Giacomo Bottà
Berlin as Urban Palimpsest
1.
Introduction: palimpsests, memory and the
specificities of Berlin
Palimpsest is a word of ancient Greek origin, which signifies « scraped / erased again »1. It is used to define ancient parchments, i.e. books written by hand on expensive materials of animal origin. In medieval times, although expensive and difficult to produce, parchments were the best material for storing knowledge. Monks, who copied scripts in abbeys, were often recycling old text reputed to be unimportant or immoral by scraping away the written ink layer and writing anew on the pages. Older texts were never fully erased and at least portions of them are still visible under the secondary texts. Experts are often torn between restoring one or the other of the two texts, if not trying to preserve both. It thus emerges that palimpsest is a product of two contrasting actions: the first consists in erasing, deleting, scraping, making a text invisible; while the second is to re-write, re-use, assert a new meaning; to make something else visible. These actions result in an intricate and multilayered artefact. This complexity becomes even more poignant if we translate it into an urban spatial metaphor. The palimpsest has been a crucible in cultural research about cities for a long time. Among the first to use the concept (but not the term) in relation to the city, we find Sigmund Freud; in Civilization and its Discontents2 he builds a parallel between the layering of memory in the human psyche and in urban archaeology3.
1
T. F. HOAD. « palimpsest. » The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. 1996 : « palimpsest †material prepared for writing on and wiping out XVII; parchment, etc., in which the original writing has been erased to make place for a second XIX. — L. palimpsestus — Gr. palímpsestos (as sb. -on), f. pálin again + psestós, pp. formation on psên rub smooth. »
2
Sigmund Freud, Das Umbehagen in der Kultur, Wien, Internationaler Psychoanalitischer Verlag, 1930.
3
In this chapter, I will utilize the palimpsest as spatial metaphor in a variety of historical contexts and in connection to a range of disciplines (for instance history, architecture, literature, urban studies and musicology). This is an attempt to gain an interdisciplinary understanding of it as a viable instrument for all research dealing with issues of space. The palimpsest is able to mediate the complex relation of time, space and memory, which so strongly influence Western societies4. All places have layers of history, some visible, some hidden, some partly erased, some still visible, some easy to find, some impossible to decipher. It is something to be discovered in each city around the world and which explain the enormous fascination that cities have for human beings.
Nonetheless, the idea of the palimpsest has been particularly productive in the case of Berlin. Within the « short century », the German capital has been the centre of six very different historical experiences. First as centre of the Prussian Reich, whose military power brought to the unification to Germany in 1871. After the WWI defeat, it became the capital of a fragile democracy, the Weimarer Republik, which led to Adolf Hitler taking the power and transforming the city, in his dreams, into Germania, a future megalopolis. The WWII defeat turned Berlin into a divided city of ruins, as well as a cold war hotspot. From 1961 to 1989, the city was cut in two. The eastern part was the political centre of a socialist-ruled German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik), the western part was a Land of the German Federal Republic (Bundesrepublik Deutschland), with special status. After the German reunification in 1990, Berlin, whole/entire again, was declared capital of the Federal Republic. These distant political, social, cultural, economic national projects left heritages, both real or imagined, still standing or removed, restored or hidden and haunt the city’s experience, determining its uncertain contemporary identity5.
Berlin in the 1990s became a symbol/compendium for the whole history of the XX Century and its contradictions. The German capital became a myth in its Barthesian sense of « double meaning ». Talking about Berlin
4
See: Andreas Huyssen, « Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia », in Public Culture, 12: 1, 2000 and Karl Schlögel, Leggere il tempo nello spazio. Saggi di storia e geopolitica[Im Raume lesen wir Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik, 2003], Milano, Bruno Mondadori, 2009, transl. by Lisa Scarpa and Roberta Gado Wiener.
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doesn’t mean only talking about the capital of the German Federal Republic, it means talking about a complex and multilayered cultural palimpsest. As Andreas Huyssen noted:
What is now emerging is the more intriguing notion of Berlin as palimpsest, a disparate city-text that is being rewritten while earlier texts are preserved, traces restored, erasures documented – all of this producing a complex web of historical markers that point to the continuing heterogeneous life of a vital city ambivalent about its built past and its urban future6.
