The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape

by Brian Ladd

The concentration of troubling memories, physical destruction, and renewal has made Berliners, however reluctantly, international leaders in exploring the links between urban form, historical preservation, and national identity.

Only by selective forgetting, according to Nietzsche, can we overcome a sense of helplessness in the face of historical destiny. He argued that only the ability to forget makes creative action possible.6 In short, if I cannot select certain facts from history and discard others, I will never have any beliefs firm enough to act on.

There is an obvious difference between the Berlin Wall and a monument like the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.: the builders of the former did not intend to create a monument; they had other purposes in mind. But the Wall, too, became an important monument because it took on a meaning of its own. Both kinds of monuments, the “intentional” and the “unintentional,” give form to the collective memory of a city.7

West Berlin never became quite like West Germany, however: its subsidized economy, peculiar legal status, and frontier allure meant that artists, draft dodgers, and nonconformists (but also pensioners) were overrepresented, businessmen and factory workers underrepresented in its population.

soft coal, East Germany’s only domestic source of energy and hence the main fuel both for industry and for home heating. It turned the winter sky brown in both Berlins, but its aroma was most pungent in the quiet residential streets of the East’s older neighborhoods,

Berlin had been divided into twenty districts in 1920 (fig. 3). The four occupying powers apportioned them in 1945: eight to the Soviets, six to the Americans, four to the British, and two to the French. The zigzag course of the Wall across the city was thus largely determined by arbitrary administrative decisions in 1920 and 1945. The district of Mitte (Middle), the historical center, lay in the Soviet sector, but after 1961 it bordered the Wall on its southern, western, and most of its northern side. Across the Wall to its south, the tenements of Kreuzberg were cut off not only from the city center but also from the parks in Treptow, to the east. East Berliners who lived just north of the center could no longer walk across the sectoral boundary to Wedding’s many small shops and cinemas. Those businesses, in turn, lost their customers in 1961 and many soon closed.

By severing long-established paths of inner-city circulation, the Wall created peculiar urban backwaters in the center of Berlin, devoid of the usual bustle of pedestrians and—what was often more noticeable—of automobiles. This was true, in different ways, on both sides. The crucial difference was that the approaches to the Wall’s Eastern side were carefully controlled. Apart from official ceremonies, Easterners were discouraged from approaching the Wall and even taking note of its existence. Those East Berliners who lived in the streets next to the Wall had to adjust to special restrictions, intrusions, and inconveniences. Friends from outside the neighborhood could never just drop by, for example: permission had to be obtained from the police.

the Wall created quiet recreational spaces on the newly established edge and, more generally, came to be seen—or rather not seen—as the edge of the world.

In contrast to the East, the Western side of the Wall was a notably disordered space. Neglect of the streets, bridges, and other structures abutting the border was apparent to anyone coming from other parts of West Berlin or West Germany. The proximity of the Wall devalued old neighborhoods, particularly in Kreuzberg, and their working-class populations were increasingly supplanted by an odd mix of Turkish immigrant workers and the growing West Berlin alternative society of self-styled dropouts, artists, musicians, punks, anarchists, and squatters in abandoned buildings.

(When the Wall disappeared, Kreuzberg became centrally located, and real estate speculation doomed the “scene.”)

Contrary to its name and reputation, then, the security system was in its essence less a wall than a controlled sequence of empty, visible spaces.

From the Western side it was the concrete wall that marked the border’s menacing presence. And only on that side was it officially a “wall.” Eastern officials dubbed their new edifice the “antifascist protective rampart.” By the 1980s, they rarely referred to any physical structure, speaking rather of “the border” or of “border security.” Use of the word “wall” (Mauer) was strictly forbidden in the East.

eschewed by others? The notion of a wall carries historical baggage: through many centuries of European history, walls were basic to the identity as well as the security of European cities. Berlin itself was a walled town for most of its history, until the 1860s. Both East and West Berlin honored this tradition. A remnant of Berlin’s medieval wall was excavated and displayed in East Berlin’s Waisenstrasse, and during the 1980s West Berlin’s archaeological office excavated a segment of the city’s eighteenth-century customs wall in Stresemannstrasse. The fact that the course of the latter wall coincided for a distance with the border between East and West Berlin, and hence with the 1961 wall, offered the new Berlin Wall a historical pedigree. The official Eastern name, “antifascist protective rampart,” also invoked the traditional wall, if not the traditional enemy, by alluding to the kind of fortification that had protected earlier towns.

in an earlier age, with much less human mobility, rulers would not have needed and subjects would not have noticed this barrier to mobility. But that is precisely the sense in which the Berlin Wall of 1961 connoted an attempt, by political fiat, to reverse the growing economic and social mobility of the modem world.

