The Voids of Berlin

Read the city

As a literary critic I am attracted to the notion of the city as text, of reading a city as a conglomeration of signs. Mindful of Italo Calvino’s marvellously suggestive Invisible Cities, we know how real and imaginary spaces commingle in the mind to shape our notions of specific cities. No matter where we begin our discussion of the city of signs—whether with Victor Hugo’s reading of Paris in Notre-Dame de Paris as a book written in stone; with Alfred Döblin’s attempt in Berlin Alexanderplatz to create a montage of multiple city discourses jostling against each other like passersby on a crowded sidewalk; with Walter Benjamin’s notion of the flaneur who reads urban objects in commemorative meditation; with Robert Venturi’s upbeat emphasis on architecture as image, meaning, and communication; with Roland Barthes’s city semiotics of the Empire of Signs; with Thomas Pynchon’s TV-screen city; or with Jean Baudrillard’s aesthetic transfiguration of an immaterial New York—a few things should be remembered: The trope of the city as book or text has existed as long as we have had a modern city literature. There is nothing particularly novel or postmodern about it. On the other hand, one may want to ask why this notion of the city as sign and text reached such a critical mass in the architectural discourse of the 1970s and 1980s, arguably the peak of an architectural obsession with semiotics, rhetorics, and codings that underwrote much of the debate about architectural postmodernism. Whatever the explanation may be—and certainly there is no one simple answer to this question—it seems clear that today this interest in the city as sign, as text, is waning in much architectural discourse and practice, both of which have by and large turned against an earlier fascination with literary and linguistic models, no doubt at least partially as a result of the new image-graphing technologies offered by ever more powerful computers. The notion of the city as sign, however, is as pertinent as before, even though now perhaps more in a pictorial and image-related rather than a textual sense. But this shift from script to image comes with a significant reversal. Put bluntly: The discourse of the city as text in the 1970s was primarily a critical discourse involving architects, literary critics, theorists, and philosophers bent on exploring and creating the new vocabularies of urban space after modernism. The current discourse of the city as image is one of “city fathers,” developers, and politicians trying to increase revenue from mass tourism, conventions, and office or commercial rents. Central to this new kind of urban politics are aesthetic spaces for cultural consumption, megastores and blockbuster museal events, festivals, and spectacles of all kinds, all intended to lure the new species of city tourist, the urban vacationer or metropolitan marathoner who have replaced the older model of the leisurely flaneur. The flaneur, even though something of an outsider in his city, was always figured as a dweller rather than as a traveler on the move. But today it is the tourist rather than the flaneur to whom the new city culture wants to appeal, just as it fears the tourist’s unwanted double, the displaced migrant.

There is a clear downside to this notion of the city as sign and image in our global culture, nowhere as evident to me as in a recent front-page article in the New York Times in which the paper’s art critic celebrates the newly Disneyfied and theme-parked Times Square as the ultimate of a commercial billboard culture that has now, in this critic’s skewed view, become indistinguishable from real art¹. One can only hope that the transformation of Times Square from a haven for hustlers, prostitutes, and junkies into a pop art installation will not presage the wholesale transformation of Manhattan into a museum, a process already far advanced in some older European cities.

This brings me back to Berlin, a city justly famous for its glorious museum collections but, due mainly to its decenteredness and vast extension, much less liable to turn into an urban museum space such as the centers of Rome, Paris, and even London have become in recent decades.

Thus it is no great surprise that after an upsurge in the early 1990s, tourism to Berlin is significantly down. This slump may of course have something to do with the fact that Berlin is currently the most energized site for new urban construction anywhere in the Western world: enormously exciting for people interested in architecture and urban transformation, but for most others mainly an insufferable mess of dirt, noise, and traffic jams. Once all this construction is completed, the hope is that Berlin will take its rightful place as a European capital next to its more glamorous competitors. But will it? After all, Berlin is in significant ways different from other Western European capitals, in terms of its history as a capital and as an industrial center as well as in terms of its buildings. And the fact that the city is caught between the pressures of this new urban image-politics and the more general crisis of architectural developments in these last years of our century makes any such hope appear simply misplaced, if not deluded. Indeed, Berlin may be the place to study how this new emphasis on the city as cultural sign, combined with its role as capital and the pressures of large-scale developments, prevents creative alternatives and thus represents a false start into the twenty-first century. Berlin may be well on the way to squandering a unique chance.