This becomes clear if we refer to the Berlin Wall. It was built in 1961 as a defensive structure, an antifascist barrier created to defend German democratic socialism from German federal capitalism. However, it became a cage, a trap, and a symbol of oppression. The act of writing on it from its western side became a way to demonstrate against a regime, it was also part of a new street culture / subculture / popular culture. When it fell, it became a symbol of freedom and democracy. This is the reason why it is possible to find a portion of it in Strasbourg, where I am living, standing in front of the European Court of Human Rights. The portion of the Wall that ended up in Strasbourg (fig. 1) has been painted with graffiti; there are 3 layers of paint-art visible on it. The first layer is only partly visible and quite abstract. The second layer, the big silhouettes of a stylized head, is still today reproduced a bit everywhere in the city. The artist who first produced them is unknown and the big heads could be just a sign in Berlin’s collective visual language. The most recent graffiti is a sentence in French, written in white paint. It reads cryptically « le duo d’enfèr a encore frappé ». Below the layers, we see portions of the original greyish colour of the naked concrete. Graffiti are understood either as crime, art, or political action. In this specific case, they have a positive connotation; otherwise they would not stand where they are. They are supposed to communicate freedom and democracy. They make the examined portion of the wall definitely a signifier of some shared European values and therefore worth its location in front of the European Court of Human Rights. Nonetheless, it is easy to forget that the Wall was a barrier and a border and therefore an object with two sides. Examining the other side of the wall (fig. 2) feels like looking at the backside of a painting, it carries no meaning in itself. Its meaning is
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hidden, forgotten, not considered, erased, although this side of the wall mattered as well. It is the side people beheld, when trying to escape, the side the wall was built from, the side that was supposed to be invisible, untouchable and because of that, it was so materially visible. The other side, the painted one, although reachable, touchable, writable, stood as if it were not there. The wall had two sides not one. One is today invisible. Both are to be preserved as symbols of 40 years of divided history, 40 years of a divided cultural life, which echoes continuously in the contemporary city.
A palimpsest is never neutral: there are always hidden powers, ideologies, opposing narratives at stake, when something is erased to make space for something else or when something is made visible or invisible. It is very important to always determine the mechanisms that brought something to be hidden and something to be made visible, something to resurface from oblivion and something to be suddenly reputed as less important.
2.
Textscape: Palimpsest and Literature
One of the greatest expectations of the newly reunified Berlin of the 1990s was the rebirth of the German big city novel (Groβstadtroman). The literary genre was reputed the most appropriate media to make sense of the heroic historical happenings which should have brought Berlin back to its real or imagined past splendour.
Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) was able to capture the buzz of the 1920s Weimar republic capital, its contradictions and its sudden change into a modern city. Döblin achieved this through innovative literary techniques like montage, cut up, and experimentations with the language of other media (advertisement, radio, popular song, cinema). Something similar was expected in the 1990s from someone, from anyone. Günter Grass made a step forward but failed; Ein Weites Feld (1995) is remembered nowadays mostly because of a bizarre cover of the magazine Der Spiegel (34/1995), where the literary critic Reich-Ranicki is portrayed industriously tearing the book in two.
of a new economy and, within this process literature became less important than before. The literary works, set and written in Berlin in the 1990s, reveal the difficulties of relating oneself with the city, with its new mediated images and with its new postmodern myths. The palimpsests became a means to express these doubts, fears, and disillusionments, as evidenced lucidly in this passage from the novel Die Schattenboxerin, published by Inka Parei in 1999:
On certain days, I walk through the city where I was born like a stranger, for example lately, as I entered the Friedrichstrasse station. I am looking for an S-Bahn, which will take me to Bornholmer Strasse and I am unable, to read a sign or to find the exit, among the architectonical eviscerations and patches, spread out of two mutually excluding social systems. I am caught in a jungle of symbols and texts, whose meanings are too outdated or too pristine. They refer to parts of the buildings, that don’t exist anymore, like the Intershop sign, massive and thrown at the same time, or that are not yet available, like the sticker for the lift, which leads me to an open excavation, precariously delimited by the white and red striped ribbon of the construction sites. After a long wandering, I leave the place, tired of tiles, planking and escalators that don’t match with each other7.
This short quote reveals the double articulation of the palimpsest. First, as a literary document about Berlin, it portrays, reproduces, represents, mediates the city and therefore constitutes another layer in the literary palimpsest of the city. Walter Benjamin was the first intellectual aware of this textual operation. His Arcade Project (Passagenwerk, written between 1927 and 1940) shows that the city can be approached as a palimpsest of literary quotes to be collected in the library. The library
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with its rows of shelves, full of books to be examined, can act as if it were the city itself8.