It was immediately obvious that the Wall was anti-thetical to the mobility and circulation characteristic of a modern city.

Most of Berlin’s intercity rail stations became useless and were abandoned. The elevated rail stations above Nollendorfplatz and Bülowstrasse, on a line that went nowhere, became flea markets. And how was a subway system supposed to work in a walled city? Two subway lines connected northern and southern parts of West Berlin by passing under central East Berlin, gliding through ghostly stations where no train had stopped since 1961.

Western leaders breathed a secret sigh of relief on August 13, 1961, when a midnight action by the East German army sealed off the sectoral lines in Berlin and began the construction of a barrier all the way around West Berlin, ostensibly to foil an imminent Western invasion. Because the West did not intervene, this sudden move effectively resolved the conflicting claims to the entire city: the West implicitly accepted division and the East surrendered its claim to West Berlin.

Immediately after the Wall’s construction, Berlin represented something of a political embarrassment, a place to avoid, since Western leaders—Adenauer of West Germany, Macmillan of Britain, Kennedy of the United States—were criticized for their failure to respond to it, and since they could scarcely admit to being relieved at its construction. Before long, however, West Germany and its allies began to exploit the propaganda value of the Wall as a symbol of Communism’s failure.

East Germany ritually commemorated the heroic defense of the border every August 13, granted the border guards an annual day of honor, and taught all schoolchildren the correct interpretation of the events of 1961, when alert security measures had staved off war.

In this battle to define a symbol, each side was trying to make the Berlin Wall comprehensible in ways that would justify its cause. Each side knew it had to redefine what a wall meant.

Official Eastern parlance knew no “East Berlin,” only a remote and infrequently mentioned “Westberlin,” which appeared as a blank space on the GDR’s city maps. On Western maps, by contrast, it was the Wall that was often inconspicuous, indicated only by a stripe barely distinguishable from those dividing the districts within East or West Berlin. The maps on each side serve as evidence of denial and wishful thinking.

Since the airlift of 1948-49, Berliners, more than other Germans, had been able to claim the hearts of their former enemies in the west.

former Nazis also basked in their redemption: all anticommunist Berliners stood together, and bygones could be bygones.

“Berliners” were victims of Communist tyranny and virtuous exemplars of a noble steadfastness, and they were portrayed as such in American Cold War propaganda. The adoption of the victim’s perspective made it possible to turn the shame of the Wall into a position of moral superiority.

the Wall, as an unintentional monument, came to define the urban space of Berlin. It was thus an exemplary, if by no means typical, case of a monument giving form to collective identity.

In 1945, no one in Germany thought of preserving the memory of most Nazi sites in this way. But after 1989, nearly every proposal to sweep away a relic of the East German state was met with opposition in the form of calls for remembrance. This should not have been a surprise. As we shall see, attitudes toward the Nazi past, and toward Nazi sites, had in the meantime undergone a long and painful transformation. The cumulative effects of two world wars plus a cold war have made German historical memory excruciatingly sensitive, at least in Berlin.

The oldest part of Berlin, since 1920 defined as the district of Mitte (Middle), belonged to the East. Despite its name, after 1945 it lay on the edge of East Berlin, surrounded on two and a half sides by West Berlin and thus by the Wall. Mitte had encompassed the central institutions of government, finance, and culture for successive Prussian and German regimes, including the German Democratic Republic. All had established themselves within the narrow confines of medieval and early modem Berlin. This process of continuous redevelopment has ensured that little remains of old Berlin.

After 1945, once the rubble had been cleared, the heart of East Berlin was a windswept district of vacant spaces, which were only slowly covered with new buildings. The sense of desolation was hardly countered by the row of high-rise apartment houses built along the southern edge of Mitte around 1970 as a symbolic and visual barrier reinforcing the Wall.

Berlin never amounted to much as a medieval city. Its identity in later times (unlike Cologne’s or Nuremberg’s) was thus rarely linked to its medieval past, permitting that past to be neglected. The major cities of medieval Germany lay mainly to the south and west. The vast plain of northeastern Germany was on the margins of the Roman-influenced Christian civilization defined by Charlemagne’s empire. Only in the twelfth century did most of the territory of the later GDR forge permanent links to Germany and the West. Under the sponsorship of various princes, ethnic German colonists began settling the area. They founded towns and conquered, assimilated, or drove out the Slavic inhabitants of the area, who were for the most part neither Christians nor town-dwellers. Although there may have been an earlier settlement on the site, Berlin’s poorly documented origins can probably be placed in the late twelfth century. Sometime in the early thirteenth century, town charters were granted to two settlements on opposite sides of a fordable crossing of the Spree River. The larger town on the right bank was named Berlin; the other, an island enclosed by an arm of the river, was Cölln. Each was protected by walls. The two towns would remain closely allied, and soon the name Berlin was customarily applied to both together.

