Bagels by the Spree: A New Yorker in Berlin

2007-06-12T23:42:00.000Z

G8 Press Round-Up

Resistance to the Group of 8 meetings this year was quieter and smaller than expected. Rowdy kids stormed through farmland to approach the security fence around Heiligendamm, then did nothing, while Rostock saw a mere 25,000 protestors, a quarter of the expected number, according to police. (Protest organizers claim 80,000 showed up, but as with Heiligendamm, no official count exists.) And although black-clad rioters threw rocks and ignited autos one afternoon in Rostock, mass violence on the scale of the 2001 riots at Genoa was mainly averted.

That is, physical violence was minimal. The verbal assault of the German press against protestors, on the other hand, was substantial. Media outlets from conservative (weekly paper Die Zeit) to liberal (Berlin’s fabled Zitty) had little patience for so-called “G8-Gegner” (anti-G8-ers). Die Zeit published the scathingly sarcastic piece “They Just Want to Play,” mocking the self-involvement of Rostock protestors—including those dressed mysteriously as clowns—who seemed uninterested in packaging their radical slogans and claims in words understandable to the politically initiated onlooker.

In “Love Songs at the Rebel Camp,” the Berliner Zeitung went behind the scenes at one of the many activists’ camps thrown up in the agrarian pocket of Northern Germany. While finding the usually dumb-headed quotes about violence being necessary to attack a violent system, the reporter is careful to insist that many camp members reject Molotov cocktails. “Violence is total shit,” says a girl in the communal kitchen.

Meanwhile, a teen identified as “Micha,” who skipped school to camp out, “speaks, seemingly clueless, about globalization.” In other words, correspondent Martin Schumacher presents an entire camp of protestors without a single well-spoken, intelligent representative. He concludes that they are charmingly dumb hippies.

The story is pretty similar, minus the charm, when another Berliner Zeitung correspondent tails three young men from Berlin’s Kreuzberg on their way to Heiligendamm’s beleaguered security fence. One boy swills from a beer bottle before throwing it aside on the ground—so much for the environment—and when a farmer who tends the land they trespass through accosts them for not respecting his field, he answers, “Leave us…alone. Those [government leaders] behind us throw bombs.”

Are a lack of educated viewpoint and pass-the-buck attitude the only things needed to protest? Not according to Tadzio Müller, whose opinion formed Zitty’s lead-in to an article about protest. Mr. Müller couldn’t have provided better fodder for a journalist looking to skewer an innocently anti-globalization little lamb: “I don’t like this smug attitude when people say you need to read a couple good books before you form an opinion. You have to feel protest. That’s at least as important.”

In case you didn’t understand protestors, now you do. They feel something. Something more important than, uh, thought.

This is just a small selection, of course. There were more articles that made protestors seem, if not outright childish or dumb, at least a bit misinformed. In fact, the rock-throwing, police-attacking, black-clad mass at Rostock got the nicest treatment, as the media focused attention on their trendy clothing. The sleek black sweaters and stylish three-quarter-length pants were too tempting for journalists to resist commenting upon, while wrap-around reflective sunglasses garnered Matrix comparisons.

The strangest of all things G8, however, is the priceless tidbit picked up by Der Tagesspiegel. The NPD, Germany’s right-wing, xenophobic, neo-Nazi party succeeded in hoodwinking police in the capital and marching through the Brandenburg Gate several times last Monday, June 4th, before law enforcement got its act together and scared them off with arrests.

Merely days after this prank-like maneuver, Der Tagesspiegel reported on June 6th, the NPD attempted to get around the anti-Neo-Nazi demonstration ban up in Rostock by faxing Russian President Vladimir Putin a plea for democracy. Yes, go ahead, I’ll wait while you read that sentence again.

The NPD wrote what sounds like an earnest request for Putin to “politely try” to convince Chancellor Merkel, in the course of their private conversations, of the importance of “demonstration rights for the opposition” and of “democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany.” Perhaps they figured that Putin’s stint as a KGB agent in East Germany taught him the value of democratic free speech. Their fax, unsurprisingly, received no answer from the Russian Embassy in Berlin or representatives in Heiligendamm to whom it was sent.

Leaders photo courtesy http://www.g-8.de/ Riot images courtesy http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,486307,00.html

2007-05-25T18:25:00.000Z

At the G8: the Stasi and Seaside Views

As an employee of East Germany’s secret police, Axel Hilpert used to befriend dissatisfied citizens and then turn them into the authorities, shattering lives. He now works in real estate. He is in fact partial owner of the dreamy hotel get-away in Brandenburg where various G8 finance ministers met last week.

This story, which was broken by The Wall Street Journal, strangely declined to mention the luxury resort by name. The only reason I can think of for this would be libel concerns, perhaps fearing that the astute businessman would claim legal damages for sullying the vacation spot’s good name, which happens to be Resort Schwielowsee.

This may even be a sensible concern, since their investigation about Mr. Hilpert, pictured in this photo at left, reveals a particularly depraved past. He assisted the broke socialist government in extorting valuable antiques from private ownership to then sell at a profit for the state under a project called “Koko,” or commerical coordination. He also, as mentioned, developed personal relationships to gain information about possible “traitors,” later turning on those who never had a clue who he really was.

Yet Mr. Hilpert, codename "Monika," is only one of many employees of the Staatsministerium für Staatsicherheit, or "Stasi" for short, who got off scot-free after German reunification. Official literature from the the BStU [Bundesbeauftragten für die Unterlagen des Staatsicherheitsdienst der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik], the office responsible for sorting out the mess, proclaims this sad truth quite openly.

The office also represents this truth to a certain extent—52 of its current employees were also on the Stasi payroll. It defends this number by saying that these employees provide inside knowledge vital to sorting out the labyrinthine paper trail of espionage left behind. The BStU is hoping to finish organizing and reconstructing the total 180 kilometers of files and 5,600 sacks of shredded paper by 2012.

Perhaps it is from one of these continually-sorted shredded sacks that Mr. Hilpert’s file was reconstructed. When the Berliner Zeitung first wrote a feature about the real estate developer’s past in 2004, it described the files as “disappeared.” It also describes KoKo as an antiquities business rather than as a shadow Stasi organization of essential thievery, hinting at a lesser grasp of exactly how the state machinery worked.

But a lot can change in three years, as German citizens hungry for the facts of their own history keep pulling back layers. On this May 16th, Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg published the efforts of investigative journalists Gabi Probst and Sascha Adamek, whose search for the thought-destroyed files produced duplicates, and who savvily turned to victims’ files as well to continue collecting the facts.

Since “The Lives of Others” [Das Leben der Anderen] (Post Feb. 12) won the Best Picture Oscar in February, international attention has turned to the Stasi, especially in America, where Hollywood is buzzing with talk of an English-language remake. Probst and Adamek took advantage of this atmosphere and shared their findings with Journal correspondent Marcus Walker, who published the English-language expose the following day on May 17th.

It is important to call attention to a Stasi spy who expresses no public regrets about his past. (Although he may sense that investors or hotel guests won’t find them particularly palatable; he declined to ‘fess up to the Berliner Zeitung, staying mum on supposed devious acts that Probst and Adamek’s research later confirmed.) As Timothy Garten Ash recently wrote in the New York Review of Books, “The Lives of Others” is flawed by how easily its protagonist turns tail from Stasi die-hard to nice guy. It makes his salvation a bit too easy, a bit too relatable; in short, it obscures the fact that many Stasi employees were selfish, ignorant, or both, and simply have no regrets whatsoever, never thinking twice about their victims.

Rather, Mr. Hilpert’s thoughts are presumably now about his Resort, whose offerings include a spa called Tao Life Wellness Center housed in a faux pagoda, as well as quaint, white vacations huts that look out upon the blue Schwielowsee, one of the many bodies of water dotting the Brandenburg landscape. Near the historic city of Potsdam, the Resort is also not far from Berlin, where the latest financial figures show that the federal government is spending about 50 million euros per year in federal aid to victims of the Stasi. This sum represents 3% of what the feds pay to former Party functionaries, including Stasi employees, who receive an average of one and a half billion euros per year since 2002. One wonders if they spend any of this money vacationing at an idyllic spot on the Schwielowsee, visiting an old friend.

Tip: “Stasi, Slander, and the Schloss: Remembering the GDR,” appears in this month’s Exberliner. For it, I researched the debated history of Berlin’s various Stasi memorial sites, including early 1990s bickering between victims’ groups and the newly united government about who would administrate the memorials and what they will say. Fans of “The Lives of Others” will learn about what happened to the secret jail as well as Stasi headquarters featured in the movie after 1989. Unfortunately, the article text is only available in print and not on the web, but the magazine can be ordered online.

2007-05-23T22:28:00.000Z

To Err is Human, to Protest Berlinish

You can feel it in the air in Berlin right now—the combined anticipation and wariness as the G8 summit approaches and thousands across the city prepare to protest. One hopes that slogan-memorizing, placard-painting citizens stay peaceful from June 6th to June 8th when Germany hosts the international forum in the northern city of Heiligendamm.

Then again, perhaps all the preparation feels more ho-hum than highly alarming to Berliners: protests are modus operandi here, and the latest slew of non-G8 headlines only confirms this. Axel Springer Verlag, among others, recently protested in court against the successful renaming of a stretch of Kochstrasse to Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse (Post Jan. 20). The conservative media mogul whose publishing empire bears his name was criticized heavily by Dutschke for his reactionary publishing. However, political concerns weren’t officially cited by Springer et. al. in their appeal to overturn January’s citizen’s vote for the renaming; rather, they focused on the costs they will have to incur. You know, big stuff like ordering new letterhead. Their case was rejected by a judge’s decision that emphasized the democratic weight of the local ballot, but the Dutschke-doubters plan to appeal the ruling. No surprise there.

Another rather ornery figure was also recently dismissed in courts: famously self-important architect Meinhard von Gerkan, who designed the capital’s Hauptbahnhof, has been chastised for claiming that it is Deutsche Bahn’s fault that hurricane-strength winds in January caused a steel support to fall from the station’s roof. Von Gerkan is already known for bickering with the Bahn about the extent to which they followed his original design when he insisted they rebuild the a lower-level roof at great cost so as not to disrupt the aesthetic effect of “his” train station (Post Dec. 6) Von Gerkan has now been slapped on the wrist by the same legal system that so surprisingly supported his earlier protest.

It remain to be seen, however, if protest will work on Kreuzberg’s Wrangelstrasse, where 24-year-old Katrin Schmidberger is organizing against the neighborhood’s first McDonald’s franchise. The interesting part of this picture is not Schmidberger’s youth or emphasis on non-violence (both “no duh” s in the world of home-grown social activism) but rather her justification: there are 7,000 schoolchildren living around the planned construction site, and many don’t learn proper nutrition from their parents at home. Schmidberger avows that she “knows what makes Kreuzberg kids tick” and wants to protect them from McCholesterol.

Home to all these nutrition-ignorant children, Wrangelkiez is also the same area that was briefly famous last fall when a group of Middle Eastern youths surrounded policeman and forced them to retreat from attempting to arrest two young men who had just mugged a third. The incident alarmed the public, largely because the press went into yellowest journalism mode, crying, “The next Paris?” and hoping to stir angst at banlieue-like chaos. Banlieue it isn’t, but Wrangelkiez is heavily settled by immigrants. In other words, what Schmidberger is essentially saying is that these foreigners don’t teach their kids how not to be fat. They are easy prey for McDonald’s.

With or without the perhaps gentrifying influence of the fast food chain, the neighborhood will likely retain its slightly rough reputation, one not helped by violence on the 1st of May. Although the traditional riots did not take place, thanks in part to a citizens’ initiative called Myfest bent on replacing drunken vandalism and drunken dancing (Post May 1), one woman was badly beaten during a protest/riot that did break out that night. The catch is that neither flying bottles nor stones injured her, but rather a clubbing incurred from a policeman when she tried to take shelter from the fray in an apartment building entranceway. According to reports from Der Tagesspiegel, the victim and Amnesty International employee, who suffered broken ribs and sharp pains after her beating from the peace-keeping forces, is looking into a lawsuit.

And there are continuing protests at the city’s oldest university, Humboldt, about the administration's participation in a federal “elite initiative,” or competition for government money to improve the school’s facilities. Students claim the measure will neglect other subjects.

This is just a selection, of course. There is a lot of reality with which to be discontented in Berlin. It will be interesting to see if G8 protests stand a chance at drowning out local rebelliousness on the news or in the popular mind. If so, this diverted attention surely won’t last long, as life slowly returns to normalcy…and people begin objecting to it once more.

2007-05-04T01:42:00.000Z

The Trail of Question Marks…?

The latest puzzle in Berlin is no longer what to build on Schlossplatz or when the next piece of the Hauptbahnhof’s roof will come whistling off. Rather, it is what to make of Thomas Hirschhorn’s new installation “Stand-alone,” which opened last Friday in Arndt & Partner gallery. With fireplaces vomiting broken furniture, obsessively repetitive wall graffiti, “mega-form” cardboard tubes stamped with gruesome “war porn” images, as well as mutilated computers and tape-wrapped armchairs, the art confounds the viewer and overwhelms the senses. Thrill-seekers, forget the return of Tresor: walking into Hirschhorn’s installation is just as psychedelic as Alice’s trip down the Rabbit Hole. Perhaps more.

Hirschhorn condenses the stimulus of everyday reality into a few cramped rooms while removing our usually helpful filters and controls. The result is visual onslaught combining commentaries on contemporary media saturation, violence in Iraq and collective consciousness, and consumer acquisition. All at once. Or so I argue in my review for white hot, written only after sorting through a thick tangle of impressions and images.

Indeed, Hirschhorn’s jam-packed collage technique has left some viewers scratching their heads, including a writer who couldn’t make heads or tails of his spring 2006 installation “Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War, One Army, One Dress”: “at first sight…I was knocked out...[so] rather than a review, this will be a gathering of my first impressions.” She was, however, able to conclude that the work was a “bold affirmation of art as communication.” Another reviewer for Art in America required several thousand words to address Hirschhorn’s loquacious clutter, yet found it to be an impressive “exhibition that engulfed one with its mix of burgeoning chaos and hyper precision.”

Of course, there are also critics who recoil at Hirschhorn’s bombastically overwhelming approach. The New York Sun lambasted his 2006 “Superficial Engagement” installation at Gladstone Gallery in New York as an “adolescent crap-fest” with a “puerile addiction to the macabre and scatological.” Ouch. Another New York reviewer of a Hirschhorn cut-and-paste extravaganza “left puzzled whether the artist had anything much in mind,” a complaint echoed in the San Francisco Chronicle’s discussion of “Utopia, Utopia,” which faulted the artist’s “staccato, redundant, fragmentary and possibly self-contradictory presentation” for presenting issues worth thinking about and then undercutting itself with the obsessively collected bits of visual noise. The reviewer concluded, “One departs not stimulated to think further about such questions but merely relieved that someone else has apparently taken them on.”

So may be the case with Berlin’s very own Der Tagesspiegel, whose short review resorts to simply listing the gallery’s contents, inventory-style, rather than tackle the task of interpretation Hirschhorn may (or may not) be challenging us to. Whether he makes viewers think or numbs them with his overload, one thing is certain—his work has a happy home in Arndt & Partner. Although represented locally in abbreviated form in this spring’s “Into Me/ Out of Me” exhibit at Kunst-Werke Institute of Contemporary Art, Hirschhorn’s hyper-stimulated style has real breathing room this time around and is being enthusiastically received.

A pre-opening talk at Humboldt University last Thursday was so full of sweaty bodies that the moderator ran out multiple times to fetch Hirschhorn fresh water. Hirschhorn played along gamely, speaking about his trajectory as an artist—which only recently resulted in the overstuffed installation format—and taking an hour’s worth of questions afterwards. He was also an affable presence at his opening, shooting the bull with whomever wondered up to mutter words of admiration, and likewise enthusiastic at a overflowing gallery talk the following day. He surveyed his methods and motivations with statements like “Material as philosophy, that interests me!” or “I don’t want to make arte povera. I want to make poor art!” or even “I don’t want to eliminate anything. I just want to show what is going on in the world.” That should help puzzled viewers, somewhat, but for those who missed it, there is always the map of his thought process provided at the entrance to “Stand-alone.” Hirschhorn is trying the best to talk, share, and show—and it would be a shame to miss it.

"Stand-alone" is at Arndt & Partner until 7 July, Zimmerstr 90-91, Phone +49 30 280 8123.

2007-05-01T21:09:00.000Z

My Kiez, Myfest

To fight violence and vandalism with music, food, and community fun is the idea behind Myfest, a large street fair that took place today in Berlin’s Kreuzberg. On the 1st of May 1987, mass riots broke out in the neighborhood’s rougher quarter, nicknamed SO 36, forcing police to retreat for hours while rioters set cars on fire, broke windows, and stole from storefronts. Since then, the 1st of May, which is traditionally a national holiday called “Day of Work” or “Day of the Workers’ Movement,” has also been a time of civil unrest in the neighborhood. However, in 2003 some residents sick of the radical Left’s unruly overtures organized to create a neighborhood celebration dubbed Myfest, a play on the German pronunciation of "Mai" meant to indicate that this is their neighborhood too.

As Myfest’s website explains, the themes of social justice and labor can be confronted peacefully through the medium of music. Today’s Myfest, the fifth, featured twenty stages stretching from Kottbusser Tor to Oranienplatz to Heinrichplatz. Present too were the expected punks and alternative-looking characters, but conspicuously absent were angry revolutionaries inciting the crowd to an uprising. Despite objections from some in the Left who accuse the event of turning a day of resistance into a watered-down carnival and even led counter-demonstrations last year—the banner in this photo says “Myfest is bullshit Revolutionary 1st of May!”--there was no aggression as of 9 p.m. this evening. Long lines of police cars stood idle near Myfest’s entrances while revelers streamed underneath the U-bahn tracks in the mild weather.

In fact, Myfest is both an admirably successful “take-back-the-streets” project and a showcase for Kreuzberg. As organizers promised, here was “the neighborhood in all its diversity”: Turkish families sat behind makeshift börek stands (a doughy pastry stuffed with spinach, cheese, or both) alongside rainbow-headed teens sipping beer. Visitors could sample sausages, pretzels, falafel and döner as they listened to indy-rock, techno, and Arabic-language tunes. Meanwhile, police arrested over 60 people for throwing bottles and other acts of violence around Boxhagener Platz in Friedrichshain last night, reports the Berliner Zeitung. The rowdiness there stemmed from observance of Walpurgisnacht, a pre-Christian tradition more recently linked to witch-hunts in medieval Germany.

Here are some images from Myfest’s decidedly violence-and-sorcery-free happenings.

Punks munch under a revolutionary banner in Turkish and German.

Bands play while visitor pour into Myfest via Adalbertstrasse. Below, homemade böreks for sale and a cigarette break in the shade.

Burnt-out “Bolle” supermarket image from 1987 courtesy http://schule.de/bics/son/wir-in-berlin/kiez/FriedKreuz/bolle/7.htm
Anti-Myfest protest image courtesy http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erster_Mai_in_Kreuzberg

2007-04-28T14:16:00.000Z

Permanent Adolescence

Are you sick of trying to explain to your friends who don't live in Berlin what it means when you say the roughly 800-year-old city has an unfinished quality, an appealing roughness around the edges? Me neither. I love to talk about it. But in case you need a visual aid, just direct them to this photo of the enormous desert/vacant lot in front of the shiny, brand-new Hauptbahnhof, symbol of the capital's rise to European prominence. Well, maybe one day.

2007-04-27T08:52:00.000Z

The Politics and Palatability of “Edible Ivory”

Unlike New York, which is periodically engulfed in mania for whimsically idiotic fashion—high heels with socks, couture track pants—Berlin is sensible about its collective frenzies, focusing on what really matters. Like asparagus. Anyone in the city now will notice that grocery stores, underground stands in the metro, and even café chalkboards from the corner Kneipe to upper-crust establishments are proudly boasting the fruits (er, veggies) of Spargelsaison, which officially began a couple weeks ago. Asparagus cream soup, asparagus-accompanied schnitzel, asparagus-topped linguini—the lists sound a bit like Bubba’s famous “shrimp” monolog in Forrest Gump. And this isn’t the enforced fixation of scarcity, a-lá the potato famine, but rather self-selected obsession. Germans love, love, love asparagus.

As Deutsche Welle reported recently, the national affection for “white gold” adds up to the world’s highest annual consumption, at about three pounds per person, as well as Europe’s highest production, at about 82,000 tons. This massive harvest is fueled by the domestic belief that “Made in Germany” means a tastier plant, a preference not present with respect to other crops like cauliflower. That is, asparagus is not merely a foodstuff but rather a point of national pride, occasioning statues in town squares and annual festivals like those in Effeld or Zerbst, the latter proudly boasting the “Asparagus-Peeling World Championship.”

Yet the treasured nutriment is not one hundred percent “German-made”—not if you want to credit the contribution of Poles and other Eastern Europeans who stream into their richer Western neighbor each spring. And not everyone is going mad from asparagus-induced ecstasy this year: Der Tagesspiegel reports that farm owners are dissatisfied with labor laws passed last year that require up to one fifth of the workers to be German. They claim that while Poles are willing to bend over sandy fields and dig out the stalks, German laborers either refuse the back-breaking labor or sign up but then play hooky when harvest time comes. This chronic absenteeism angers owners who say that the pay of 500-700 Euros a month is more than enough for non-native laborers, while unemployed German recipients of state welfare feel entitled to turn their noses up. And while the ethnic quota was only put into practice last year, some growers also claim that it has already scared away potential Polish workers who didn’t want to risk getting sent home.

One thing is certain, however: even if Germans would rather eat their food than harvest it, and Poles defect in droves to greener pastures, the country’s asparagus adoration isn’t going anywhere. And although I understand the convenience of having a completely innocuous symbol around which to rally in a place where nationalism was neutered post-WWII and is still not quite acceptable (although flags have made a comeback since last summer’s World Cup), I have to ask myself what, really, is the appeal.

If, like me, you grew up in the United States, you may have recoiled instinctively at the drained, ghostly pale rods, even more so at the hint of freakishly ultraviolet purple that some stalks bear. The preference for chlorophyll-free food strikes me and others who grew up with verdant veggies as frankly strange. One American asparagus-loving essayist on Salon paused her rhapsody with the following parenthetical:

“(What is white asparagus? It is grown in secret caves, as mushrooms are. It is a long, spooky fungus. It is naked and phallic. White vegetables do not make me want to live.)”

Actually, white asparagus isn’t grown in caves but rather underground, but I sympathize with the author’s disgust, as does the following American cooking website:

“White asparagus, as you know, is grown covered in mounds of sandy soil so that it never sees the light of day until the moment it is unmercifully hewn down.”

Wow. Those mean, mean German farmers. (Although, for the record, something cannot be “hewn down” if it never broke ground; it would be more accurate to say “cruelly plucked from the soil’s breast.”)

The white variety even costs more than the green variety, due to the labor-intensive cultivation. Despite the visual and pocketbook drawbacks, I was initially filled with curiosity about the collective asparagus euphoria. I decided to try some, only to discover that it was…okay. It wasn’t the revelation I’d been hoping for, merely a somewhat less full-bodied version of the green type I’d grown up eating. Full disclosure: it was also cooked by an American. The next step would be to try some authentically German-prepared (and Polish-harvested) Spargel. Feel free to post recommendations here about what dishes, local restaurants, recipes, etc. bring the earth’s bounty to its fullest glory.

Meanwhile, Michael Pollan wrote yet another scathing indictment of American food culture for the New York Times Magazine last week, bemoaning the Farm Bill’s heavy subsidies to corn growers and lack of support to vegetable farmers. Compared to the embarrassingly expensive carrots and cheap soda pop Pollan discusses, all this asparagus hubbub looks pretty good. The next question is, of course, whether the mania will arrive stateside any time soon. Transplanted German Hans Röckenwagner tried to serve the washed-out stalks in up to 75% of the dishes in his eponymous Los Angeles restaurant, which he later shuttered to reopen a “hipper” bistro, then later still, a bakery. One possible conclusion: the Amis didn’t bite. Our tastes remain green, but perhaps it’s better that way--after all, we have our own issues to nationally fixate on, like the comeback of leggings, or Britney's time in rehab.

Spargelfrau image courtesy http://www.meinestadt.de/dudenhofen/tourismus/pix Two colors images courtesy http://www.chefdecuisine.com/vegetables/asparagus/asparagusmain.asp

2007-04-22T20:42:00.000Z

Dr. Range-Rover
(or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the American Ambassador)

He doesn’t speak German, some grumbled. He’s a businessman by trade, not a diplomat, others pointed out. And perhaps the most strident complaint: he’s friends with President Bush. In fact, he’s a major campaign fundraiser for his buddy. And anyone in Berlin can tell you this is bound to raise eyebrows of suspicion.

But William Robert Timken, Jr. has also earned some praise since assuming the post of American Ambassador to Germany in fall 2005, largely for his friendliness and open attitude, reports The Atlantic Review. His charm was certainly turned on for a talk he gave at the Embassy last Thursday morning when he introduced himself by saying, “Look, I wore my pin-stripe suit for you folks today,” making light of his official status as commander of America’s largest foreign mission outside of Iraq. He maintained his "aw-shucks" informal tone throughout the talk but was just as eager to spotlight his close relationship with the President and the enormity of his role as “a sort of President of the US-in-Germany.”