Second, this quote is a representation of a classic architectonical Berlin palimpsest. The city that used to be two cities had to be surgically reunited. In the 1990s, communication, energy, waste, electricity and traffic lines, street signs, and icons had to be made conform again throughout the city. This urban face-lifting caused a sort of time/space annihilation, here beautifully described with the metaphor of a « jungle of symbols and texts, whose meanings are too outdated or too pristine ». While an outdated urban text was being erased and a pristine one was being written atop, both old and new meanings remained suspended, trapped behind appearing and disappearing signifiers. The resulting sense of estrangement in one’s own city, a feeling longed for by urban intellectuals from flâneurs to situationists, had bitter/negative undertones for the normal citizens. Writers in the 1990s used palimpsests as cultural signifiers of precarious urban existences more than as engines for formal literary experiments.
3.
Landscape: Palimpsest and Architecture
If literature presented palimpsests in a minimalistic way, architecture has become the language to deliberately erase, preserve, rewrite, communicate, transmit, hide, and restore memory in the name of the new city power structures. The interests were and remain high, very high, although reality has been grimmer than the political expectations were dreaming of. The city bankruptcy in 2007 was estimated at sixty million Euros. Nonetheless, as Goebel notes:
If German national identity after reunification is notoriously inseparable from intricate connections among the post-industrial economy, political power, and cultural memory, then the new Berlin's architecture of citation and allusive reconstruction can be an important hermeneutic vehicle for adding to our understanding of these issues. Perhaps, then, returning to the synchronicity of the (seemingly) nonsynchronous is the most appropriate mode of historical self-reflection in the new Berlin9.
8
See: Karl Schlögel, Leggere il tempo nello spazio. Saggi di storia e geopolitica (Im Raume lesen wir Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik), Milano, Bruno Mondadori, 2009, p. 55-63.
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In this article, Goebel describes Berlin’s architectural search for authenticity, as an elusive use of medial simulation and historical citations. These uses are recollected both in official institutional buildings (the Reichstag, the destruction of the Palast der Republik and the reconstruction of the Schloβ façade) and in commercial experiments (Postdamer Platz, Hotel Adlon and the Friedrichstadt-Passagen). Projects glorifying contemporary globalized economy, restorations of long forgotten but highly symbolical buildings, destruction or surgical removal of socialist icons went hand in hand creating an indecipherable palimpsest composed of a multitude of layers pointing at the city complex past, present and future.
For instance, the Potsdamer Platz presents a very fascinating example of an architectonical palimpsest. Its visit nowadays constitutes a non-experience: tourists mostly notice a simple mall in a semi North-American fashion, where it is possible to buy anything from a lava-lamp to an expensive high-tech music diffusion system. The big multinational concerns, which made the construction of the square possible, name the three high-rises, defining the skyline of the square, but are otherwise invisible, just like new capitalism is expected to be. Only by digging behind its postmodern surface, are we able discover the poignancy of
Potsi as an architectonical palimpsest. Potsdamer Platz was in fact the busiest node of Weimar Republic’s Berlin; different transportation systems (train, metro, tram, bus) crossed over on the square on in close proximity to it. Being one of the gates to access the centre of the city, it was loaded with hotels, bars, cabarets, cinemas and theatres. Electric light filled the square nightly with advertisements fuelling desire and slogans promising the extraordinary.
Under National Socialism the square lost much of its appeal. In fact, for the Nazi ideology, it represented the nest of all evils: Americanisation, Semitic degenerate culture, cosmopolitanism and urbanity in their most hysterical expressions. Its function, in the short-lived Nazi experience, was restricted to the functional purpose of central transportation junction and therefore it was heavily bombed. Throughout a good portion of second half of the XX century, due to its being in close proximity to the Wall, it became a wasteland, partially taken over by nature.
Elkins and Hofmeister (1988) describe the condition of the western part of the square in the 1980s, in these interesting terms:
spectacle. One block near the Potsdamer Platz is reserved for the training of guard dogs, another is the permanent headquarters of a circus, yet another muddy area is the scene of a regular Saturday market; to some extent this land on the approaches to the former Potsdam Station has remained unoccupied because, until recently, it has belonged to the Deutsche Reichsbahn, which is based in East Berlin10.