Churches, fragments of churches, and one small piece of a restored town wall are all that remain of the buildings of medieval Berlin. Even the street pattern and scale of the medieval town has been virtually obliterated.

St. Nikolai is the oldest medieval church of Berlin, and the Nikolai Quarter was the heart of the medieval town. Here is a concentration of cafés and craft shops clearly aimed at tourists. Visitors to German cities are used to finding the “Altstadt,” the ancient city center, restored as a place for pedestrian strolls, nightlife, and tourists’ deutschmarks. West Berlin had no such Altstadt, except in the remote suburb (and once-independent town) of Spandau.

One peculiar fact about this ancient neighborhood should be noted, however: it is brand new. In 1979, it was mostly empty land. The ruins of the church and a few scattered buildings were all that stood in one of the more desolate patches of central Berlin. It was at this time that the East German authorities authorized a plan by the architect Günter Stahn to re-create the neighborhood. In addition to restoration of the church, the project entailed the careful re-creation of entire rows of long-destroyed houses. Some of these could lay claim to particular historical significance—the home of the eighteenth-century writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, for example—but most were simply typical examples of merchants’ houses from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Communist state had inherited many of the least bombed German cities after 1945; forty years later, complete neglect had doomed many blocks of intact buildings in the centers of cities such as Halle, Erfurt, and Potsdam. Money and attention that might have saved them had instead gone to Berlin. For that matter, even in Berlin the so-called Fishermen’s Island, the southern tip of old Cölln, had survived fairly intact into the 1960s, when it was leveled to make way for high-rise apartment buildings. For somewhat different reasons, the Nikolai Quarter’s architecture was poorly received in the West. The concrete buildings were seen as ugly, the re-creations as an offense against proper historical preservation, the entire design as unalloyed kitsch. The quality of the food and drink served in the many cafés and restaurants offered Western critics a final confirmation of their established belief in the aesthetic bankruptcy of East German Communism.

With the Nikolai Quarter, reunified Berlin came with a ready-made Altstadt that quickly began to absorb visitors from the West. The intellectuals will have to accept that visitors in search of authentic old Berlin will find it in the counterfeit form created by the East German government during its final years.

all national symbols, including palaces, are prized by some Germans and feared by others.

In the seventeenth century, however, the electorate of Brandenburg emerged as one of the most powerful German principalities. It was in this age, which we associate with the principles and practices of absolutism, that princes strove to make their residences into capital cities. Berlin was no exception, despite the devastation it (along with much of Germany) suffered during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). The elector Friedrich Wilhelm, who came to the throne of Brandenburg in 1640, has been known since his lifetime as the Great Elector. Through diplomacy and military posturing, more than through conquest, he enlarged his territorial holdings while strengthening his control over them. As part of his mercantilist policies of promoting domestic trade and industry, he also sponsored the expansion of Berlin. To the two walled towns of Berlin and Cölln he added a third and a fourth: in 1662, Friedrichswerder, just west of Cölln, and in 1674 a larger planned grid, Dorotheenstadt, centered on a grand western boulevard, Unter den Linden, which led from the castle to the prince’s game park, the Tiergarten. Meanwhile, he settled disputes between Lutherans and Calvinists in 1664 by issuing an edict of religious toleration—a rare practice at the time. This edict proved valuable in attracting skilled merchants, craftsmen, and farmers to populate the expanded Berlin and neighboring villages. Friedrich Wilhelm actively recruited persecuted Protestants, notably French Huguenots, and, with...

The Great Elector was succeeded in 1688 by his son, Elector Friedrich III, who immediately founded a fifth town, Friedrichstadt, larger than the others and laid out in blocks extending south from Unter den Linden. In 1709, he officially united these five towns into a single city of Berlin

Friedrich failed to match his father’s successes in diplomacy and expansion. More interested in establishing a grand court, he did manage to score one important success: he acquired the title of king. He obtained his crown through complicated diplomatic maneuvers. German sovereign princes were electors, grand dukes, counts, and many other things, but not kings, because they were nominally subordinate to the Holy Roman Emperor. Friedrich, however, took advantage of the fact that Brandenburg had acquired the duchy of Prussia, which lay to the east, outside the Holy Roman Empire’s borders. After currying favor with the emperor, Friedrich was granted the right to crown himself Friedrich I, “King in Prussia,” in the Prussian city of Königsberg (now Russi...