The past city and the transformed city

There is perhaps no other major Western city that bears the marks of twentieth-century history as intensely and self-consciously as Berlin. This city-text has been written, erased, and rewritten throughout this violent century, and its legibility relies as much on visible markers of built space as on images and memories repressed and ruptured by traumatic events. Part palimpsest, part Wunderblock, Berlin now finds itself in a frenzy of future projections and, in line with the general memorial obsessions of the 1990s, in the midst of equally intense debates about how to negotiate its Nazi and communist pasts now that the safe dichotomies of the cold war have vanished. The city is obsessed with architectural and planning issues, a debate that functions like a prism illuminating the pitfalls of urban development at this turn of the century. All of this in the midst of a government- and corporation-run building boom of truly monumental proportions. The goal is nothing less than to create the capital of the twenty-first century, but this vision finds itself persistently haunted by the past.

Berlin-as-text remains first and foremost a historical text, marked as much, if not more, by absences as by the visible presence of its past, from prominent ruins such as the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche at the end of the famous Kurfürstendamm to World War II bullet and shrapnel marks on many of its buildings. It was in the months after the collapse of the East German state that our sensibility for the past of this city was perhaps most acute, a city that for so long had stood in the eye of the storm of politics in this century. Empire, war, and revolution; democracy, fascism, Stalinism, and the cold war all were played out here. Indelibly etched into our memory is the idea of Berlin as the capital site of a discontinuous, ruptured history, of the collapse of four successive German states; as the ground of literary expressionism and the revolt against the old order; as the epicenter of the vibrant cultural avant-gardism of Weimar and its elimination by Nazism; as the command center of world war and the Holocaust; and, finally, as the symbolic space of the East-West confrontation of the nuclear age, with American and Soviet tanks staring each other down at Checkpoint Charlie, which is now being turned into an American business center watched over, temporarily, by the towering photographic cut-out figure of Philip Johnson and a shrunk, gilded Statue of Liberty placed atop the former East German watchtower. (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2)

If at that confusing and exhilarating time after the fall of the wall Berlin seemed saturated with memories, the years since have also taught us multiple lessons about the politics of willful forgetting: the imposed and often petty renaming of streets in East Berlin, which were given back their presocialist, and often decidedly antisocialist, cast; the dismantling of monuments to socialism; the absurd debate about tearing down the GDR’s Palace of the Republic to make room for a rebuilding of the Hohenzollern palace; and so forth. This was not just tinkering with the communist city-text. It was a strategy of power and humiliation, a final burst of cold war ideology, pursued via a politics of signs, much of it wholly unnecessary and with a predictable political fallout in an East German population that felt increasingly deprived of its life history and of its memories of four decades of separate development. Even though not all of the plans to dismantle monuments and to rename streets came to fruition, the damage was done. GDR nostalgia and an upsurge of support for the revamped communist party, the Partei des demokratischen Sozialismus (PDS), were the inevitable political results, even among many in the younger generation who had been active in the opposition to the state in the 1980s.

Forgetting is equally privileged in an official ad campaign of 1996, literally written all over the city: “Berlin wird” (Berlin becomes). But “becomes what”? Instead of a proper predicate, we get a verbal void. Indeed, this phrasing may reflect wise precaution, for in the current chaos of public planning, backroom scheming, and contradictory politicking, with many architectural developments (Spreeinsel and Alexanderplatz among them) still hanging in the air, their feasibility and financing insecure, nobody seems to know exactly what Berlin will become. But the optimistic subtext of the ellipsis is quite clear and is radically opposed to Karl Scheffler’s 1910 lament that it is the tragic destiny of Berlin “forever to become and never to be.”² Too much of the current construction and planning actually lacks the very dynamism and energy of turn-of-the-century Berlin that Scheffler, ever the cultural pessimist, lamented. Since much of central Berlin in the mid-1990s is a gigantic construction site, a hole in the ground, a void, there are indeed ample reasons to emphasize the void rather than to celebrate Berlin’s current state of becoming.