Timken was speaking as a favor to a group of visiting Stanford University, having received a B.A. there in 1960, as did fellow presenters and embassy staff John Bauman, Minister-Councilor for Political Affairs and Ryan Wirtz, Economic Policy and Development Officer (as did yours truly, hence my invitation to the talk.) Also present was William Czajkowski, Commercial Counselor for the US Commercial Service in Germany, who with his colleagues discussed key economic and social issues like unemployment and EU membership. Timken was quick to jump in with a comment or a quip, keeping the tone both classically capitalist—characterizing unemployed state aid recipients as “government check slaves”—and comically light—“My wife said, ‘Ok, sure, I’ll call him ‘Your Excellency’—but he’ll have to pay for it!”

Despite his charismatically commanding presence (see New York’s recent article about how “boss” personalities seduce) and affable manner, I will admit that I was initially uncomfortable with the figure Timken cuts. His emphasis on his close relationship with the President betrays the unapologetic cronyism that has landed the administration in hot water more than once. I was actually quite surprised to learn that he is from Ohio, not Texas. And Timken’s straight-talkin’ speech was peppered with what can only be called, well, Bushisms.

He referred repeatedly to the “ex-East German countries” rather than using the correct term of “states,” a glaring and embarrassing mistake, since “countries” unambiguously means “sovereign nations.” There are also, according to the ambassador, “Still a lot of Stasis walking the streets.” He presumably meant ex-employees of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, whose colloquial abbreviation into "Stasi" neither refers to people nor is used in the plural. He also emphasized that “people can only now see their Stasi files,” which is correct, technically, although it has been correct since 1990 as well. These seemingly little mistakes nonetheless jump out of his speech, marking it as a bit amateurish and cavalier.

Finally, some view Timken’s refusal to acknowledge anti-American sentiment with skepticism. To his claim that he hasn’t truly encountered any, they suggest he simply doesn’t know enough German to understand the media’s bombastic headlining.

Yet Timken has a right to brag. No one would envy the post he took over, a seat soured by predecessor Dan Coats’ outspoken criticism of ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s anti-invasion stance regarding Iraq. At a time when many lamented the “special relationship” between the two nations was irrecoverably eroded, Timken arrived in Berlin ready to make nice. Although it is unclear how much credit he alone can take for the turn-around, especially since a new coalition government headed by Angela Merkel has decided to befriend rather than rail against the Bush administration, German-American relations have improved since his appointment.

As well, Timken’s pragmatic approach to projecting a positive image of America in Germany seems to be the right one. Not only does he try to keep people smiling while speaking their language (although not literally), the classic tasks of a diplomat, he also has rightly targeted the German Muslim population as prime candidates for a bit of international healing. He has met with Arab youths in Berlin’s Wedding district to discuss their needs and encourage them to start their own businesses, at a sitting where Der Tagesspiegel reports his wife, Sue Timken, as having suggested the teens spin off their graffiti skills into marketable products. The same article also points out that the press is usually not invited to such meetings; in other words, they are not publicity stunts but the rather Ambassador’s sincere efforts to improve relations.

Timken also invited conservative Muslim cleric Abdul Basit Tariq to speak at Berlin’s recent sixth-year anniversary ceremonies for September 11th, a calculated gesture of reconciliation that strikes a strong note when compared to the native German protests against the mosque that Tariq’s supporters are building. In short, despite his posturing vis-à-vis his good pal Dubya, this man is here to get good work done.

I forgive him for his verbal slip-ups and lack of German too—that’s what aides are for, to make sure everything is translated and understandable. Sure, the Ambassador may look a little uninformed sometimes, but it doesn’t seem to hinder his understanding of where priorities lie or how to make friends. Besides, his advisors are doubtless being paid to be kept well-informed, while Timken is paid to run the show smoothly. As the New Philadelphia Times Reporter quotes him saying, “[I am] careful to utilize the resources of the embassy, meaning the talents of the people, when it comes to the nuts and bolts” of policy. In other words, my employees iron out the kinks while I manage the office.

I don’t even mind the allegation that his assignment was a “thank you” for Timken’s massive campaign fundraising; it’s water under the bridge if he is doing a good job. And the accusation that he got rich in the past off of trade tariffs that hurt his German competitors is frankly irrelevant. Moreover, I believe Timken when he claims that his business background of meeting the needs of diverse clients from around the world is ample preparation for a diplomat’s job. We have a failed businessman in the Oval Office now, and as far as I can see, he is running the United States into the ground in a similar manner. However, he seems to have chosen well for our nation’s representation in Germany.

Timken image courtesy http://berlin.usembassy.gov/germany/timken_bio.html Merkel image courtesy http://www.bundesregierung.de/Content/FR/Reden/2006/03/__Bilder/angela-merkel971265,layoutVariant=Poster.html Mosque image courtesy http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,grossbild-610583-456751,00.html Bush image courtesy http://www.allposters.com/-sp/George-W-Bush-Bushisms-Posters_i391763_.htm

2007-04-18T18:10:00.000Z

Rainbows in Berlin

Berlin’s proposed update to inner city driving laws has some drivers of the roughly 80,000 automobiles old enough to spew excessive pollutants into the atmosphere feeling unfairly targeted (Post Feb. 18). Some drivers are also delightfully creative, as this picture of a tie-dye VW Bug shows. The sign in the window reads, “Against the 2008 Inner-City Driving Ban.”

Tidings from Vienna (Post Apr. 11) continue: Die Presse reports that Austrian architect Adolf Krischanitz, who designed a temporary modern art exhibition hall for the capital in 1992, is looking to do the same in Berlin. Berlin’s Palast der Republik is on schedule to be fully demolished by 2008, leaving two years before the Communist-era structure’s replacement is continued with inaugural construction of the Stadtschloss in 2010. Many have proposed opening a grand hall for contemporary art in this time, an idea enthusiastically endorsed here in New Yorker in Berlin in November.

Krischanitz’s design presents a wooden box similar to his Viennese steel “crate” for this central complex. This structure would also be clad with an outer skin of plastic open to design by featured artists. Here’s hoping that the rainbow-bar-code imagined in this graphic one day pops up next to the Berliner Dom’s archetypical Baroque grandeur. Unfortunately, neither the article nor Krischanitz’s homepage give further details about the proposed design, but stayed tuned on the blog for more updates.

Meanwhile, the Berlin Senate and federal officials are trying to get discussions about the financing of the Stadtschloss wrapped up by summer, Der Tagesspiegel reported yesterday. The latest plan, which forgoes the planned underground parking lot and four-star hotel, clocks in at a clean 480 million. Additionally, the city may bear the brunt of the cost of proposed cultural additions to the site, including the transplant of ethnographic collections from current museums in the Western neighborhood Dahlem, as well as the construction of a major central library.

Berlin art is also appearing in the world of letters: the catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s” (Post Jan. 16) is reviewed by Francine Prose in this month’s Harper’s. Prose concludes that “only a very few of the paintings in Glitter and Doom move us as great paintings do,” yet finds the scathing Verist style of Dix, Schad, et. al grippingly accurate in its portrayal of reality’s ugly side. Some of the paintings are now on display at Berlinische Galerie’s very own “Masterpieces from the Twenties,” including Dix’s heartbreaking “The Poet Iwan von Lücken” (1926).

Finally, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote about the Jewish Museum’s “Dateline Israel” exhibit this week, reviewed March 27th on this blog as part of a commentary on cliché. Cotter declines to say the dreaded C-word but does lament that Wim Wenders’ Mount of Olives images, which I described as bringing “nothing fresh to the table,” present “an easy idea, a generic consumerist dig.” Cotter and I agree that the show has plenty of interesting images but misses the chance to provoke: I found the show to be largely lacking in insight, batting around ideas that have been “point[s] of concern for native artists for the last fifteen years,” and Cotter criticizes the curators for “stick[ing] to package-tour generalities.” While I conclude that the usual stuff nonetheless provides an interesting framework for a few outstanding pieces, Cotter insists that tougher questions should be posed by the pieces on display. He thereby exposes the real damage of clichés: opportunity cost. When you’re busy repeating, you can’t interrogate at the same time.

2007-04-15T09:47:00.000Z

I The City’s New Self Esteem

“Whoever looks to the future, heads to Berlin!” trumpeted Der Tagesspiegel yesterday, after a temperature reading of the Internet showed that Berlin was considered Europe’s “place to be.” The article went on to excitedly point out that after years of economic stagnation, bankruptcy, and population shrinkage, things were finally looking up. This hopefulness sounded almost like the hype of the early 1990s, when everyone expected Berlin to become the financial, cultural, and geographic capital of post-Cold War Europe. (It didn’t.) Yet the optimism was backed up by the assertion that in the last fiscal quarter of 2006, more jobs were created in Berlin than anywhere else in Germany.

Fair enough. But read on and discover that Berlin also has the second-slowest growing economy in Germany, i.e. that its dismal fiscal situation remains, well, dismal. It clocks in at 1.9%, barely missing the booby prize, which the small Western German state of Saarland wins with 1.6%. This figure complicates the idea of Berlin as the capital of job creation and innovation—if so many jobs are being created, why isn’t the economy growing? Perhaps because more jobs are also being lost, or because people are still leaving for cities with greater native industry. The most optimistic assumption is that growth figures haven’t caught up with job creation yet. However, the market growth that the piece touts seems more like fiction than fact.

What this article is really celebrating is the change in Zeitgeist, that is, Berlin’s slow transformation into the Next Trendy Metropolis. After that one measley scientific figure about job creation, author Ralf Schönball gives up the pretense of a financial thesis and shows he is thrilled, just thrilled, that people around the world are really starting to like Berlin, citing growing numbers of tourists as well as the city’s extreme image boost after the summer 2006 World Cup. He even proudly mentions that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie—those child-adopting beacons of humanism! Those attractive ambassadors of taste!—recently bought an apartment here.

Without citing statistics, I must say that Schönball appears to be right, from my expatriate—and hence, member of the club of new admirers—perspective. Hipsters from New York are swarming around in great numbers, the art scene here is exploding (see Post April 3) and I truly don’t remember seeing quite as many tourists two years ago; even the Berlinale film festival (see above photo) seemed more chaotic than previous. And he is right in celebrating: Germany is still heavily associated with its dark past in the eyes of many foreign observers, and it is high time people began to adore its darling, scruffy, good-timing capital city. Schönball's piece is really just a platform for Der Tagesspiegel's giddy announcement of an upcoming series dedicated to describing “fourteen successful New-Berliners.” And why not? Everyone deserves the chance to cry out, eyes misty and arms outreached, “You like me! You really like me!”

II Unbearable News

As long as it doesn't try to maintain the pretense of real findings, and simply allows itself to a fabulous, self-admiring, sociological-human-interest project of Berlin worship, Der Tagesspiegel's series promises to be great fun. Less fun is some of the recent news from Berlin: Tilo, one of the city's mascot brown bears who are kept in a special, non-zoo-related enclosure, succumbed to lymph node cancer. This just after Yan Yan, a Zoo panda bear, died of intestinal congestion at the end of March. Of course, all eyes remain on Knut, (See Posts Mar. 30, Mar. 28), the little polar bear who no one expected to survive; the Zoo recently clocked 90,000 visitors since his March 23rd public debut and counting.

Bears have a way of capturing public fascination in Germany; the shooting of a brown bear who wandered into Bavaria from Austria caused outrage in the fall. His body had to be hidden from angry environmental groups and is currently being kept at an undisclosed location. The creature, dubbed Bruno, had captured the public imagination partially because wild bears are extinct here, and perhaps this gets at the root of the collective fixation--a whopping guilt complex, a hope that current adoration can make up for foolhardy hunting of the past. Or perhaps the bear fascination is much older than modernity: witness the Albert I, who lived in what is now Northern Germany from about 1100 to 1170. The warrior who defeated the Slavs to conquer the area of Brandenburg in which Berlin lies was dubbed "Albert the Bear." And of course, being a city whose official seal bears (pun intended) a rather chicly stylized bear, Berlin is the best setting for ursine fixation. Here's betting Der Tagesspiegel cannot resist the temptation to list Knut as one of their "fourteen successful new-Berliners."

Knut photo courtesy Franka Bruns, AP. Bruns' last name may be a variation on Bruin or Bruun, old English/Dutch words used to mean "baby brown bear." (And now adopted by sports teams a-la the UCLA Bruins.)

Tilo photo courtesy http://www.berlin.de/ Brandenburg gate iconic shot courtesy http://library.gmu.edu/resources/german/German%20page%20images/Berlin-brandenburg-gate.jpg

2007-04-11T14:48:00.000Z

A Tale of Two Cities

The number of Germans living in Vienna has risen 78% since 2001, reported Die Presse recently. They are drawn by a quality of life that tied for international third best in Mercer Consulting’s latest survey, a standing which owes much to Vienna’s former role as capital of the Holy Roman Empire. After five centuries at the center of Western wealth, the city has an inordinately large number of palaces, well-kept gardens, and clean, beautiful streets. Meanwhile, that other German-speaking national capital, Berlin, is known for its scruffy patchwork appeal, a reconstructed flavor that speaks of bombed-out buildings, the Berlin Wall, and the misery of the last century. It is notoriously rough around the edges and lacking in Old World charm. As a resident of the latter city, I wanted to find out for myself what the Habsburg enclave to the south had to offer, and headed down for Easter weekend.

The necessary immersion in the great traditions of music, royalty, and decadent pastries began with an evening at the Konzerthaus. This is the venue where the Wiener Mozart Orchester performs a “greatest hits” rendition of the genius’ ouvre, including selections from A Little Night Music, The Marriage of Figaro, and The Magic Flute among others. While purists might scoff at the alternation between beloved movements and roof-raising arias, these are also the context-snobs who made fun of you for buying the Beatles’ One compilation, so pay no mind and enjoy the music. Besides, this seemingly modern “Classics-Lite” approach is actually a tradition founded by similar “Musical Academies” at the end of the eighteenth century. The only challenge was staying alert during the rather drowsy stretch from the Requiem, which the composer worked on as he slowly succumbed to a mysterious illness.

To hear more about conspiracy theories surrounding this illness, as well as about Mozart’s inveterate extravagance in clothing and illegal gambling, the Mozarthaus near the Stephansdom cathedral is the place to go. Its barren rooms lack authentic objects but the curators have filled the walls with pictures and the audio guide is there to ensure that every detail of Mozart’s life is filled in. Their picture of wealthy patronage feeding the fanatically egotistical child star is much complemented by a pre-trip viewing of Milos Forman’s Amadeus, which won the 1984 Best Picture Oscar (and several more.)

True fans—or anyone in need of caffeine after an hour of biographical sketches—can walk a couple minutes from the museum over to the cafe Frauenhuber at Himmelpfortgasse 6, the coffee house where Mozart allegedly hung out. The typical Viennese drink is called a Mélange, which Berliners will recognize as a poor man’s Milchkaffee, that is, coffee and hot milk mixed together, here with less milk than up north. That may, however, be to save room for the proud array of artery-clogging sweets sitting smugly behind the glass counter. The toughest choice visitors to Vienna must make is between Sachertorte, the triple-chocolate classic invented here—Oreo, take note—the hazelnut-flavored Esterhazy, and the dependable classic apple strudel, a less crusty version of our stateside pie.

After three days of such decisions, my sweet tooth began to ache. I wasn’t craving sugar any more, but rather spice—the controversy of Berlin, where modern history keeps the populace feisty and up in arms. Recent arguments include how to commemorate the Berlin Wall and how large the pensions of East Germany’s Draconian secret jails should be. Berlin’s most important palace is one they are ripping down, the Communist-era Palace of the Republic, to much outcry from former Eastern residents and historical preservationists. In contrast, Vienna’s palaces quietly became government buildings or art museums as the city slid genteel-y into modernity, its picturesque streets barely registering the last century’s catastrophes.

However, this rather charming transition does give tourists much to “ooh” and “ah” over. Since my capacity for looking at pretty things is no smaller than the next person’s, I thoroughly enjoyed gazing at masterpieces in the mansions of the titled families who once collected them. Of particular note are the Albertina’s spectacularly re-created chambers, open to the public only since 2003, and the Belvedere’s gorgeous halls, which house a truly impressive cache of Art Nouveau masterworks by Gustav Klimt, including his infamous The Kiss (1907-8). The Museumsquartier complex should also be on every culture hawk’s itinerary, especially admirers of recent and contemporary art who want to avoid the trips out to individual collections (and are perhaps sick of all the frippery.)

On the other hand, royalists of all flavors, particularly Habsburg buffs, will appreciate touring the apartments of Emperor Franz Josef I and Empress Elisabeth (“Sisi”) in the central Hofburg, as well as the Versailles-like Schönbrunn complex slightly outside of the city center. While the former showcase the modesty of modernizing monarchs, the latter exhibits such recent restraint as well as the earlier lavishness of Empress Maria Theresa, who spared no expense.

Many, many canvases, tapestries, statues, and manicured lawns later, it isn’t hard to understand Vienna’s attraction. It is a lovely place to spend a packed weekend, soaking up beauty the way one soaks up sun on beach getaways. But like Empress Sisi herself, I grew restless with all the courtly backdrops and was happy to be back in Berlin on Monday, where the newspapers were full of arguments and my taxi driver started a political discussion about the Turks. Only this time they weren’t the Ottomans laying siege at the gates of Vienna, but rather the community of families in my neighborhood. After a brief jaunt to the past, I was firmly and gratefully back in 2007.

2007-04-03T19:23:00.000Z

Women, Media-Savvy and Otherwise

“She is just an embarrassment now. She won’t be given any future responsibilities,” intoned CSU representative Markus Ferber ominously. He was speaking of the unforgivable crime of fellow CSU member Gabriele Pauli: posing in suggestive photos. The images appeared in this month’s issue of Park Avenue, a German glossy that fancies itself a mix of high style and social engagement—when that engagement comes in pretty packages like Ms. Pauli, who appears in one shot with leather gloves, and in another with a face-paint eye mask. As Der Tagesspiegel reported today, many members of the Christian Socialist Union, Germany’s prominent conservative party, are now calling for her expulsion.

It gets worse. Not only did Ms. Pauli appear in these photos, but she won’t apologize. “Do we live in the middle ages?” Tagesspiegel reports her telling the Hamburg magazine Der Stern. She also vows to continue her political engagement even if shut out of the CSU. With such a fresh and defiant attitude, you’d think she actually believed woman deserved to be judged by the same standards as men. You’d think that she objects to her denouncement as a tramp, slut, etc., when a man posing in a similar, stylish spread would simply be seen as trendy or attractive. You’d think that she views a photo shoot as less important than her campaign ideas, that the “personality” piece portraying her as sexy and fun should not occasion calls for her resignation.

You might be right. But Ms. Pauli is clearly wrong. As one reader commented on Der Tagesspiegel's website, “How can a politician be so naïve? There is no private life in politics…I wonder if she got her position [as district administrator] because of her intelligence or because of a [gender] quota.”

Pauli is probably not so naïve after all. This whole affair isn’t truly about her indignant astonishment, but rather woeful miscalculation. She probably knew the photos would gather press, but she underestimated the sort of attention they would garner. Since it is generally ok for male politicians to be attractive (or even ugly!), and since their sexual exploits neither damage their reputations (Clinton and the cigar), even becoming the stuff of legend (JFK and Marilyn) or are ho-hum enough for nationally-syndicated commercials (Dole’s Viagra ad), she figured she could let her hair down and allow a photo to show her as…a pretty (but not chaste!) woman. Boy, was she wrong.

As Katha Pollitt has pointed out with her excellent column in The Nation for some years now, contemporary society wields a double standard like a mallet, ready to whack any woman who attempts to pretend men and women may be equally considered. It appears that her assessment of the American scene works for Germany too.

Pollitt has also attacked many a New York Times headline about the “death of feminism” for being based on anecdotal evidence and thin reporting, and unlike Pauli, her media analysis is spot-on. Sunday brought another article based completely on anecdotal evidence, this time Sarah Rimer’s acquaintance with a circle of adolescent over-achievers at a prep school outside of Boston.

“For Girls, it’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect Too” is not the expose it promises to be, relying mainly on conversations with these hyper-American hard-workers to form a repetitive run-down of their goals and extra-curriculars. Rimer aims to shock us with the workload these girls are taking on, but her promise of gender analysis doesn’t come through. Sure, these girls are working their track-captain butts off—but what does that have to do with being female? Boys at such prep schools are working just as hard, the article itself acknowledges, in its gender-neutral quotes from administrators and parents and multiple reversions to the word “student” rather than “girls.” The piece has nothing to do with gender, outside of the author’s choice to interview only young women. This is really an article about the ever-more-ridiculous ideals of achievement America’s elite communities foist on their high school youth, dressed up in a skirt to make it sexier. Shame on the New York Times. It could have at least used, say, black rubber gloves and an eye mask.

Pollitt's new book, a collection of her columns entitled Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time, is in stores now.

Pauli images courtesy Park Avenue, Pollitt image courtesy http://ffrf.org/day/?day=14&month=10, and student image courtesy New York Times.

2007-04-03T10:18:00.000Z

Who needs bar-hopping…

People stood chatting in clusters, swilling glasses of Riesling and having a mighty fine time. They greeted one another with two or even three kisses, exclaiming in English, German, Italian, and Japanese. Some stood aside, taking pictures or messaging their friends. In fact, the only thing not happening was art spectatorship--no one seemed overly concerned with the works we were there to see.

“It’s always like that at an opening,” one of the artists, Wilken Skurk, told me. He was showing new iron and glass sculptures, heavy shapes with a likable heft that stood out in the crowded room. “But I saw you looking at my art. So you’re the exception.”

“I’m the one with no friends to talk to,” I corrected him. We laughed. Ah, the wonderful world of galleries in Berlin!

Berlin’s casual, open ambience, where gallery openings are accessible to all and artists actually talk to no-name visitors (like me), is created largely by the surplus of talent here. A decade of stable, low rents has drawn artists to the metropolis like moths to a light bulb, and many have planted long-term roots in the ever-growing scene. There are always creative figures who aren’t famous enough—yet—to have someone better to talk to than the average visitor. Meanwhile, the sprawling gallery scene is too unruly and quickly-growing to provide the incubating conditions for an elitist class of big-name dealers, art-media paparazzi, and privileged art celebrities. Like all places, it has its VIPs, but even they can’t make events “invitation only,” a phrase as likely as “no smoking” to pop up in promotional material.

The result is simultaneously relaxed and exciting: all are welcome—to ten events in one night. On last Friday’s warm, early spring evening, the few streets most heavily lined with galleries in northern Mitte were dotted with noisy islands of revelers spilling out otherwise quiet cobblestone streets. I attended three openings, each event growing naturally as pedestrians paused, attracted by the good time they had stumbled upon, and passing foot traffic converted into wine-fueled art viewing.

And it wasn’t just fun: the art was good too! Galerie Rossella Junck, where I chatted with Mr. Skurk, was also showing new work by Robert van de Laar. Himmel-Erde or Heaven-Earth was a series of glass circles painted with ink images of dream-like hands, faces, birds, and spirals that seemed a cross of Kiki Smith’s bodily fairy-tales and Joan Miro’s doodle aesthetic. The ink was visually delightful in its variability: at once heavy, dark, and splotchy; and light, immaterial, and fluid, where pigment mixed with water and feathered outward.

“They remind me of Goya’s ink and ivory miniatures,” I told the artist, who stood nearby in a tweed coat, agreeably chatting with visitors.

“Yes, they are a bit like that,” he agreed. “You don’t have total control over where the color goes when you are working in this technique.”

Down the block, Takafumi Hara was showing his Signs of Memory: Project Pink Windows. The project is an investigation of local geography, carried out by pink panels placed in the windows of selected buildings. From his native Japan to Berlin to Singapore, Hara has polled inhabitants about their thoughts and feelings and created tablets of their words, illustrated by child-like, whimsical images. The latest incarnation, on display here, was Singapore’s City Hall for the 2006 Biennale there.

“People said it was disrespectful to do such a thing to a historical building,” Hara explains. “They didn’t think it should or could be carried out.”

Yet he did it, and we get to enjoy the result—on display in the form of a model here—a work that neatly highlights Singaporeans’ ambivalence about their rapidly-modernizing nation’s role in the global world. By suggesting that the best way to “peer into” a building is through not a window but rather the minds of inhabitants, Hara reminds us, lest we take our physical, built reality too seriously, of the immateriality of hopes and reflections that must precede physical realization. The tension between material and immaterial, seen and invisible, was also present at the gallery’s bar, where drinks were rapidly going from existent to non-existent.

At each event, the anything-goes atmosphere was quite nice. Doubtless, the terrier accompanying one gentleman through Rossella Junck enjoyed it. So did the woman who set down her wine glass on a pedestal alongside the work on display.

In all seriousness though, this is the ideal way to view art--as objects that exists up close next to us, right in the middle of our messy lives, not as silent, sterile things in museum. Indeed, while museums charge us for the service of appropriate cultural edification, galleries court us, motivated by the hope that viewers will become customers. However, to summarize by saying that one walks out the Pergamon feeling educated and out of Rossella Junck with a shopping bag is to do the scene a disservice: where else can you view something new and interesting (in most cases, anyway), then turn and discuss it with the creator?

