Abstract
In this third decade since the fall of the Wall, the center of the postmillennial, reunified Berlin is still being rebuilt by design. Planning overreach is a problem by association: after all, urban social engineers—including the Nazi Albert Speer, of course, but also avant-garde modernist ideologues such as Ludwig Hilberseimer and Le Corbusier, all with discernible roots in the earlier City Beautiful movement—have too often wanted to rewrite a city’s center in order to remold its inhabitants.2 According to postmodern tenets, urbanism as order is (or should be) dead; ergo we should not expect to control or reconfigure city space in the manner that urban planners once thought possible. Yet despite these cautionary planning tales, today’s Berlin has been overhauled as part of its reinstatement on the political, infrastructural, and architectural levels and in tandem with the former West German federalist system’s accommodation of the regained capital.3 We have witnessed immense efforts toward the re-capitalization of post-Wall Berlin—a process that has continued regardless of whether this contemporary post-industrial city may have lost its right to represent the nation in the first place. In fact, the re-capitalizing of Berlin constitutes a self-regenerating, self-renewing source of energy, at least for political, cultural, and architectural ideologues.
All of new Berlin is owned by the developers.
—Karl Scheffler (1910)1
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Notes
Karl Scheffler, Berlin. Ein Stadtschicksal, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Erich Reiss Verlag, 1910), 187, translation here and throughout by the author.
For a critique of the City Beautiful movement, see Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996), 174–78, 202.
A lone voice of caution was offered by former cultural minister Michael Naumann, Die schönste Form der Freiheit. Reden und Essays zur Kultur der Nation (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 2001), 213.
Werner Durth, “Stadt und landschaft,” in 1945. Krieg — Zerstörung — Aufbau. Architektur und Stadtplanung 1940–1960, ed. Jörn Düwel, Werner Durth, Niels Gutschow, and Jochen Schneider (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1995), 154;
And Jeffry M. Diefendorf, In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 118–20.
Karl Bonatz, “Der neue Plan von Berlin,” Neue Bauwelt 2, no. 48 (December 1,1947): 755–62.
Alfred Gellhorn, “Formung der Grossstadt,” Die Form 2, no. 2 (1927): 56.
Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the labyrinth: Avant- Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino dAcierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1987), 175, 174.
Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs [1970], trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983);
Excerpted in The City Cultures Reader, ed. Malcolm Miles, Iain Borden, and Tim Hall (New York: Routledge, 2000), 195.
Hermann Ullmann, Flucht aus Berlin (Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1932), 9.
Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996), 208.
Jürgen Habermas, “1989 in the Shadow of 1945: On the Normality of a Future Berlin Republic” [1995], in Habermas, A Berlin Republic: Writings on Germany, trans. Steven Rendall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 180.
This opinion was offered by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki in reference to Berlin after the Wall; quoted in Hans Stimmann, ed., Babylon, Berlin etc. Das Vokabular der europäischen Stadt (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1995), 163.
See Janet Ward, “Berlin, The Virtual Global City,” Journal of Visual Culture 3, no. 2 (2004): 239–56.
David Newman, “Boundaries,” and Sankaran Krishna, “Boundaries in Question,” both in A Companion to Political Geography, ed. John Agnew, Katharyne Mitchell, and Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 133, 304.
Lutz Koepnick, Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 241, 242.
Marc Augé, Non-Places [1992], trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 2008);
Hans Ibelings, Supermodernism: Architecture in the Age of Globalization (Rotterdam: NAi, 1998);
And Iain Sinclair, London Orbital: A Walk around the M25 (London: Granta, 2002).
Michael Sorkin, “Variations on a Theme Park,” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992), xiv.
See, for example, Karl Schlögel, “The Comeback of the European Cities,” International Review of Sociology 16, no. 2 (2006): 471–85.
Peter Marcuse, “Reflections on Berlin: The Meaning of Construction and the Construction of Meaning,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 22, no. 2 (1998): 334.
Marcuse continues this line of inquiry in his “Tradition in a Global City? “Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 17, no. 2 (2006): 7–18.
See Chapter 17 in Mike Davis, Dead Cities and Other Tales (New York: New Press, 2002).
Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz. Die Geschichte von Franz Biberkopf [1929] (Munich: dtv, 1988);
And Norman Ohler, Mitte (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2001), 222.
See Gabriel Rosenfeld’s account of post-Wall Berlin’s architectural transformation as an aspect of the “Architects’ Debate,” itself an offshoot of the “Historians’ Debate.” Rosenfeld, “The Architects’ Debate. Architectural Discourse and the Memory of Nazism in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1977–1997,” History and Memory 9, no. 1–2 (1997): 208–16.
