Reframing Berlin

Gul Kacmaz Erk, Christopher S. Wilson

Description

Reframing Berlin is about how architecture and the built environment can reveal the memory of a city, an urban memory, through its transformation and consistency over time by means of ‘urban strategies’, which have developed throughout history as cities have adjusted to numerous political, religious, economic and societal changes. These strategies are organised on a ‘memory spectrum’, which range from demolition to memorialisation.

It reveals the complicated relationship between urban strategies and their influence on memory-making in the context of Berlin since 1895, with the help of film locations. It utilises cinematic representations of locations as an audio-visual archive to provide a deeper analysis of the issues brought up by strategies and case studies in relation to memory-making.

Foreword by Kathleen James-Chakraborty

A new volume in the Mediated Cities series from Intellect

Foreword

Kathleen James-Chakraborty

Introduction 

Berlin: The Remembered City 

Urban Memory 

Urban Strategies 

Memory in Berlin 

Filmstadt Berlin

1. Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Demolition 

New Reich Chancellery 

Palace of the Republic 

2. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Temporary Installation

Escape Tunnels 

Wrapped Reichstag 

3. From Scratch: New Construction 

Sony Center 

Spreebogen 

4. Business or Pleasure?: Disneyfication 

Checkpoint Charlie 

Berliner Stadtschloss 

5. Cycle of Life: Mutation 

The Berlin Wall 

Potsdamer Platz 

6. Prosthetic Limbs: Supplementation 

The Reichstag Dome 

Berlin Olympic Stadium 

7. Frozen in Time: Suspension 

Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church 

Topography of Terror 

8. On the Move: Relocation 

Grand Hotel Esplanade 

Victory Column 

9. Survival Instinct: Adaptation 

Berlin Techno Clubs 

Berlin Bunkers 

10. Altered States: Appropriation 

Berlin TV Tower 

Neue Wache 

11. My Precious!: Preservation 

The Brandenburg Gate 

Berlin State Opera 

12. Once upon a Time: Memorialization 

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe 

Stumbling Blocks 

Conclusions: Berlin: Remember When …

Berlin Lessons 

The Global Context 

Filmography

Bibliography 

Index 

Sujets

• Buildings
• architectural history
• History of architecture
• Disneyfication
• Index of urban studies articles
• General officer
• Building
• Cinema of Germany
• Memory
• General
• Germany
• History
• ART
• Film
• Berlin
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 10 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781789386899
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Reframing Berlin
Mediated Cities
ISSN 2058-9409
Series Editor: Dr. Graham Cairns, Architecture_Media_Politics_Society (AMPS) Director
Please send all series enquiries and proposals to Jelena.
The Mediated Cities series explores the contemporary city as a hybrid phenomenon of digital technologies, new media, digital art practices and physical infrastructure. It is an inherently interdisciplinary series around intersecting issues related to the city of today and tomorrow.
As Marshall McLuhan identified in 1964, today s global village is a place of simultaneous experience; a site for overlapping material and electronic effects; a place not so much altered by the content of a medium, but rather, a space transformed by the very nature of medias themselves. For some, this is little more than the inevitable evolution of urban space in the digital age. For others, it represents the city s liberation from the condition of stasis. For scaremongers, it s a nightmare scenario in which the difference between the virtual and the real, the electronic and the material, the recorded and the lived, becomes impossible to identify.
Reframing Berlin
Architecture, Memory-Making and Film Locations