In the presence of a void

The notion of Berlin as a void is more than a metaphor, and not just a transitory condition. It does carry historical connotations. As early as 1935 the marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, in his Erbschaft dieser Zeit, described life in Weimar Berlin as “functions in the void.”³ He then referred to the vacuum left by the collapse of a nineteenth-century bourgeois culture that had found its spatial expression in the heavy, ornamental, stone architecture of Berlin’s unique apartment buildings, the pejoratively named Mietkasernen (rent barracks) with their multiple wings in the back, the so-called Hinterhäuser, which enclosed inner courtyards accessible from the street only through tunnel-like archways. The post-World War I vacuum was filled by a functionalist and, to Bloch, insubstantial culture of distraction: Weimar modernism, the movie palaces, the six-day bicycle races, the new modernist architecture, the glitz and glamor of the so-called stabilization phase before the 1929 crash. Bloch’s phrasing “functions in the void” also articulated the insight that, in the age of monopoly capitalism, built city space could no longer command the representative functions of an earlier age. As Brecht put it in those same years, when he discussed the need for a new, postmimetic realism, reality itself had become functional, thus requiring entirely new modes of representation.⁴

A little over a decade later, it was left to fascism to transform Berlin into the literal void that was the landscape of ruins in 1945. Especially in the center of Berlin, British and American bombers had joined forces with Albert Speer’s wrecking crews who had intended to create a tabula rasa for Germania, the renamed capital of a victorious Reich. And the creation of voids did not stop then; it continued through the 1950s under the heading of Sanierung (urban renewal) when entire quarters of the old Berlin were razed to the ground to make room for the simplistic versions of modern architecture and planning characteristic of the times. The major construction project of the postwar period, the wall, needed another void, that of the no-man’s-land and the minefields that wound their way through the very center of the city and held its Western part in a tight embrace. Fig. 3 All of West Berlin itself always appeared as a void on East European maps: West Berlin of the cold war as the hole in the East European cheese. Just as weather maps on West German television for a long time represented the GDR as an absence, a blank space surrounding the Frontstadt Berlin, the capitalist cheese in the real existing void.

When the wall came down, Berlin added another chapter to its narrative of voids, a chapter that brought back shadows of the past and spooky revenants. For a couple of years, the very center of Berlin, the threshold between the Eastern and the Western parts of the city, was a seventeen-acre wasteland that extended from the Brandenburg Gate down to Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz, a wide stretch of dirt, grass, and remnants of pavement under a big sky that seemed even bigger given the absence of a high-rise skyline that is so characteristic of this city. Berliners called it affectionately their “wonderful city steppes,” their “prairie of history.”⁵ It was a haunting space, crisscrossed by a maze of footpaths leading nowhere. One slight elevation marked the remnants of the bunker of Hitler’s SS guard, which after being reopened when the wall came down was soon sealed shut again by the city authorities to avoid making it into a site of neo-Nazi pilgrimage. Walking across this space that had been a mined no-man’s-land framed by the wall and that now served occasionally as a staging site for rock concerts and other transitory cultural attractions, I could not help remembering that this tabula rasa had once been the site of Hitler’s Reichskanzlei and the space to be occupied by Speer’s megalomaniac north-south axis from the Great Hall in the north to Hitler’s triumphal arch in the south, all to be completed by 1950, the power center of the empire of a thousand years. Fig. 4