Nearly immediate is the connection with some scenes of Wings of Desire
(Der Himmel über Berlin, 1987) by Wim Wenders, who adopts the former square for some of the film’s most estranging sequences. Its eastern part was not different, although there were no traces of entrepreneurial spirit. As Sarah Kirsch (1982) puts it in one of her poem, the square could have been as well a Naturschutzgebiet (natural reserve area):
[…]
Metropolitan rabbits
hop to their delight on Potsdamer Platz Looking at this meadow
How can I believe what my grandfather recounted Here was the very centre of the world
when in his youth with his Adler he was driving a beautiful girl […]11
In 1990, after a few months during which it was used as a Mercedes dealership run by Polish immigrants, the square was sold to the three big concerns. They turned a laborious real-estate operation into a huge urban spectacle, which run for almost 10 years. The construction site was immediately labelled the biggest in Europe. Deep excavations and certain elements of the future skyline were kept illuminated, for the delight of the dancing crowd, exiting the surrounding illegal techno clubs in the early hours. The info-box, a red square shaped construction, inspired by the containers where the Turkish and Polish construction workers were living, gave out 3D reconstructions, large amounts of data and futuristic descriptions about the finished project. Again,
10
T. H. Elkins and B. Hofmeister, Berlin. The spatial structure of a divided city, London and New York, Methuen, 1988, p. 179–180.
11
Sarah Kirsch, « Naturschutzgebiet », in: Michael Speier (ed.), Berlin, mit deinen frechen Feuern: 100 Berlin-Gedichte, Frankfurt, Reclam, 1997, p. 36. Transl. by G. Bottà.
programmatic urban palimpsests abounded: a new cafe within the Sony Centre complex was named Josty, just like the legendary artists meeting place, standing on the square in the roaring 1920s. Portions of the Grand Hotel Esplanade (destroyed during WWII) are casted into the café (the former Frühstückssaal, Breakfast room) or were moved through a complex hydraulic system to a different location and put under glass (the
Kaisersaal, Emperor’s Hall)12.
Interestingly, in 1999 the newly reformed West-Berlin industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten, produced song called « Die Befindlichkeit des Landes » (on the album Silence is Sexy). In the song’s lyrics, they take a polemic stance towards « the new temples », nothing more than « material for the next layer » and refer to what the urban palimpsest is hiding: the « secret net of bunkers », where Adolf Hitler committed suicide, and which are still hidden in close proximity to the square.
4.
Soundscape: Palimpsest and Music
The applicability of the palimpsest metaphor to non-visual or non-textual artefacts has been deeply ignored by the cultural work on Berlin. Nonetheless, cities are also noisy, smelly13, rough and angular places. Urban soundscapes are deeply layered and connections between specific genres of music and certain places certainly influence our own memory of the latter. It is nearly impossible not to connect fado to Lisbon, tango to Buenos Aires or waltz to Vienna14. These particular genres are part of the sounding / written palimpsest of these cities together with the noises of trams, voices of people, church bells, muezzins, fire alarms etc. How then to identify then the sounds, which have been erased from a city? It is possible for instance to refer to the « voice ». The term has been widely used, in particular when referring to contemporary
12
Rolf J. Goebel, Berlin's Architectural Citations: Reconstruction, Simulation, and the Problem of Historical Authenticity, in: PMLA, 118: 5, Oct. 2003, p. 1276.