Besides, without much native industry or financial power, resource-poor and bankrupt Berlin can at least brag about its contemporary cultural edge over Frankfurt and Munich. For self-esteem, the capital makes neither steel nor glass—it turns them into works of art.

The group exhibition Ve:tro is at Rossella Junck, Auguststr. 28, +49 30 94 88 38 98 through May 26. Hara's Signs of Memory: Project Pink Windows is at DNA, Auguststr. 20, +49 30 28 59 96 52 through May 19.

Images: top, Galerie Rossella Junck. Skurk's Cathedral, Iron and glass, 2007. Two shots of Van de Laar's Himmel-Erde, Ink on glass, 2005. Hara's Singapore City Hall in miniature, text excerpted for lack of room on model. Hara in front of his exhibit. Wine glass alongside Julius Weiland's Relaxan, Blown glass, 2007.

2007-03-30T08:06:00.000Z

Look at this! (Again….)

Picture the most tasteless, offensive paper-selling strategy, one that would make William Randolph Hearst blush. Now multiply that by ten to get an idea of the low to which Berlin’s illustrated dailies sunk yesterday. Plastered across the front pages was a picture of the city’s iconic TV Tower enveloped in grey fumes, a-la the burning World Trade Center towers. Parroting the instantly famous “smoking skyscraper” printed by every newspaper in the world on September 12th, 2007, the Berliner Kurier as well as B Z and yes, Bild, are hoping to sell a few more prints.

What’s worse, the picture stems from a new made-for-tv movie--it’s not related in the faintest to reality. It’s entertainment. But then again, the same could be said of the “newspapers” that printed it. Perhaps it is pointless to accost tabloids for using sensationalism. There are no standards for trash; if there were, it would be journalism. The other illustrated dailies, that is, papers of non-tabloid status with pretensions to real reporting, didn’t even register the TV show today.

But c’mon, wasn’t anyone bludgeoned in their sleep last night in Berlin? Didn’t someone see Jesus in their morning coffee? There is always plenty of front page news to go around for these sorts of papers. The publicity stunt is even more indefensible since they haven’t the slightest pretense of using the attention to say anything of substance.

However, perhaps this is too harsh an assessment; after all, the article did contain a couple actual, real-life facts. It informed me that “The Inferno: Flames over Berlin” is being produced by Wiedemann & Berg, the same team that turned out Oscar-winning “The Lives of Others” [Das Leben der Anderen], which is certainly worth a smirk. And I know that the film, which centers on a fire breaking out in the sky-high restaurant in the tower dome—Windows on the World, anyone?—was filmed in Lithuania, where the TV Tower was meticulously reconstructed. (Gotta love those new EU member states and their cheap labor!) And, thank goodness, I can rest easy, reassured that such a tragedy couldn’t occur in the real tower: a smoking ban reigns in the fire-resistant structure and even food is cooked elsewhere and delivered to the restaurant.

But I wonder if anyone even bothered to read the text. During the German routine of gathering at the newsstand for a morning cigarette and look at the headlines, they may have just said, “Where are the soccer scores?” Bombarded and desensitized as readers are by the classic September 11th photos the papers copycat, it would be no wonder if they didn’t bat an eyelash. They certainly didn’t on the metro I rode, where the riders were notably unalarmed by the enormous, burning tower conspicuously smoking on rustling papers around them.

I do know what the newspaper seller had to say about it. The young man who handed me my B Z shook his head and decried the excessive press given to the baby polar bear at the Berlin Zoo, who was also allotted (much smaller) front-page coverage. “Two weeks of the same crap,” he sighed. “You know how much money the zoo is making off of this?” And he quoted an exact figure. He is certainly following the news closely, yet this crass image didn’t even catch his radar. He’s probably seen it too many times before.

That’s the irony of the tasteless endeavour: tabloids have done their job too well, printing shocking pictures so frequently that the images lose their punch. The readers are visually maxed-out. What was fascinating becomes mundane. This is bad news for the next baby polar bear born in Berlin. It may make the front page—but no one will think twice.

Bear image courtesy http://www.bz-berlin.de/z/picshow2/index.php/item/knut/ibbdb23d778422ada9d3a7c4307f0908b/

2007-03-28T20:20:00.000Z

Updates: Posts Revisited

The timing couldn’t be better: on the heels of the last post about how kitsch and cliché are necessary evils, and not even all that evil, Der Tagesspiegel had a special feature on kitsch today, calling it “sugar water for the soul: insubstantial, way too sweet, but sometimes too good to give up.” That right there is justification to run out and buy some bad art for that bare spot above the washing machine. Or better yet a poster copy of bad art.

The Feb. 12 post reported about the DDR museum’s rosy focus on daily life and not-too-subtle exclusion of the darker aspects of routine existence under the East German dictatorship. Perhaps heeding the call to keep history, well, history, and not happy stories, the Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen, or Stasi-jail-complex-turned-memorial, just opened an exhibit about daily life in Stasi prison. Items such as a shaving brush or prison uniform will complete this second version of Alltagsleben, giving the capital two completely opposing exhibitions of quotidian material debris.

The Palast der Republik, the former seat of the East German government controversially currently being ripped down to rebuild a Baroque Palace that once stood on the spot (see Jan. 28 post) is now missing its front tooth: the foyer has been completely torn down, leaving an enormous wind-whistling gap in the center. It packs a visual punch of finality that yes, the Palast really is going to disappear, despite the work’s seemingly slow progress in dismantling only the façade. The skeleton is now losing its bones, a development so illustratively startling as to be found newsworthy today.

The momentum is likely to continue, since recent pledge of support to rebuild the Schloss’ from the American group Friends of Dresden. The group that initially collected funds to reconstruct Dresden’s once-firebombed Frauenkirche is turning its attention to the woefully broke Schloss project, vowing financial support. Henry Kissinger, who was born in Germany and fled as a Jewish refugee in 1938, sits on the Foundation’s board, giving the story a nice reconciliatory twist as well. This will make it yet-harder for Schloss criticizers to continue portraying the tear-down as work of historical idiocy and misguided Utopianism.

Meanwhile, a baby polar bear was born to the Berlin Zoo and he’s very cute. That’s it. Yet that’s not it, because the press has gone absolutely hog-wild (excuse the mixed animal metaphors) for the little white furball, focusing headline after headline on him. And this isn’t just Bild tabloid fans driving such mania; even normally staid papers are in the action. As readers of post Nov. 27 can imagine, the Berliner Zeitung has also been following the little bear, named Knut, quite closely.

Knut image courtesy Der Tagesspiegel.

2007-03-27T12:06:00.000Z

You’ve Seen it Before

Kundera rails on it (again) in his new book. I had to research its culture-consuming ways (a lot) when writing an undergraduate research thesis. Yet somehow kitsch and the related evil of cliché seem to be making the museum rounds this month. Kitsch is portraying what’s tacky as tasteful; cliché is the bloodletting of originality through repetition to reduce art, ideas, etc. to commonplace triteness. While Kundera and the rest of academe would flinch at these generalizations, they are sufficiently aesthetic for casual museum visits.

On one such visit I learned that Richard Avedon’s current show at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is being touted as convention-breaking. Rather than showing the storied West of mythic landscapes and handsome cowboys, the images “In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon” expose a horrifyingly neglected West of underpaid, overworked, or unemployed Americans. Or so the claim runs. Yet, these overworked farmers, coal miners, highway drifters, and big-haired secretaries are the spiritual heirs to the farmers and migrant workers of Walker Evans’ and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. We have seen their rural poverty, laced with both despair and pluck, in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The dust in the creases of their skin has been floating in the Western air for the better part of the last century, long before the 1978-1984 timeline of Avedon’s series.

Clearly, Avedon has cliché covered. Kitsch comes in at the icky, exploitative nature of these photographs. Is it really high art to capture human misery, then stand back and wait for it to be shocking? This technique, banking on the poignancy of failed faith in the American way, doesn’t give its viewers much credit for having been previously alerted to “hidden” America by earlier artists.

De-mythologizing a self-aggrandizing nation is a mission also close to the heart of Dateline Israel: New Photography and Video Art at New York’s Jewish Museum. Twenty-three artists tackle the Middle Eastern nation’s heroic iconography and attempt to bring it, if not to its knees, at least back to reality. Among the Israeli artists are also foreigners, including the likes of Wim Wenders, who provides two large-format photos of Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, one depicting an ancient graveyard, the other a hillside strewn with trash. Beautifully captured, this juxtaposition of the dream-image of Holy Land with actual evidence of the nation’s social inequality--poverty is holding steady at twenty percent these days—nonetheless brings nothing fresh to the table. The inconsistency it highlights has been a point of concern for native artists for the last fifteen years at least.

In fact, the majority of the show’s clichéd works come from non-native hands, which is not surprising since locals are probably sick of this stuff. Brit Catherine Yaas’ 2004 film Wall follows the path of the eponymous barrier, the footage's visual monotony emphasizing the structure's threatening, bleak hegemony. Yawn. Drawing attention to the totalitarian tinges of Israeli rule is nothing new, and still a worthy message to be made, but need it be made in such a familiar, formulaic way? Similarly, Dutchwoman Rineke Dijkstra’s contrasting portraits of teenage girls in civilian clothing and their army gear feel as though we’ve seen them before, probably because we have, again and again. The tension between “normal” and military life and the effect of pervasive militarism upon the country’s youth are also long-standing preoccupations, and they are quite stale in Dijkstra’s conventional white-background, viewer-facing, “stark” portraiture. Their extreme ho-hum quality borders on kitsch, that is, the co-optation of the quotidian—in this case, common, common art—for the purpose of high culture.

A notable exception to all this been-there, done-that imagery is Sharon Ya’ari’s print Page 4. Four senior citizens walk through a grassy field towards a cookie-cutter apartment complex that sprouts perhaps a kilometer away and dominates the horizon. There are no further visual cues as to where the scene takes place or who the elderly pedestrians are, although a plastic bag toted by one suggests errands, while the kipas worn by the men indicate religious observance.

Born and living in Israel, Ya’ari witnessed the approximate 20% population growth over the 1990s, from under five million to just over six. The boom was fueled largely by immigrants from the former Soviet Union, mainly of them middle-aged or older, and this group heading towards their fresh, new housing is likely a part of this population. The geographic ambiguity of the image combines with its power of suggestion—that path is well worn; was the complex thrown up too fast for well-planned streets? The walkers have such a ways to go; do senior citizens have it rough in these new communities?—to provide a startlingly engaging and truly fresh image. From amongst the exhibits other emblematic works, including mystical and sunny olive groves, and the flashes of Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox worshippers, comes the most surreal image of Israel, captured by eliding cliché.

Just down Fifth Avenue from Ya’ari’s tantalizing picture is a series of sad ones. Roman Vishniac, best known for his pre-war portraits of Eastern Europe’s lost Jewish world, also visited big-city Berlin in the 1920s and 30s. His impressions of the place then dubbed “Chicago on the Spree” are on display at the Goethe-Institut New York, showcasing the newly modern metropolis of bustling avenues, brimming cafes, and downtrodden Jews. Yes, sitting quietly alongside shots of the blithe bourgeoisie is picture of a disheveled man receiving advice at the Jewish Aid Society. He stares forlornly ahead, perhaps aware that it will only get worse.

By the mid-1930s, Hitler’s regime was already enforcing comprehensive antisemitic legislature and the lives of the Jewish community--that is, those who hadn’t already fled--were rapidly deteriorating. This makes the scene of schoolchildren smiling happily into the camera even more affecting; when one visitor writes in the guestbook that she was “moved to tears” by the exhibit, she is presumably speaking of this image and not that of the wealthy having lunch on Unter den Linden, hanging nearby.

The photographs displayed were only developed in the late 1990s, so whoever brought them to life was well aware of their poignancy, fostered by knowledge of the doom that would befall their characters. Yet, this awareness, or the fact that these heart-breaking “before” moments are ones we have viewed dozens of times previous, does not send the exhibit straight to the land of recycled cliché. Rather, it invokes familiar, well-liked cliché. And it isn't any worse off for it.

In fact, Avedon's exhibit may be verging on kitsch but it is also visually absorbing and quite impressive; it needs cliché to work its hypnosis over the fascinated viewer. This is especially so in Silicon Valley, where stupefied museum-goers can then contemplate what they've seen over a nine dollar organic-lettuce sandwich at the museum cafe. Similarly, Dateline Israel needs to invoke the well-worn conventions in order to provide a comprehensive look at the social concerns of contemporary society, thank you very much. As well, without the walls, soldiers, and olive trees, Ya'ari's image would be a lot less interesting, lost in the neutral no-context zone. In other words, Kundera and fellow cultural guardians can spend days, or more appropriately, novels and dissertations, condemning pretentious and cheap representations. The rest of us will just enjoy them.

In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, California through May 6th.
Dateline Israel: New Photography and Video Art at the Jewish Museum, New York City, through August 5th
Roman Vishniac’s Berlin at the Goethe-Institut New York through April 13th

Images
Avedon: Jimmy Lopez, gypsum miner, Sweetwater, Texas, 6/15/79. Edward Roop, coal miner, Paonia, Colorado, 12/19/79 . Loretta, Loudilla, and Kay Johnson, Presidents, Loretta Lynn fan club, Wild Horse, Colorado, 6/16/83. Sharon Ya'ari, Page 4, 1999. Roman Vishniac, Berlin, 1922.

2007-03-13T13:09:00.000Z

Confronting the Internet

Robbing you of your dignity and your personal life. Taking over your home, your peace of mind, your social time, in short: your freedom. These are the offenses Berlin's trendy culture rag Zitty recently accused eBay of committing. The online marketplace's ability to increase personal freedom by allowing you to buy or sell exactly what you want from your bedroom, freeing up the time you might have spent searching for the item in stores or giving you back the money you would have lost by not being able to otherwise sell it, went unmentioned. Even though the author quotes 19-year-old teenager-come-jewelery-designer Ulrika's satisfaction at being able to sell her wares on eBay rather than sit at a supermarket check-out for extra cash, he manages to sum up her seller activites thusly: "All of that eats up time--Ulrika's free time."

Meanwhile, over in eBay's neighborhood, Siliconvalley.com reported on Attent, a new system developed by software company Seriosity, designed to help people filter their junk mail a bit better. Attent gives each employee virtual cash to attach to emails of great importance, which is paid back by the recipient if the email was worthy, and lost forever if not. This virtual cash can later be redeemed for real-life compensation. "Never again will you read the email warning you to take your food out of the company refrigerator by Friday," a Seriosity consultant proudly claimed.

Like the folks at Zitty, Seriosity sensed a growing concern that the computer screen was eating up too much time. The solution they discovered, however, was not to accuse email of viciously devouring employees' lives, but rather to monetize exchanges to change they way people view email: as an exchange of real value, rather than a quick way to convey even the most piddling of information. Of course, their system also relies to a startling degree on trust, as well as parallel values: if the board members forget to reward my "urgent memo," then I lose just as much as if I'd forwarded the latest Youtube video; alternately, if my co-workers and I decide Youtube videos are more valuable than product updates, the firm has a problem on its hands. Nonetheless, it is an interesting solution to the helplessly entrenched problem of clogged inboxes and resultantly lowered productivity.

Yet the problem for Zitty isn't truly that the technology takes up too much time; it's how it forces the user to reconsider time, blurring the boundaries between "work" and "non-work." The author claims that being a seller on eBay eats up Ulrika's "free time," as though bagging groceries would not, portraying eBay as an invader of "free time" because the work takes place amongst shipping boxes in Ulrika's bedroom. The author feels threatened by the evaporated demarcation between traditional "work" and "home" spheres, viewing eBay as a foreign body tredding all over the private sanctum. Hence the ludicrous accusations slung eBay's way, when all evidence to the contrary points to the conclusion the commercial giant only gives people more freedom of choice, time, and livelihood.

The eBay article betrays a deep preference within German culture, one readily denied yet borne out by social practice and articles like this: Germans generally prefer rules to order their days. Things segmented, with a given order, known times, borders, and customs, in sum, the entire neat logic of rules, is much more comfortable for the national psyche than blurry boundaries. This is a nation that for decades had specific store-closing times that would drive any free-wheeling shopper nuts. The recent alterations caused a heap of press actually asking if the excess of choice--milk at 9 pm?! jeans at midnight?!--would confuse and upset consumers. They might, suggested some, end up less happy with this confusing world of options, and desire the comfort of knowing they absolutely could not go grocery shopping after 8pm.

To perhaps no American's surprise, this has not been the case. Some stores discovered the longer closing times didn't make up extra operational costs with increased sales and shortened the times back to the old way. Other discovered people did indeed want to walk in 8:01 and get what they want, and have kept the open times.

Zitty and Seriosity form a study in two different cultural attitudes: when the technology spins out of control and seems to be functioning too intrusively, Americans respond by crudely monetizing it and throwing more technology at the problem. With a money value on everything, the Silicon Valley inventors seem confident that junk mail should be gradually phased out. It's dubious, but perhaps a better response than viewing the technology as disruption of the older, more trusted ways, the more German viewpoint expressed by Zitty. The troublesome intrusion into the private sphere, as well as the time-intensive nature of e-commerce, are read as threats rather than challenges to be met with more technology.

Don't get me wrong: the nation of strict closing times is also a place of innovative brilliance. MP3 technology that has changed our world was invented here. But most of the profits go to firms outside of Germany, because, as the director of the Frauenhofer Society that led MP3 research recently lamented to Business Week, "German companies...were often too slow" to warm to the new technology. Perhaps the companies just didn't get the memo about adapting new technology--it may have been lost between car pool requests and eBay advertisements.

Source: Jack Ewing, "An Idea Incubator Tries to Grow Cash," BusinessWeek, 12 March 2007, 61.

eBay seller image courtesy http://magazin.zitty.de/2036/magazin_thema.html

People staring at screen courtesy http://www.vedior-brand-leaders.com/Default.aspx/71

Cash image courtesy http://www.lumpsumusa.com/

2007-03-04T22:03:00.000Z

Piecemeal Memory

It can happen anytime—when stepping out to pick up a carton of milk, on the way home from work, or after grabbing brunch with friends on a leisurely weekend morning. You can “stumble” most unexpectedly just about anywhere in Berlin, a metropolis with over 900 “stumbling-stones” and counting. The “stumbling-stones” [Stolpersteine] are small brass-capped squares laid flush with Berlin’s stone sidewalks. One stumbles psychologically, not literally, for inscribed into their surface is the name, birthdate, deportation date, and sometimes death date of a former Jewish inhabitant of the dwelling alongside the stone. The brainchild of artist Gunter Demnig, the miniature memorials must be privately sponsored at a cost of roughly 95 Euros, and have caught on as an effective way to personalize the enormity of the Holocaust.

There have been objections—some Jewish groups say that the stones encourage “treading on the dead” and some present-day residents would rather not run into the small, grim, reminders—but on the whole the project has been remarkably successful. With Berlin’s sidewalks thoroughly dotted with stones and other cities in Germany following suit, Demnig has even begun to talk of taking the idea abroad to other European nations. Meanwhile, after so many encounters with the stumbling-stones, I became eager to talk to the individuals who funded the stones’ creation and inlay, which the artist completes himself. A phone call to my neighborhood’s stumbling-stone coordination center puts me in touch with a local couple. I am set to meet sponsors of the latest memory trend.

Thomas and Jutta Schmidt greet me at one of Berlin’s thousand cheap Italian restaurants, chosen so we could talk at length without worrying someone else will be waiting for our table. At first blush they are what Germans call “bürgerlich,” which means solidly middle-class, orderly, and normal. At about sixty years old, Mr. Schmidt is a life-long civil servant whose employment moved him from a village near the Dutch border with his childhood sweetheart and wife to West Berlin. He explains with a smile that he joked at the time to his wife, “at least we’ll be there when the wall falls.” His smile doesn’t fade when he describes running to the Brandenburg gate after watching the evening news on November 9th 1989 and dancing with joy on top of the stormed “anti-Fascist protection rampart” with ecstatic Easterners.

“He saw it all, he was there!” Jutta Schmidt chimes in enthusiastically. “I couldn’t go because our son was young,” she says in afterthought. “But he saw everything.”

Like many West German mothers, Mrs. Schmidt stayed home to raise children, later working briefly for the national insurance agency. She waits for her husband to answer first when I ask questions and lets him lead the discussion. Her umbrella lies on the floor in a KaDeWe shopping bag, emblem of the bourgeois wife.

All in all, theirs is an interesting but not atypical picture of politically conventional citizens. Yet on second glance the picture becomes more complicated.

The Schmidts have two children, one born in Germany, one born elsewhere. While contemporary media coverage portrays third-world adoptions as a practice of pretentious celebrities, it was a bold act for early 1980s Germany. Until January 1, 2000, German citizenship was still defined by inheritance, that is, by blood, in contrast to the United States and many other nations, where it is defined by birth.[1] Being born in Germany did not guarantee citizenship, and in fact it still doesn’t—one must first apply for the privilege, which is expensive and time-consuming.

In such an exclusionary atmosphere, the Schmidts nonetheless went ahead with their decision to adopt. They also hold unorthdox political opinions, supporting Israel in a climate more inclined to condemn the state as an aggressive oppressor. Finally, Mr. Schmidt believes in the “collective guilt” theory, one which many Germans today reject. The theory, popularized after a 1981 speech by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, holds that Germans as a people are guilty for the crimes of Nazi Germany.[2] A prevailing counter to the “collective guilt” theory runs that German society is not collectively guilty but rather collectively responsible; as witnesses to the terrible history and heirs to its consequences, they have can help ensure it does not happen again. While Mr. Schmidt agrees with this responsibility, he nonetheless sees the nation as categorically culpable.

And here we come to why Mr. Schmidt wanted to sponsor a stumbling-stone.

“With this stone, I’m accepting a small piece of the guilt of our people. The guilt that I inherited. I take on this guilt in recognition of the terrible crimes we have committed,” he explains slowly and carefully, as though describing a logical proof.

Mrs. Schmidt expands on their reasons, bringing up an incident from their 1974 trip to Israel, when they stopped in a bakery for a snack.

“I wanted to buy a pastry and the woman behind the counter had blue numbers tattooed here.” Mrs. Schmidt points to her arm. “When she heard us speaking German she just gasped and then couldn’t breathe. She froze, completely transported by horrible memories.”

This encounter with a concentration camp survivor stayed with Mrs. Schmidt for decades. “I had to face what my people did,” she says. “And for me, the stumbling-stone is a way of dealing with this past.”

The Schmidts’ stumbling-stone commemorates an elderly woman deported to Theresienstadt and killed in October 1942. It lies not far from our restaurant in the Tempelhof district near the old airport and we visit it after dinner.

Mr. Schmidt bends down to wipe a bit of dirt off the surface. “Now you can see how it shines.”

Without his handkerchief, however, the stones run no risk of darkening with dust. Perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, it is constantly being walked upon that prevents residue build-up and allows them to glisten.

“We came upon them the same way you did,” explains Mr. Schmidt. “We noticed them shining here and there throughout the city, and at some point we thought, ‘that’s something we’d like to do. We’d like to sponsor a stone.’”

They were able to turn their desire into action when Mrs. Schmidt read a newspaper article with detailed information about the local office that coordinates with the artist. She called the same number that put me in touch with them, and ten months later, the stone was set.

The Schmidts would like to do more. After reading about the former Jewish neighborhood in Venice, where the phrase “Ghetto” originated, the idea of laying a stumbling-stone there appealed to them. They were dismayed to find out, however, that the office in Berlin was only responsible for local history and that no corresponding “coordination point” exists in Venice.

“I have to get in touch myself with the mayor in Venice and do all the research about Jews there personally,” Mrs. Schmidt explains as she shows me Giudecca Island, former home of the Giudei, or Jews, in a travel guide she brought to dinner.

We study the map for a minute. The cartographic neutrality of the land mass, shaped like a bread crust lying in a soup of Venetian canals, does not betray the cramped conditions under which Jews lived.

“We’re not sure if everything is recorded, either,” Mr. Schmidt adds. “Germans like to write everything down, but other countries might not have.” He is referring to the astoundingly precise German documentation that occurred alongside their crimes, right down to careful inventories of homes from which Jews were deported.

“Only when the research has been done can I go to the authorities, and only with the authorities’ permission can I then call the artist,” Mrs. Schmidt concludes a bit wearily.

Despite these tactical obstacles, the Schmidts believe strongly that in what they are doing, stating emphatically that only by remembering can one avoid repeating past mistakes. When asked how they would advise someone planning to sponsor a stone, their message is clear, “Be sure you know why you are doing it.”

Names have been changed to protect the couple's privacy. Demnig image courtesy http://www.lyrikwelt.de/stolpersteine/home.htm Shoe image courtesy http://www.moedling.at/stolpersteine/
[1]“Reform of Germany’s citizenship and Nationality Law,” German Embassy in london, 2006. [http://www.london.diplo.de/Vertretung/london/en/06/other__legal__matters/Reform__Germanys__citizenship__seite.html] Website viewed March 2, 2007.
[2] Micha Brumlik, ed., with Doron Kiesel, Cilly Kugelmann, Julius H. Schoeps, Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland Seit 1945 (Frankfurt: Judischer Verlag, 1986), 94.