Carolyn Loeb, “Planning Reunification: The Planning History of the Fall of the Wall,” Planning Perspectives 21, no. 1 (2006): 67–87. For updated versions of the land Use Plan, which has since been revised in 1998, 2004, and 2008, see the Berlin Senate’s website: http://www.stadtentwicklung.berlin.de/planen/fnp/(accessed June 3, 2009).
Interview with Volker Hassemer, “Informationstechnologie entlastet die Städte,” in Virtual Cities: Die Neuerfindung der Stadt im Zeitalter der globalen Vernetzung, ed. Christa Maar and Florian Rötzer (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1997), 188.
Michael S. Cullen, Der Reichstag. Parlament, Denkmal, Symbol (Berlin: be.bra verlag, 1999), 332.
James S. Russell, “With his sleek, ecological design, Lord Norman Foster imbues the Reichstag with Germany’s new self-image,” Architectural Record 187, no. 7 (July 1999): 103.
Eric Jarosinski, “Building on a Metaphor: Democracy, Transparency and the Berlin Reichstag,” in Berlin: The Symphony Continues. Orchestrating Architectural, Social, and Artistic Change in Germany’s New Capital, ed. Carol Anne Costabile-Heming, Rachel J. Halverson, and Kristie A. Foell (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 64.
This auratic reworking of the Weimar era is suggested by Koepnick in Framing Attention, 255–56. See also Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Brian ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997);
And Karen E. Till, The New Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 81, 84.
Michael Z. Wise, Capital Dilemma. Germany’s Search for a New Architecture of Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 95–96.
See also the government brochure with text by Hans Wilderotter, Das Haus am Werderschen Markt. Von der Reichsbank zum Auswärtigen Amt (Berlin: Auswärtiges Amt, 1999), 30, http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/diplo/de/AAmt/VirtuellerRundgang/Uebersicht,navCtx=21922.html (accessed December 17, 2009).
Wise, Capital Dilemma, 25. Before Nazism, German modernist architectural debates were trying to lift Berlin out of its rental-barracks stone; see, for example, Werner Hegemann, Das steinerne Berlin. Geschichte der größten Mietskasernenstadt der Welt [1930] (rpt. Berlin: Vieweg-Verlag, 1988).
On the glass-as-democratic-symbol debate, see Deborah Ascher Barnstone, The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany (New York: Routledge, 2005);
Bernhard Schulz, “Noch einmal eine europäische Stadt,” Tagesspiegel, September 3, 1998;
And Max Welch Guerra, Hauptstadt Einig Vaterland. Planung und Politik zwischen Bonn und Berlin (Berlin: Verlag Bauwesen, 1999).
Volker Wagner, Regierungsbauten in Berlin. Geschichte, Politik, Architektur (Berlin: be.bra verlag, 2001), 56–59.
Harald Bodenschatz, “Hauptstadtplanungen aus der Perspektive der Stadt,” in Geschichtsmeile Wilhelmstraße, ed. Helmut Engel and Wolfgang Ribbe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 247.
Alan Balfour, “Morphosis: Spreebogen,” in Berlin, ed. Alan Balfour (London, UK: Academy Editions, 1995), 121.
Georg Simmel, “Brücke und Tür,” Der Tag, September 15, 1909.
For a discussion of the reaction to Schultes’s design, see Heinrich Wefing, Kulisse der Macht. Das Berliner Kanzleramt (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2001), 40–77.
Axel Schultes, “Berlin—The Belated Capital,” in Berlin, ed. Alan Balfour (London, UK: Academy Editions, 1995), 46;
see also Matthias Oloew, “Die Raumgreifenden,” Tagesspiegel, January 29, 2008.
Max Page, “Berlins Identity Crisis,” Architecture 93, no. 9 (2004): 26.
Paul Virilio, “The Overexposed City,” in Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (New York: Trustees of Columbia University/Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 547.
Since 2004 Berlin’s Office of Migration and Integration boasts a multicultural motto: BĘŘŁŸÑ; see http://www.berlin.de/lb/intmig/(accessed September 3, 2009). See also Stephan lanz, Berlin aufgemischt: abendländisch — multikulturell — kosmopolitisch? Die politische Konstruktion einer Einwanderungsstadt (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2007).
Alan Colquhoun, “On Modern and Postmodern Space,” in Architecture Criticism Ideology, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985), 116.
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© 2011 Marc Silberman
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Ward, J. (2011). Re-Capitalizing Berlin. In: Silberman, M. (eds) The German Wall. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118577_5
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