Cinema and Berlin's Spectacle of Destruction: The 'Ruin' Film, 1945-50 Author(s): Ralph Stern Source: AA Files, No. 54 (Summer 2006), pp. 48-60 Published by: Architectural Association School of Architecture Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29544634 Accessed: 26-03-2019 08:47 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Architectural Association School of Architecture is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to AA Files This content downloaded from 95.183.184.51 on Tue, 26 Mar 2019 08:47:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Cinema and Berlin's Spectacle of Destruction The 'Ruin' Film, 1945-50 Ralph Stern The new reality. The sign of our time is the ruin. She surrounds our life. She lines the streets of our cities. She is our reality. In her burned-out fagades blooms not the blue flower of the Romantics but the demonical spirit of destruction, collapse and Apocalypse. The ruin is the outer sign of the inner insecurity of the people of our age. The ruin lives in us as we live in her. She is our new reality, one which wants to be designed. Hans Werner Richter1 Figures 1 & 2 (courtesy of the Deutsches Historisches Museum, DHM): The destruction in the inner-city areas of Berlin was immense. On the left, a woman wearing a gas mask flees with a pram past the Gloria Palast, one of the city's major cinemas. Carrying the Ufa sign, the frontage advertises Hans Zerlett's Reise in die Vergangenheit (1943) {Journey into the Past). On the right, a rubble-filled street with evidence of early postwar salvage operations (in the centre left of the image). 48 AA FILES 54 This content downloaded from 95.183.184.51 on Tue, 26 Mar 2019 08:47:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Architecture, Destruction and Visual Culture moral rebirth; a promise rejecting the ordered, monumental and repressive systems of representation associated with fascism and The destruction of New York's World Trade Center brought with the National Socialist state. it unprecedented coverage of both the unfolding tragedy and the Removed from fascist codings, the topography of urban ruins aftermath of cleanup and recovery. Images of these events have lent itself to representational systems ranging from expressionism to already become markers of a particular historical moment, serving neorealism, thereby linking the liberating aspects of early twentieth as constitutive elements of an 'urban imaginary' specific to New York century utopianism with those of mid-century modernism. And, and underlining the vulnerability of any great city. As documents of although all of Germany was in a state of ruin, the specific conflict, they will take their place alongside other images of tragic, intersection of the psychological, the ideological and the large-scale urban destruction, such as London during the Blitz, the representational (whether urban, architectural or cinematic) was levelling of Rotterdam and Warsaw, and the erasure of Hiroshima nowhere more apparent than in the physical, and very contested, and Nagasaki. Each of these might be considered a site which the terrain of Berlin. While other German cities suffered a greater French historian Pierre Nora has termed un lieu de memoire; a site percentage of destruction, Berlin lost the greatest number of of memory where, in these instances, place and image are fused. structures. The statistics are staggering: of its 248,000 buildings, To this list must be added Germany's major metropolitan 28,000 were destroyed, another 20,000 were completely beyond centres destroyed during the Second World War. However, unlike repair and a further 178,000 were damaged. In 1945 Berlin was a city New York, London or Warsaw, Germany's devastated cities elicited in which one could travel for kilometres and see nothing but ruins. little sympathy from the victorious Allies. Conceived of in British circles as a war of terror against a civilian population, the air war was Berlin: 'Illusions in Stone' and the Theatre of War deemed a justifiable act of retribution against a ruthlessly aggressive opponent.2 By the close of the war, the scale of destruction inflicted A little more than a decade before the end of the war, Albert Speer, by the Allies was immense: of Germany's 19 million homes, one Hitler's personal architect, had developed a 'Theory of Ruin Value' quarter were destroyed. Cities were filled with 400 million cubic (Theorie vom Ruinenwert) which in its essentials followed Gottfried metres of rubble, creating an 'everyday psychotopography of Semper's views on the value of natural material, particularly stone.5 German cities [...] dominated by ruins'.3 Housing the psychological To illustrate this point, two picturesque paintings of the ruins of the trauma of those