Berlin: united by the fall

David Sornig takes us through the streets, lives, architecture, art and politics of the city that has been the focus for the rebirth of a post-Communist Europe as it prepares to celebrate 20 years since the Wall came down.

In early October this year the streets of Berlin were transformed into the stage for “Berlin Reunion – The Giants Arrive” a three day performance that celebrated German reunification centring on two oversized mechanical marionettes: a “little” girl standing seven metres tall and her fifteen metre tall deep sea diving uncle. The marionettes were manoeuvred through the streets and waterways of Berlin by Lilliputian-attired puppeteers from the French troupe Royal de Luxe in a story about their long separation by a now destroyed wall, their search for one another, and their eventual reunion in an embrace at the Brandenburg Gate where they spent the night at rest, the girl asleep in her uncle’s lap.

Many of the almost two million who turned out to see the spectacle spoke of the fairytale’s revival of the enchantment and wonder they had first felt at the demise of the Berlin Wall twenty years before.
When the Berlin Wall was breached on November 9, 1989 by a populace in East Berlin that no longer had the stomach for the oppressions that it had lived under for just over forty years, it appeared that the resolution of the great twentieth century drama had finally unfolded into a neat and cathartic final act. Within a year of the Wall’s demise, the two halves of the country, and the anomalous city of Berlin, which technically didn’t belong to either of the German states, barrelled headlong into reunification. It was the perfect fairytale happy ending.

The contrasts between the physical states of the two halves of the city in 1989 were plain. Where West Berlin was relatively affluent and ordered, East Berlin was characterised by the dilapidated state of its urban fabric. Older buildings were crumbling, and vast areas of the city were given over to soulless high rise housing estates. Entire areas, especially buildings by the tract of land where the quickly dismantled Wall once stood, were simply derelict.
The vacuum attracted the underground cultural scene that had already been flourishing since the late 1960s in the inner West Berlin district of Kreuzberg and its opposite number Prenzlauerberg in the East. In the “new frontier” of the East this DIY movement of artists and musicians quickly occupied many derelict spaces. Two of the most famous of these, the artists’ community Tacheles and the night club Tresor, became institutions and were carved out of the ruins of two long-defunct department stores.

Peter Brendle, an Australian who has spent many years in Berlin promoting Australian arts and culture, says that the city is “like a magnet to all artists and young people”. They come not just for its low rents and its well-developed arts infrastructure, but also because there is something intoxicating about the mythology of Berlin’s troubled past, its reunification and its gritty cutting-edge arts scene that is filled with a sense of risk and possibility.

The romance of Berlin seems to have held special sway over many Australians. Its arts presence in Berlin stretches from Nick Cave’s explosive years there in the mid-1980s through to this year’s performance of the late German-Australian choreographer Tanja Liedtke’s “Twelfth Floor” at the Hybrid Arts Fest which features a host of Australian productions. Regular artistic visitors to the city include theatre figures like Raimondo Cortese and Robyn Archer, and from 2012 director Barrie Kosky will take up a five year appointment to head the Komische Oper, crowning his long association with the city.

Berlin’s urban landscape is noted for its mega-projects, many of which are aimed squarely at healing the scars in both space and time left behind by Nazism and the Berlin Wall. The monumental stretch of offices known as the “Band des Bundes” that houses the German Chancellery crosses the River Spree and links the east and west of the city; the remade Potsdamer Platz echoes the once thriving heart of pre-war café culture Berlin that was erased by the Berlin Wall death strip; and the stark field of concrete slabs that form the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe sits atop memories of both Hitler’s war machine and the Berlin Wall.

One of the most powerful changes in the city over the last twenty years was its designation as the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1999. The move from the more provincial Bonn had its symbolic beginning with the wrapping and renewal of the Reichstag building by conceptual artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude four years earlier. When the Reichstag’s transformation into the home of the modern Bundestag was completed with the addition of Sir Norman Foster’s great glass dome, the city took a major step towards its ideal of being at the centre of a Europe whose borders were expanding ever eastward.

That the city consciously faces the east of Europe is underlined not only by the large number of Poles and various former-Yugoslavs who live in the city, but also by its fast-growing Jewish community which has expanded from just 20,000 in 1989 to more than 120,000 today.

This new Jewish Berlin is built largely on immigrants from former Soviet communities who took up the right to settle in Germany toward the end of the Soviet era. Jewish life in Berlin is today characterised by a growing number of schools and community organisations and is often held up as a symbol of some pride, again speaking to the fairytale story of rebirth in the city after the suffering and devastation that befell it at the hands of the Nazi regime.
But Berlin is not all fairytale. On the same night that the two giant marionettes sat in their repose under the lights of the Pariser Platz in the heart of the city, and while pictures of the performance were being picked up by media across the world, in the eastern Treptow district of Berlin a Molotov-cocktail attack was launched on a kneipe, a bar well-known as a gathering place for neo-Nazi groups that had in previous weeks been the target of a protest campaign by the city’s vigorous anarchist and leftwing groups. In the aftermath of the attack one man was left seriously injured when he gave chase and was run over by the attackers’ car.

