Many words – poetic, journalistic, novelistic – written about Berlin in the past 20 years make reference to the omnipresence of cranes on the city’s skyline. As I write this, activists desperately try to stop a private developer from pulling down sections of the Berlin Wall at the East Side Gallery. It is a rerun of winter 2013, when Berliners resisted the razing of a section of the East Side Gallery by the owners of a ghastly glass monstrosity built dubiously beside the Spree. The happy ending to that story is that the building remains half empty, hopefully forever tainted by the contemptuousness with which it was built. The activists won that time, with only a few sections of the Wall being removed. In January 2018, the outcome looks less certain. The grip of malls/gyms/shops/hotels on the imagination of developers the world over, and their ever willing army of investors who apparently like to exercise and shop where they eat and shit, looks set to define the city’s shape for decades.
On one of my tours in 2016 I encountered a very kind, very rich Norwegian man who had invested heavily in Berlin after the Wall came down. After listening patiently to my not very subtle digs about the sheer lack of imagination evident in current development happening all over Berlin, taking the rent prices and the city’s anarchic culture with it, he said to me, even sympathetically, “I understand your distress but nothing will stop this process. It is inevitable. It is business.”
I appreciated his honesty; and absorbed his words with a pricking behind my eyes. I ended that tour with a new feeling for Berlin. A feeling of mourning, knowing I would watch the city tip over into a new era when I hadn’t had the privilege to see it as the Wall fell.
Privilege! you may exclaim?! Privilege to see the grimness and decay of East Berlin, and the strange graffitied West, still generically elegant in parts but shabby from years of isolation? Who wants to witness the ruin and stultification of 45 years of war and division?
I did. I do. Berlin limped into the 1990s with the skin of the past still on, so that we could see, feel, smell it. So that we could warned, reminded, forced to look and see alongside Walter Benjamin’s ‘Angel of History’ the wreckage piling up at our feet (still piling, every day still piling up at our feet).
In fact, that skin remains, much depredated, but still evident. In December 2012, I was lost on Friedrichstrasse on an icy New Years Eve afternoon. It was my 3rd week in the city. I’d gone the wrong way up Friedrichstrasse and instead of arriving at the Brandenburg Gate I ended up at Hallesches Tor. It was grey, wet and ugly. Three old ladies perambulated across the red brick square in front of the U-Bahn entrance. Bottles clattered around in the sudden gusts of terrible wind. Anticipating the night, the fireworks started up around me.
I felt as though I had temporarily slipped out of time. I heard the sounds of the war in 1945. The relentless guns on the city limits. Rolling rounds of heavy artillery and the high pitched rattle of the anti aircraft guns. I looked around to see if anybody else heard it. The old ladies? They stood inside a bake shop buying rolls. They didn’t even react. The only thing rumbling was a train arriving at the station. I closed my eyes. At that moment the air filled with a memory that wasn’t only mine. It was Berlin. In this city the past darts out of side streets in sudden flashes of sound and smell. I am still not used to it, four years later.
Is it naive to believe that the relentless development of the city will kill its ghosts? After all, arguments can be made for increasing available housing and giving people the chance to make money. This churlish, ever-resistant city is, after all, the capital city of the largest economy in Europe.
I don’t care. Careless development will sew closed the gaps from which the past of the city emerges to surprise and warn us. From some angles it doesn’t look like the new developments rise upwards. Instead they look like burial sites, with their wide blank mountains of sand, and they are burying Berlin, with all of us looking on.
© Lauren van Vuuren 2017 Berlin
Lauren van Vuuren 