13
In this article I won’t refer to the chances of articulating a palimpsest of smells, although I find the idea particularly intriguing, especially in reference to its street food (Curry-Wurst, Döner Kebap, China-Pfanne, Vietnamese food…) or to obsolete forms of heating (coal in some not-yet renovated buildings of Prenzlauer Berg and
Friedrichshain). 14
multiculturalism in cities. The voices of certain ethnic groups seem to be stronger than others, to have a deeper impact in the representation of certain cities. A good portion of Berlin population has spoken Turkish for about sixty years, but rarely do we find this voice used in connection to the German capital. The already quoted band Einstürzende Neubauten (collapsing buildings) has been working consistently throughout their career with the construction of urban palimpsests of noise, since their first LP Kollaps (1980). If we consider the aural memory of Berlin, we cannot only refer to cabaret, the work of Kurt Weil or the contemporary emphasis on techno music. Explosions, destructions, eviscerations are rooted into the city aural memory as well. Einstürzende Neubauten make systematic use of these sounds by performing with construction work gear (such as pneumatic hammers and concrete mixers) along standard music instruments and voice. Lirically, references to urban noises are also abundant, such as in the case of « Steh’ auf Berlin » (from the album Kollaps, 1980):
Stand up/Lie down / Burnt earth / I stand on virii / I stand on chemistry / Stand up / Fall apart / Collapse / Explode in the air / War between cars / I stand on fire / I stand on smoke / I stand on noise / I stand on rocks / I won't pull you out / I stand on decay / I stand on disease / I stand on decline / I stand on end / I stand on closure / I stand on out / I stand on hell / I stand up / I stand on decline / I stand on end / on end / on end / on stop / I stand on intoxication / I stand on…15
These lyrics emphasize the connection to Berlin (starting from the title of the song) and contribute to anchoring and justifying certain sounds and their layering into the city. Their cultural operation consists in recuperating the forgotten, unheard, or removed sounds, which made Berlin what it is nowadays.
15
Einstürzende Neubauten « Steh’ Auf Berlin », Kollaps, 1980. Transl. by G. Bottà. The sentence « Ich steh’ auf » could mean both « I stand on » and « I like ». Original lyrics available at: www.neubauten.org/?q=kollaps (last accessed 16.12.2010:
5.
Timescape: Palimpsest and Tourism
Tourism changed enormously in the 1990s. Tourism researchers put their emphasis on the increased diversification of it and to the rising attention towards authenticity and sustainability. In addition, the individualized experience of a place is considered more than a mere visit.
Within this framework, a trip to Berlin is increasingly connected to the experience of a vibrant authentic place, where the layers of history should be looked for, discovered, recollected, or recognized. Part of the architectonical facelift that the city underwent, is connected to tourism and to the chances offered by this kind of city consumption.
Operations aimed at letting the tourists/citizens play with the city palimpsests are continuously being produced. An outstanding example within these strategies of playfulness is the timescope, a product developed by ART+COM in 2005. Timescope is a traditional heavy-duty telescope, coin-operated, as found in many cities around the world (for instance in Paris, on the Eiffel Tower), with an important twist. As stated on the website of the company:
The basic idea of the ‘timescope’ is a virtual journey in time via telescope. The device contains additional controls that enable viewers to view a place in the past or future time through its eyepiece. The ‘timescope’ can be used for a wide range of purposes: it can be set up for use with tourist sites such as the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate or the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church for example, giving visitors the chance to get a closer view of how these locations looked in the past. The ‘timescope’ can also be used for large-scale building projects. In such cases it can be used not only to show how a building project has progressed, but also to show how a building will look in the future. Additionally, it can be used at geological interesting sites, enabling viewers to perceive natural history visually. ‘timescope’ is a product
development of ART+COM16.
The timescope has to my knowledge not been adopted in Berlin; nonetheless it represents a significant example of how to implement the palimpsest in an innovative and market-oriented way. In its descriptions there are references to its possible use in the case of Berlin landmarks,
1616
From the « Detailed Project Description », available at:
but also in reference to construction sites and building projects (along sites of geological interests).
Similar experiments are available also in the increasing number of museums about the city, where different simulacra, reconstructions and simulations are used to convey to the visitor the idea of a journey through the site-overlapping memories of the city.
6.
Conclusions
In this chapter I abused the suffix –scape, which in English always refers to the spatial dimension of something. By describing text-, land-, sound-, and time-scapes I intended to reveal how palimpsests can be recollected in written texts, sounds, material expressions (buildings) and technological artefacts, just like in many other urban expressions.
The historian Karl Schlögel observes that in space we are able to read time17. This is what I tried to do when analysing the way different time layers ‘deposed’ themselves on certain specific spots of Berlin. Nonetheless, time doesn’t leave a neat stack of clearly sequenced layers; rather, it ‘flows’ and therefore also the opposite statement is true: in time we read and make sense of space. Looking at a city trough time and understanding the memory flow on some of its expressions enables us to fully comprehend the operations of erasing and re-writing, which define urban palimpsests.
Examining a palimpsest should always be an action which accounts for different streams moving through it in different directions, pointing artificially or naturally to diverse historical constellations.
The German capital offers its own past in an array of ways, rarely possible for other cities and is therefore a perfect instrument to confront oneself with the invisible city.
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