In the summer of 1991, when most of the wall had already been removed, auctioned off, or sold to tourists in bits and pieces, the area was studded with the wall’s steel rods left behind by the Mauerspechte, the wall chippers, and decorated with colorful triangular paper leaves that were blowing and rustling in the wind; they powerfully marked the void as second nature and as memorial. Fig. 5 The installation increased the uncanny feeling: a void saturated with invisible history, with memories of architecture both built and unbuilt. It gave rise to the desire to leave it as it was, the memorial as empty page right in the center of the reunified city, the center that was and always had been at the same time the threshold between the Eastern and Western parts of the city, the space that now, in yet another layer of signification, seemed to be called upon to represent the invisible wall in the head that still separated East and West Germans and that was anticipated by Peter Schneider long before the actual wall came down.⁶

Since then, the rebuilding of this empty center of Berlin has become a major focus of all discussions about the Berlin of tomorrow. With the new government quarter in the bend of the river Spree next to the Reichstag in the north and the corporate developments at Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz at the southern end of this space, Berlin will indeed gain a new center of corporate and governmental power. But how important should the city center be for the cities of the future? After all, the city as center and the centered city are themselves in question today. Bernard Tschumi puts it well when he asks, “How can architecture, whose historical role was to generate the appearance of stable images (monuments, order, etc.) deal with today’s culture of the disappearance of unstable images (twenty-four-image-per-second cinema, video and computer-generated images)?”⁷ For some net surfers and virtual-city flaneurs, the built city itself has become obsolete. Others, however, such as Saskia Sassen, the New York urbanist, or Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, the well-known Berlin architecture critic, have argued persuasively that it is precisely the growth of global telecommunications and the potential dispersal of population and resources that have created a new logic for concentration in what Sassen calls the global city.⁸ Indeed, the city as center is far from becoming obsolete. But, as center, the city is increasingly affected and structured by our culture of media images. In the move from the city as regional or national center of production to the city as international center of communications, media, and services, the very image of the city itself becomes central to its success in a globally competitive world. From New York’s new Times Square, with its culture industry giants Disney and Bertelsmann and its ecstasies of flashing commercial signage, to Berlin’s new Potsdamer Platz, with Sony, Mercedes, and Brown Boveri, visibility equals success. Fig. 6

Not surprisingly, then, the major concern in developing and rebuilding key sites in the heart of Berlin seems to be with image rather than use, attractiveness for tourists and official visitors rather than heterogeneous living space for Berlin’s inhabitants, erasure of memory rather than its imaginative preservation. The new architecture is to enhance the desired image of Berlin as capital and global metropolis of the twenty-first century; as a hub between Eastern and Western Europe; and as a center of corporate presence, however limited that presence may in the end turn out to be. But, ironically, the concern with Berlin’s image, foremost on the minds of politicians who desire nothing so much as to increase Berlin’s ability to attract corporations and tourists, clashes with what I would describe as the fear of an architecture of images.

Critical reconstruction

This tension has produced a very sharp debate in which the battlelines between the defenders of a national tradition and the advocates of a contemporary high-tech global architecture are firmly entrenched. The traditionalists champion a local and national concept of urban culture that they call “critical reconstruction.”⁹ Its representatives, such as Hans Stimmann, the city’s director of building from 1991 to 1996, and Vittorio Lampugnani, former director of Frankfurt’s Museum of Architecture, call for a new simplicity that seems to aim at a mix of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s classicism and Peter Behrens’s once-daring modernism, with Heinrich Tessenow as a moderate modernist thrown in to secure an anti-avant-gardist and anti-Weimar politics of traditionalism. Berlin must be Berlin, they say. Identity is at stake. But this desired identity is symptomatically dominated by pre-World War I architecture, the Mietkaserne and the notion of the once again popular traditional neighborhood, affectionately called the Kiez. In the late 1970s, the Kiez became associated with counterculture in run-down, close-to-the-wall quarters like Kreuzberg, where squatters occupied and restored decaying housing stock. In the 1980s it was embraced by the city’s mainstream preservation efforts. Now it dictates key parameters of the new architectural conservatism. Forgotten are the architectural and planning experiments of the 1920s, the great Berlin estates of Martin Wagner and Bruno Taut. Forgotten or, rather, repressed is the architecture of the Nazi period of which Berlin, after all, still harbors significant examples, from the Olympic Stadium to Goering’s aviation ministry near Leipziger Platz. Ignored and to be quickly forgotten is the architecture of the GDR, which many would just like to commit in its entirety to the wrecking ball—from the Stalinallee all the way to satellite housing projects like Marzahn or Hohenschönhausen. What we have instead is a strange mix of an originally leftist Kiez romanticism and a nineteenth-century vision of the neighborhood divided into small parcels, as if such structures could become prescriptive for the rebuilding of the city as a whole. But this is precisely what bureaucrats like Stimmann and theorists like Hoffmann-Axthelm have in mind with critical reconstruction. Prescriptions such as city block building, traditional window façades, a uniform height of twenty-two meters (the ritualistically invoked Traufhöhe), and building in stone are vociferously defended against all evidence that such traditionalism is wholly imaginary. Building in stone, indeed, at a time when the most stone you’d get is a thin stone veneer covering the concrete skeleton underneath.

