S'lim #2 Berlin

nº2 Berl i n

S’LIM

nº2

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Berl i n Hard & Cold Editorial Neither Prenzlauer Berg Nor Marzahn: LichtenbergHohenschönhausen Sebastian Möring Glückskarte von Berlin Chow Yik Entering Apartments Maaret Louhelainen Einige Berliner Rurik Wasastjerna Misplacements Oscar Chan Yik Long Excerpts from Berlin in The New Baedeker; Being - Casual Notes of an Irresponsible Traveller (1910) Harry Thurston Peck

Inner cover: A disability aids store. Karl Marx Allee, December 2009.

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Hard & Cold Editorial

For the second issue of S’lim we asked a group of contemporaries for their past and present impressions of Berlin. And perhaps the results echo, to an extent, the cliche of a quote by Anneliese Bödecker, the city is dirty and grau (while she would of course feel sorry for those who did not live there). Thus, similarly to much of Berlin, the issue, too, comes out in grayscale. By choice.

Tonight, for the f irst time thi s w inter, it i s ver y cold. The dead cold g r ips the tow n in utter silence, like the silence of intens e midday summer heat. In the cold the tow n s eems ac tually to contrac t, to dw indle to a small back dot, s carcely larger than hundred s of other dots, i s olated and hard to f ind, on the enor mou s European map. O utside, in the night, be yond the last ne w-built blocks of concrete f lats, where the streets end in f roz en allotment gardens, are the Pr u ssian plains. You can feel them all around you , tonig ht, c reeping in upon the city, like an immens e waste of unholy ocean – spr inkled w ith leaf less cops es and ice-lakes and tiny v illages which are remembered only as the outlandi sh names of battlef ield s in half-forgotten wars.

B erlin i s a skeleton which aches in the cold: it i s my ow n skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the shar p ache of the f rost in the g irders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, in br idges, tramlines, lamp-standard s, latr ines. The iron throbs and shr inks, the stone and the br icks ache dully, the plaster i s numb. 1

Like perhaps with any repetitive undertaking, we had some trouble in deciding which direction this sophomore edition would take.

Literally. Geographically. As out of nowhere, we settled on Berlin which undoubtedly has a contemporary clang, but for us personally, Berlin has always been an especially hard and cold place. While there is praise of the city’s lively summertime, for us so far, it has been a city of a constant winter, autumn or a spring.

But maybe the coldness, in regards to temperature, as well as per visual impression, or even as a modern literary experience, is an authentic and contemporary feature of Berlin. The concrete is, concrete. The gray is gray.

For, doesn’t it feel like there is an actual reason why so few artists have ever depicted Berlin as romantic, or why so few writers or poets have praised an ethereal or sensuous Berlin? Instead, there is an abundance of voices from the margins that have at times both flourished and cruelly withered.

Maybe it has always been like this. An example is found in the anthology Goodbye to Berlin (1939) in which Christopher Isherwood writes in his Berlin Diary (1932-33):

But perhaps there are perks of being so gray. In 1892, Mark Twain compared Berlin to Chicago: Berlin is the newest city. Perhaps within the hard and cold there exists a creative form of prose, as it really doesn’t matter what kind of a show you put on. A cabare here and there will not change the gray – so you might feel free to... whatever.

Then again, only this week someone thought it very vexing that Berlin has become a victim of its own success. “If the city’s uncoolness was once made it cool, its new coolness threathens to make it uncool again.” 2 Let’s see.

Photocopy of a paper.

A photo of Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, December 2009.

1. Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (Frogmore, St. Albans England: Triad Panther, 1977), 188.

2. Lucien Kim, “Being Cool Has Ruined Berlin,” Slate, 15 April, 2016. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/roads/2016/04/berlin_is_cool_these_days_what_a_bummer.html

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Neither Prenzlauer Berg Nor Marzahn: Lichtenberg-Hohenschรถnhausen Sebastian Mรถring

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Courtyards Some of Berlin courtyards are not just like any courtyard. Some are vast, complex and seemingly never-ending mazes, messing up the unfamiliar visitor’s orientation, offering a view after another and perhaps yet even another behind the corner. The surprising scenes inside the cityscape are not unlike a Russian nesting doll – bringing up a certain berlinesque feeling. Anything can be just around the corner, if we enter just another courtyard.

Entering Apartments Maaret Louhelainen

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The times I’ve visited Berlin in the past few years, I have repeatedly encountered certain kinds of spaces.

In my mind these spaces have created an imagery of typical Berlin which I recognize and look forward seeing again when visiting. In the historical scale of the built city, things that make as big impr ession as the monumental Soviet-style

environment,

are

the

courtyards, hallways and apartments of Berlin, mostly Kreuzberg-NeukĂślln area. These three types of urban spaces create the paths for entering Berlin homes.

