Ernst, Une Semaine de Bonte: A Surrealist Novel in Collage (New York: Dover Publications, 1976), 168. Page 229. Figure 3: Hannah Hoch, Deutsches Madchen, 1930 Source: Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), plate 5. Page 230. Figure 4: Page from Tacita Dean's Die Regimentstochter, 2005. Source: Dean, Die Regimentstochter, no pagination. Page 231. Figure 5: Page from Tacita Dean's Die Regimentstochter, 2005. Source: Dean, Die Regimentstochter, no pagination. Page 232. Figure 6: Page from Tacita Dean's Die Regimentstochter, 2005. Source: Dean, Die Regimentstochter, no pagination. Page 233. Figure 7: The new towers of Potsdamer Platz amidst construction cranes, Berlin. Photograph: author, 2002. Page 234. Figure 8: Reconstructed streetscape opposite the Gendarmenmarkt. Mitte, Berlin. Photograph: author, 2002. Page 235. Figure 9: View from Unter den Linden towards Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate under restoration, covered with tarpaulin screen and painted with a representation of the Gate itself, Berlin. Photograph: author, 2002. Page 236. Figure 10: Tarpaulin simulation of Karl Friedrich Schinkel's former Bauakademie (with one corner rendered in brick). District Mitte, Berlin. Photograph: author, 2006. Page 237. Figure 11: Detail: corner of the Bauakademie screen. District Mitte, Berlin. Photograph: author, 2006. Page 238. Figure 12: The facades of apartment houses serving as the first incarnation of the frontline Wall, Bernauer Strasse, Berlin, 1965 Source: Polly Feversham and Leo Schmidt, Die Berliner Mauer Heute (Berlin: Verlag Bauwesen, 1999), 32. Page 239. Figure 13: Keith Haring painting a section of the Berlin Wall near Checkpoint Charlie, 1986. Source: Feversham and Schmidt, Die Berliner Mauer Heute, 62. Page 240. Figure 14: Fragments of the Berlin Wall offered for sale, Berlin 1998. Source: Feversham and Schmidt, Die Berliner Mauer Heute, 60. Page 241. Figure 15: Berlin under construction; the future site of the Canadian Embassy on Leipziger Platz. Berlin, 2002. Photograph: author. Page 242. Figure 16: Shimon Attie, Joachimstrasse 2: Former Jewish resident, ca. 1930, Spandauer Vorstadt, Berlin, 1992. Source: Shimon Attie, Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie European Projects: Installations and Photographs (Vermont: Verve Editions, 1998), 99. Page 243. Figure 17: Shimon Attie, Joachimstrasse 11a: Former Jewish cafe with patrons, 1933, Spandauer Vorstadt, Berlin, 1992. Source: Attie, Sites Unseen, 97. Page 244. Figure 18: Shimon Attie, Mulackstrasse 37: Former Jewish Residents, ca. 1932. Spandauer Vorstadt, Berlin, 1992 Source: Attie, Sites Unseen, 117. Page 245. Figure 19: Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, Monument Against Fascism, Harburg (suburb of Hamburg), 1986. Source: James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 29. Page 246. Figure 20: Horst Hoheisel, Submission for the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, 1995. Source: James E. Young, At Memory's Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 93. Page 247. Figure 21: Krzysztof Wodizcko, Leninplatz — Projektion, Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit exhibition, Friedrichshain, Berlin, 1990. Source: Giorgio Verzotti, "Doppel Jeopardy," Artforum 29 (November 1990), 124. Page 248. Figure 22: Christian Boltanski, Missing House, Die Endlichkeit der Frieheit exhibition, Spandauer Vorstadt, Berlin, 1990. Photograph: author, 2006. Page 249. Figure 23: Christian Boltanski, detail of Missing House. Photograph: author, 2006. Page 250 Figure 24: Karol Broniatowski, Mahnmal Bahnhof Griinewald, Wilmersdorf, Berlin, dedicated 1991. Photograph: author, 2006. Page 251. Figure 25: Frieder Schnock and Renata Stih, Places of Remembrance - Isolation and Deprivation of Rights, Expulsion, Deportation, and Murder of Berlin Jews in the Years 1933 to 1945, Schoneberg, Berlin, 1993. Source: Young, At Memory's Edge, 112. Page 252. Figure 26: Frieder Schnock and Renata Stih, detail of Places of Remembrance. The text reads: "In Bayerischen Platz Jews are only allowed to sit on yellow park benches." Source: Young, At Memory's Edge, 113. Page 252. Figure 27: Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the Neue Wache, Berlin, 1817-18 Source: Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 219. Page 253. Vlll Figure 28: Kathe Kollwitz sculpture, inside the Neue Wache (added 1993). Source: Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 223. Page 253. Figure 29: Aerial view of the area surrounding the future Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 1997. Source: Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Materials on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung GmbH, 2005), 21. Page 254. Figure 30: Christine Jacob-Marks, Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, Winner of the nullified 1995 competition for a Berlin Holocaust Memorial. Source: Young, At Memory's Edge, 190. Page 255. Figure 31: Richard Serra and Peter Eisenman, photograph of the model and winning submission for the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin, November 1997. Source: Foundation for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Materials on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 22. Page 256. Figure 32: Fence with graffiti surrounding empty site of future Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, memorial site, Berlin, 1997. Source: Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), frontispiece. Page 257. Figure 33: Dedication of the memorial at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, 24 April, 1961. Source: Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), plate 4. Page 258. Figure 34: Shimon Attie, RuckerstraBe 4: Slide Projection of Jewish Residents (ca. 1925), Spandauer Vorstadt, Berlin, 1991. Source: Shimon Attie, The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin's Jewish Quarter. Essays