While rulers came and went—and often lived elsewhere—the palace’s physical presence defined the city center, linking old Berlin across the Spree with the new, planned extensions to the west.

(The “museum island” thus created is actually just the northern tip of old Cölln.)

What is remembered and honored about central Berlin is largely Schinkel’s work.

The dynamiting began on September 6, 1950. Despite official assurances to the contrary, salvageable parts of the palace were not reerected elsewhere, with a single exception. The removal of the ruins took months, but once they were gone the way was clear for construction of a reviewing stand from which Ulbricht and his colleagues could survey their grand demonstrations of proletarian power. While plans for new, monumental buildings came and went (see chapter 5), little changed for years on the site. As the proletarian will became less demonstrative (or as the GDR became more bourgeois), the palace’s site came to be used for parking the proletariat’s diminutive Trabant automobiles. The cathedral, museum, and arsenal, the other main buildings on the Lustgarten (now, in its expanded form, renamed Marx-Engels-Platz), remained.

By no means all opponents of rebuilding the royal palace wanted to preserve the Palace of the Republic, but the empty GDR showpiece and the ghost of its baroque predecessor were competing for the same site.

arguments about buildings and squares are inevitably arguments about history and identity.

In the absence of a king, this fortunate combination of uses cannot be recovered, so what, exactly, would be rebuilt? The practical answer was that only the facade—and probably not all of that—would be reconstructed. The palace’s friends agreed that rebuilding the interior—the magnificent throne rooms and ballrooms—would be pointless as well as impossible, since there would be no use for them. But they did believe that the city center needed the palace facade to help heal wounds and to restore a coherent urban identity. Opponents countered that a palace facade would repress half a century of historical memory and create the illusion of a continuity and wholeness that had never existed: “Neither in a monumental nor in a political sense could a palace function today as the city’s crowning glory. For it would be—in the sense of its original purpose—empty. It would be an utterly misguided symbol for this state: an architectural lurch to the right and an enormous encouragement for restorative tendencies in society. It can be assumed that this is one of the palace lobby’s intentions.”19 This outburst came from a journalist writing for a respectable middle-of-the-road newspaper. Its imputation that the palace debate was really about right-wing politics should not surprise anyone who knows that deep philosophical and political divisions lurk just beneath the surface of German debates about form and identity, including debates about architectural form and urban identity. Many on th...

What does this have to do with the royal palace? Its defenders would protest that the palace is not a symbol of Prussian militarism or German chauvinism—and they would be largely correct. The palace was essentially completed prior to the death of Friedrich I, before one can discern anything resembling Prussian militarism or German nationalism. Several later kings lived there seldom or never—including Wilhelm I, who presided over German unification and was the first Hohenzollern to be called emperor. Also—an important if rarely voiced argument for the palace’s friends—it can be seen as uncontaminated by the stain of Nazism. It played essentially no role in the Third Reich. Hitler, wary of any sentiment to restore the monarchy, shunned the building.

Proponents of reconstruction cited many examples of projects they saw as comparable. Their favorite was postwar Warsaw, a city much more thoroughly destroyed than Berlin. Although (or because) there was virtually nothing left standing in the center of their capital, the Polish leadership decided soon after the war to undertake a careful restoration of the royal palace and the adjoining Old Town, returning it as closely as possible to its prewar appearance. The reconstructed buildings represented an obvious statement of national pride and defiance in the face of near obliteration. Statements of what might appear to be German national pride, however, make many people nervous—not least many Germans. Moreover, it is a different matter to envisage the reconstruction of a building gone for nearly half a century, one remembered firsthand by relatively few Berliners.

The obvious historical precedent for such an undertaking was in sight just across the river: the Nikolai Quarter. But the palace’s proponents never mentioned it. Praise for any GDR project would presumably have been seen as tainting the palace proposal.

Belief in the authenticity of the original artifact has remained constant among preservationists, but the enormous destruction of World War II forced a rethinking of their practices in Germany and other European countries. So much had been lost so quickly; ruins were the spectacle of daily life, not the exceptional reminders of a distant past. Compromises with principle, backed up by overwhelming public sentiment, permitted the restoration or, in a few notable cases, the complete reconstruction of destroyed buildings.

With a few notable exceptions left deliberately as ruins, West Berlin by the 1960s had chosen either obliteration or repair for all its major buildings.