The cycle of tension and violence continued when on October 10, some 800 black-clad Rechtsradikale descended on Berlin to march the four kilometres from Alexanderplatz to Landsberger Allee. This rightwing march through eastern Berlin attracted four counter-demonstrations by leftwing groups, the largest of which was 300 strong. The rival groups were kept separate by over 1000 police. Bottles were thrown, injuries sustained, a car and a rubbish bin were torched and arrests were made on both sides.
More alarming still was the February 2009 commemoration of the 64th anniversary of the World War Two firebombing of Dresden which attracted some 6000 neo-Nazis to the eastern German city. The federal state of Saxony, of which Dresden is the capital, is the only legislature in Germany to have representation from the overtly far-right National Democratic Party.

The waxing fortunes of both the underground and mainstream extreme right are often linked to the significantly worse economic conditions in the former East Germany in comparison to other parts of the country. As at September 2009 the average unemployment rate in what are termed the “new” federal states in the east stood at 12.3 percent, whereas in the “old” states of the west the figure was just 6.9 percent. The highest unemployment rate of all is in Berlin itself where the figure stands at 14 percent.

Despite the perception produced by the long list of mega-projects, Berlin has not fared well as a city since 1989. Its physical transformation masks the ongoing financial crisis that has more than once almost bankrupted its administration. In 2006 the city’s long-term governing mayor Klaus Wowereit argued in the nation’s federal constitutional court that while the city was sexy it was desperately poor and that the federal government was obliged to assist in the relief of its debt burden, which then stood at 60 billion Euro.

In a recent interview with Lettre International Berlin’s former finance minister Thilo Sarrazin, who was largely responsible for reining in the level of public debt in Berlin, delivered a broadside aimed at much of what the city prides itself on: its multicultural working class, its leftwing culture and its attractiveness to hard-up artists and writers. He in part blamed these aspects of the city as being at the core of its ongoing financial weakness. Most controversially he disparaged the city’s large Turkish and Arab populations as an unproductive “underclass”. His attack fell on what he believed to be the culture of dependence produced by the artificial propping up of the West Berlin economy during the Wall years and the annihilation and flight of intellectual and business elites that both the Nazis and the Communists were responsible for. Sarrazin’s claim is that because of its old ways of thinking, “Berlin will never be saved by the Berliners.”

Sarrazin’s assessment suggests the ongoing relevance of Peter Schneider’s prediction in his 1983 novel “The Wall Jumper” that if the Berlin Wall were ever to come down there would remain a “wall in people’s heads” that would take longer to tear down than the actual wall itself.

Christian Bischof, who studies engineering in Leipzig, the city whose Monday protests were the catalyst for 1989’s upheavals, was eight years old and living in a small East German town near the border with West Germany when the wall came down. Soon after, his family took the cautious step of driving over the border to visit the west in the family car, the iconic East German Trabant. “Everything was bright and colourful, not grey like in the east,” Bischof remembers. “Now we could buy all the nice things, for me it was chocolate or little matchbox cars.” He remembers realising that in the west one didn’t need to hide from his envious school friends the bananas his grandfather sometimes brought home in his job delivering fruit to East German supermarkets.

Bischof is part of the generation that has now grown to adulthood without ever really knowing the repressions and deprivations of living on the “wrong” side of the dividing wall, apart from those he has been told about. He’s one of those who believes in the worth of reunification. “It is easy for young people because we don’t know or don’t remember life in East Germany. We just know the new life.”

Ultimately it’s the stories themselves, whether they are the accounts of continuing difference favoured by politicians like Thilo Sarrazin, the racist slanders of neo-Nazi thugs who threaten politicians of Turkish origin, or the fairytales of reunification enacted in spectacular puppet shows in Berlin, that shape both the teller and the listener.

The stories Christian Bischof tells of 1989 are those shaped for him by his father. Bischof says that in the town near his father’s village where his father went to join protests, “all the people were standing and holding hands with each other and were singing. It was such an emotional moment for him that he had goose pimples.” The story is Bischof’s father’s, but it has become unassailably his own.
On November 9, Berlin will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Wall’s demise with another city-sized story. A cascade of large dominos will be set off tracing part of the former path of the Berlin Wall. It will be another very public, very official reminder that the expectations of reunion still persist in the city, that despite the realities of change, the emotional and political value of reunification is worth celebrating. But then again, in Berlin expectations are always high.

David Sornig lectures in creative writing at Flinders University. His novel Spiel, a metaphysical thriller set in Melbourne and Berlin, has recently been published by University of Western Australia Publishing.