conclusions

conclusion:

legacy.

fig. 4.1

Reichstag Wrap 1995

“It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen: 100 rock climbers abseiling down the facade of the Reichstag, slowly unfurling this huge silvery curtain. There were no cranes or machinery, just people descending in a kind of aerial ballet.” - Christo [50]

The words of the artist, Christo discussing the 1995 Reichstag Wrap [fig.4.1], which involved the complete covering of the dormant German parliament, iterates the uniquely performative value the art piece held. This act, like so many other experiments on public space conducted in Post-Wende Berlin sought to perform a ritualistic healing onto the city’s scars. As this thesis has described, doing so would represent a conciliatory performance of the aspired identity of the reunified nation. Burned by the fascist city and left neglected by a divided nation, the Reichstag stands an architectural manifestation of German trauma. Its wrapping arguably set forth a purification process for both the bricks and mortar as well as the hearts and minds of a nation coming to terms with its unification. For two weeks, two million visitors poured to the site, to touch, to caress and to witness and celebrate this anomalous event. As a consequence of four decades under partition, it is said that Berliners had a troubled relationship with public space and mass society. The Post-Wende years saw the unprecedented use of event to encourage new ways of being as well as promoting a new found optimism for the reconstruction of the city’s architectural voids. This period gives a unique case study of a city undergoing dramatic physical and cultural upheaval and the mediums in which identity can be performed through urbanism.

The city streets played an intrinsic role in this performance. Mauerfall was a uniquely architectural piece of theatre of which Berliners, from East and West participated in with the common aim of claiming their city back from the contestation of superpowers. Reconstruction of the city, meanwhile was enacted by a different set of actors with competing interests seeking to use built form to express aspirations of capital, commerce and statehood.

As the building boom swept through Berlin in the early-nineties, so too did conflicts over the identity of the ‘new’ city. The moments discussed within this thesis shed light onto the battles staged upon the city’s streets in the pursuit of a normalised built environment. To understand the legacy of this period, one must only look to the streets of central Berlin today to view the impact held by the critical reconstructionists of this époque. The once contested decisions of historical manipulation are now naturalised elements of the urban landscape, thereby speaking of the myth of collective identity. When histories can be staged and memory constructed, the politics of the built environment comes into focus. The purposeful attacks on the built legacy of the DDR reveal the central role played by architecture in public memory. As street names were erased, monuments demolished and new quarters drawn up to the plans of an idealised past, we can see in plain sight the distorted nature of Berlin’s physical remembrance. What occurred during this period was nothing new for a city which had been successively made and re-made according to the tenets of each age. The mantra of critical reconstruction would justify its actions with the right to forget. And indeed whilst erasure and historical production succeeded in releasing the city from some its twentieth century wounds, those in favour of historical accuracy found themselves clinging to ever smaller monuments of the divided city. The strength of emotion tied to this argument has continued visibly into the twenty-first century as portrayed by the fierce protests against the removal of one of the last remaining sections of the Wall at the East Side Gallery in 2013. Chanting, 'Die Mauer soll bleiben' - the wall must stay, protesters unsuccessfully campaigned to stop portions of the fixture being removed to make way for luxury housing.

Ultimately these decisions and those conducted during the building frenzy in the years following the Mauerfall act as a reflection of power structures in German society. Who decides what is remembered and what is forgotten? Who gains the right to influence the place identity of an urban area? These questions ran throughout the debates of Post-Wende Berlin yet hold value for all cities to this day. The struggles to hold onto dying identities or to assert triumphant ones onto the urban fabric provides a telling case study for any democratically formed urban environment. In this case, dominant forces placed symbols onto the landscape of a city with abandon as they strived to construct meaning and image in an ideological vacuum. These symbols largely pertained to the state and market dominance of reconstruction yet it would be inaccurate to portray the actions of these groups as having had the last word on the formation of Berlin’s urban identity. Looking to the contemporary city, the urban topography remains far from entirely normalised and the city’s

fig. 4.2

identity conceivably owes much more to its underground scenes than to the actions of neo-liberal interests. The battles that continue to be waged in the city against the ever growing threat of gentrification and mass tourism evoke the struggles of the Post-Wall city. These are contestations that should resonate with all of us. The city streets remain one of the most visible platforms for the performance of identities and politics. What holds true from the streets of Post-Wende Berlin is the inate communicative power of urban space to reveal a society's inner most divisions. Through assertations of power or cries

of dissent the street is a voice for all who claim the right to use it.

East Side Gallery Protest 2013