2007-02-27T12:11:00.000Z

Making Up For It

On Sunday Martin Scorsese won the best director and best picture Oscars for his film “The Departed.” These victories are being both celebrated and sarcastically groused about, but nearly all agree on what they represent: making up for the snubbing the virtuoso has endured in past years. Those who applaud this tactic herald the Oscars as long-overdue; those who don’t complain that better nominees got overshadowed. Meanwhile, a different kind of making up for history was going on across the Atlantic, where Berlin’s municipal government passed a measure last Tuesday requiring all public buildings to hang flags every 18th of March. This date marks the German peoples’ attempt at Revolution in 1848, an attempt that many think failed because the population lacked the required disobedient spirit. The new measure is therefore being interpreted by some as an attempt to make up for earlier docility. The 100-word announcement in daily Der Tagesspiegel unleashed an unusual flood of commentary on their website.

Some felt the event’s embarrassing failure should occasion no commemoration. As “BK” put it caustically, “It’s the primary symbol of the German people that they can’t resist a ruler for long and ultimately obey the authorities.” Indeed, the powerful German princes and dukes pretended to accede to local revolutionary demands when it looked as though their heads might roll, but when the masses had calmed a bit, they claimed every ounce of their old power, in places strengthening it. Yet there was no significant further revolt because residents of the various provinces that would one day become Germany were never as riled up as their contemporaries in France and remained respectful of traditional leaders. One observer who had witnessed the revolution in Paris was astounded by the obedience he saw in Berlin, where revolutionaries continued to lift their hat to the king when he rode by.[1]

Yet the government wants to restyle this perceived blemish on national character by giving the revolutionary attempt its day in the sun, as if to say, “we weren’t feisty then, but we would be now.” This underlying message has caused some to look through the collective aura that surrounds civic commemoration decisions and read the measure as a partisan choice. It was drafted by a government dubbed the “Red-red coalition” in reference to the composition of left-wing parties that currently dominate the city senate. As the reader “Aging Rebel,” comments, it is not the first time that coalition member PDS [Party of Democratic Socialism], the successor party to the SED Communist dictators, wants to rename history. “Rebel” cites the PDS’ political success by normalizing the term Wende, or "Turn," rather than "Revolution" for the events in East Germany in 1989. In so doing, he claims, they tapped into a German distaste for real revolution, allowing the Germans to “obey the authorities” once more—and re-elect the PDS in the recent vote rather than letting it fall in permanent disgrace from the political scene.

Indeed, the PDS’ attempt to perhaps tweak how history is read—the 18th of March as a day of honor rather than failure—is mocked in another wry comment that suggests “flag-hanging and no school for children on the 21st of October, to commemorate the victims of the 2001 vote for Berlin Parliament, when the incompetent Red-Red coalition was first elected.” Ouch. At least Scorsese’s detractors don’t insult the man, just the measure: he’s great, they acknowledge, but better-late-than-never Oscars lower the integrity of the event. Yet, Berlin’s never-ending stream of memorials and memory gestures runs by a better-late-than-never credo, even when its measures begin to seem a bit laughable. And in fact this better-late-than-never motto motivated more than just Scorsese’s wins over in California: the environmental, international, and self-effacing air of the 79th Academy Awards urged us to make up for our atmosphere-destroying sins while subtly apologizing for Hollywood’s own cultural hegemony of yore and promising a brighter future. Even the caustic Berliner wit received this message well; as liberal rag die tageszeitung (taz for short) conceded, “Never was the alliance of mass media power and simple messages so clearly directed to attune a global public to a good cause.” It appears easier to accept reconciliation when it’s not in your backyard; Berliners are more comfortable with red carpet proselytizing than perceived preachiness from the Red-red coalition.

Note: Discussed as a realistic antidote to historical white-washing in the Feb. 12 Post, “The Lives of Others,” Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s work about life under surveillance in East Germany, upset Mexican favorite “Pan’s Labyrinth” to win best foreign language film.

[1] Amos Elon, Zu Einer Anderen Zeit: Porträt der jüdisch-deutschen Epoche 1743-1933 Aus dem Englischen von Matthias Fienbork (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag: 2002), 160. Originally published in English under the title The Pity of It All. A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743-1933 by Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York.

Scorsese image courtesy http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/26/features/oscars.php.

Barricade image courtesy http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=311
Berlin 1989 image courtesy http://www.defence.gov.au/news/raafnews/editions/4711/letters.htm

2007-02-20T09:32:00.000Z

Biller’s Will

Maxim Biller does not sit before the expectant audience—he slouches and hooks his hands on his jeans, as though his plastic chair were a combination La-Z-Boy and barstool. This living-room posture contrasts strangely with the anxiousness written across his features as he waits for the audience to respond to his inquiry. It may seem like an act of ego-preening for one of Germany’s most-lauded authors to ask a room of university students why they like him, yet the recipient of multiple literary awards, hailed by the Suddeutsche Zeitung as the bringer of Jewish literature back to Germany, is rather skeptical of himself. He pauses in the middle of speech to pronounce a recent utterance “idiotic” or says of a story he reads aloud, “that didn’t sound very good to me.” This confidently-expressed self-deprecation smacks a bit of Woody Allen, an impression aided by his horn-rimmed glasses and slight stature, yet Biller isn’t interested in shtick.

He has ostensibly come to this white-walled classroom in Berlin’s Humboldt University to read from his upcoming book, but as the afternoon wears on, it becomes clear he is out to gain something himself. He wants to know what makes his works stand out in the German literary landscape as “Jewish” books, and whether they can simply be “German.” In the following discussion about what is “German,” Biller asserts that a country with a genocidal past that until recently “still used blood to decide who belongs…will never be a fully just society.” (He is referring to how German citizenship prior to 2000 was not guaranteed to those born on German soil without German parents.)

He also accuses the German language of being hindered by a preponderance of Prussian, bureaucratic terms, such that instead of replying to an invitation to dinner with “I don’t know,” someone might say, “I can’t definitively confirm that.” Jewishness brings a looser flavor to the language, he contends, although his latest stories sound less Jewish than simply straightforward-yet-lyrical, reminiscent of Hemingway without the self-conscious ascetism.

It’s a shame Biller hasn’t been published in English. Although the unnaturally frequent swooning women populating his literature also recall the babes who mysteriously fall for the wimpy protagonist in Allen’s films, Biller’s tales also have a meaty lesson to offer American readers. Ordinary people are blown about by fate, tossed aside by the whims of dictators, overwhelmed by “the people;” in short, in works like Land der Väter und Verräter [Land of Fathers and Traitors] Biller presents a world where political intervention wildly disrupts the notion of self-determination.

As Jeremy Rifkin among others has pointed out, Americans expect to be able to control their life, to take the bull by the horns and make their own fate. If they work hard enough, things should naturally, according to a God-given plan, fall into place. As his mother told him, “Jeremy, in America, you can do anything you choose to do and be anyone you choose to be, if you want to do it or be it badly enough.”[1] That is, while we see our political freedom as exceptional, we have also grown normatively accustomed to self-determination as a individual’s God-given birthright.

For subscribers to the man-is-master-of-his-own-destiny worldview, Biller’s tellings of shattered lives would provide a mournful, yet fascinating window on a sort of tragedy fairly foreign to American soil. Biller himself is a refugee who left Czechoslovakia in 1968 after the Soviets crushed the uprising there, fleeing to Germany and learning the language in which he now writes.

However, I ask Biller if his stories, with their tension between individual will and historical forces, are meant to illustrate that capitalism is a system of ultimately more control over one's own life, a natural rejoinder for an American recoiling at unhappy endings. Biller explains that every society has rules to which one must bend and that the individual will be very unhappy if s/he doesn’t conform to fit into what is expected. He then proclaims that the Bohemian non-conformists of any society are freer and happier than the obedient mass. But not to worry: this trite Euro-intellectual creed barely wiggles into his mournful work, leaving its fascinating study of fate untainted.

A recent New York Times article also addressed free will, or rather, tried to. Author Dennis Overbye examined the proposals of various scientists to conclude that some people believe we have free will, some don’t, but the smartest ones seem to believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Perhaps this middle ground, rather than his presumed “Jewishness,” is what makes Biller’s work so interesting. His characters may be pummeled about by history’s unfair evilness, but they cling tenaciously to the illusion of their own freedom, making audaciously strange choices about how to lead their lives as though responding in defiance to the unseen controlling forces. Biller, naturally, takes after them: his reading for the students may have been fate, and his views on Bohemians may be an inevitable part of his identity, but his hubris in deconstructing his listeners’ homeland and language was all his own.

[1] Jeremy Rifkin, The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream (New York: Penguin, 2004), 12.

Biller image courtesy http://www.dwworld.de/popups/popup_lupe/0,,2068768_ind_1,00.html
Czech image courtesy http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/fooc50/4158970.stm

2007-02-18T10:05:00.000Z

Free to be Polluted

The Berlin Senate recently passed a series of measures to “greenify” the city center by forbidding entry to cars that generate harmful emissions through inefficient or dirty technology. While not yet set in stone, the new policy means that as many as 80,000 cars in Berlin will lose access, reports the Berliner Zeitung. This is fantastic news, implying better air quality, less noise pollution, and less congestion. Although the measure will cause consternation among owners of “old-timers,” the German nickname for old-fashioned models, there are also planned concessions that would allow for the occasional Sunday spin while precluding daily commute. With the city’s infamously punctual and efficient public transportation system, as well as extensive bike lanes, there isn’t much of an excuse to be driving anyway.

In taking this step, Berlin is ahead of a fellow city across the sea. Although New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration has toyed with the idea of introducing “congestion pricing,” the idea has been criticized as a regressive tax that would disproportionately hurt the lower and middle classes. Congestion pricing charges vehicles more during times of high use, and it has been successful in London, for example, in keeping more cars out the cramped metropolis’ busy hub during rush hour. Yet New Yorkers were strangely resistant to the idea, although they live in a city with the nation’s second-longest commuting time.

Equally strange is the response of residents in a rural pocket of Virginia to a proposed wind farm to be built on a local mountain ridge. Although they take pride in the beauty of their land and encourage eco-tourism, they view a wind farm as “industrialization in the wilderness,” reports the New York Times. Owners of a lodge promoting ecological tourism are afraid turbines in the distance will "ruin" the nature their guests come to see. Yet the idea of “untouched wilderness,” though a favorite American founding myth, needs to be viewed critically. It is a falsehood sometimes used to justify morally atrocious acts, as when the US Army exterminated the native inhabitants of Yosemite Valley to claim the “untouched land” for a national park for white people.

As well, these rural residents are idealizing a lifestyle more environmentally damaging than they perhaps realize. In the modern world, little wooden shacks do not sit alone on prairies as self-contained family-units. Rather, modern houses in somewhat isolated locales hook up to an electrical grid and use large amounts of energy to heat and cool themselves. This consumption makes a far larger ecological footprint than that demanded by urban apartment-dwellers surrounded on all sides. This is not to say everyone should moves to Queens; just think of what the traffic would be like then! It is rather to point out that romanticizing certain lifestyles causes people to see things fuzzily and miss the bigger picture, especially in Highland County, where turbines able to power 15,000 homes with clean energy may not be built.

What links the wary Virginians with their stubborn metropolitan cousins is resistance to changing individual lifestyles for a greater social good. In New York, critics claim that poorer drivers will lose out—despite a Transportation Alternatives report showing that 90% of auto commuters also have access to nearby public transportation with a maximum fifteen minute time difference from their car commute. For fifteen minutes longer, many can enjoy less air and noise pollution, as well as, for those willing to ante up the cash, a better commute. Yet small individual sacrifice is not taken to kindly by Americans, who are inclined to feel that laws and rules infringe their rights rather than enhancing their quality of life. As New York indicates, this viewpoint is certainly not dismissible as a red-state or even generational problem; a poll in Jane magazine last year asked its young, liberal readership if introducing gasoline taxes would be fair or “fascist;” a whopping half replied “fascist”!

Similarly, Virginians don’t want to look at turbines on a mountain ridge they would rather conceptualize as “pristine.” Their discomfort with this lifestyle adjustment obscures the fact that turbines could also be seen as a hopeful sign of the future, not as a scar on the untouched landscape, but only if individuals are willing to let an unwanted measure force them to change their minds. This change-of-heart in a small community would in turn provide 200,000 tax dollars for the potential benefit of all residents of the poor county. However, in the land of the free, such a change will be a long time in coming.

Turbine image courtesy http://www.richard-seaman.com/Travel/NewZealand/Cities/Wellington/AroundAndAbout/index.html

2007-02-12T22:30:00.000Z

Life is a (Nude) Beach

Do old condoms or old jail cells more accurately present the past? Open since summer 2006, Berlin's DDR Museum aims to represent the flavor of daily life in the German Democratic Republic [Deutsche Demokratische Republik], by focusing on banal objects like, well, condoms. In contrast to other traces of “real existing socialism” in the GDR’s former capital, such as Hohenschönhausen, prison of the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, the DDR Museum displays only on the quotidian, the normal, the average. Or rather, normal aspects of life are presented in an exotic, “oohing-and-aahing-encouraged” fashion, as relics of a bygone era the museum’s website likens to ancient Rome or the Middle Ages. The brainchild of a corporate customer relations specialist, the museum, which is not publicly-funded but rather a for-profit corporation, is shamelessly self-promoting and according to detractors too reliant on a history-Lite approach that obscures darker realities. Yet it must also be praised for its hands-on emphasis and illumination of little-publicized aspects of life in the GDR.

The museum's exhibition fosters understanding of the ordinary by encouraging visitors to touch actual objects ranging from a restored Trabi, the GDR’s signature boxy automobile, to yellowing cookbooks and children’s toys. Designed to resemble the famous Plattenbau architecture of socialist planning (see Post Feb. 6), the exhibit transforms a dumpy, underground room alongside the Spree river into a series of small displays and informational plaques on topics ranging from blue jeans to kindergarten to vacation. Most of the displays are interactive and highlights include the afore-mentioned car as well as a small “movie theater” where a projector plays state-sponsored television.

All this combines to make like in the GDR seem, if not cushy, then at least not too bad. Indeed, such Alltagsleben receives a different treatment in Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s widely-acclaimed film “Das Leben der Anderen” / “The Lives of Others” (2006), which opened in the United States last week. Here we see the main characters, GDR cultural crème-de-la-crème playwright Georg Dreymann and actress Christa-Marie Sieland (played by Sebastian Koch and Martina Gedeck) enjoy their success with a birthday party whose small-talk and chintzy gifts seem to resemble a typical bourgeois Western fête. In the West, however, the host would not have to break up a spat between one guest accusing another of being a Stasi informer.

Yet the museum claims not to take part in the current ostalgie trend sweeping Germany, wherein life under an oppressive dictatorship that employed 90,000 citizens just to open the mail is either mourned for its loss or misrepresented as a world of quaintly unhip consumer products (see Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film Goodbye Lenin!). The exhibition certainly walks a fine line, allotting a tackily expansive display about nude bathing equal room as a corner addressing the Stasi’s surveillance.

This light-hearted and accessible approach has won the museum many fans, as its own advertisements will tell you, quoting a guestbook entry that calls it, “One of the most interesting museums in the world.” The populist self-promotion doesn’t stop once you’re inside, where entrance wall text adopts a friendly, slick tone straight out of PR to brief visitors on the well-conceptualized tactile world they are about to discover. Naturally, a poster of the aforementioned guestbook quote is also available in the gift-shop, doubtlessly to complement the just-completed “voyage of discovery through the daily life of a past time.”

None of this slick strategizing should be surprising, given founder Peter Kenzelmann’s roots as a self-styled motivational speaker. But while being put off by the occasional tastelessness is acceptable, using this disdain to dismiss the museum’s achievements is not. Apparently, people do feel as though they are learning something they couldn’t get elsewhere in the time they spend fingering old junk and reading simply-worded wall texts. An employee of the museum who preferred not to be identified claims that “ninety-five percent” of visitors walk away satisfied, and admits that in relation to his own upbringing in East Germany, the exhibit feels fairly accurate. The main inaccuracy? A small section linking the childcare system’s collective potty-breaks to contemporary right-extremist violence.

“That’s just not right,” explains the elderly ex-DDR-Bürger before the display case containing small models of children sitting on toilets.

As the kids demonstrate, the exhibit doesn’t veer from the obviously sensational, or perhaps even historically fuzzy. In fact, a book published by Dr. Stefan Wolle, Head of Research, was criticized by peers for not providing enough academic sources for his discussion of everyday life. Whoops.

Regardless of the museum’s less-than-heavy analysis and overtly shrewd business sense, Mr. Kenzelmann was right in identifying a certain absence in the memory landscape. While jails, security centers, and memorials rightly expose the injustice of a corrupt regime, the GDR was not pure, grueling oppression for each of its citizens. There were some who believed in the rhetoric of social progress, betterment, and equality as much as those on the other side of the Iron Curtain, but they hoped they had found a better solution. This museum brings the nobility of that hope to light. It is a small light, but an important one for understanding, as the museum phrases it, “a culture of a past time.” To this end, some of the wall texts are notable in their striving for historical fairness and are at times is at times quite successful, as in the discussion of the halfway emancipation of women who were able to work yet still responsible for picking the kids up from state-provided daycare.

A trip to the DDR Museum is certainly worthwhile; it would be a lie to hide behind high-brow definitions of culture and deny that the normal material detritus of a society imparts an aesthetic and physical understanding not easily gleaned from well-cited textbooks. It would also be a shame not to acknowledge that the “other” system, that which lost to today’s reigning capitalism, wasn’t motivated by strikingly similar ideals. Yet in its striving to present the quotidian and not the cruel, the DDR Museum nearly forgets that the lines between these categories are often blurry, as the birthday party in “The Lives of Others” so aptly shows. To resolve this tension, a museum visit is best followed by a viewing of von Donnersmarck’s suspenseful and richly-layered film, not so much as an antidote but rather a complement, a secret-police inflected yin to the naked-beach yang.

2007-02-06T21:44:00.000Z

The (Literally) Empty Legacy
Europe’s biggest housing project is slowly being taken apart. Marzahn, a massive complex of oppressively ugly concrete towers capable of housing 60,000 residents, will have at least 1,800 fewer apartments by 2008. Located in former East Berlin, Marzahn’s bleak, urban aesthetic once starkly represented “real existing socialism,” but after the Wall “fell” residents rushed to leave their skyscraper socialism. They moved on to prettier places, giving Marzahn a measly 85% occupancy rate in 2000. Empty apartments are expensive, and the current solution to the cost is to rip down the buildings and replace them with public parks, reports the Berliner Zeitung.

Earlier attempts have been made to spruce up Marzahn’s image, such as a golf practice course erected in nearby Hellersdorf that used vast stretches of underdeveloped and cheap land, yet as investors soon found out, this was not a place for country-club style patronage. Marzahn’s somewhat roughneck image has even been turned into a brand recently by a group of self-styled young thugs; “Marzahn Wear” peddles shirts with the iconic Plattenbau, or concrete tower, above the logo, “Don’t Mess with Marzahn.” On their website, a rapper beckons: “Do you have a knife? / Kids go to Marzahn. / Are you a criminal? / Kids go to Marzahn.”

I blame Le Corbusier. For the ugliness, for the crime, for everything. The man who proclaimed the New York City’s 1916 Zoning Law to regulate building height a “deplorably romantic city ordinance,”[i] dreamed up a housing model for the modern era that would become its worst nightmare. His Utopic city was composed of cloud-grazing high-rises with acres of greenery and highway between them. It did away with the traditional pedestrian street and also eliminated the fabric of social interaction and neighborly geography that, as Jane Jacobs was to argue, composed the city’s essential vitality.

Le Corbusier’s sanitary vision, created as a counterpoint to places like the crowded immigrant slums of New York’s Lower East Side, looked pretty good to many city planners, including Robert Moses. As twentieth-century New York’s Hausmann, he demolished twenty-one different neighborhoods to build Le Corbusier’s vision, which morphed from drawing-board Utopia into modern-day housing project. The housing project proceeded to “fail” miserably, proving a breeding ground for crime and mistreatment. People didn’t seem to take pride in their weird tower-garden terrain, which ultimately did not foster neighborliness, as the old streets, stoops, and small-built brownstones and stores had, but rather neglect.

As Spike Lee’s film Clockers (1995) perfectly depicts, the open space of the housing project became a vector for illicit behavior rather than community interaction. Critic James Sanders has pointed out that Lee’s film was the first to truly address housing projects, despite their previous four-decade existence, because unlike the crowded tenement streets they (sometimes) replaced, their harsh environment provided no home-grown stories and lacked what moviegoers wanted to see—engrossing human enterprise.[ii]

Even Le Corbusier’s high-end projects lack aesthetic charm or well-planned social fabric. Residents of his 1953 “Berlin typ” high-rise in western Berlin later had to add a small newspaper kiosk in the first floor, since the tower is ringed with park and driveway rather than stores, as well as storage and laundry space between the building’s concrete supports, since this hadn’t been thought of either. While offering great views, the interior resembles a bureaucratic labyrinth or jail rather than a living space, while the exterior’s boxy repetition is plain unattractive. Luckily, this high-rise is the only of its kind in the lonely neighborhood alongside train tracks and the Olympic grounds, rather than being part of a larger complex or social structure, so there have been no reports of excessive crime or resulting deterioration of urban fabric.

The government of the German Deomcratic Republic may have been inspired by idealism when they adopted the towers-in-the-garden model of social planning for Marzahn. Or they may have pragmatically picked the cheapest construction method possible. One thing is certain: the propagation of such a model is a legacy of Le Corbusier’s life work. As is its failure. Ugly and socially unappealing, Marzahn is now going the way of St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, modeled after Manhattan projects but dynamited barely fifteen years after it opened, because its crime and vandalism also led to incurable non-occupancy problems. As Harvard historian Alexander von Hoffmann puts it, “even poor people preferred to live anywhere but Pruitt-Igoe.” It appears that poor people would also prefer to live anywhere but Marzahn.

Another recent article linking the "modern housing project" model's replacement of streets with intermittent green spaces with drug use and crime appeared recently regarding Berlin's Paul-Hertz Siedlung: http://www.morgenpost.de/content/2007/01/26/bezirke/879035.html
Image of housing project with trees of New York City’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Houses courtesy of: http://www.nyc-architecture.com/HAR/HAR018.htm
Further reading: Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: The Modern Library, 1961.
[i] Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), 251.
[ii] James Sanders, Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 219.

2007-02-02T15:51:00.000Z

Nice Curtains, Bad Hummus: the Culinary Revival is Halfway There

The tabouleh was strangely flavorless and the pita bread cold. My dining companion’s gefilte fish smelled (and looked) like cat food—more than gefilte fish usually does, that is. But our table was graced with dreamy Chagall images, with the usual floating figures and purple-blue livestock. In fact, each table corresponds to a historical Jewish figure, our waiter at Kadima explained enthusiastically. The restaurant, whose name means “forward” in Hebrew, aims to become a culinary beacon in the much-touted revival of Jewish life here in Germany’s capital. The restaurant’s pedigree seems nearly guaranteed, as it sits directly alongside Berlin’s restored New Synagogue in the Spandauer Vorstadt, a neighborhood that before the Holocaust was a historic center of Jewish life. However, Kadima highlights the contradiction of this revival, in that the striving for authenticity feels a bit, well, inauthentic.

This is not a problem it struggles with alone: the kosher Beth Cafe café on neighboring Tucholsky Strasse presents itself as a little slice of both diaspora and Middle Eastern Jewish tradition, with a menu containing bagels alongside eggplant dishes. As with Kadima, its furnishings are charming and clean, and right now an exhibit of photography from Jerusalem’s Old City accents the walls. A display of typical Jewish food, mainly popular brands of sweet and snacks imported from Israel, stands near the bar. However, when I asked whether there were any to-go hummus available, waitress suggested using a powdered mix they were selling. “It’s really simple,” she promised. “You just add water and it really tastes just like normal hummus.”

Dr. Jeffrey Peck, author of “Being Jewish in the New Germany” (2006) points out that this inconsistent-yet-earnest revival, which began in the 1990s, is currently fueled by American visitors who come to check out the Jewish “scene.” No wonder the only other occupied table at Kadima was taken by New Yorkers discussing their tour itineraries.

A gregarious professor who by his own admission occasionally runs into students at trendy watering holes, Peck is a good person to ask about the much-touted cultural revival. He says he is not satisfied with Berlin’s Jewish-oriented offerings, but hesitates to describe them further. He can’t find the words, but to my suggestion of “authentic,” he laughs loudly—“absolutely not.” In alignment with my impressions, he dismisses Beth Café as “awful,” yet at the end of our conversation suggests a guidebook to “Jewish Berlin” that he favors, not quite willing to dismiss the still-natal scene completely. After all, Peck has spent years studying what it means to be a Jew in Germany and applauds the mixed achievements for what they are: inspiring signs of vitality in a perhaps unlikely place.

That is, these restaurants have opened their doors alongside not-infrequent reports of vandalism of Jewish graves or Holocaust memorial plaques. The synagogue, Kadima and even Beth Café’s small entrance are fronted with metal protection barriers and permanent police watch. This is not to say society is wildly antisemitic: one also sees articles about schoolchildren organizing group research projects about their colleagues who disappeared in the 1940s, or neighborhood parliaments setting aside funds for new memorials to lost citizens. However, the revival takes place in a country whose attitude towards Jews remains uneasy; Peck describes it as either anitsemitic or philosemitic, with little middle ground, little “normalcy.”

