Re: <documenta X><blast> the image/the urban

Michael Wetzel (blast-agent@forum.documenta.de)
Mon, 15 Sep 1997 08:58:00 -0400

The decision to make Berlin the new capital of the reunified Germany,
passed by a bare majority, clearly reflected the nation's dividedness on
this issue. And yet it was not the 1945 division into eastern and
western sectors nor the demarcation line--the concrete wall and the
"death strip" between the world's two power blocs--that first made this
city a symbol of schism. Here more than anywhere, all lamentations
regarding the loss of the middle prove to be historically out of place.
Since its foundation as first a colonial, then a Prussian, finally a
capitalistic *front city*, Berlin has always evolved in contradictions,
duplications, and deconcentrations. In place of the contrast between
center and periphery, the metropolis on banks of the Havel and Spree is
more familiar with spurts of development erupting in several places at
the same time--often competitive doubles, stopping as abruptly as they
had started--e.g., in the early years, the simultaneous foundation of
Berlin and Coelln, later the parallelism of feudalistic and bourgeois,
imperial and republican or proletarian focal points (such as the Schloss
and the Reichstag or Kurfurstendamn and Alexanderplatz).

As Blanchot points out in his essay *The Name Berlin*, the uniqueness of
Berlin lies in its facility not only to symbolize the fragmentary aspect
of reality but to embody it: like an exhortation aimed at "the deep gap
in our words and our thinking." The peculiar fault lines of its urban
topography allow the ground--itself possessed and marked by city
history--to break through. The emptiness of these breaks rouse the
memory of other, bygone spaces. With his annex to the Berlin Museum,
Daniel Libeskind picked up this thread as a concept of *voids*. The
Jewish Museum, constructed around sealed empty spaces, is perhaps one of
the most prominent advocates of this attitude of respect for the
invisible traces of past realities.

These considerations were the first expressions of a project I carried
out in the summer of 1993 with the Parisian photographer Erik Bullot,
the general framework being provided by my research program on cultural
exchange between Berlin and Paris, based at the College International de
Philosophie. Berlin presents a fascinating problem: how can a capital
be built without wiping out traces of history--particularly the scars
and bare patches of postwar Berlin, still visible in the eastern part of
the city? It is a challenge involving Berlin's unique chance to attain
a quality unlike the typical overconstruction of other metropolises,
i.e. the architectural utilization of even the smallest nooks and
crannies.

-Michael Wetzel
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