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Staircases The gateways, the front doors, the railings, the stairs, the windows , the apartment doors, the doorbells, the mailboxes, really everything about a Berlin apartment building’s staircases seems highly standardized. And a casual occupant feels thankful that everything in this semi-public space of is recognizable and familiar. Having used to a diversity inside my home town’s housing (and having actually studied staircases), these stairs leave me astounded.

The level of standardization in this densely populated city is – and has been – so high that it actually makes sense.

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Apartments The Berlin apartments in Kreuzberg and northern NeukÜlln are much alike. The apartments themselves appear similar to the hallways of the buildings – the same level of standardization can be seen inside the apartments as well. It seems that in every apartment you can orientate naturally finding the narrow kitchen and bathroom, the spacious living room and bedroom with high ceilings right in its proper place. So are the squeaky floorboards, double doors and tiled stoves.

There is a sense of safety and homeliness in the kind of familiarity.

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Berlin ist die erste Stadt in der Yik in Europa gewesen ist.

Sie weiss nicht, ob sie Berlin mag oder nicht.

Glückskarte von Berlin Yik Chow

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䘀甀猀猀氀甀昀椀最 䔀爀爀攀椀挀栀戀愀爀

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Einige Berliner Rurik Wasastjerna

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T H E B L U E - S H I R T- G U Y S AV E D M Y LIFE FROM TRAM CRASH AFTER TA K I N G T H I S P H O T O

Misplacements Oscar Chan Yik Long

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HE KEPT THIS POSTURE FOR AN HOUR AND I KNOW IT

I WA I T E D U N T I L T H E Y K I S S E D

A KID NEEDED A REST

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ABANDONED

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FRIDGES

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Excerpts from “Berlin” in The New Baedeker; Being - Casual Notes of an Irresponsible Traveller (1910) Harry Thurston Peck

The New Baedeker; Being - Casual Notes of an Irresponsible Traveller (1910) by Harry Thurston Peck

It is delightful of a summer morning to wake and hear the notes of a bugle in the Tiergarten below one’s window.

Looking out, one sees a group of Uhlans riding between the strips of greenery, the little pennons fluttering from their lances, and their splendid horses moving all together. The perfect training of the German cavalry is wonderful. At a distance they seem like a row of lead soldiers, cast all in exactly the same mould. Each lance is held at precisely the same angle. Each rider has precisely the same seat upon his steed. Each horse, even, lifts his hoofs at precisely the same instant as each other horse. And when you see fifty thousand cavalry and infantry at some great review on the Tempelhoferfeld, it is just the same. A column of a thousand men seems not to be composed of individuals.

It might have been carved as a whole out of some blue and red material, and its movements are as regular as those of a machine. In fact, an intelligent machine is the ideal of the ruling German — not the highest possible ideal, but one of which the realisation is astonishing wherever you observe it — in the army, the police, the post-office, the universities, or the imperial court. Perhaps, after a little, you weary of its mechanism. Spontaneity, individuality, personality, have all been thrown into the hopper of a huge official mill, and have come out a finished product which lives and works and thinks according to a formula.

https://archive.org/details/newbaedekerbeing01peck

It is the eternal presence of the German soldier that differentiates Berlin from an American city of its size ; for all else here is modern — the ornate palace of the Reichstag, the glorified Luna Park display of the Siegesallee, the brand-new Protestant cathedral or Domkirche, the avenue of the Linden itself, lined with ghttering shops and restaurants, the Leipzigerstrasse, crowded by trams and vans and bustling burghers. There is a brown-stone-front effect to the Schloss which recalls New York; and though the Schloss Bridge, with its statues overlooking the little river, is beautiful, it has not the effect of mellow age. To be sure, there are many places here which are redolent of history, but it is very modern history. One looks at the column in the Belle Alliance Platz, and it takes you no further back than Waterloo. The building that nestles under a great Mansard roof and encompasses a garden in the Wilhelmstrasse gives you a thrill when you remember that in its offices the mighty Bismarck, with his

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Reichshund crouched beside him, created a great empire, and gave law to Continental Europe until the day when his “ young master “ sent an aide-de-camp to turn him out. But this was only a few years ago. We all remember it; and the Man of Blood and Iron might himself appear upon the steps without seeming like a visitant from another world.

Yes, Berlin is very new — an infant among European capitals — and even old Fritz upon his lumpy horse is not an ancient, since his end came only after we Americans had won our freedom. Compare the German capital with Paris or Vienna or Brussels, not to speak of Rome, and it seems almost as new as Cincinnati or Detroit. The distinctive and pictorial interest of it comes first of all from the swarming soldiery — from the bright helmets, spiked or plumed, the glitter of gold lace, the blue and crimson uniforms, the white jack-boots, and the clank of sabres everywhere. A dozen times an hour you see some gorgeous warrior stiffen suddenly and salute, as he perceives another of his kind somewhere within the regulation distance. It is most attractive for a time; and the bugle of the Uhlans in the morning is but the overture, the thrilling note with which the martial drama of the day begins.