These restaurants have a potentially large role to play in creating this “normalcy,” since good restaurants are part of a “normal” image of a culture. Despite the Jewish people’s horrific past vis-à-vis this nation, they are nonetheless a group of people with particular customary foods, just like any other group. If visitors from abroad as well as local customers maintain patronage, there is reason to hope that both places improve through feedback and capital. It would be a shame if they didn’t. For when it becomes as unremarkable to grab a snack at Beth Café as it is to buy a döner from a nearby Turkish joint, Berlin will truly have come a long way.

Kadima, Oranienburger Strasse 28, tel. +49, (0)30 / 27 59 41 51 Tip: Try the Russian dishes; they promise a better dining experience since the kitchen team seems to be more Russian than Middle Eastern or American.
Beth Cafe, Tucholsky Strasse 40, +49, (0)30 / 2 81 31 35

2007-01-29T09:11:00.000Z

Most Embarrassing or Most Effective?

January 27th marked the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a day officially commemorated in Germany with memorial ceremonies, educational programs, and official utterances from high-profile politicians. Yet Lea Rosh, a publicist who rose to fame as the promoter of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, conducted a protest. She organized the protest in Berlin’s main train station Hauptbahnhof to demonstrate her dissatisfaction with Deutsche Bahn’s new plan for a memorial to the deportation of Germany’s Jews. She wasn’t protesting the company’s initiative, of which she approved, nor the location of the commemoration, which the firm has agreed to place in train stations right alongside contemporary travelers. Rather, Rosh was upset with Deutsche Bahn for taking too long. According to her, the announced “conception phase” of one year to review plans for the memorial and decide upon its design ought to be shortened.

Could it be that Rosh doesn’t believe that the Bahn could possibly need a whole year to develop a working concept? This explanation is unlikely, given that the monument Rosh brought to existence, commonly called the Holocaust Memorial, took seventeen years from conception to completion. Rosh witnessed multiple design competitions, presided over public forums about whether the plans should go forward, and campaigned no-holds-barred against occasionally resistant politicians to bring her pet project to light. She is intimately acquainted with the delicate and slow politics of commemoration, as well as with the belabored examination of every little detail of designs. So why is Rosh so set on telling the Bahn to speed things up?

To frame this question properly, one needs to know a bit more about the woman. Her initial career as a West German journalist was quickly superseded by her role as memorial-campaigner after she first proposed the idea during a panel discussion in Berlin in summer 1988. To further her cause, she had founded the citizens’ group “Perspective Berlin,” of which she made herself chairwoman, which later became the Association for the Promotion of the Establishment of a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe [Förderkreis zur Errichtung eines Denkmals für die ermordeten Juden Europas]. It sounds earnest enough in the telling, yet the crusader-like stance Rosh adopted repelled many who came to see her as a woman in search of a pedestal from which to preach. Some accused her of changing her name from the original “Edith” to “Lea” to sound more Jewish and called her self-styled role as “fighter” for the memory of murdered Jews self-righteous, asking how she could claim to speak for the victims. Her typical response was, “if not me, then who?” Yet her public image remained in question and the popular biweekly magazine Tip’s named her #1 of the “The 100 Most Embarrassing Berliners” in its 2004 annual survey.

Rosh’s behavior at the Memorial’s 2005 dedication ceremony also cast doubts as to how earnest she was in her desire to respect the dead, re-raising the specter of an attention-loving gadfly. Her speech concluded with the suggestion to bury an original cloth star of David and a molar she had found at the Belzec concentration camp in Poland within one of the concrete stele that compose the monument. Rosh had not previously announced her intent and since the monument’s building process revolved around planning, consultation, and group consensus, her surprise gesture was received as self-important and disrespectful.

It also offended the Jewish community for its taboo stance towards Jewish law. Albert Meyer, Chairman of Berlin’s Jewish Community [Vorsitzender der Jüdische Gemeinde], furiously responded that Rosh’s gesture violated the religious burial order that Jewish corpses and parts thereof only be buried in Jewish cemeteries. Rosh responded that her wish was in accordance with Jewish law and enlisted Rabbi Yitzhak Ehrenberg to clarify that the law only applied to large body parts, and that single teeth could be exempt.[1] This could not deliver her from the rage of Belzec’s administration, who scolded that it was “strongly forbidden” to take “souvenirs” away from a visit to the camp.[2] The question remains whether such an astoundingly obtuse blunder, which managed to somehow offend everyone, was just a clumsy mistake, or evidence of Rosh’s privileging of her own self-styled crusader role respect for those she claims to represent.

Other evidence that Rosh puts controversy and public attention before the emotions of the Jewish community is her creation of offensive controversy in the form of posters proclaiming “The Holocaust never happened.” The posters, created during debates about the memorial and intended to raise her campaign’s profile by demonstrating the offensive nature of Holocaust denial, worked a little too well, offending survivors and Jewish groups. Rosh later removed the posters, but her defiant, entitled stance has remained a constant throughout her public engagement, as evidenced in this latest incident. When asked whether she had a right to protest on privately-owned land, that is, Deutsche Bahn’s train station, she responded with the flip assertion, “It would be unwise to throw us out.”

So is Rosh truly a righteous crusader championing a cause many would rather just be done with? Or is she a muckraker in search of acclaim, clinging to an issue that turns heads? Does she aim to churn up controversy or remembrance? Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The more engrossingly obnoxious Rosh’s public persona becomes, the more people read about her and pay attention to what she’s doing. As a consequence, her efforts at commemoration receive much press, and, as with the Holocaust Memorial, are one day actualized. Perhaps the realm of memory needs more people like Rosh, who rather than acting polite and appropriate, embarrass and annoy everyone into listening.

[1] Quoted in Claudia Keller, “Empoerung ueber Lea Rosh” 12 May 2005, Der Tagesspiegel. 14
[2] “Stelenspringer.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 14 May 2005
Top Rosh image courtesy http://www.morgenpost.de/content/2005/05/14/berlin/753649.html?redirID

2007-01-28T15:56:00.000Z

The Latest from the Hauptstadt
It’s time for a small rundown about the themes touched on in here in A New Yorker in Berlin:

First, the Schloss-saga. As discussed in posts from Nov. 19, & 26, Dec. 17, and Jan. 15, the city is struggling to explain where the money will come from to rebuild the Baroque palace that stood on the central Schlossplatz until the East Berlin government blew up its war-damaged remains in 1950. The structure that replaced the Schloss in the 1970s, the German Democratic Republic’s Palast der Republik, is now being removed amidst accusations that there isn’t sufficient funding to build its predecessor/successor.

Not so, says the municipal government, which has produced a new plan to build the Schloss without an attached luxury hotel, without an underground parking lot, and, most importantly, without the signature historical dome rising majestically above its wings. The plan does, however, remain true to its goal of creating a mix of exhibition and museum space for the study of other cultures, an educational space that recreates “the world in the center of Berlin,” to be called the "Humboldt Forum." This latest plan reduces costs enough to begin construction perhaps in 2008, and finish perhaps by 2012. There are also suggestions to maintain the river-facing side of the Schloss in the style of GDR architecture to commemorate each era the site has seen. How diplomatic, especially since the left-leaning municipal government isn't quite convinced it wants to contribute to the Forum's coffers.

As regards so-called "One Euro Jobs" (post Nov. 12), a new federal study (pdf link; for html see the institute's homepage) suggests that this federal initiative to combat Germany's high unemployment actually takes away jobs away rather than creating them, giving jobs on the cheap to those who qualify for such state-mandated labor rather than those who were trained to perform given functions at a higher minimum wage. In other words, the initiative is forming temporary positions for lesser pay rather than permanent opportunities; only 2% of the One Euro Jobs even come with the possibility of long-term employment. One suggestion to fix this situation is to have civil employees watch over and approve the One-Euro administration at job agencies. This could be a good solution; it would also in theory create more jobs.

The great competition between two companies to build jumbo-sized Ferris Wheels (post Dec. 1) is playing out to Western advantage. The Wheel at the old Zoologischer Garten train station is in the lead financially and according to a public opinion poll. However, the poll reports that 52% of those asked want the wheel, a rather slim margin. One wonders if Berliners will look back at the years from 1990-2010 with contentment or with resentment directed at many silly or socially destructive construction projects. While obvious scapegoats like New York’s much-criticized Robert Moses are currently lacking, history might find some. Then again, it depends on how successful the Berlin Republic ends up. As the new positively-slanted Moses exhibit in Queens shows, each era remembers a bit differently.

As reported on Dec. 6, Berlin’s new main train station has not arisen without growing pains, including a spat between architect Meinhard von Gerkan and head of Deutsche Bahn Hartmut Mehdorn, in which the former sued the latter for not following his plans to construct arched roofs in the lower level. To everyone’s surprise, he won the suit—meaning more costs and travel delays for a project already marked by such developmental hiccups. Yet from making headlines for the lawsuit, delays, and its much-touted glass roof that ended up unfinished, leaving first-class passengers in the rain, the Hauptbahnhof has now come to define debacle, making headlines for being simply awful. When the weather system Kyrill plowed through Germany on January 18, its hurricane-force winds knocks loose a steel girder on the station’s façade. In turn, the girder’s fall damaged a staircase and left structural weakness such that plate glass started to loosen, and the entire station was evacuated, stranding thousands of travelers. It re-opened the following day, only to close again 48 hours later due to heavy winds threatening the damaged structure. These embarrassing closures are taking place amidst the revelation that the apparently faulty structure actually cost 1.2 billion euros to build, not the single billion Deutsche Bahn had reported. Repairs will naturally also be costly. If only von Gerkan’s arched roofs had been built—then at least customers retreating from the station, on either day, would have had something to admire on the way out.

Finally, in recent news, Kochstrasse in Kreuzberg will be renamed Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse. As discussed in the latest post from Jan. 20, the seemingly banal matter of street names is a political firecracker in Berlin, igniting tempers and conjuring up historical squabbles. The suggestion to rename a small strip of one street after a student activist and liberal thinker riled up those who saw him as a “revolutionary,” including the nearby Axel Springer press, a notoriously conservative outfit against which Dutschke had campaigned. After a neighborhood-wide poll, forced by the controversy at a cost of 200,000 Euros, it is clear what the people want. Or is it? Apparently approximately 75% of voters living right near the street in question voted against changing the name. As well, in an always-changing city like Berlin, there are newly-created streets up for grabs alongside construction projects, meaning an older name needn’t be sacrificed. The irony of erasing a contemporary bit of memory (the name Kochstrasse) to propose a better memory we will like more in the future (the name Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse) is yet more proof that Berlin may not be the prettiest city in Europe, with a broken train station, vacant lots rather than palaces, and kitschy Ferris wheels to come, but it is the most interesting.

Ein-Euro-Jobber image courtesy http://www.anti-hartz-buendnis-nrw.de/demo-051105.html Dutschke image courtesy http://www.iisg.nl/today/en/11-04.php

2007-01-20T12:16:00.000Z

Word on the Street

Tomorrow residents of the Berlin district Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain will vote on whether or not to rename a local street, Kochstrasse, as Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse, in honor of the leader of Germany’s rebellious student movement of the 1960s and partial founder of the Green party. The current honoree Johann Jakob Koch was a baker, and according to members of the Christian Democratic Union, a party that opposes the renaming, his service to the city oughtn’t be forgotten. Along with fellow opponent and current Kochstrasse resident Axel Springer Press, against whose conservative papers Dutschke protested, the CDU accuses Dutschke as having been an anti-democracy revolutionary. It is the CDU’s signature-collection initiative to block the renaming that gave rise to the need for a citizens’ vote: after the neighborhood parliament had already decided in favor of the renaming, the CDU was able to prove minority dissent with the signatures. Residents will settle the matter once and for all in the polls tomorrow.

The controversy has split the neighborhood, with signs proclaiming alliance hanging in shop windows. The liberal newspaper taz, which originally proposed the renaming in late 2004, is gearing up for a victory in what it sees as a campaign for justice and proper remembrance. Meanwhile, opponents invoke not only political but also pragmatic objections, calling the measure costly and impractical since companies will have to order new letterhead, among other measures. The taz initiative has already made a concession to the municipal transit authority, which claimed the cost of renaming the underground stop on Kochstrasse would be too high. In response, the suggestion was altered such that only a piece of the street would receive a new moniker. If this sounds silly to American readers, it is the norm in Berlin, where what looks like one street on a map may change names two or three times over the course of several kilometers.

The amount of hullabaloo over a street name might also be foreign to Americans, who live in a country of usually bland public monikers. This has a lot to do with America’s history of expansion, in which surveyors turned “uncharted territory” into a grid of salable land, relying for simplicity’s sake upon numbers to order the terrain. Despite the existence of verbose personalities such as Henry David Thoreau in their midst, surveyors also tended to be a fairly unimaginative lot, sticking to simple, inoffensive names like “Main” or “Oak” when drawing up their maps. They were, however, business-savvy, frequently numbering the streets starting at ten or even twenty-five to leave room for coming expansion in all directions. In this regard, surveyors were either spookily prescient or self-actualizing purveyors of the contemporary sprawl phenomenon.

Then again, Americans miss out on the arguable cultural flavor of local names. In Berlin, each street also has a plaque somewhere in its stretch that notes the birth, death, and profession of its eponym. When they are singular and denote short stretches, names also become tied irreparably to a place. For example, one justification the Berlin government provided to critics of its decision to build a fifth Rosa Luxembourg monument was that the socialist reformer would otherwise be remembered as an actress: her eponymous plaza lies in front the famous Volksbühne, or People’s theater.

In New York, attempts have been made to bring in the folksiness and character of interesting street names, but how many people know that 84th street in Manhattan’s Upper West Side is also named Edgar Allen Poe Street, after the one-time resident? One would be hard-pressed to find a business or residence that inserts the supplemental name on its letterhead. Even a wide-ranging change such as Sixth Avenue to Avenue of the Americas in 1945 is frequently overlooked by natives who go right on calling it, well, Sixth Avenue. It sits in between Seventh and Fifth, does it not? In New York, pragmatism trumps romanticism, it seems.

Yet Berliner Markus Domsch, owner of the local organic grocery “Laib und Käse” [Loaf and Cheese] and neighborhood resident for twelve years, also expresses a practical outlook.

“I’m not voting tomorrow because the name really doesn’t affect me,” he says, referring to his store’s location approximately two kilometers from debated block. “It’s up to the people who live and work there to decide. Whatever they choose democratically is their right.”

Not everyone feels that way. The proprietor of a nearby second-hand bookstore who preferred not to be named displays a large “Vote NO” (to the decision not to rename the street) poster alongside rows of dusty volumes. “He was an important political figure. It’s a shame if they decide not to honor him. It should remain Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse,” she says emphatically, referring to a name the street does not yet officially bear. Her answer hits at one possible linguistic consequence of tomorrow’s vote. Just like New Yorkers to whom “Avenue of the Americas” is a fictional place, Berlin fans of the political activist may refer to the street as Rudi-Dutschke-Strasse regardless of the outcome.

Kochstrasse image courtesy: www.pro-kochstrasse.de Dutschke image courtesy: http://www.stred.org/picdb/43ebc643c598f_t.jpg
Postcard image courtesy:www.taz.de/pt/.1/etc/dutschkestrasse/chronik Poe image courtesy: http://richmondthenandnow.com

2007-01-16T22:17:00.000Z

Decadence and Salvation, Looking Good

There is a bit of Berlin in New York these days, in the form of grotesque caricature, riveting sexuality, and hypnotic self-doubt. Yes, self-loathing can be alluring—“Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s,” on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through February 19th, shows us how, with portraits of an era of social mayhem routinely labeled as utter decadence. Here are Weimar Berlin’s decrepit prostitutes, despairing intellectuals, and repulsive military personnel, pompous officers and wounded cannon fodder both, as seen by the likes of Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and George Grosz, among others.

The show has tongues wagging in a variety of tones. ArtForum speaks clinically of the paintings’ intent to “intensify Dada’s anatomical operation---suggesting…an entire culture driven by an ongoing cycle of corporeal assault,” while Newsweek enthuses “There's not a trace of ‘my kid could have done that’ modernism in this show. These guys could really draw and paint.” Whether issued from the Ivory Tower or phrased as pure populism, reviews all find the exhibit mesmerizing, which begs the question of why societal dysfunction is such a crowd-pleaser. Is it as simple as the canvases’ visual vibrancy, their bright-yet-forbidding coloration, gripping compositions, navel-gazing intimacy? Or is it more of a rubber-necking syndrome evincing the fascination of decay, with everyone equally enthralled by the warped figures, arrestingly ugly faces, and in-your-face genitalia?

As it turns out, both. This “amazing show” earns such a pronouncement from the New York Times by delighting with Beckmann’s technical virtuosity and Dix’s innovative, decorative touches. It is beloved in a comparatively naughty review in New York magazine because it “cheered [the reviewer] up to no end…There is a wicked joy…to be found in skewering the human animal…Sometimes, screw ‘em all.” As this author astutely points out, the renaissance of such a style--dubbed Verist in its search for the truth behind society’s ugliness--in contemporary America could lead to some interesting depictions of Bush, Cheney, and cohorts. Beyond the vicarious delight of mentally ripping into our world with the aesthetic language of between-wars Berlin, the show also provides well-written wall texts, an extensive catalog, and unfussy, straightforward arrangement. Decadence has never looked so good.

Meanwhile, in California, the future has never looked brighter--literally. On January 10th, SunPower, a corporation which manufactures solar cells and panels, acquired PowerLight, a smaller yet equally dynamic firm that specializes in the systems and plants that utilize the cell technology. PowerLight is a quickly-growing shining star whose major projects include airport hangars, jails, and even real estate developments, while SunPower is a giant in the field, with the world’s most efficient solar cells and the innovation to drive the technology forward. One enthusiastic goal of the merger is to reduce the cost of solar energy by 50% by 2012.

A visit to PowerLight’s headquarters in south Berkeley, a neighborhood itself in transition with eco-home stores alongside bait shacks, reveals a buzz of change already taking place just days after the merger. Smartly-designed posters that incorporate each firm’s logo are going up throughout the office. Magnets are already in place on filing cabinets. Nearby, a wall displays PowerLight’s solar achievements already in place, including the Solarpark in Bavaria, Germany, where rows of panels nestle in the hills like a modern-day reinvention of the pastoral vineyard. (This image is not terribly far-fetched: PowerLight has also worked with wineries to design systems that save money by using solar energy at hours of peak prices on the grid.) Unlike in the United States, where solar subsidies come only at a state level in places like California, keeping the cost prohibitively high in non-subsidized regions, in Germany solar is federally subsidized. Germany believes firmly--if a bit frantically, as anyone who has read the press' recent Weltuntergang global warming assessments can attest--in the importance of a cleaner, more environmentally-sound future

A peek inside PowerLight’s headquarters is refreshing without the schadenfreude. It provides a bit of hope. It seems obvious to suggest that one reason "Glitter and Doom" is so entrancing is that societies on a slow path south love to gaze on other fallen civilizations, perhaps explaining the current American craze for the late Roman empire. Yet it is equally compelling to imagine how we can save ourselves. Under the relentlessly sunny California sky, an image of positive things to come nearly outstrips the carnival of oddities on the New York gallery wall. Nearly. Like yin and yang, sweet and sour, downfall and upswing form a pleasing duet. Here’s hoping “Glitter and Doom” travels far and wide so that all may enjoy it, that it flies ultimately to Berlin—in a solar-paneled jet.

Images courtesy http://www.sunpowercorp.com/products/photogallery/, (solar complex in Arnstein, Germany) http://www.powerlight.com/success/powerplants.php (Bavaria Solarpark)
and http://www.metmuseum.org/special/glitter/images.asp. Top image detail of Christan Schad's Count St. Genois d'Anneaucort (1927), below is his Self Portrait (1927). Female is Otto Dix's The Dancer Anita Berber (1925). Group is Dix's Skat Players (1920).

2007-01-15T17:18:00.000Z

Trading a Palace for a Castle

“Thanks a lot, Schlossverein, for making it ever clearer, that Ossis [those from former East Berlin] have nothing to add!”[1] proclaimed an angry letter published in the liberal biweekly magazine Zitty in Winter 2005. Even two years ago, invoking the Us vs. Them, East vs. West rhetoric in the Berliner Schloss debate was beginning to sound a little old since the Palast der Republik’s tear-down was a foregone conclusion for years (see Posts Nov. 19, Nov .26, Dec. 17). It was, however, logical: a survey by the Berliner Morgenpost at that time showed that 55% of West-Berliners clearly supported the Schloss’ reconstruction, while only 34% of East-Berliners could say the same.[2]

Now that the federal government has announced it will not fund Schloss reconstruction and financial dire straits have caused whispers that it may never be rebuilt, it is worth examining the symbolism of the Palast der Republik to understand why some are so upset about its removal. That no ersatz architectural showpiece is arriving any time soon makes grieving and resentment for what will obviously be missing even more compelling. So what is being mourned? As historians Godfrey Carr and Georgina Paul write, “It was here the citizens of East Berlin were married, celebrated birthdays, and took part in a range of leisure pursuits, all at very little cost. It was open and affordable to all. As such, it represented a much appreciated facility for urban cultural and social life unparalleled in the west of the country.”[3]

However, if the Palast’s central, community feel was unparalleled in the West, its openness was also unparalleled in the East. That is, its cultural offerings came as close to permissible western-ness as possible; it was here that the government finally caved to pressure and let musicians perform “degenerate western music,” that is, rock and roll (as long as lyrics were previously submitted for review). Although post-reunification Westerners have tended to see the building as a symbol of an oppressive Communist regime, they may have missed the irony that under the German Democratic Republic the building also stood for a certain sort of Western influence.

Nevermind that the Palast was originally supposed to be part of a huge building complex, including an enormous tower of rising 130 meters above the Palast’s roof, and a manicured parade ground for 400,000 people—a project for which the GDR did not have enough money and curtailed in the 1960s.[4] Although the Palast stood alone, a golden cigarette carton fronting a sprawling, wind-raked parking lot, it still represented a sort of comfort, pleasantness, and ease atypical for life in the GDR. A tale from a former Wessi elaborates this claim:

“Coming from the West, my first stop would often be Palast der Republik, because after such a long wait at the border, one often had to use the bathroom, or get a coffee, and here was one of the only known places to do this. There were lights, and mirrors, and music from the cafes. Abba, in fact! There were comfortable chairs, and attractive places to eat. You have to understand what the GDR was like: The overwhelming first impression was grey. Everything was this depressing grey. And the Palast der Republik was an island in the grey,” she explains. “An island of color and music in the grey.”[5]

The second great irony of Eastern resentment about what is perceived as largely Western embrace of the Prussian aesthetic is that at the root of many citizens’ connectedness to the structure lay aesthetic reasons: a relationship to the place was developed because it was pretty and nice. By ripping down the Palast, one of the few symbols of the GDR that can be thought of as pretty and nice is also obliterated. In the spirit of reconciliation for those who deeply perceive the East-West tension as marking the Palast issue, those at whom resentment and ire is directed should at least be comforted by knowing that the resentful and wrathful share a central concern for aesthetics, and that what they struggle to preserve was once nearly symbolic for what they now reject: excess Western influence.

[1] “Jetzt fehlt nur noch Koenig: Ein Brief an die Freunde der Schloss-Rekonstruktion.” Giuseppe Pitronaci. Zitty feb 21?
[2] “Stadtschloss: Jeder zweite Berliner fuer wiederaufbau,” von Stefan Schulz. Berliner Morgenpost 21 January 2005, p 13.
[3] “Unification and its Aftermath” Godfrey Carr and Georgina Paul, in German Cultural Studies: An Introduction Rob Burns, ed.New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
[4] “So haette as DDR gebaut…wenn genug Geld dagewesen waere.” Von Hildburg Bruns. BILD Berlin, 22 January 2005, p. 6
[5] Dr. Christine Wolf, Landesdenkmalamt, Senatsverwaltung fuer Stadtentwicklung, Interview with author, Berlin, Germany, 4 February 2005.

Schloss image courtesy http://www.berliner-schloss.de/

2007-01-04T22:42:00.000Z

Gelobtes Land—Two Sorts of Charm
In summer 2006, 4,000 rockets fell on northern Israel from Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon. [1] Today, barely five months later, my visit to the Hula Valley, a rich agricultural strip on the western shore of the Jordan River right below the border with Lebanon, reveals few signs of destruction. Although less targeted than more populous areas like Kiryat Shmona, the area nonetheless received rockets, a fact belied by its current undamaged appearance. Our guide can only point out the smallest traces of war: here is a bunch of yellowed trees that burned when a Katyusha fell nearby; it was aimed at a bridge slightly farther upstream on the river, which is more of an irrigation canal tamed into a straight line than the mythic, war-causing waterway its name calls to mind. And over there--the guide gestures out the window of the Jeep--another rocket fell, but the farmland has been more or less smoothed out and one must squint to convince themselves they see an undulation in the landscape.

To compare apples and oranges, the former East Berlin bears much more obviously the scars of war. While districts of former East Berlin are now central city today, vacant lots from the post-war era remain, as do long, wide, ghostly strips of what was no-man’s land alongside the Berlin Wall during the Cold War. These lots look like dollar signs to investors, even as new projects and dreams then fail, leaving more holes in the cityscape. While growth and change are characteristic of all metropolises, in few do they stamp the city with such vivid pockets of emptiness, a forlorn patchwork mystique.