who had experienced the destruction, this Roman Forum by the eighteenth-century painter Hubert Robert topography also had a distinctive ethical dimension. For Germans, were hung in the cabinet room of Speer's new chancellery.6 The their ruined cities symbolised a profound social and moral collapse; construction site of the chancellery itself was the subject of two they were the 'moral ruins' of National Socialism. As a topography paintings by Paul Hermann, which served as colour illustrations in of moral debris, the ruins carried a unique metaphorical charge; one Speer's sumptuous publication Die neue Reichskanzlei. First published that would be deployed in the various social and political discourses in 1940, this monograph from the NSDAP Press had reached its third seeking alignment with the new regimes of either East or West. printing, with a total run of 40,000 copies, by 1942. Architecture, Germany's ruined cities can therefore be seen both as an together with its illustration and dissemination, was clearly central emotionally charged psycho-topography and as a potentially to the programmatic efforts of the Third Reich to synthesise and explosive ideological terrain, the ground on which the Cold War control all areas of visual culture. Whether as 'illusions in stone' or would later be fought. as the 'architecture of light' used by Speer in staging party rallies, To the psychological and ideological connotations of the cinematic efforts were deployed less for purposes of entertainment topography of ruins a third dimension must be added, one of or historical documentation than as active agents in the construction particular interest within the realm of urbanism and urban of a Gesamtkunstwerk in which stagecraft and statecraft were ultimately representation. In many respects the topography of ruins fulfilled synonymous.7 Coupling ideological goals with modernist technologies the Utopian dream of the dissolution of the city: the Aufl?sung der appropriate for mass consumption, this culture reached its apotheosis St?dte that architects such as Bruno Taut had formulated. For those in the medium of film.8 Incorporating and subverting the resources architects belonging to earlier expressionist Utopian movements of Weimar's progressive film industry, the Third Reich transformed rejecting 'cities of stone', the destruction of war inadvertently Berlin into the heart of a propaganda machine that created its own offered the possibility of a radically new and 'democratic' urban cinematic regimen and successfully perpetuated this 'scopic regime' landscape (Stadtlandschaft) liberated from the confining scale of the to the very end. Already in the first weeks after Hitler's ascension medieval city and rigid structure of the nineteenth-century perimeter to power, Joseph Goebbels, Germany's Minister of Propaganda block. In this vision, buildings, like individuals, were to stand free in and the man responsible for the Reich's film production, 'placed a the Stadtlandschaft. These were the Tr?ume in Tr?mmern, the 'dreams determined value on synthesising all the possibilities of propaganda in the ruins' dominating much postwar architectural discourse.4 into a singular effect'.9 Supporting these efforts, films such as Leni Comprising stark silhouettes, freestanding facades devoid of Riefenstahl's Triumph of the 1^/7/(1934) fused the architecture and ornament and a ground plane defined by a rolling, landscape-like choreography of Albert Speer with the technology of montage to topography of rubble, urban ruins evoked a distinctive visual and produce vast spectacles of power.10 Such an intertwining of politics, spatial regimen that in many respects resembled the ideals of architecture and film prompted the film historian Anton Kaes to modern architecture. Therefore, despite their associations with deliver a biting indictment of the Third Reich's politics of film, hardship and tragedy, these traits lent the urban ruins of postwar writing of 'Germany as the location, Hitler as the producer, Goebbels Germany a dual resonance understood either as a condition of and his officers as directors and stars, Albert Speer as set designer, retribution and destruction or as the promise of reconstruction and and the rest of the population as extras'.11 Even in the closing hours AA FILES 54 49 This content downloaded from 95.183.184.51 on Tue, 26 Mar 2019 08:47:31 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms of Berlin's rule, this endeavour never diminished in importance. starving people in rags. Lost German soldiers who no longer As the Russians were almost within firing range of Berlin, Goebbels knew what was happening. Red Army soldiers singing, addressed a group of colleagues with the following challenge: celebrating and often drunk.