Basically a travel piece
January 2000
Radio Free Mike
Berlin Rubble
or, adventures in reading a new city
UILDINGS UNDER construction," Frank Gehry has said, hoping to explain some of his designs, "look nicer than buildings finished." This might be true of Berlin as a whole. The ordinary-seeming façade of Gehry's building at 3 Pariser Platz -- erected for DG Bank on the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate, more or less in the former path of the Wall -- hides a magnificently impractical, and unfinished, sculpture-showroom of warped girders and curving glass. The room is walled in calm and rational Oregon pine, but a mound of glass breaks the ground-floor surface and swells up to the mouth of a monster that resembles an aborted section of Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. This is the conference room. A footpath wanders across the glass into the room's main entrance, and when it's finished -- when the warped girders are clad in steel -- attending a meeting there will be like walking into the maw of a humpbacked whale.
Nikolas Weinstein, a glass sculptor in San Francisco who designed a chandelier for the bank, privately wonders if the bankers have really gotten Gehry's symbolism. "I've never had a conversation with him about it," he says, "and I don't know what he thinks, but when you see it sitting there, and you're right next to the Brandenburg Gate and all that kind of stuff -- and you walk down the street and there's still bullet holes riddling the walls of the buildings -- you can't help but sort of associate it somehow with some kind of historical specter." Weinstein's chandelier will hang in thirty-six sandblasted panels under the swell of glass, for the benefit of people in a basement cafeteria hall. It should look something like enormous flakes of plankton going into the whale's baleen. He and Gehry have deliberately played with heavy and light: The glass swells defy gravity; the plankton flakes will seem lacily white; but the Moloch at the heart of the hall is cold and gravid and dark. When I visited Weinstein's studio, in San Francisco, workers were sorting more than two thousand glass tubes, which still had to be melted, formed into chandelier-panels, blasted, and shipped. A special kiln was built for this project: Weinstein's sculpture has no precedent in the world. Blowout parties planned for the bank in early 2000 had him under a heavy deadline, and in mid-October he was visibly anxious, sweating. ~ MY WIFE AND I FLEW to Germany in late September. We went, partly, with the very specific idea of seeing the building at 3 Pariser Platz. There had been so much talk in San Francisco about the chandelier that we decided to see this bank for ourselves. It was also a good excuse to see how Berlin was doing. I first saw the city two weeks after the wall fell, in 1989; a few months later I watched a crane lift away the guardhouse at Checkpoint Charlie. Now, only ten years later, not an inch of the Wall stands in its historical place -- not even as a memorial. Real estate's too expensive. Most of it has been crushed for gravel in Pankow. Our host, Dieter, grew up in Berlin but lives in Hamburg. He lent us his small office-apartment near Spreebogen Center, with a view across the green river to the gleaming twin towers of that horseshoe-formed building. Dieter is a quiet, cultivated man -- a translator of Nabakov -- with a self-evident love for his city and an abiding curiosity about its future. He picked us up at the airport and gave us a tour. This involved, mainly, sitting in traffic. The city was a chaos of building sites, detours, rubble, and dust. "As you can see, the best way to get around Berlin," said Dieter, while we idled near the DG Bank, "is on foot." Right now it's chic to wonder where the new Berlin hides its soul. The novelist Bernhard Schlink has said the city "lacks a physical or psychological center," and if you look for a single center, which Berlin has never possessed, he's obviously right. But just after World War II Stephen Spender described the city's perennial schizophrenia as a split between "two West Ends, the pompously Prussian Unter den Linden and the meretriciously dazzling Kurfürstendamm. These two entirely different conceptions of what a West End should be -- whether a pretentious essay in studied Greek classicism or a Whore of Babylon -- lie as it were in different bedrooms, like two mistresses of the Berlin soul." But a single dichotomy is now about as crude a description of Berlin as a single concrete wall. At the very least, there are three dichotomies, manifested almost everywhere. One is still Spender's -- the rich neighborhoods mix Prussian pomposity with an almost Parisian will to seduce, mostly among the tree-guarded townhouses off Kurfürstendamm. Another dichotomy is obviously Hitler's -- reminders of Nazism vs. traces of a (reviving) Jewish culture. And the third is a contrast so widespread in the city that it really isn't funny anymore, between capitalism's triumph and the remnants of a vanishing East. Down the street from the Berliner Ensemble, and the statue of Brecht, a new bar called the Broker's Bier Börse offers drinks at "market" prices. The place is halogen-lit, with a large atmospheric silk-screened photo of brokers at the stock exchange; three monitors show the going prices of beer and wine. It's a gag: Buy a drink, the price goes up. When it's really crowded it's also really expensive. Sometimes the market crashes, and the bartender rings an enormous bell. Then drinks go for cheap. A capitalist gag. But the warnings running along the base of each screen -- "Achtung! Der Börsencrash kommt!" or "Careful! The market crash is coming!" -- have a Marxist tinge. The orange-windowed, formerly state-run Palasthotel at Alexanderplatz, where Stasi agents used to spy on Western guests, is now a Radisson, with a TGI Friday's on the ground floor. Bright new S-Bahn trains, with first-class sections in every car, pull through gloomy wooden eastern stops. The silver-orange globe of the TV tower is alluded to (from the proper angle) by the Reichstag's new glass dome. The dome itself has uncertain historical echoes, which posters wheatpasted across the city won't let Berliners forget. These posters show a picture of Albert Speer's Germania. The Nazi architect's