In contrast, even the military fortifications in the pastoral Hula are picturesque. Pontoon bridges are nestled in the eucalyptus groves alongside the river in case the permanent bridges are ever damaged; their fatigue green paint and patches of red rust match the trees’ light leaves and rich-hued bark. The ruins of Syrians command centers and bunkers only half-destroyed by the conquering Israeli army in 1967 are similarly charming. Bunkers, command centers, and border-crossing customs tollhouses dot the slopes that look down on the farms. They are composed of partial walls and collapsing ceilings, large chunks of grey-yellow cement crumbling down into soil speckled with grey-yellow boulders, as though the layers of military conquest are yet another geologic process slowly taking place on the ancient landscape.

However, the aesthetic of pastoral charm doesn’t always supercede that of metropolitan creation-and-decay. Berlin’s gritty ugliness has enchanted just as many as it has repelled; residents call it an “interesting” city rather a “beautiful” one. To decode this rag-tag geography, to follow the constant physical developments in the city—the breweries and airports slated for demolition, the new condominiums or office complexes scheduled for construction—is to feel like not just like an insider but also a fellow-traveler through a process compelling in its demonstration of temporality. When buildings are so frequently here today, gone tomorrow, one is keenly aware of existing in a particular, short time window, aware of their own impermanence.

Yet, a variation of this feeling also permeates the Golan Heights, which begin on the Hula’s eastern side. The Hula lies along the pre-1967 border with Syria, and to cross it and ascend the rocky slope on the other side is to tread land that once belonged to another country—a country still calling for it back. The Israeli-occupied Golan is a moonscape of rocky soil and snowy hilltops, fertile pockets of land with white-walled villages tucked inside, and land-mines zones and tanks lying alongside roads. Visiting such terrain is to be reminded of the fragility of borders, of peace, and of personal existence.

In both Berlin and the Golan, inhabitants fight to maintain their land and their identity--for example, the Syrian minority refuses to adopt Israeli citizenship despite that government’s pressure, while former-East Berliners protest the rapid gentrification of their environs and draw boundaries between themselves and their neighbors (see post Dec. 23). Yet, as mentioned, such a comparison is like that between apples and oranges: occupied mountains versus a free city, countries versus neighborhoods, decades of mutual injustice versus the changes of modernity. Maybe. What is certain is that each variety of beauty is fiercely clung to, scarring the landscape it enhances, its allure giving rise to territoriality, its vulnerability a product of its appeal.

[1] Steven Erlanger, “The Mideast Crisis: Aftermath; Reservists in Israel Protest Conduct of Lebanon War,” The New York Times, 22 August 2006, p. A11.

2006-12-30T14:29:00.000Z

Magical Hatred as a Platform

The Central Council of Jews in Germany is renewing the call for a ban on the NPD, or National-democratic Party of Germany [Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands ]. Such bans have failed in the past, yet the Council is seeking to reactivate the urgency of this goal. To American readers, it may sound absurd to ban a political party you don’t like, so a little background helps explain the call: the NPD platform is based on xenophobia and scorn for what they deem non-German. As their charter describes, they are against the “Enlightenment-influenced Utopias and multiethnic excesses” of modernity. Like the Nazi party they emulate, they define enemies as those who don’t have the magical quality of inherent German-ness, enemies of “the Folk”; this, naturally extends to citizens of Turkish descent and Jews. Their followers perpetrate the waves of right-extremist violence that leave hundreds dead or injured annually and make certain areas of East Germany no-go zones for those who don’t look white enough.

But can you ban a political party just because what they say is trash and their influence is abhorrent? As Green Party political Volker Beck points out, “Banning the NPD won’t solve the problem of right-extremism. Their following would still be there and they would simply look for new forms of organization.” In addition to being ineffective, such a ban also risks admitting that the current democratic methods of combating hatred are ineffective: Heribert Rech of the Christain Democratic Union believes that “Party-banning-processes don’t get us anywhere; we must fight the NPD politically.” Finally, others claim that such a ban would lessen current awareness of the NPD’s actions, even if it eventually failed, only strengthening the party.

These claims are all wrong. While banning the NPD won’t solve right-extremist violence, it will stop its condoning and legitimization from a political party that has recently made its way into Parliament and sits on many local councils. Forty-three thousand Berliners voted for the NPD in the last elections this fall; these are lost votes that should have gone to parties that want to use public funds for social benefit rather than hate. The more money is used to promote a philosophy of xenophobia, the more “okay” such destructive thinking becomes. It is an ignoramus' answer to East Germany's high unemployment (in some places, 25%) but it works when trumpeted loudly enough and in the right tone by men in suits who have the legitimacy of the political arena behind them.

Claims that an attempt to ban the NPD would draw attention away from it are ludicrous at their core, and one wonders which of the non-NPD politicians who consistently condemn extremist violence and xenophobia would feel justified in shutting up if the NPD no longer existed. One must also look at the atmosphere in which the call for a ban comes: Germany has already banned Nazi-related emblems. In the sea of Hitler mustaches and “homeland” slogans at NPD rallies, swastikas remain out of sight because of the strict illegality of displaying one. Although Mein Kampf can be found at most Barnes & Noble’s in the United States with nary a raised eyebrow, it is notoriously difficult to find in Germany and even most libraries don’t keep copies available. Such a country refusing to ban a massive Neo-Nazi organization is dangerously strange.

Finally, resistance to the ban often revolves around the distasteful idea of censoring politics, but is the NPD a political party or a hate crime organization? No one would dare call the Ku Klux Klan a “political party” in the United States, although for years they controlled the South with a specific social agenda. A glance at the NPD charter reveals ideas familiar to Americans raised on the rhetoric of the Religious Right: the importance of (heterosexual) family, anti-abortion stance, and pro death penalty. Not surprisingly, women appear on the group’s website only as contact partners for senior citizens’ or family affairs. Yet far beyond such conservative-but-not-criminal ideology are passages that call for an end to the German examination of its Holocaust past: “We Germans are not a nation of criminals!” The website also contains an image of Germany showing its pre-1945 borders, encompassing much of Poland and all the way up to Kaliningrad. Its discussion of the danger non-German-ness poses to the mystical inherent German-ness of the people is deeply troubling: no platform should be built on fairy tales.

This is not a group that should be allowed to wear the mantle of “political party” any more, or permitted in any way to participate in a democratic government. It is sad that the citizens have chosen such a group and that it cannot be defeated politically, as its growing numbers and influence attest, but the answer is not to continue to come up with self-contradictory reasons about why it should continue to appear on the ballot. Along with an NPD ban, educational measures to combat violence are needed, and sharp awareness of Germany’s problem with xenophobia must be maintained. We needn’t watch it continue to masquerade as a political platform, however.

Heribert Rech quote from "Neuer Streit ueber NPD Verbot," http://www.juden.de/.
Top NPD rally image courtesy BBC. Other NPD images courtesy NPD Homepage.

2006-12-23T19:50:00.000Z

Us vs. Them

“East Berlin wishes you a good trip home! Christmas 2006.” What a nice sign to have hanging on lampposts and buildings all over trendy, fast-gentrifying Prenzlauer Berg! Except that the implication is that those who were not born in the neighborhood are not “real” residents, or not truly at home—distance markers below the slogan show mileage to western cities a ways from Berlin. The ubiquitous signs are anonymous, reports the Berliner Zeitung, although they have been linked to a store called Koof im Kiez, which translates clumsily as "Buy Locally."

Rivalry between older and newer residents is an unavoidable phenomenon of areas that grow stylish: as more people move in and new shops open their doors, demand increases, prices rise, and those who have lived there for a long time feel squeezed. They also don’t appreciate the physical changes they see in a neighborhood that they feel belongs more to them than to the newbies introducing these changes. This resentment is understandable; everyone likes home to feel like home and even the corner falafel stand in Prenzlauer Berg costs too much compared to a less trendy neighborhood like southwestern Kreuzberg (in photo above). The current mood is comparable to the controversy about the gentrification of Williamsburg in New York City.

However, this incarnation of the timeless new vs. old resentment is distinctly Berlin in its East vs. West framing. “Westerners are like this,” one long-time resident is quoted as saying, pushing his nose in the air with his finger. He is echoing sentiments that have been around since early 1990, when a t-shirt saying “I want my wall back” became popular throughout Berlin. As author Peter Schneider predicted quite presciently in 1982, “It will take us longer to tear down the wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see.”[1]

In the article, another resident accuses, “They all act so cool, as though they brought their smugness with them from the West.” Defensive words from a local--except that he just moved in four years ago and was born in western Hannover. In other words, it is easy to frame petty, common resentment (Us vs. Them, Old vs. New, me vs. the Other) in the rhetoric of East vs. West; it is almost expected, and it gives such assessments a wave of self-aware, self-justifying flavor. Have you ever met a middle-class sociology major who despises the “bourgeoisie?” Exactly.

In fact, “feeling the pain” or at least identifying with those who grew up in the former East has become a bit stylish itself with the recent rise of ostalgie, or nostalgia for things Eastern. It represents both backlash against reunification sweetened by time into romanticized memory, and also an attempt to re-color history along more pleasing lines. Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin (2003) is a fantastic example, wherein the pitfalls of life in East vs. West Germany are summarized as outdated, anachronistic-looking food packaging and less trendy clothing.

The Christmas signs aren’t just reactionary, however, they’re also inaccurate. Frequently “outsiders” appreciate a place better than those born there, for the tautological reason that they chose to come, indicating a certain esteem for the location. Like New York, Berlin is an immigrant city made up of people from other places who frequently don’t identify with their birthplace as much as with the cosmopolitan place they now call home. “Outsiders” who become "insiders" most often make a city better by directing their energies towards use, enhancement, and preservation of its good qualities.

Luckily, according to the article, the younger generation in diapers when the Wall “fell,” seems relatively free of resentment, geographic or otherwise. One can only hope they retain their open-minded outlook when, as middle-aged taxpayers, trendsetters from other cities move into their neighborhoods and start selling chic commodities. When grumbling about how their daily latte costs twice as much, one hopes they leave behind labels of “east” and “west,” which, as time passes, are becoming just—dare I say it?—trendier, smugger ways to express tribalism.

[1] Peter Schneider, The Wall Jumper: A Berlin Story, Trans. Leigh Hafrey, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 119.

2006-12-19T20:34:00.000Z

Poverty and Secret Police

The municipal bureaucracies of both Berlin and New York are receiving makeovers for the New Year. On Monday Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a new $150 million initiative to fight poverty that will focus two-thirds of its funds on brainstorming incentive-based programs to increase financial literacy, while cutting out programs over time that appear ineffective. With an assumption that built-in feedback-loops will allow for continual self-improvement, this entrepreneurial approach sounds like it has learned something from the Silicon Valley 80-20 mentality: throw a product out when it is 80% finished and work on the last 20% when the problems become apparent. (Witness eBay or Gmail.)

Of course, the question of whether success and failure are as easily and quickly measured in the social sector as they are in the economic sector might throw a wrench in the works, but on the other hand, it might not. Bloomberg is employing hard-core managers and capitalists to design this program and presumably they will bring their knowledge of how to measure success in diverse environments with them.

This kind of capitalistic improvisation would most likely never fly in well-planned and relatively big-government Germany, perhaps partially because the welfare system in place is less likely to let citizens fall through the cracks into abject poverty and give rise to its own need for creative solutions. Yet there are recent signs that the Berlin government is performing an official version of looking in the mirror and asking itself, “Do I look too fat?” Following a recent study that compared Berlin to other cities in Germany and found its bureaucracy comparatively bloated and unnecessary, there have been rumors that up to a third of public servants could fall under the knife. Mayor Klaus Wowereit has begun the hack job by eliminating, among other appointments, the storied position of Culture Senator and folding it into his own office.

To explain to those confused New Yorkers who know from Hilary what “carpet-bagging” means but don’t understand what a Culture Senator is: someone in this position is an official government cheerleader for the arts, a representative different artistic community members can approach as well as somehow who has a certain say in how funds are used. The Culture Senator also enjoys the privilege of attending the big art-world debuts, monument dedications, and so on, such that when Wowereit took over the post, one Berliner Zeitung columnist seriously lamented “Thomas Flierl [the previous senator] barely made it to all the museum openings; how will the Mayor ever find time?”

Perhaps more interesting than worries that a figurehead won’t be present to anoint cultural offerings with a sprinkle of civic approval are the new accusations against employees of the Stasi-Documentation-Office [Stasi-Unterlagenbehörde] that handles the mountains of paperwork left behind by the demise of the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. It has recently come to light that more than fifty employees of the Stasi Documentation Office [BStU for short] used to work for the Stasi itself, as a consequence of one official accusing them of hindering the work of the office. These workers, however, cannot legally be fired from a position for which they might be essentially inappropriate; they can only be shuffled around within the massive Stasi-paperwork-sorting bureaucracy, a bureaucracy with apparently very close ties to the past. For example, former GDR government employees heard to be making snide remarks about civil rights activists cannot be released, but must rather be assigned a different task. Here is a bureaucracy that sounds in desperate need of a trim.

Perhaps, though, in his dual role as Mayor and Culture Senator, Wowereit can take a stand against historical revisionism of the sort expressed by Almuth Nehring-Venus, member of the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) the successor party to the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) which ruled East Germany until 1990. Recently Nehring-Venus explained in a speech at an exhibition opening that, “Stalin admittedly wanted to model Germany after his own image..[but]…the Soviet Union long [strove for] a united Berlin and Germany.” This discussion caused political opponents to call for her resignation, which seems sensible, since she clearly needs time off to open a history book and read about the Soviet Berlin blockade and airlift as well as the Soviet-constructed Berlin Wall. (For more on historical revisionism see post Nov. 27).

Nehring-Venus gave this speech in her capacity as the City Representative for Culture, Economy and Urban Development of Pankow, one of Berlin’s districts. While one Stalin apologist doesn’t imply the whole lot of public servants are rotten, it does make one more sympathetic to the prospect that Berlin’s bureaucracy be trimmed a bit. That is, tax dollars are going to Nehring-Venus with trust that her perspective and capabilities bring added value to the city’s cultural landscape. That seems pretty dubious.

In conclusion, the two metropolises, one on the Hudson and one on the Spree, are now seeking decidedly different bureaucratic strategies. While in New York, Bloomberg has identified failures in the social system and responded by creating more municipal offices and jobs, in Berlin it may be high time for the opposite to be done: in response to failures of the social system, Wowereit has begun to identify where it is time to cut back and eliminate offices. He could go further, removing particularly those offices where individuals are paid to assess culture rather than exclusively perform objectively beneficial work.

Image of Bloomberg courtesy Office of the Mayor.

2006-12-17T21:09:00.000Z

Avant-Garde in the Vacant Lot

Since the federal government refused counted-on financial aid to broke Berlin (see post Nov. 6), the future of the Berliner Schloss stands in question. It may end up sharing the fate of the former GDR seat-of-government-come-public-entertainment-complex Palast der Republik being steadily ripped down to make way for it: nonexistence. (See posts Nov. 19 and Nov. 26.) Although Wilhelm von Boddien, head of the Schlossverein that promotes the rebuilding the former royal residence, suggests that individual donations can close the funding gap, this is incredible optimism. As a Tagesspiegel writer correctly observed this weekend, it is dubious if the Berliners, who don’t spend money on anything, (see post Nov. 6) will support the Schloss financially, especially since not all of them support its rebuilding.

Since the Schloss cannot be rebuilt without money, the debate has turned to what to do in the euphemistically-named “between-use” [zwischennutzung] period, the perhaps decades-long time frame in which the space will be a vacant lot. A recent suggestion is to build a large hall for contemporary art. This suggestion is justified by the fact that despite Berlin’s reputation as the international capital of contemporary art, residents like star Olafur Eliasson, whose 2003 installation "The Weather Project" for the Tate Modern propelled him to fame, have no proper space to exhibit their art. Although his studio is in his adopted second-home of Berlin, Danish-born Eliasson lately had to exhibit his larger-scale works in Wolfsburg.

Mayor Klaus Wowereit, who recently trimmed the city’s roster of public posts by anointing himself Culture Senator and kicking out the
incumbent, has announced his agreement: Berlin needs a major exhibition space for contemporary art. The Schlossplatz--whose name is quickly becoming ironic--is the perfect site. Accordingly, the press has bemoaned how a broke city whose recent political bickering has revolved around the extent to which its enormous bureaucracy should be cut down wants to spend more money to build a modern art hall.

Yet, why not build the hall with different terms of engagement? Why not sell the land on temporary lease to the highest bidder and allow them to build a lavishly trendy exhibition space and charge outlandishly high entry fees? The obvious roadblock is the local shallow-pocket mentality, but in a central spot, tourists would pay for such a spectacle. High-minded artists might boycott such a popular and gimmicky exhibition space, but perhaps not if this space gained international acclaim with a couple big names at the start and became an irresistible resume-booster. It could even broker a deal with the Schlossverein to turn over some of its earnings in exchange for access to the verein’s massive publicity machine and meddling political sway.

Finally, destroying central state architecture from multiple eras in order to build a temporary shrine to the very newest and freshest art conveys the amnesiac urge for self-invention which has been a hallmark of this city for so long—it’s traditional. Then, in another thirty years or so when the money to build the Schloss has finally been collected, everyone will have another opportunity to argue about the cultural blindness of ripping down the beloved Contemporary Art Hall, the symbol of turn-of-the-millenia aesthetic savvy, the product of the nascent Berlin Republic! There will be another public debate about historical irresponsibility, one more argument for old time’s sake. That would be true Berlin.

Wowi headshot courtesy of http://www.klaus-wowereit.de/

2006-12-12T19:19:00.000Z

The Muckraker in the Museum

“BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T LOOK GERMAN” large letters spell out across the front of a building a mere fifty meters from the Brandenburg Gate. Below the sign are placards listing the victims of right-extremist violence in Germany, mainly foreign-born immigrants who were killed because, well, they didn’t look German. Dressing up the façade of the prominent Academy of the Arts [Akademie der Künste] with documentation of provincial bigotry alongside a major tourist landmark is, however, relatively toothless for artist Hans Haacke, the man behind the sign. As “Hans Haacke for Real: Works 1959-2006,” the exhibit inside documents, Haacke’s work often bites the hand that commissions it, turning upon museums and galleries as participants in morally questionable societal practices, and exposing the skeletons in the closet of those places that invite him to create art for them.

For example, Haacke’s Manet-PROJEKT 74, created for the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum’s 1974 exhibition “PROJEKT 74,” chronicled the lives of the owners of the recently acquired Manet canvas Bunch of Asparagus. In so doing, it made public the Nazi-related past of Hermann J. Abs, the driving force behind the canvas’ acquisition. It called to attention the widespread practice of “sweeping under the rug” of National Socialist past that occurred in the Federal Republic of Germany, a point only doubly proven when the museum declined to exhibit it.

Haacke has also been censored when his works do not explicitly target the institution, such as in Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, which meticulously documents an implicitly immoral real estate practice through a series of photographs and charts. The “political” nature of the piece led to the Guggenheim’s refusal to include it in the show for which it was commissioned, creating one of the most famous cases of censorship of this century—at least until New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani tried to strip the Brooklyn Museum of Art of its funding in 1999 for showing a painting he thought was offensive.

Because They Didn’t Look German presents a point upon which educated viewers will doubtlessly agree, as well as exposing reprehensible behavior of a non-white-collar sort that museum owners, trustees, boards, and the like, are not involved in or linked to and can safely condemn. (It also camouflages a building whose appearance Haacke recently likened to a “bank from the Seventies.") However, Haacke’s work needn’t have an implied “up-yours” to challenge the viewer: in many cases, the plethora of information calls upon the onlooker to piece it together. An appreciative glance is not enough to "get" the work, which often seeks above all not to be aesthetically "appreciated" but rather and above all understood.

Thus, the way Haacke’s work defines itself as art leaves a question mark hanging in the air. Those pieces composed of informational plaques or graphs, like Shapolsky, could just as easily be found in a sociological museum or a town-hall citizens gathering or college history class; they become “art” through their location in a museum or gallery. They defy clichéd notions about viewer subjectivity, since statements like “art is what you get out of it” or “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” don’t apply to Haacke’s works. Rather, each has a fairly specific point which cancels out other messages; for Shapolsky, is it obviously not correct to conclude that Haacke is praising Shapolsky’s business acumen.

In fact, Haacke’s use of the phrase “Real Time System” is meant to indicate an art object that continues to function as depicted regardless of viewer perception or presence.[1] In Haacke’s early Conceptualist pieces, like 1965's Blue Sail, where a simple fan blows a blue sheet in the air, this functioning was mechanical. In later works like Shapolsky, it is sociopolitical. The choice to portray his message through the medium of art, then, when it is at times patently sociological and political, has been criticized by Slate editor Judith Shulevitz who encourages Haacke to stop “hiding out in an art museum” and join public discourse through the published journalistic word.

However, the author of “Museums and the Consciousness Industry” knows what he is doing: he picks museums as his medium because he believes they are participants in cultural discourse to an equal degree as newspapers (or online culture rags).[2] Two of these “generators of consciousness” are exhibiting “Hans Haacke for Real” right now: the Academy of Arts here in Berlin until January 14th, and the Deichtorhallen Hamburg until February 4th, with the former focusing on works where politics and history play a central role, the latter on earlier works as well as works which address economic roles of corporations and museum sponsorship.

The Berlin exhibit, filling the downstairs gallery space at the AdK, is curated with an emphasis on dialog between the works, chronologically mixing them in order to create cross-decade correspondences. For example, Manet-PROJEKT 74 is shown alongside Der Bevölkerung, Haacke’s 1999 installation in the Reichstag, presumably since both address Germany’s sometimes selective and reluctant memory of its past. In the latter case disputed memory can be seen more prominently in the response to the work than the work itself: the parliamentary debate about whether or not to install it is shown here on video. Such supplementary explanations throughout the exhibit form a necessary backdrop to understanding Haacke’s work the way he would like; as he states, “When a work of this nature is shown outside its original context, background information needs to be provided so that the viewers can understand the references and the impact it might have had.”[3] The only drawback is that explanations of the work’s cultural relevance are all in German and no supplementary English materials are available, an ironic shame given the imperative to read and understand embedded in Haacke’s ouvre.

The last gallery features Haacke’s latest works, placing pieces critical of American jingoism, flag-waving, and attitudes towards Iraq, alongside his suggestion for a memorial to 9/11 and a smaller commemorative piece, the aptly titled Commemorating 9/11. Responding to a call from arts support group Creative Time for poster suggestions in October 2001, Haacke’s entry is simply a white outline of the World Trade Center’s two towers’ silhouettes, which is posted on top of previously existing billboard paste-ups such that the advertisement composes the body of the towers while white defines the space around them.

The silhouette suggestion shows an almost insider’s sensitivity to what the loss means to New Yorkers once familiar with the sight of the World Trade Center. As seen in the annual re-creation of the buildings’ shape through the high-powered illumination of the Tribute in Light, the towers’ absence is a keenly visual loss to city inhabitants. The tragedy is not minimized but rather referenced with exquisite minimalism by these two projections of light into the sky. Haacke’s recreation of the silhouette even before the first showing of Tribute in Light—the visual memorial was first lit on March 11, 2002, six months after the attack—intuitively exhibits the same metonymy of visual loss for enormous societal loss, which makes sense since Haacke is a long-time resident of the city. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Creative Time is also behind Tribute in Light).

Unfortunately I didn’t notice that these images of billboards contained a World Trade Center outline and had to read the wall text to put it together, assuming instead it was a commentary on pervasive visual culture in public space. If a native New Yorker equipped with the awareness of cultural context that Haacke describes as equally necessary to his process as “bronze or paint on a canvas,” doesn’t make the connection, then perhaps the need for explanation has gone too far.[4]

The opposite problem was apparent with other new works, such as the enormous ripped American flag hanging from the ceiling, or the man wearing a flag-printed hangman’s hat-come-pillowcase that not only blocks his vision and obscures his individual identity but also threatens to smother him. Such simple social commentary seems a bit too obvious and uncomplex after the multivalent works in previous rooms.

Despite the weakness of the survey’s more recent offerings, it nonetheless presents a slice not just of the career of a thought-provoking artist but also snapshots of postwar Western society, through its descriptions of the work’s censorship or resultant political hullabaloo. Haacke’s work itself tries to prod the viewer into doing more than just “visiting a gallery” and the curators here ensure that the visitor sees not just a survey of painting but also of social criticism of the last several decades. And this relevance has no expiration date—with increased restrictions in American civil liberties as well as the growing Neo-Nazi movement in Germany, to name a couple examples, Haacke’s earlier work remains biting and important.

Exhibition catalog: Flügge, Matthias, and Robert Fleck, editors, Hans Haacke for Real: Works 1959-2006 Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2006. (With contributions by Walter Grasskamp, Benjmain Buchloh, Rosalyn Deutsche.)

[1] Walter Grasskamp, Molly Nesbit, and John Bird, eds., Hans Haacke (New York: Phaidon, 2004), 41.
[2] First English publication: Ian North, ed. Art Museums and Big Business (Kingston: Art Museums Association of Australia, 1984), 33-40.
[3] Grasskamp., 12.
[4] Ibid., 12.

