Berlin: City as Memory Landscape - Max Sternberg and Claudia Schrag

Berlin: City as Memory Landscape Max Sternberg and Claudia Schrag

Conflict in Cities: Europe and the Middle East

Berlin is a city where the extremes and tragedies of the 20th century were experienced at first hand. Past events continue to have a dramatic physical presence in the fabric of urban life today. The city functions as a symbol of World War II and the Cold War, as the prism of a torn nation, which has had the chance to reconstitute itself fundamentally in the past two decades. With the fall of Communism, ideological division ceased to dominate public life. The resulting void was partly filled by a quest for authenticity in commemorating and relating to German history, especially the heritage of WWII and the years of division. A vibrant public debate has featured fierce contests between competing narratives of recollection and underlying collective identities, central motifs including trauma, guilt, and loss.

The revived interest in questions of memory builds on earlier processes of memorialising especially in West Germany. The sculpture ‘Berlin’ (1987), symbolising the divided city, was erected only two years before the fall of the Wall, a testimony to how unexpectedly unification came. The Kaiser-Wilhelm memorial church (1959-63), manifests an older West German memory culture. It embodies the destruction of WWII, during which a large proportion of the city centre was obliterated.

In the early years of the reunited Berlin, the massive development project at Potsdamer Platz attempted to create an icon of a reborn capital.

Built on the cusp of the former buffer zone, Potsdamer Platz was an iconic statement that Germany had weathered the after-effects of the wars and was now ready to assume a leadership role at the heart of Europe.

In this narrative, Berlin was about to become a world capital, thriving economically and attracting new residents from all over the country, Europe, and the world.

Yet this narrative of the post-conflict capitalist city evaporated in the 1990s, with economic and demographic stagnation setting in. Unification had been negotiated and sealed at breakneck speed. Many East Germans increasingly felt alien in a country that appeared to have been taken over, rather than reunited on an equal footing. The East German traffic lights serve as an emblem of this process and the resistance it provoked. They were first replaced by ‘superior’ West German ones, but then re-installed in response to popular demands. Today they speak of ‘Ostalgia’, a certain nostalgia for what was good about the GDR.

After October 1989, when the Wall was first breached, most of its infrastructure was dismantled within months, first spontaneously by the people, then systematically by municipal authorities. With urban regeneration setting in, many started forgetting where precisely the Wall ran. Occasional lines of cobble stones, such as these near Brandenburg Gate, indicate its former course. Tourists, eager to see the iconic wall, were increasingly disappointed to find no traces of it.

In response to tourist demand as well as the generally felt need to represent the history of division, an official memorial to the Wall was established at Bernauer Strasse. A complete section of the barrier with its different tranches was reconstructed, showing the ‘death strip’ that cost about 180 East Germans their lives as they tried to cross it.

The reconstructed strip is contained by two tall delimitation walls with reflecting surfaces on their inside, which allude to the Wall’s previous extension. This juxtaposition of walls at the memorial has been criticised for confusing people about the actual course of the wall, and because they appear to dwarf the original structure. Not all Berliners see this officia l commemoration as meaningful; tourists seem to be the primary audience.

Another approach to integrating the physical legacy of the division can be seen in the ‘wall park’. Here the Wall’s buffer zone was particularly wide, and after the “Wende” (change) in 1989 Berliners almost immediately appropriated the area as a public open space. It has become a trendy hangout place favoured also for staging flea markets, public performances, music festivals, and political demonstrations. Again part of the Wall was reconstructed, and is used as a large canvas to practice graffiti.

One of the few places where stretches of the original Wall still stand is now the East Side Gallery.

In 1989/1990 German and international artists were invited to use this 1.3 kilometre strip of the Wall to respond to the historic moment.

The resulting band of graffiti was an ephemeral take on history’s dramatic unfolding in the moment.

Twenty years later, in 2009, the graffiti, which had been slowly weathering, was carefully restored and the site declared a monument.

This memorialised and froze in time what was once spontaneous expression. The question is what can develop there now. Will it transform into a mere art curiosity?

How will the Wall Mile remain part of the living, and thus changing, memory of the city?

Like no other site, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, widely dubbed the ‘Holocaust Memorial’, stands for the troubled nature of the Germans’ ways of remembering their darkest hour. It forms part of a network of memorials on Wilhelmstraße’s ‘History Mile’ right in the centre of the city. A prolonged and fraught controversy had been triggered by a German journalist who, upon visiting Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, admonished that Germany had no equivalent. Competitions were held in 1995 and 1997, and the memorial opened in 2005, its accompanying debate was once described as a ‘monument’ in itself.

In contrast to the formal memorial, Berlin’s side-walks are peppered with Stolpersteine (‘stumbling stones’) that give details of individual victims by the doorsteps of their former homes. Funded by individual donors, these discrete grassroot reminders sit as humble yet ever present markers in the background.

Just across the road from the Holocaustmemorial, a small monument commemorates the persecution of homosexuals under Nazism. By singling out one further group of Nazi victims, it points to the absence in Berlin’s memorial landscape of yet other groups of victims including Roma-Cinti gypsies, Communists, disabled persons, or members of the clergy, all targeted with hundreds of thousands of dead. The debate around a new centre for forced migration, including German victims, too, has raised the vexed question of a ‘hierarchy’ among victims.

The centre ‘Topography of Terror’ in Wilhelmstrasse turns the focus on the perpetrators. The site formerly hosted the headquarters of the Gestapo and the SS, the operational centre of Nazi state terror. The walls of the excavated former torture cellars align with the remains of the Cold War Wall. In this way the site conveys a sense of direct causality between Nazism and the division of the city.

The Soviet Honour Monument, a vast garden-memorial, in Treptower Park commemorates the twenty million Soviets who died in WWII. The Red Army bore the brunt of the German war machine and was the most central force in defeating fascism. Yet, the Soviet Union no longer exists, socialism is dead, and Berliners are largely indifferent to the memorial. Its marginalisation today testifies to the fact that no memorial can counter processes of forgetting, casting a shadow over Berlin’s feverish reconstruction of itself as a vast memory landscape.

Conflict in Cities and the Contested State research project, supported by the ESRC (grant number RES-060-25-0015) w w w. u r b a n co n f l i c t s . a r c t . c a m . a c. u k

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