vision for Berlin included that massive mother-breast of a dome on an auditorium which would have taken up all of Pariser Platz, dwarfing both the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. The posters compare Hitler's megalomania to the current fervor over a new Berlin. Like most Hitler-comparisons, this one is way out of proportion, but it's not completely churlish. Speer's model is famous: Why would Germans put anything resembling it on top of a government building? Dieter bristled at comparison. "Should the fact that Speer fantasized about giant buildings with cupolas prevent Germany from building something with a cupola," he said, "or require it to take all cupolas off buildings? Speer used doors and windows. Should Germany have renounced those, too?" The Nazis, after all, burned the Reichstag. The building started with a (square, Italian-Renaissance) cupola, and it dates from the 1890s, long before Speer. It stands for parliamentary democracy, not absolutism, and the glass of the new dome, designed by Englishman Norman Forster to let light into the plenary hall, is also a very deliberate citywide symbol of democratic clarity. Instead of imposing stone walls, the new Berlin will be a city of open, crystalline façades. Oh yeah, the glass. Someone should measure the vertical miles of glass used to build the new Berlin. When my wife saw all the glass in Gehry's bank, she said the sheer act of cleaning it should keep unemployment down in Berlin. That's true. The new city will have so much glass that most of the overalled construction workers could stay on in the city as windowcleaners. The Reichstag Dome is glass. Marlene-Dietrich Platz is mostly glass. The Sony Complex at Potsdamer Platz will be a bluish Emerald City. The effect of these crystal palaces is no less imposing or cold than Prussian monuments of stone: Berlin's pomposity, in this sense, is winning out. The new city is awesome but unseductive, still unsure enough of itself to maintain a chilly will to impress, even if what we're supposed to be impressed by is lighter, more democratic than the incarnations we've known for most of the twentieth century. The old urge to convince the world that Germany deserves a place in the sun hasn't gone away; and Marlene Dietrich wouldn't be caught dead near her own Platz. ~ "I THINK FOR MOST adult Berliners of the time," Dieter went on, still thinking about Speer, "Germania was just a crazy idea somebody had at the most inappropriate moment, when there were air raids by day and by night, when nobody was sure he or she would last another twelve hours, when the neighborhood was burning, when we children were rummaging in the rubble to find a few pieces of wood to burn in the stoves... And then 'Germania' with its cupolas, but what was more, with solid walls of bricks and mortar! A majority of Germans had voted the Nazis into power, to be sure, and even by 1942 there were still quite a few Nazis left; in our street we knew one who was a Nazi, in whose presence no remark that could be construed as defeatist should ever be made during the endless hours spent in the crowded air raid shelters. But please remember this was a dictatorship, and a most ferocious one, in a moment of impending doom, with people hanging from the street lanterns for trivial reasons, and that the majority of the people, especially Berliners who are sarcastic by nature, were not crazy and knew how to take the megalomaniac fantasies the leadership kept spouting, and that this was the worst possible moment to think of grandeur. 'Germania,' my foot!"
Berlin wants to outlive these associations. The city now shows solidarity with its Jews by stationing green-uniformed cops outside synagogues, graveyards, Jewish museums, community centers. The cops are necessary as well as symbolic -- "It's the vandal skinhead problen," says Dieter -- but Germany also ranks third as a destination (after Israel and the U.S.) for Jews fleeing anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union. In this sense, the tectonics of history haven't changed. A hundred years ago pogroms and revolutions were driving Jews west, to Berlin. And now this capital city on the Brandenburg plain -- burgeoning, booming, half-built, huge -- looks attractive again, compared to places east. The Moloch sculpture in the Gehry bank sits on such prime real estate that working near it will naturally be a source of pride. Chancellor Schröder and a host of dignitaries plan to rub shoulders at a party there later in 2000. I have no trouble believing that bankers and politicians will happily grasp any black meanings attached to the Gehry bank, because no powerful German at the moment is mad enough to deny the nation's past. On the conrary: The whole point of the new Berlin is to admit and transcend, to trumpet a new dawn. Which is exactly the reason to resist any facile symbolism. Because as soon as you find a meaning heavy enough to match (for example) the Moloch's shapeless avoirdupois, along come all the fatheads, full of flatulence, to embrace it with ruddy faces and pop the champagne. Weinstein told me, "Gehry's notorious for forcing himself to throw away ideas, even at the twelfth hour; and it takes a certain amount of courage to throw away something you've become attached to -- that process of continually forcing yourself to break down and discard your preconceptions ... you know, you do one thing, and then you destroy it, and gather together the parts that were good and try something totally new." In that spirit, I'll take back something I just wrote. Parts of the so-called new city do work a strange seduction. Whole eastern neighborhoods are still unimproved. Prenzlauer Berg at night has dark and silent streets walled in by vast, vaguely Victorian Mietskaserne; the buildings are graffiti-ridden at sidewalk level and lit in a brooding Communist orange. The people act more contemplative, less predictable. Dieter said Prenzl'berg is the city's next candidate for gentrification by yuppies -- the German capital's East Village -- but the neighborhood where we found a lone Internet café on a darkened street still had a satisfying edge of danger. The soul of Berlin, for now, may be lurking in these places, which still pass uninterpreted before the world.
Michael Scott Moore
|
|
Radio Free Mike Home |
|