2006-12-06T21:53:00.000Z

The Arch of Compromise

Recently the courts ruled that the ceilings of the lower floors of the Hauptbahnhof, Berlin’s new central train station, must be rebuilt at a cost of 40 million Euros. The ruling came after architect Meinhard von Gerkan sued Deutsche Bahn for altering his original plans for arched ceilings without the architect's consent, indeed, without even telling him. The flat ceilings that Hartmut Mehdorn, leader of the Bahn, chose to build in the face of rising costs represent violation of contract to von Gerkan and apparently also for the courts. Now the ceilings must be altered at a high price and lower transportation efficiency, just when the city was giddily excited about its finally-functioning train station.

The assertion of the architect’s rights before those of the paying client’s has been received as wondrous and revolutionary right of entitlement—an act that will single-handedly change the history of how structures are commissioned. But what is truly revolutionary is the aesthetic implication of the court’s decision: that the part is representative of the whole, a metonymy that mustn’t be violated for risk of injuring the entire the entire structure. In contrast to the back-and-forth history of much architecture, where parts are viewed as subject to change without damage to the work’s integrity, this act signifies a holistic understanding of architecture. Some might say that it’s about time; after all, if a Picasso canvas were partially painted over, it couldn’t be pawned off as original, yet buildings frequently receive face-lifts or alterations while retaining their creator’s name or representative associations.

However, compromise as a hallmark of the architectural process doesn’t necessarily breed disappointment. For example, the transparent cupola of the Reichstag, from which one can look down into the German parliament or out over the city, presents a pleasing space-as-democracy metaphor for representative government as well as visual charm. However, it is a product of negotiation; Santiago Calatrava, who was taking part in the rebuilding of the Reichstag complex, asked the government to ensure that the Reichstag be created with a cupola that he had been earlier informed would exist and according to which he had shaped his own designs. The government, in turn, requested that Lord Norman Foster round out his intended flat roof. The result has become a proud symbol of the Berlin Republic.

So is the decision “a good thing?” Legal precedent does not necessarily apply internationally so it is difficult to say if this decision will affect commissions outside of Germany, or even how far-reaching the local consequences will be. It may, however, scare clients into creating a new contractual culture whereby changes to the existing model are allowed only under clearly defined financial strain. But where does this leave client satisfaction, if changes may only be introduced under certain limited and constrained conditions? If Mehdorn and his company paid the artist for a service rendered, do they not have some say in how the “service,” in the case, an aesthetically pleasing yet functional and affordable train station, is enacted?

The keystone, then, to propping up the fluid process of building creation remains old-fashioned negotiation. In the matter of the Reichstag cupola Foster agreed to the government’s requests, but his contact also contains a clause outlining his right to review future suggested alterations to the Reichstag’s exterior (shown here) and interior. Mehdorn was wrong to hire another architectural firm to design flat roofs without von Gerkan's knowledge or assent; it would have been wiser to consult him and attempt communication. Now von Gerkan's resulting fury has found legal validation. He refuses to back down, pointing out that thousands of people would see the alterations to his design and associate the damaged, flat-roofed work with him. The secondary problem, then, after miscommuincation, is ego: what perhaps hasn't occured to von Gerkan is that these thousands of people will also be moving through an efficient new train station, grateful for the services it provides to the city. When the new arched roofs are installed, these people will be made to suffer delays and inconveniences, to say nothing of possible ticket price increases if the Bahn looks for ways to cover additional costs. What will these people think of von Gerkan then?

2006-12-01T22:36:00.000Z

Post-Modern Power or Merely Playtime?

Here in Berlin a competition is taking place. It is between neither football teams nor politicians nor beauty queens, but rather two Ferris wheels: the “World Wheel” and the “Giant Wheel.” Neither has been built yet, but in their planning stages both represent the city’s continual effort to transform into, and literally be able to see itself as, a first-class metropolis of recognizable stature. On the drawing board, the latter wheel is winning, sort of, with 5 meters of height on the merely 175 meter tall World Wheel, although the World Wheel is having an easier time collecting funds—200 million Euros--necessary to start construction. The competition also has a dicey tinge of East-West rivalry to it, with the World located near the famous Western transportation center Zoologischer Garten, and the Giant alongside the newly spruced-up Ostbahnhof, or “East-train-station.”

(Note: both Wheels bear names in the original English. Perhaps the world’s current-day lingua franca is employed to denote construction of international significance, or perhaps the owners simply know where the tourist dollars come from).

As with the London Eye, the premise behind these wheels is a popular and profitable tourist attraction that relies on the giddy pleasure of being high up in the sky and seeing all. And, as was the case in London in the pre-Eye era, there are sufficient extant look-out points in Berlin, for example, the cupola of the Reichstag or the cloud-grazing top of the Fernsehturm, or TV tower, unofficial icon of the city skyline. The added appeal of these wheels, then, is that their slightly peripheral location provides a view of all the viewing points, an ability to take in what you can’t take in if you are in the center of the city trying to take it all in.

But is that all? The paradox of a Ferris wheel is how sharply it exposes one’s atom-like existence compared to the spreading terrain out there while empowering the individual with an expansive gaze otherwise impossible to attain. The panoramic gaze has been a source of delight for centuries; in the United States nineteenth century landscape painters like German-born Albert Bierstadt showed their enormous canvases in conjunction with carefully constructed platforms, lighting, curtains, and curved walls so that the sweeping gaze would feel real, so that the view out over the landscape would be actual. These paintings were presented not as hermetic art but rather as entertainment; Bierstadt was no avant garde artiste but rather a showman.

In fact, George W. Ferris created his eponymous attraction for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair only twenty years after Bierstadt rose to the peak of his fame, at the close of the same era of wild geographic expansion and attempts at consolidation of the American identity. It was incredibly popular, grossing over half a million dollars at fifty cents per ride, and it rose about 80 meters, or 264 feet, off the ground. Its influence has been felt at fairgrounds ever since; the photos here depict an amusement Ferris Wheel from the current Christmas Market in Berlin’s Schlossplatz.

However, to paraphrase Stanley Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket, “this ain’t your granddaddy’s Ferris Wheel.” Unlike the amusement-park Wheel, which one rode as part of a larger fair experience of entertainment and oddities, and which positioned itself as part of a greater festival atmosphere, the new Wheel is proud of its stand-alone shock value and peddles itself as no more than the all-consuming gaze. These new Mega-Wheels are distinguished by this self-imposed uniqueness, evinced in their sheer enormousness as well as their physical distance. They are not for views of the terrain but rather out and over it; their marketing draw is the all-encompassing nature of their gaze which by definition stems from a point outside. If one is looking at something, one is not of it: the new wheels mark a boundary between onlooker and looked-upon, between individual and urban sphere.

This gaze is not just separate; it is also empowered by its mind-boggling breadth and reach. The equation of an all-seeing gaze with power has been discussed by thinkers like Jeremy Bentham, whose “Panopticon” prison tower posited a world where the threat of constant surveillance, rather than certain punishment, keeps people in line. (The Panopticon was popularized by French theorist Michel Foucault.) Art historian Allan Wallach has called the panoramic gaze in American landscape painting “Panoptic” to connote just these struggles to gain control over the landscape, to come to terms with new geography by forcing that geography to conform to the terms of one’s own vision.

So is this new Mega-Wheel proliferation a post-modern attempt to reconstitute the individual citizen as a powerful agent in the face of ever-larger and ever-more chaotic modern metropolises? Is it a way to make the nearly-atomized viewer, who increasingly counts for less in the over-populated globe, a judge on the perimeter of the brave new world? Perhaps a cultural attempt to figure out what to make of the sprawling society that we’ve created? A push to regain the upperhand over decadent millennial civilization through re-established visual supremacy?

Or is it just another way to make money and have fun?

SOURCES
If the link above becomes outdated, information about the two wheels can be found in Karin Schmidl, “Das Geld reicht sogar fuer sechs Raeder,” Berliner Zeitung, 30 November 2006, 27.
Wallach’s assertion is in: "Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke," in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 83-84.

2006-11-27T18:21:00.000Z

Irony and Zoo Animals

Today’s Berliner Zeitung reported that at the Sunday funeral of Stasi bigwig Markus Wolf, whose career focused on foreign espionage, one speaker praised the dead man for “always accepting a variety of outlooks [and] listening patiently to different opinions.” Hmm. For a former leader of the German Democratic Republic’s notoriously repressive Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, this is unlikely. Wolf’s long-time pal Gerhard Neiber, known for brutally taking care of “special assignments,” was also in attendance but didn’t bother to speak up about whether or not Wolf was the Voltaire this eulogy made him out to be.

There was also coverage of the office of the President's annoucement that former Bundespraesident Horst Koehler was spied on by the Stasi during his career. The representative insisted that it was a one-time incident on a trip Koehler made to the GDR, and insofar as spying practices of the day went, fully routine. The federal office that handles former Stasi files—literal tons of secret paperwork were discovered after Reunification—refuses to release the file because it contains private information about the then-employee of the Finance Ministry. The private information does not have to do with Koehler’s historical role, the office clarified.

Finally, the paper reported on a meeting in Parliament between “troubled youths,” i.e. the teenage and twenty-something children of immigrants in poor neighborhoods, and the mainly old white Germans who want to help them integrate. One youth pointed out that all this talk about not being part of German society is nonsense; if one goes to school and works hard, one becomes integrated. However, he asked whether his own culture can then remain a part of his identity as an “integrated” society member. This seems like a pretty good question in light of the fact that he was sitting next to Kurt Wansner, parliamentary representative for the conservative Christian Democratic Union, who once campaigned in a Turkish neighborhood under the slogan, “Germany must remain recognizable [here].”

Since recently coming under new ownership, the Berliner Zeitung has been criticized for weaker-quality reporting and increasing technical imprecision, such as growing numbers of typos. The recent surprising number of articles about the lives and migratory patterns of animals seems to be a symptom of the downward trend in quality, from a blurb about the new blue shoes of New Zealand zoo penguins to a long feature about stranded whales. Coverage of Wolf’s funeral lay below a feature about endangered Chinese dolphins. However, despite the perhaps negligent and fauna-friendly editorship, the Berliner Zeitung still makes a valuable contribution. Its transmission of the ironies of political chatter is worth flipping past the penguins for.

2006-11-26T22:14:00.000Z

Putting Beauty to Work

Although the Palast der Republik debate is frequently cloaked in East-West political language (see post Nov. 19), or arguments about the sanctity of memory and preservation, many view it purely as an aesthetic question. The obvious rejoinder here is that the aesthetic is political, and that beauty is not Platonic but rather selected and preened by society. These are good points, to which I respond to with a quote from a taxi driver, who told me last week, “The Palast needs to go. Ten years ago they could have still made something of it, but now it’s so decayed and ugly that they need to rip it down and build something nice.” In other words, the pragmatic notion of beauty-utility, of using central city space to be both functional and attractive, is democratic: the Palast and the Schloss are both considered pretty until they embody the image of urban decay. As well, although notions of beauty may be political—see, for example Susan Sontag’s breakdown of the fascist aesthetic Leni Riefenstahl developed for the Nazi party—the Prussia-worship of Schloss supporters is hardly imperious in nature.

Firstly, their whole-hearted embrace of the democracy of dollars demonstrates a certain crass commercialism from which one certainly cannot position oneself as superior. Foerderverein Berliner Schloss e.V.’s Infocenter a few hundred meters from Schlossplatz sells cringefully tacky mini-busts of Friedrich the Great as well as “historical novels” detailing the romantic intrigues of powder-haired Prussian dames. As well, the methods by which they fundraise—appealing to thousands of citizens to donate to the cause, or pointing out how much could be made if X number of people gave the equal sum of Y euros—are civic and equalizing in their language, even if their publications are aimed at the upper crust, judging from their placement in high-brow hotels. Leader Wilhelm von Boddien is also eager to project a man-of-the-people persona when he predicts that a “People’s Party” will take place upon the Schloss’ reconstruction, adopting the same comrade-brother-tinged vocabulary of the structure he is eagerly ripping down. The final nail in the aesthetics-is-politics coffin is the suggested use of the newly rebuilt royal Schloss: “A Sanctuary for Art, Science and Communication.” This plan suggests that geographically peripheral museums move their collections to this prominent location and together with the offerings of nearby Museum Island for “The World in the Center of Berlin.”

Some may argue that this attempt to bring Berlin to cultural prominence has its own echoes of the Kaiser-era quest for greatness. However, the modern-day project of capital cities to ever-expand their cultural offerings is not comparable to an earlier era’s territorial ambitions. Although the lens of Germany’s history may make almost any ambition sound a bit ominous, there is nothing wrong with Berlin aspiring to be an important place on the scale of international cultural awareness. The plan for the Schloss’ use sounds pretty neat to a Berlin resident who would love to have all these museums in one place. Humboldt University, (pictured at top) located across the street and with 32,000 students, would also doubtlessly benefit from a construction of such proportions. It is easy to mock the Schloss-supporters as foolish Utopists trying to reconstruct a lost past, but much harder to disparage the space they hope to build, a place of culture and art that has very little to do with the spot’s autocratic legacy.

2006-11-26T12:27:00.000Z

Cubism, Kafka and the Castle
Prague’s New Museum Scene

Who knew that Prague, tourist trap of central Europe, would continue to build its infrastructure and develop several new concept museums in the last few years? When I visited in summer 2003, packed between hordes of other Americans and several thousands Italians swarming over the Charles Bridge and trying to have an “authentic” pivo [beer] break on the Old Town Square, I had no idea that the innate charm of the old and picturesque was about to be updated. On this last visit, I was pleasantly surprised.

Down the street from the Powder Tower entrance to Old Town is the Museum of Czech Cubism at the so-named House of the Black Madonna, where the Lady stands in a small golden cage protruding from the third floor. This is a Cubist building; after taking college seminars about Cubism’s keywords of Picasso, Braque, Krauss, semiotics, and African masks, I still didn’t know there was a such thing as Cubist architecture. There is—it was enthusiastically developed by the Czech Cubist school into a theory of dynamism of form that was brought not just to the canvas but also to the drawing board and even the workshop; furniture and applied design are also on display in this museum, which opened in late 2003. As a bonus, the fantastic Grand Café Orient on the second floor of the House of the Black Madonna is furnished from curtains to floorboards with visually indulgent Czech Cubist flourishes. From their extensive menu I recommend trying the local Frankovka wine, a mild, fruity red.

Across the Charles Bridge is the newly opened exhibit The City of K: Franz Kafka and Pragu e, which only arrived in the eponymous city in 2005 after touring other world cities such as Barcelona and New York first. Rather than present a series of mummified artifacts in chronological order, the typical approach of museums dedicated to a single great figure’s life, the space seeks to conjure up the “existential topography” of Kafka—that is, the bundle of childhood and adolescent anxieties that brewed within him during his residence in Prague and led him to create masterpiece literature. This is created by the manipulation of film, projection, photography, and strangely-shaped rooms, as well as a soundtrack of Poe-like Romantic “horror” noises such as water dripping in an echo chamber and crows cawing. “Let this space talk. Let the sound guide you,” the exhibit introduction explains. While the curator’s insistence upon drumming up a sense of Freudian childhood anxieties may grate in these forced instances, the exhibit is by and large fascinating and the psychological template it provides for approaching Kafka’s life is as interesting as the almost-pretentious premise promises. Minor inaccuracies, such as a mistranslation of the word shiksa into fiancée, or wrongly cited pages from his German diary, cannot hide the curator’s obvious sympathy for Kafka’s internal mental struggle and the masterpieces it produced, or outshine the superbly-worded wall text explaining different aspects of his development.

Finally, rag-tag Prague Castle up above the city has its own new museum. “Castle” misleadingly suggests one structure, whereas the complex actually contains structures developed and enlarged over the last thousand years, from Romanesque St. George’s Chapel to the Renaissance Royal Rooms to the only-recently-completed Gothic cathedral. In fact, although the Cathedral dominates the maze of courtyards both in size and number of tourists, it actually plays a relatively unimportant role in the history of the site. With such confusing topography, “The Story of Prague Castle” exhibit, opened in the Old Royal Palace Building late 2003, is long overdue. The well-designed series of halls explains the different eras and rulers the space has seen while providing diagrams detailing its physical development. It also provides plenty of objects from different eras to help visitors imagine the changes, before they go on and try to decide which combination entry tickets to purchase for the warren of chapels, residences, and other attractions. That the municipal cultural authorities have become rather trigger-happy with their ticketing for the complex is yet another reason to visit the Story of Prague Castle museum and find out what exactly one is paying for at each doorway.

Images courtesy: http://malone.ba.ttu.edu/personal_pics.htm, www.prague-info.cz

2006-11-23T16:29:00.000Z

Memorial Snippets

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in the middle of Berlin, has been generating debate since it was suggested in 1990. Questions such as whether such a huge memorial was necessary or desirable, futile or useful, kitschy or earnest, came up immediately, and the specific Memorial that's taken shape after a design by Peter Eisenman also throws up huge question marks. PBS has a great website that introduces the important issues at stake.

Today I participated in a long and interesting discussion about the Memorial with a room of twenty-something students in the Cultural Science [Kulturwissenschaft] department of the Humboldt University and their comments make an interesting confetti of assertions. The motivating query was whether the monument is actually "disturbing," given its location in the heart of Berlin's touristic sight-seeing network:

"It doesn't stand out from the city or disrupt the center in any way [despite what may have been intended]. It fits perfectly. You visit Berlin, you visit the Reichstag, you walk for a minute and visit the Memorial and experience a little remembrance. The children play, the parents picnic. Yep, perfect addition to the city center."

"That may be problematic, but it's not totally wrong. The Memorial fits into the city in a certain way that the event fits into German history."

"Eisenman wanted this openness anyway."

"It's not a memorial for the Jews but rather for the Germans. It's from Germans, for Germans."

"I think it's effective. You go in the middle and the traffic noise fades and you're down in the middle of these tall stele and you have a space to think a little. In this sense, the earlier design, with taller blocks and greater enclosure, would have been even more effective."

"It's about getting the most Germans possible to reflect. That's why it's in the center, and it's good that way."

"I don't know whether or not you can control how it affects people. It's a total issue of personal taste."

"Let's remember this is a Mahnmal, not a Denkmal. It's goal is to mahnen, to honor the victims, not necessarily to make you think, to make you denken."

"As a non-German, it's not really my monument. Of course when I have visitors we go however."

"Well you know there's the question of authenticity; it's just there in the middle of the city. No one would picnic at Auschwitz."

"Thirty seconds of engaging oneself in the theme is better than no time. At least you have a starting point then."

2006-11-21T00:04:00.000Z

Right vs. Privilege: Two Definitions of "Preservation"

In the debate about the demolition of Berlin’s Palace of the Republic (see post Nov. 19), many have argued that as a historically significant building, the structure belongs under Denkmalschutz, or, roughly, “landmark preservation,” and to tear it down is a blatant violation of this legal condition. To argue for the inherent worth of a structure based on its historical baggage is an interesting concept and it got me thinking about how architecture is or is not preserved at home in New York.

To begin with, the concept of Denkmalschutz in Germany is far more wide-ranging than the American idea of “landmark preservation.” While the former is an umbrella term for the refusal to let old things be destroyed, the latter refers to the careful judgment and selection of what is worthy of preservation. Things like crumbling factories or deteriorating public works are frequently scrapped in America rather than renovated; in Germany such structures fall mainly under Denkmalschutz.

Both systems have their quirks and fallbacks. The reuse of old structures creates interesting spaces such as Berlin’s Kulturbrauerei, or “culture brewery ,” a cultural complex containing clubs, restaurants, theaters, and other performance spaces in a former beer brewery. The large brick structure, with its turrets and vast interior courtyard, reminds one a bit of a castle and a bit of a labyrinth and is a cultural symbol for the trendy neighborhood, Prenzlauer Berg, in which it sits.

On the other hand, I was surprised during a visit to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp in the northern suburbs of Berlin, to see a lot of construction taking place alongside the camp walls. I asked if private houses were being built and an employee answered that the building were merely being sanitized and renovated; as former Gestapo lodging and administration they belonged to the complex and stood under Denkmalschutz, so they had never been ripped down. I asked what they were going to be used for after renovation. The answer? Training grounds for the modern-day police academy.
At right: image of a memorial in Sachsenhausen.

Despite such astoundingly ironic blunders—all with good intentions—the German system’s emphasis on valuing physical history, even when not gorgeous or profitable, is commendable. In New York the drawbacks of the “landmark preservation” approach are constantly apparent as historic structures are torn down despite Herculean efforts from concerned citizens. The Colonial Club, formerly on the southwest corner of 72nd street and Broadway, was a visual ballast to the neighborhood for a century, but did not pass muster with the Landmark Preservation Commission, which requires that buildings “have a special character or special historical or aesthetic interest or value as part of the development, heritage or cultural characteristics of the city, nation or state.” Despite its slightly lofty name, the Club was in principle a social club only notable because it admitted women in a time when few others did (albeit through a separate entrance). It closed soon after its 1892 opening due to financial collapse and many of its pretty architectonic elements, such as limestone floors or an iron balcony, were removed during its transformation into office space.

Two separate evaluations from the Landmarks Preservation Commission found that the building wasn’t worthy to carry the name “Landmark” and it is now shrouded in scaffolding, awaiting transformation into something sleeker and more modern. A neighborhood group that “fights” for landmarks didn’t mount a campaign to save the Colonial because even though “there’s no reason it shouldn’t be a landmark…in the scheme of things, a lot of buildings deserve to be landmarks,” and the group had to prioritize. An example of this prioritizing is the1964 Palazzo-cum-Woolworth building by Edward Durell Stone at 2 Columbus Circle. Battled over for years by those who wanted to preserve the architecturally significant structure as an example of Modernism, the building’s fate was sealed by a recent city permit allowing for the dismantling of the façade. Despite the desperate lobbying of groups including the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the World Monuments Fund, which placed it on the “100 Most Endangered Sites for 2006,” the Landmarks Commission never held a hearing that may have led to the building’s preservation. Like the Colonial Club, it is now behind a tomb of scaffolding, a new building to house the Museum of Arts and Design set to emerge in 2007. As a New Yorker, I am sad to see Stone’s work go, not because I am a particularly qualified judge of historical value, but rather because I grew up with it and like the way it looked. It stamped the image of Columbus Circle with a neat, weird little flare, and would have been an especially nice counterpoint to the sleek, dominant minimalism of the new Time Warner Center.

To summarize, in Germany one can almost take for granted that an old and even faintly interesting building will be legally protected from demolition; in the United States buildings must be deemed good enough to deserve protection, a judgment so difficult to obtain that frequently citizens band together to combat economic or social forces and lobby for the preservation of their neighborhoods. The American cultural attitude behind this is that new things are occasionally more valuable than older things, and that physical history is open to alteration with minimal loss. As 2 Columbus Circle and the Palace of the Republic show, it is not always that simple. As the Colonial Club shows, sometimes it is.

Sources
Dunlap, David W. “The Colonial Club: A Landmark in All but Name.” The New York Times, 9 November 2006, Metro.
Wikipedia’s site about 2 Columbus Circle provides a good overview of its history.

2006-11-20T12:53:00.000Z

An Inconvenient but Pretty Truth

Here is a view of Tiergarten, Berlin's largest park, from last week. It's still green and idyllic despite the coming winter, perhaps because meteorologists are reporting this as the warmest fall ever recorded for Berlin. In the last couple days gardeners reported that annual flowers were blooming in their backyard, thinking it was spring.

Tiergarten is part of a collection of parks that make up 1/3 of the city. This photo was taken right below the Strasse des 17. Junis, a wide avenue made famous this summer when the city gamely hosted up to 700,000 screaming football maniacs on the "Fan Mile" during the World Cup.

2006-11-19T23:56:00.000Z

Doubting Thomas vs. Hopeful Wilhelm

During Berlin’s January 2005 “Long Night of Museums,” when the eponymous institutions stayed open all night with concerts and special programs in the spirit of a culturally edifying pub crawl, the darkness near Museum Island was illuminated by an enormous neon DOUBT. Seven letters, each 6 meters high and together spanning 38 meters, spelled out the German word “ZWEIFEL,” or “doubt,” across the top of a run-down, squat building shaped like a roachtrap. This dark hulk was nearly drowned out by the light, but nonetheless there was no mistaking the Palace of the Republic [Palast der Republik], the former seat of East German government, a boxy structure condemned by the unified government to sit uninhabited for a decade after the discovery of asbestos within. Or so the West claimed—many former Easterners viewed this “discovery” as a political calculation and pointed out that plenty of buildings in West Berlin were also full of asbestos but running smoothly. This claim is the tip of an iceberg of political contention surrounding the structure, a great societal difference of opinion on how to treat the past. This post will be the first in a series outlining aspects of the debate.