There is not much of interest to say about the corporate side of the debate. There we have international high tech, façade ecstasy, a preference for mostly banal high-rises, and floods of computer generated imagery to convince us that we need to go with the future. But this dichotomy of stone age versus cyber age is misleading: the fight is over image and image alone on both sides of the issue. The new nationally coded simplicity is just as image-driven as the image ecstasies of the high-tech camp, except that it posits banal images of a national past against equally banal images of a global future. The real Berlin of today, its conflicts and aspirations, remains a void in a debate that lacks imagination and vision.

Take Stimmann and Lampugnani. Lampugnani disapproves of “easy pictures… superficial sensation… tormented lightness… wild growth… nosy new interpretation.”¹⁰ Stimman in turn protests that “learning from Las Vegas” is out of place in a central European city, a programmatic statement as much directed against postmodernism in architecture as it is quite blatantly anti-American in the tradition of conservative German Kulturkritik.¹¹ But this attack on a twenty-five-year-old founding text of postmodern architecture and its reputed image politics is strangely out of place and out of time. Las Vegas postmodernism has been defunct for some time, and nobody has ever suggested that Berlin should become a casino city. The hidden object of Stimmann’s moralizing protest is Weimar Berlin. For Berlin in the 1920s, we must remember, defined its modernity as quintessentially “American”—Berlin as a “Chicago on the Spree”— and as such different both from older European capitals and from the Berlin of the Wilhelmian Empire. The embrace of America was an embrace of pragmatic technological modernity, functionalism, mass culture, and democracy. America then offered images of the new, but memories of Weimar architecture—Erich Mendelsohn, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, Bruno Taut, Martin Wagner, Hannes Meyer, Mies van der Rohe—simply do not figure in the current debates about architecture in Berlin. In their antimodernism, the conservatives themselves have gone postmodern. Small wonder then that Stimmann’s preference for critical reconstruction is itself primarily concerned with image and advertising: the image of built space creating a sense of traditional identity for Berlin whose voids must be filled; and the more intangible, yet economically decisive, international image of the city in an age of global service economies, urban tourism, cultural competition, and new concentrations of wealth and power. But the desired image is decidedly pre-1914. The critical reconstructionists fantasize about a second Gründerzeit analogous to the founding years of the Second Reich after the Franco-Prussian war. Never mind that the gold rush of the first Gründerzeit quickly collapsed with the crash of 1873 and the beginning of a long depression.

