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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