PALAST DES ZWEIFELS [Palace of Doubt], a work of art by Norwegian Lars Ramberg, is a good place to begin. In the most immediate sense, the large “doubt” that stood atop the Palast from January-March 2005 represented the controversy surrounding the proper use for the spot of land, one which lacks a doubtlessly “correct” answer. The spot where the Palast stands, although not for much longer, was occupied for four hundred years by the Hohenzollern castle [Schloss], the seat of Berlin’s ruling power. Its last incarnation was a Baroque façade designed by Andreas Schluter in 1706. After World War Two, the government of the Soviet-controlled German Democratic Republic claimed that the building was too war-damaged to be worth salvaging, and despite outcry, began demolishing it in September 1950. From 1973-6, they built a gold-glass rectangle that housed the German Democratic Republic’s parliament, as well as cultural exhibitions, performance space, cafes and even an ice-skating rink for the citizens, and proclaimed it a “Palace of the Republic.” After re-unification came the discovery of asbestos and resultant closure, and several years after that, in 1993, the government decided to tear it down, generating immediate consternation from former east-Berliners for whom the space had enormous cultural and sentimental significance. The debate was not entirely split along geographic lines; there were also many Westerners who saw the destruction of such a historically significant structure as disrespectful to anyone who had lived through Berlin’s division.

The controversial tear-down decision wasn’t truly put into action until January 2005, when Senator Ingeborg Junge-Reyer, the leader of Berlin’s municipal governing body, announced that demolition of the large, boarded-up wreck would soon begin. In its place, the Baroque Schloss would later be rebuilt, to the delight of lobbyists who had long dreamed of restoring central Berlin’s Prussian elegance. With support from the Norwegian embassy and several other organizations, Ramberg’s artwork was erected above the ultimately condemned Palast on January 20th, 2005. Ramberg explained that his work should cause “doubt and reflection from local and official levels about the pursuit according to continually new perspectives of the lost, past Utopia.”[1] In other words, the latest Utopists should look at their Prussian aspirations with a critical, shall we say doubtful eye.

The work did not cause enough doubt. A year and a half later in fall 2006, the tear-down is in full swing and a patchwork of cloudy sky is visible between gaping holes in the Palast’s steel skeleton. The project has not and will not stop ruffling feathers; many insist on referring to the Schloss' rebuilding as a fool’s errand, an argument easy to support when the numbers are examined. The advocacy group currently fundraising for the Schloss’ reconstruction, Foerderverein Berliner Schloss e.V., hasn’t clarified where all the money will come from, other than to suggest, in full-color newsletters placed in the rooms of Berlin’s toniest hotels, that citizens “sponsor” different stages of the reconstruction. One can choose between supporting an individual architectonic element, such as a “colossal column capital” for 151,450 Euros, or be one of the “only” 200,000 citizens to pledge 400 Euros over the course of ten years to make the 80 Million Euros needed to complete the elegant façade. In addition to someone who plays hopefully with numbers all day, the group also has a tremendous sense of optimism. The willpower behind the project can be traced back to one powerful personality, Wilhelm von Boddien, head of the Schlossverein, seen at left in this picture.

In an interview with the Berliner Morgenpost during the 2005 wave of controversy after the final decision to rip the Palast down, von Boddien expressed nearly blind optimism. When asked how he planned to pay for the façade reconstruction, he responded by asserting that if merely a third of Berliners were willing to pay 50 euros each, there would be plenty of money for the project. He did not acknowledge that this may have been asking a lot from a city with almost 20% unemployment. He also didn’t do the math very well; 50 million is not 80, but no matter. Von Boddien also brushed aside concerns of Eastern resentment, enthusing, “I’m telling you, it’ll go like the Frauenkirche [the reconstructed church in Dresden.] When the building begins, it will bring the opposition together.” He predicted that the reconstructed palace would be ready to open in October 2015, the 25th anniversary of German reunification, and could be celebrated with a week-long “Volkfest” or “people’s party.”[2]

Ramberg’s “doubt,” then, is both prescient and innaccurate. Von Boddien’s expectation that hundreds of thousands of individual citizens will elect to pay for the rebuilding, a hope he actually seems to believe, is dubious at best, especially for a society whose structure is not the American system of private wealth donated to public causes, but rather complete federal fiscal responsibility in the realm of culture and the arts. The Schloss falls under this cultural rubric not least because plans for it include gallery and exhibition space. Yet if von Boddien’s assumptions appear as all else but dubious or misguided to him and his supporters: official Schlossverein material trumpets an exuberant, exclamation-marked mood of jubilation. There is no doubt in their minds: the Schloss will be rebuilt, and it will be better than ever!

[1] “Dieser Zweifel wiegt schwer – Zehn tonnen, um genau zu sein.” Von SOF 29/30 Jan 2005, p. 1.
[2] “Das Stadtschloss steht 2015,” moderated by Katrin Schoelkopf, Berliner Morgenpost, 1 Feb 2005, p. 16

Images courtesy of iphppb.com, Berliner Morgenpost and Foerderverein Berliner Schloss e.V.

2006-11-14T01:00:00.000Z

A(nother) Nation of Materialists

The United States is frequently attacked for being too materialistic, that is, valuing the acquisition of property too highly and missing the point that all that stuff is just…stuff. Living here in Germany has certainly confirmed that we are more willing to view life as a sequence of purchase opportunities. As a college graduation present, an American friend of mine received a new cell phone and new computer not because she needed either goody, but because her parents figured “why not?” It’s not bad logic since the new gadgets work well and make her happy, but yes, they were completely unnecessary.

In contrast, Germans hold on to their possessions, including technology, for longer. Many households have appliances in them that are “really old” by American standards, for example ancient TVs or radios, because they still somehow function and there is no apparent reason to replace them, no matter how outdated they may be (or look). In comparison, when I was growing up my parents would routinely throw out any appliance that couldn’t compete with the latest model—which, as it turns out, was most things. This is not a complaint or criticism; like most American kids, I took it for granted that getting new stuff all the time is a pretty neat lifestyle choice. In other words, I was raised as materialistically as the next.

However, materialism doesn’t always revolve around the constant and competitive consumerism the world associates with the US. Materialism can also be of a less physical type, what is called “intellectual materialism.” The kind of materialism is concerned with the accumulation of knowledge, or even spiritual experiences, in order to be better. This sort of drive to better oneself is discussed for example in Buddhism, which describes intellectual materialism in much the way as physical materialism: equally characterized by the feeling, “if I could just have something more I’d be whole; with that extra thing I don’t yet have, I’d be good.” For intellectual materialists, the pursuit to be worthy revolves around the baggage they carry in their head rather than the things in their living room.

Intellectual materialism is a characteristic of German society. Just as the attitudes of American materialism are clearly visible in advertisements that convince one s/he’ll be sexier (read: a more worthy human being) if s/he gets the new cell phone, Germany’s print media and advertising world hammer home the message that acquiring more knowledge makes one not just more knowledgeable, but better. Advertisements for encyclopedias abound here—no, really, they do---breathlessly describing the newer, better edition now available. They make encyclopedias look as exciting as sport cars.

Book reviews are also a huge feature of the newspaper media, more so than in the US to the extent they are not ghetto-ized in special sections but rather get front-page billing in culture sections or blurbs on the paper’s headline page. The language used in these reviews is meant to instill desire: if the reviewer liked the book, s/he will describe how its ideas will improve one’s awareness, expand one’s thought process, truly open one’s eyes like no other book until on this subject could have; in short, with this book, the reader will become better and closer to being a whole human being. The magazine and publishing house Der Spiegel’s advertising campaign says it all: “Readers know more.” These three words are appealing enough without explanation: to know more is to be better.

The picture painted is that the average member of society here ought to work on acquiring as many facts as possible in order for self-betterment, kind-of like how US society is frequently encouraged to acquire as many new shampoos/sweaters/cars/cell phones etc. to be cool, timely, smart, sexy, in short, worthy. The difference in German is that worthiness is measured differently: by the abstract yardstick of knowledge.

This is a pretty subtle attitude and one many would deny—ask an American if they think buying the new iPod makes them a better person and they’ll probably say “no.” Ask a German if reading an extra newspaper per day makes them a better person and they’ll also probably say “no;” however, if they say yes, it’s because intellectual materialism is so easier to defend. To a certain extent, its would-be defenders are right: it is generally better to know more than to know less. And the watered-down version of intellectual materialism is simply valuing a cosmopolitan worldview informed about politics and the ways of different countries. As the cliché runs, many Americans know very little about the rest of the world, and I’ve found this to be true, although I can’t produce any statistics that substantiate the overwhelming sense of ignorance one sometimes senses in the US. It would be nice if we emphasized understanding what’s going on in other parts of the world a bit more.

But let’s examine more deeply: is reading the latest published diary from the Nazi era going to teach the reader more tolerance, political awareness, world savvy, or any of the other things promised in the book reviews? Probably not. The root source of the values that Western liberal society holds dear—democracy, human rights—is the belief that everyone is equal, in other words, that there are fundamental similarities across humanity that make us all worthy, whether or not we have the latest sexy new encyclopedia or race car. The highest value of the Western world is a deep understanding of other people as just as worthy as oneself, and this is a concept both rational and emotional learned from family and environment. Each nation, regardless of how often they read a new encyclopedia or go shopping, has the opportunity to figure out how to transmit this message to the new generation. This value can’t be taught by buying a lot or reading a lot; it comes from a good upbringing in a healthy society. Meanwhile, after the most basic lessons are taught, the belief that knowing more equals being better is incorrect. (As is the American belief that buying stuff equals being better.)

We all have a lot more in common than we think—we all want to feel good about ourselves in whatever form of materialism our culture values. It bears mentioning that consumerism in the US is an offshoot of our Protestant work ethic: since works makes us good, when we spend the money we earned at that work, we see physical proof of our worthiness. And let’s not forget that the United States is a country founded on the idea of equality, which is why so many Europeans flocked to it rather than stay in oppressively hierarchical societies. Their descendants are now those ignorant fat people at the mall. So next time I hear the US casually dismissed as a nation of materialistic morons, I am going to suggest the speaker direct his/her energy towards seeing Americans as long-lost cousins: perhaps weird or annoying, but in every way as worthy.

2006-11-13T01:23:00.000Z

“One-Euro-Job” is a Misnomer

As a solution to the scourge of unemployment, the German government has recently created new “Work Opportunities,” also dubbed “One-Euro-Jobs,” or positions that force people who have been unemployed for years to re-enter the workforce. They work in a variety of mainly low-skill positions such as cleaning litter in parks for 20-30 hours per week, for a term of 6-9 months, and earn the piecemeal salary of 1 Euro and fifty cents per hour. The goal is to supplement their state-supplied welfare income and reintroduce them to the working world, thereby readying them for long-term employment both psychically and practically.

This new measure has been attacked as taking jobs from those who are actually qualified and replacing them with under-qualified workers, i.e. spreading unemployment rather than solving it, although there are no good numbers available to substantiate this criticism. There are also claims that the measure allows workers to be fired—only to be offered their previous job back at a new low price. Others say that the requirements within the policy are not always met, especially that which requires the work to supplement pre-existing workforce conditions. Instead, so-called “One-Euro-Jobbers” are used as place-fillers where full-time workers are needed, such as a care-taker in a welfare institution or nursing home. In other words, the measure is a way to supply cheap, necessary labor that the government otherwise can’t afford. All in all, public opinion seems fairly critical; the nickname itself shows a fixation with a seemingly insultingly low wage, a ridiculous phantom of income in expensive times.

To explain the climate in which this development is taking place, let’s look at the example of Harald Ziehm, who was profiled recently by Der Tagesspeigel (under a changed name.) He receives 350 Euros a month from the government, of which 305 goes for rent, and after he divides the rest for transportation costs and health insurance, he has about nine Euros/day leftover, the newspaper reports. He spends half of this on cigarettes, and another euro and change on a daily beer, an expenditure he defends by explaining “non-alcoholic beer is more expensive.” He has been unemployed for five years and believes he will never find another job.

This sad hopelessness is not uncommon, as seen in another recent article that chronicles a family where nearly every member unemployed; only one son works, as a cook at a welfare center. Meanwhile, the grandparents, jobless, sit at home and with their other children, who are also jobless, and watch TV. The grandfather also believes his three-year-old granddaughter will be unemployed: “She’ll turn out like us.”

Mr. Ziehm and the members of this family are far from alone: unemployment in Berlin is currently 17.5%, up to 30% in certain parts of former East Germany, and mainly less in western Germany, but still high relative to what American economists consider healthy. (The average 2005 unemployment in the United States was 5.1%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; typical consensus is that a figure between 3-5% is ideal.) Not everyone without a job is also left without hope for the future, and it may be that the hopeless make the best newspaper features, but the numbers must be great indeed.

To those who sit at home for years, living by self-made routines of taking walks, watching TV, and smoking cigarettes, the psychic value of actual work cannot be underestimated. Work creates a sense of productivity and accomplishment which leads to self-worth; this is why Americans, with their Protestant work ethic, are so incredibly addicted to it. More importantly, work forces an individual to become part of a greater societal whole, to "make a contribution;” Mr. Ziehm spends his days alone and has dropped out of public life altogether outside of his trips to the grocery store. After years without being in some sort of social structure or larger purpose, is it any wonder that he can’t imagine himself waking up and going to work?

The value of "One-Euro-Jobs," then, is more than the derogatory nickname lets on; a better title might be the less catchy "Social-Reintegration-Jobs" or "Self-Worth-and-Confidence-Jobs." The government is hoping that this psychic energy, coupled with newly-learned skills, is enough to make long-term employment. Despite the accusations that these cheap jobs are harming the labor market rather than helping it, the real effects of this policy will only be seen in time. It may prove positive for the millions who don’t believe they count anymore.

SOURCES
Criticism, for example:
Anne Allex, interviewed by Cornelia Jeske, “Die Arbeit muss tatsaechlich zusaetzlich sein,” Berliner Zeitung, 7 November 2006, p. 23).
Harald Ziehm:
Philipp Lichterbeck, “Unten Durch,” Der Taggespiegel, 10 September 2006, „Berlin ist Leben“ Sonderseiten, p. V).
The family:
Maxim Leo, “Das verflixte Leben,” Berliner Zeitung, 21 October 2006, Politik, p. 3)

2006-11-10T17:23:00.000Z

Let there be **Light**
The fall/winter sunlight in Berlin (when it rarely appears) is really a treat. Berlin is 1000 miles North of New York, i.e. so far north that the sun doesn't rise all the way in the sky, giving the light a permanent twilight feel and warm yellow color that paints objects with a golden glow. Also, because the sun laps around the sky rather than rise directly overhead, the light is always coming from a low angle, creating long shadows stretching out behind illuminated objects in that romantic, late-afternoon sort of way. OK, this little ode to winter sunlight is finished: here is a picture I took today at the Brandenburger Tor showing these effects.

(P.S. Two notes: Poking around in the ruins of Caesarea, an ancient Roman city on the Israeli coast, I stumbled on a particularly dark, empty tunnel with a small hole off-center in the ceiling. A plaque explained that this was a temple for a cult of sun-worshippers, and the hole was there to let in the light. So much religious architecture, such as cathedrals with their window-encircled apses, makes clever use of illumination, but I'd never seen a chamber so simply constructed for the regular worship of pure light.

Note two: Because it's so far north, the only thing that keeps Berlin warm is the Gulf Stream, which also keeps Scandinavia from turning into one big iceberg. But Berlin is on the eastern edge of the Gulf Stream, and it's striking how much colder it is only a couple hours away in Poland. I discovered this by surprise two winters ago and will never take the "warm" Berlin winter for granted again!)

2006-11-08T22:28:00.000Z

Du-Sie-du

The do-si-do is a square dance step but I am just as bad at square-dancing as I am at trying to figure out when it is appropriate to use the German formal address “Sie” and when an informal “du” will suffice. Usually “Sie” is used with people you don’t know well, unless you’re under 25 and so are they, or also with people to whom you want to show respect. (Wake up! I’m not finished with this entry yet!) However, when I addressed a total stranger the other day with “Sie,” he laughed at me and explained that “everyone is informal here.” OK.., so it was at a salsa club, and maybe the sweaty bodies twisting around each other should’ve tipped me off. On the other hand, I asked a German professor if I could address him informally, and although he teaches in English and assigns American-style spontaneous work to loosen the students up, and he looked at me with impatience: “That is not the German system.”

Yep, good friend of mine, who is admittedly a couple decades older, used formal “Sie” with me for over a year. And I tried to convince a taxi driver the other day that I really wouldn’t mind being informally addressed, but no dice: “Sie.” But here’s the kicker: I had an internship in the Berlin government, the Germanic bureaucratic system that inspired Kafka’s The Trial, and the entire office advised me the first day: “We’re informal here.” Looking back, they must’ve been liberal hippies in grey-pants-suit disguise.

At the internship, I also had to learn to write formally: “Very Honored Mr. Gutmann, Please let us know if you shall attend the luncheon on Tuesday. With sincere greetings, Government Office AT3.” Seeing my astonishment, a co-worker asked, “Well, how would you write a letter to the President in English?” She chuckled to herself, and guessed “Dear Mr. President?”
Um, yes.

Then again, I was at New York’s Natural History Museum with a German friend the other day and we were trying to get a picture in front of some very cool dinosaur bones. A patient security guard took four different photos for us. Afterwards, my friend whispered to me, “Should we give her a little tip?” I said no, thinking it would be rude. But I really couldn’t explain to her just why it would be rude; “We’d be implying that she didn’t do it to be nice, or that we were better in some way,” I said, but that didn’t really sound right. Especially since we tip for all kinds of things in the US, in a system so Byzantine that entire articles are written about what to tip your doorman, manicurist, babysitter, psychic hotline advisor, etc. during the holidays. And in fact, there are probably plenty of Americans who would’ve given her a tip—did I stiff this poor, hard-working woman? Maybe I’m the idiot in my own country as well.

The point here is fairly toothless: cultural relativism. It seems that manners have a hint of the arbitrary everywhere you go.

(By the way, if you choose to post in response to this entry, please address me as “Highly-esteemed Blogger Arden.” In Italics.)

2006-11-07T17:17:00.000Z

The Cultural Learnings of Sacha Baron Cohen

The first time I heard a German voice perfectly imitate Sacha Baron Cohen’s character Borat in exquisitely butchered Deutsch I was astounded. Later I realized that “unspecified Eastern European accent with bad grammar” isn’t particularly tough to emulate; my twin brother also does a bang-up job. The fact that Baron Cohen makes no pretensions to linguistic authenticity on TV or in his film, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for make Benefit Glorious Nation Kazakhstan, makes it even easier. For example, Borat’s frequently intoned “Dzienkuje” means “thank you” in Polish, not Kazakh, and “jagshamesh” appears to be an invention. In much of the film, Azamat, Borat’s producer, speaks to him in Russian, and Baron Cohen answers in Hebrew smothered with a Slavic accent, frequently uttering sentences that have nothing to do with the English subtitles. In the scene about Borat’s aspirations to marry Pamela, Baron Cohen discusses making omelets with her. (The official languages of Kazakhstan, by the way, are Kazakh and Russian.)

The only rule, then, is that Borat sound authentically dumb to Western viewers, who then delight in his cultural fumbling. This delight is big in Germany right now, where Borat: CLOAFMBGNK is generating equal buzz as in the US. Zitty, one of Berlin’s big biweekly cultural rags, pronounced the film “enormously fun” although best seen in the original broken English. (After having lived in Germany for a total of eight months I don’t know any “knock-knock”-style punchline-dependent jokes; the humor in the language seems to be much more subtle, buried in droll asides or sarcasm. So maybe the obviousness of mangling a language just doesn’t sound as funny in German. Zitty Review: http://kino.zitty.de/1065/kino-rezension.html)

There are nay-sayers, of course; one reviewer dubbed it “Bowling For Pamela” for its Bowling for Columbine-like (Michael Moore, 2002) combination of semi-manipulated documentary style and exposure of embarrassing aspects of American culture but denounced it as a disappointing grouping of stock clichés. (Review by Martin Schwickert for Der Tagesspiegel, http://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/archiv/01.11.2006/2868822.asp)

And let’s not forget the Kazakh response, which is to deny the film’s veracity and express a mixture of fury and dismay. The best part about this response, however, is the way in which it subtly confirms the Grand Canyon-sized gap in cultural understanding Baron Cohen addresses, and perhaps even some stereotypes. The Kazakh ambassador to the United States dismissed the series as something only funny to “Americans who like to sit and drink beer and watch TV.” Hey, he just left out the nuns and the AA members! A New York Post article from Nov. 6 features an interview with a recently arrived Kazakh twenty-something who said he found the film funny but didn’t understand all the homosexual jokes per se, explaining “A gay dude came to my town once and turned up two weeks later floating in a pond.” And please take note: the movie is banned in Kazakhstan and the Kazakh foreign minister, Kasymzhomart Tokayev, has not seen it, despite his public condemnations.

However, all this attention might be good for Kazakhstan; more people (at least stereotypically clueless Americans) have the country on their cultural radar, for the time being, and are interested in hearing what its representatives have to say. Kazakhstan should use this opportunity wisely rather than spend too much time focusing on the work of a satirist; after all, isn’t it obvious that while Borat is fictional, the prejudiced Americans in the film are real? Who is really getting made fun of here?

No, rather than get riled up, Kazakhstan has a chance to use world attention. Of course, as an ignorant American, I have no good suggestions; the Kazakh government ought to know best what’s worth bringing to the spotlight. Now, all this deep thinking about cultural mud-slinging hurt my brain. I need to go have a beer in front of the television.

2006-11-06T17:39:00.000Z

BUND TO BERLIN: DROP DEAD

Recently Berlin found out it wasn't getting the many millions of dollars of federal aid it had counted on to help bail it out of financial bankruptcy. There is ripple of resentment now in the city's papers which ranges from "how dare the other states not recognize our contributions to the nation" to "well then they'll just have to help out in other ways," the latter including suggestions to finally move the roughly 20% of government offices still in Bonn over to Berlin, as well as create special study fees for students who study in the capital but were not born there. Finance Senator Thilo Sarrazin is even claiming that historically Prussian cultural institutions such as the State Opera ought to receive federal funding rather than local since they were intially created by the state, not the city.

However, Berlin has a lot going for it in the wake of this disappointing news. Like the New York of 1975, whose rejected appeal for federal aid was immortalized by the New York Daily News headline "FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD," it has a charismatic leader. Klaus Wowereit is as beloved by the populace as was Ed Koch in his day and some even suggest he should use his popularity to one day run for Chancellor, despite his political reputation of a fear of taking strong positions. It was Wowereit who coined the widely-quoted slogan "Poor, but sexy" ("Arm, aber sexy") to describe Berlin's defiantly Bohemian appeal, which brings me to another advantage Berlin has for dealing with this blow: it is cool to be poor in Berlin.

In contrast to New York, where a recent cover article of the eponymous magazine blared "MONEY" in neon orange letters (Nov. 6, New York), displaying unashamed fascination with making and spending, Berlin has a certain poverty-pride. A recent article in the big daily Der Tagesspiegel lauded Berlin residents for knowing how to live well without shelling out as much money as those errant consumers in Munich do. "Whoever pays 100 Euros for sunglasses is considered cuckoo," explains the author proudly. This rejection of spending doesn't make Berlin particularly less shallow than more consumer societies, just shallow in a different way; here people criticize those who dress "too chic" rather than emulate them.

I encounter this disdain towards cash often as a student, where you're considered foolish if you spend more than the bare minimum on things. If I ask a buddy if they'd like to get a coffee, they will refuse to go to one of those chains with pretentious literary names like Balzac or Starbuck's and suggest we go to bakery to save a Euro. At the bakery we might stand by a plastic table instead of sitting in plush earthtone armchairs and there will be no pleasingly ignorable pop music whining in the background, but the strong coffee we drink out of small plastic cups will be much better because we have not senselessly wasted our money. The pride people get from their spendthrift attitude is worth more than the comfort and convenience money buys. This oughtta serve the city well as the feds tighten their belt.
(Note: Some genuinely can't afford the extra 50 cents, and I apologize for the misrepresentation of lumping them into this category of proud cheapness.)

Welcome to the Blog

2006-11-06T02:46:00.000Z

Hi Everyone! Thanks for checking out this new little blog. I'll start by explaining my title, which is actually more wishful thinking than a grand reflection of my cosmopolitan life in quaint old Europe. I haven't found any good bagels in Berlin, just circular bread. And the romantic notion of dining riverside in a charming capital is way too quaint for this city, which the last century has stamped with an array of ugliness.

But I really liked the idea of eating bagels by the Spree and notions of how the city could be are a pleasing complement to how it is. This kind of dreaming is popular among Berlin residents, at least the ones who are not born in the city but rather end up here, including thinkers like Moses Mendelssohn, Rosa Luxembourg and Christopher Isherwood, as well as every expatriate who laments how the supermarket closes at 20:00 sharp.
(Isherwood's writings inspired Cabaret; while some might argue that he didn't want to change Berlin but rather gloried in its decadent excess, I would say that his vision of the bed-hopping and boozing included a sense of hope that things could somehow stay this way; they couldn't, and therein lies the dreaming.)

And now for the second part of the title: "A New Yorker in Berlin." This is very different from "An American in Germany" principally because there are many Americans who would argue that New York doesn't represent the rest of America--and many New Yorkers who would heartily second this claim--and many Germans who would similarly reject Berlin. Like New York, it is full of foreigners and weirdos, ultraliberal, noisy and messy and unappealing to the uninitiated. The northeastern city's residents are reputed to be ruder and wittier than those from southern or simply more rural zones. It is also a cultural center, a scene of artistic production, and a place where you can party all night. So for the rest of the year I'll be posting thoughts from this spiritually similar city--hope you enjoy.