The issue in central Berlin, to use Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour’s by now classic postmodern terms from Learning from Las Vegas in this very different context, is how best to decorate the corporate and governmental sheds to better attract international attention: not the city as multiply coded text to be filled with life by its dwellers and its readers but the city as image and design in the service of displaying power and profit. This underlying goal has paradigmatically come to fruition in a project on Leipziger Platz called Info Box, a huge red box on black stilts with window fronts several stories high and with an open-air roof terrace for panoramic viewing. Fig. 7 Info Box, attracting some five thousand visitors per day, was built in 1995 as a temporary installation to serve as a site from which to view the construction wasteland studded with building cranes that surround it. With its multimedia wall displays, sound rooms, and interactive computers, it serves as an exhibition and advertising site for the corporate developments by Mercedes, Sony, and the A+T Investment Group on Leipziger Platz and Potsdamer Platz. As a cyber flaneur in “Virtual Berlin 2002,” you can enjoy a fly-through through a computer simulation of the new Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz developments or arrive by rail at the future Lehrter Bahnhof. You can watch the construction site on a wraparound amphitheatrical screen inside, while listening to an animated, Disneyfied Berlin sparrow deliver the proud narrative in a typical, street-smart, slightly lower-class Berlin intonation. Or you can admire plaster casts of the major architects—the cult of the master builder is alive and well as simulacrum, all the more so as architects have become mere appendages in today’s world of urban development. More image box than info box, this space offers the ultimate paradigm of the many Schaustellen (viewing and spectacle sites) that the city mounted in the summer of 1996 at its major Baustellen (construction sites). Berlin as a whole advertised itself as Schaustelle with the slogan “Bühnen, Bauten, Boulevards” (stages, buildings, boulevards) and mounted a cultural program that included over two hundred guided tours of construction sites, and eight hundred hours of music, acrobatics, and pantomime on nine open-air stages throughout the summer. From void, then, to mise-en-scène and to image, images in the void: Berlin wird… Berlin becomes image.

Is it perverse to compare the gaze from the Info Box’s terrace onto the construction wasteland of Potsdamer Platz to that other gaze we all remember, the gaze from the primitive elevated wooden (later metal) platform erected near the wall west of Potsdamer Platz to allow Western visitors to take a long look eastward across the death strip, emblem of communist totalitarianism? It would only be perverse if one were to simply equate the two sites. And, yet, the memory of that other viewing platform will not go away as it shares with the Info Box a certain obnoxious triumphalism. The political triumphalism of the Free World during the cold war has now been replaced by the triumphalism of the free market in the age of corporate globalization.

Perhaps the box and the screen are our future. After all, the recently completed developments on Friedrichstraße, that major commercial artery crossing Unter den Linden, look frighteningly similar to their former computer simulations, with one major difference: what appeared airy, sometimes even elegant, and generously spacious in the simulations now looks oppressively monumental, massive, and forbidding, especially when experienced under the leaden Berlin skies in midwinter. Call it the revenge of the real. In addition, some of the new fancy malls on Friedrichstraße, meant to compete with the KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens) and the shopping area on and near the Kurfürstendamm, are already going belly-up, and though Berlin already has surplus office space for rental, more is being built every day. Thus my fear for the future of Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz is that just as the Info Box immobilizes the flaneur facing the screen, the tight corporate structures, despite gesturing toward public spaces and piazzas, will encage and confine their visitors rather than re-creating the open, mobile, and multiply coded urban culture that once characterized this pivotal traffic hub between the Eastern and Western parts of the city. There is good reason to doubt whether Helmut Jahn’s happy tent, which hovers above the central plaza of the Sony development, will make up for the loss of urban life that these developments will inevitably entail.

Libeskind’s voids

Looking at the forces and pressures that currently shape the new Berlin, one may well fear that the ensemble of architectural solutions proposed may represent the worst start into the twenty-first century one could imagine for this city. Many of the major construction projects, it seems, have been designed against the city rather than for it. Some of them look like corporate spaceships reminiscent of the conclusion of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The trouble is, they are here to stay. The void in the center of Berlin will have been filled. But memories of that haunting space from the months and years after the wall came down will linger. The one architect who understood the nature of this empty space in the center of Berlin was Daniel Libeskind, who in 1992 made the following proposal:

Rilke once said that everything is already there. We only must see it and protect it. We must develop a feel for places, streets, and houses that need our support. Take the open area at the Potsdamer Platz. I suggest a wilderness, one kilometer long, within which everything can stay as it is. The street simply ends in the bushes. Wonderful.