Yet after a little while, the everlasting army officer gets upon your nerves. His lordly and all-conquering air, his supercilious pose, his assumption that he has the right of way, no matter where you meet him, his refusal to swerve a hair’s breadth as he stalks along the broadest trottoir — somehow you feel that there is a great deal too much of him.

And then you hear stories of his insolence to women, his bullying of civilians, the grim tales of the barrack-yards where simple country boys are tortured by the drill-sergeant with inconceivable brutality, and now and then a darker and more sinister revelation of the moral rottenness which is festering like a plaguespot underneath the brave display of gorgeous uniforms and rigid ceremonial. It is not necessary to read such books as that of Bilse or such journals as the Zukunft.

Any German can relate to you out of his own personal knowledge things as sickening as these. And after that, the schneidig Offizier, as he swaggers by you on the Linden, nose in air, and regarding you with contempt, is not provocative of admiration. (pp. 59-63)

...Some day, if God is very good to me, I shall be sitting at my window in the Pariser Platz and looking out across the Thiergarten toward Charlottenburg. But there will be no Uhlans and no bugle calls. A strange hush will have fallen on Berlin. Shutters will be closed and curtains drawn along the Linden, and the whole great avenue will be as still as death. At the Brandenburger Thor a few mounted officers of the police in their dark uniforms will be sitting their horses, immobile and gloomy. (pp. 73-74) ...But now they have massed themselves about the Tor. Far as the eye can reach are regiments of sturdy infantry filling the whole vast area of the Tiergarten. Before them, surrounded by a brilliant staif , rides a general whose name is now perhaps unknown to Europe and the world, but who on that day will be the greatest man on earth. As he nears the Thor, the glorious tricolour Is unfurled, surmounted it may be — for who can tell — by the Napoleonic eagle. And then, following the rising thunder of a thousand drums, there bursts forth a crash of music — thrilling, maddening, divine.

I feel the words that are behind: Amour sacre de la patrie, Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs — Liberie, Liberte cherie, Combats avec tes defensem-s !

Sous nos drapeux que la Victoire Accoure a tes males accents; Que nos ennemis expirants Voient ton triomphe et notre gloire !

Aux armes, citoyens ! Formez vos bataillons !

Marchons ! Qu’un sapg impur abreuve nos sillons !

And as the music swells and billows into a tempest of martial melody, rolling up the Linden and flooding it with a glorious sea of sound, I, at my window, shall lean far out and cry aloud with an infinite exultation: Vive la France !

(pp. 74-75)

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Contributors & Contemporaries

We would like to thank al l t he cont em por ar i es w h o

S’LIM is a zine that focuses on a particular place at a

sh ared their c ontr ibut i ons on The G r ay Ci t y.

Oscar Chan Yik Long gr aduat ed f r om t he Ac adem y o f Visual Arts, Ho ng Kong Bapt is t Univ er s it y in 2011. H e has participa ted in a num ber of ex hibit ions in his n a t i v e

time, merging the contemporary and the historical experiences of visiting, living, staying and theorizing.

H ong Kon g, in Chin a as well as int er nat ionally. O sc a r ’s

ISSN 2343-1016 (online)

practice ofte n e xp lor es per s onal ex per ienc es whils t

ISSN 2343-1024 (print)

embra cin g d iffere nt m edia and t heir pr oper t ies inc l u d i n g installa tion , ce ramics , and illus t r at ion. (ht t p://www.o scarcha n. c om / )

Edited by Selim, a Helsinki-based contemporary platform for editorial / curatorial / cultural / visual / spatial projects.

C h o w Yik usua lly collec t s t hings , not m em or ies . Sh e can’t thin k o f an yth ing ( Huh?) f r om Ber lin, whic h is n o t comm on pla ce . (b.1 98 3) Liv es in Hong Kong. I ndep e n d e n t

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art ist an d cura tor. (h t t p: / / c howy ik . c om / ) SELIM Maaret Louhe lainen is a Hels ink i- bas ed m us eum

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profession al a nd co ns er v at or - r es t or er wit h an ex pe r t i s e

Katajanokankatu 8 D 24

in built h erita ge an d r es ear c h. She holds a M as t er ’s

00160 Helsinki, Finland

degree in lan dsca pe s t udies , s pec ializ ing in built c u l t u r a l environ men ts. Ma are t has m ainly wor k ed am ongs t museum colle ctio ns and ex hibit ions , as well as wit h

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and worked in Fran kfur t ( O der ) , Par is , Pot s dam , C openh ag en , Hon g K ong and Ber lin. He s pends his spare time wo nd erin g how his hom e t own c ould c ha n g e

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