After all, this area is the result of today’s divine natural law: nobody wanted it, nobody planned it, and yet it is firmly implanted in all our minds. And there in our minds, this image of the Potsdamer Platz void will remain for decades. Something like that cannot be easily erased, even if the whole area is developed.¹²

Of course, what Libeskind describes tongue in cheek as “today’s divine natural law” is nothing but the pressure of history that created the void called Potsdamer Platz in the first place: the saturation bombings of 1944-45, which left little of the old Potsdamer Platz standing; the building of the wall in 1961, which required a further clearing of the area; the tearing down of the wall in 1989, which made this whole area between the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz into that prairie of history that Berliners quickly embraced. It was a void filled with history and memory, all of which will be erased (I’m less sanguine about the power of memory than Libeskind) by the new construction.

However, in light of Libeskind’s own architectural project, which is crucially an architecture of memory, even his suggestion to leave the void as it was in the early 1990s was not just romantic and impractical. For Libeskind gave architectural form to another void that haunts Berlin, the historical void left by the Nazi destruction of Berlin’s thriving Jewish life and culture. A discussion of Libeskind’s museum project, arguably the single most interesting building currently going up in Berlin, is appropriate here not only because it gives a different inflection to the notion of Berlin as void in relation to memory and history but more importantly because, however indirectly, it raises the issue of German national identity and the identity of Berlin. While all the other major building sites in Berlin today are inevitably haunted by the past, only Libeskind’s building attempts to articulate memory and our relationship to it in its very spatial organization.

In 1989, just a few months before the wall fell, Libeskind was the surprise winner of a competition to build the expansion of the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum, as it is awkwardly and yet appropriately called. Fig. 8 The Berlin Museum was founded in 1962 as a local history museum for the Western part of the divided city, clearly in reaction to the building of the wall, which had made the former local history museum, the Märkisches Museum, inaccessible. Since the late 1970s, the Berlin Museum has had a Jewish section, which documents the role of German Jewry in the history of Berlin (currently housed in the Martin-Gropius-Bau). With the new expansion, the museum was to consist of three parts: one displaying a general history of Berlin from 1870 to the present, one representing the history of Jews in Berlin, and an in-between space dedicated to the theme of Jews in society that would articulate the relations and crossovers between the other two components. Libeskind’s proposal was as architecturally daring as it was conceptually persuasive, and even though multiple resistances—political, aesthetic, and economic—had to be overcome, the museum is being built and is to be finished in the fall of 1997.

The expansion sits next to the old Berlin Museum, a baroque palace that used to house the Berlin Chamber Court before the space became a museum. The old and the new parts are apparently disconnected, and the only entrance to the expansion building is underground from the old building. Libeskind’s structure has often been described as a zigzag, as lightning, or, since it is to house a Jewish collection, as a fractured Star of David. He himself has called it “Between the Lines.” The ambiguity between an architecturally spatial and a literary meaning (one reads between the lines) is intended and indeed suggests the conceptual core of the project. The basic structure of the building is found in the relation between two lines, one straight but broken into pieces, divided into fragments, the other multiply bent, contorted, but potentially going on ad infinitum. Fig. 9 Architecturally the longitudinal axis translates into a thin slice of empty space that crosses the path of the zigzag structure at each intersection and that reaches from the bottom of the building to the top. It is sealed to the exhibition halls of the museum. Only at the underground entry into the expansion building can the visitor physically step into a section of this empty space. Elsewhere it cannot be entered, but it is accessible to view from the small bridges that cross it at every level of the building; it is a view into an abyss extending downward and upward at the same time. Libeskind calls it the void. Fig. 10 This fractured and multiply interrupted void functions as a spine for the building. It is both conceptual and literal. And, clearly, it signifies: As void it signifies absence, the absence of Berlin’s Jews, most of whom perished in the Holocaust.¹³ As fractured void it signifies history, a broken history without continuity—the history of Jews in Germany; of German Jews; and therefore also the history of Germany itself, which cannot be thought separate from Jewish history in Germany. Thus, in line with the original demand of the competition, the void provides that in-between space between Berlin’s history and Jewish history in Berlin, inseparable as they are, except that it does it in a form radically different from what was originally imagined by the competition. By leaving this in-between space void, the museum’s architecture forecloses the possibility of reharmonizing German-Jewish history along the discredited models of symbiosis or assimilation. But it also rejects the opposite view that sees the Holocaust as the inevitable telos of German history. Jewish life in Germany has been fundamentally altered by the Holocaust, but it has not stopped. The void thus becomes a space that nurtures memory and reflection for Jews and for Germans. Its very presence points to an absence that can never be overcome, a rupture that cannot be healed, and that certainly cannot be filled with museal stuff. Its fundamental epistemological negativity cannot be absorbed into the narratives that will be told by the objects and installations in the showrooms of the museum. The void will always be there in the minds of the spectators crossing the bridges that traverse it as they move through the exhibition space. The spectators themselves will move constantly between the lines. Organized around a void without images, Libeskind’s architecture has become script. His building itself writes the discontinuous narrative that is Berlin, inscribes it physically into the very movement of the museum visitor, and yet opens a space for remembrance to be articulated and read between the lines.

Of course, the voids I have been juxtaposing are of fundamentally different natures. One is an open urban space resulting from war, destruction, and a series of subsequent historical events; the other is an architectural space, consciously constructed and self-reflexive to the core.

Both spaces nurture memory, but whose memory? The very notion of the void will have different meanings for Jews than it will for Germans. There is a danger of romanticizing or naturalizing the empty center of Berlin just as Libeskind’s building may not ultimately avoid the reproach of architecturally aestheticizing or monumentalizing the void.¹⁴ But then the very articulation of this museal space demonstrates the architect’s awareness of the dangers of monumentality: huge as the expansion is, the spectator can never see or experience it as a whole. Both the void inside and the building as perceived from the outside elude the totalizing gaze upon which monumental effects are predicated. Spatial monumentality is undercut by the inevitably temporal apprehension of the building. This antimonumental monumentality, with which the museum memorializes both the Holocaust and Jewish life in Berlin, stands in sharp contrast to the unselfconscious monumentality of the official government-sponsored Holocaust Monument that is to be built at the northern end of the highly charged space between the Brandenburg Gate and Leipziger Platz.¹⁵ For those who for good reasons question the ability of traditional monuments to keep memory alive as public or collective memory, Libeskind’s expansion of the Berlin Museum may be a better memorial to German and Jewish history, the history of the living and of the dead, than any official funereal Holocaust monument could possibly be.¹⁶

As architecture, then, Libeskind’s museum is the only project in the current Berlin building boom that explicitly articulates issues of national and local history in ways pertinent to postunification Germany. In its spatial emphasis on the radical ruptures, discontinuities, and fractures of German and German-Jewish history, it stands in opposition to the critical reconstructionists’ attempts to create a seamless continuity with a pre-1914 national past that would erase memories of Weimar, Nazi, and GDR architecture in the process. As an architecture of memory, it also opposes the postnationalism of global corporate architecture à la Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz, an architecture of development that has neither memory nor sense of place. As an unintentional manifesto, the museum points to the conceptual emptiness that currently exists between a nostalgic pre-1914 understanding of the city and its post-2002 entropic corporate malling. The history of Berlin as void is not yet over, but then perhaps a city as vast and vibrant as Berlin will manage to incorporate its latest white elephants at Potsdamer Platz and Leipziger Platz into the larger urban fabric. If Paris is able to live with Sacré Coeur, who is to say that Berlin cannot stomach Sony Corp. Once the current image frenzy is over, the Info Box dismantled, and the critical reconstructionists forgotten, the notion of the capital as a montage of many historical forms and spaces may reassert itself, and the commitment to the necessarily palimpsestic texture of urban space may even lead to new, not yet imaginable forms of architecture.

Bibliography