Christopher S. Wilson and G l Ka maz Erk
First published in the UK in 2023 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2023 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2023 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: MPS Limited
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas
Cover image: Film still from B-Movie: Lust amp; Sound in West-Berlin 1979-1989 (2015), used with permission from DEF Media GmbH.
Production manager: Laura Christopher
Typesetter: MPS Limited
Print ISBN 978-1-78938-687-5
ePDF ISBN 978-1-78938-688-2
ePUB ISBN 978-1-78938-689-9
This is part of the Mediated Cities series.
ISSN: 2058-9409
Series editor: Graham Cairns, AMPS
To find out about all our publications, please visit our website. There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue and buy any titles that are in print.
www.intellectbooks.com
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
To the memory of filmmaker Paddy Cahill 21 April 1977-9 April 2021
Contents
Foreword
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
Introduction
Berlin: The remembered city
Urban memory
Urban strategies
Memory in Berlin
Filmstadt Berlin
1. Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Demolition
New Reich Chancellery
Palace of the Republic
2. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Temporary Installation
Escape tunnels
Wrapped Reichstag
3. From Scratch: New Construction
Sony Center
Spreebogen
4. Business or Pleasure?:Disneyfication
Checkpoint Charlie
Berliner Stadtschloss
5. Cycle of Life: Mutation
The Berlin Wall
Potsdamer Platz
6. Prosthetic Limbs: Supplementation
The Reichstag Dome
Berlin Olympic Stadium
7. Frozen in Time: Suspension
Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church
Topography of terror
8. On the Move: Relocation
Grand Hotel Esplanade
Victory Column
9. Survival Instinct: Adaptation
Berlin techno clubs
Berlin bunkers
10. Altered States: Appropriation
Berlin TV Tower
Neue Wache
11. My Precious!: Preservation
The Brandenburg Gate
Berlin State Opera
12. Once upon a Time: Memorialization
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
Stumbling Blocks
Conclusions:
Berlin lessons
The global context
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
Berlin is an exception among European capitals. Unlike London, Paris, Rome or Vienna, it was founded in the Middle Ages rather than by the Romans and became a major metropolis only in the nineteenth century. Moreover, its rapid growth was related as much to the industries that clustered there as the rising importance of the Prussian state, of which it was the capital before Germany was united under the leadership of the local Hohenzollern dynasty in 1871. It is, quite fittingly, the European city that, even before it became the site of a murderous regime, was largely destroyed by aerial bombardment and invasion, divided between the victorious powers, and became ground zero for the Cold War, became a particularly attractive subject for two specifically modern media, photography and then film. Where Paris is inseparable from the painting of the nineteenth-century European urban life, filmic depictions of twentieth and twenty-first century Berlin are central, as this book demonstrates, to both the history of the medium and of the city.
Berlin is not famous for being beautiful, although in the right light and at the right season in front of the right building or landscape it can be. Instead, it is important as the site where many of the multiple modernities of the twentieth and early twenty-first century found their most urgent expression. This included already before the First World War the emergence of such major industries as locomotive production (Borsig) and electricity (AEG), as well as consumerism (Wertheim) and entertainment (Café des Westens). Germany lost the First World War; in defeat substantial chunks of territory to the east, north and west were sheared off and awarded to Poland, Denmark and France. But Berlin continued to flourish; during the Golden Twenties, it also became the world's most innovative center of film production. The Babelsberg studios drew as well upon experimental theatre for the masses conceptualized already before the war by Max Reinhardt, the city's leading theater director. Already in the 1920s, the city became not just the backdrop but a filmed actor with whom audiences forged the same eerie sense of familiarity as they did with the faces and gestures of Gustav Fröhlich and Marlene Dietrich.
The excitement buzzing through Wilhelmine (1888–1918) and Weimar (1919–33) Berlin was largely the product of private initiative. Few twentieth-century political regimes, however, have taken the representation of their cultural authority as seriously than the three that governed the city between 1933 and 1989. The National Socialists, and the governments of West Berlin and the German Democratic Republic, of which East Berlin served as the capital, all staged their regimes in ways that were designed to entice the camera. These proved as seductive in many cases to their opponents, even generations later, as to their own supporters. The challenge of tying the city back together following German reunification in 1990 was also extremely imageable, although by the twenty-first century the internet was as important as film to its global dissemination. But Berlin in the past 30 years has not just been about remembering horrific pasts. The parties, including Christopher Street Day, the Love Parade and the rest of the techno scene, much of it made possible by deindustrialization and cheap flights, have become legendary, too. And since the 1980s Kreuzberg's counterculture and Turkish communities have put up principled, if not always successful resistance to the gentrification that has more recently transformed Prenzlauerberg into a haven for young Americans and Israelis dissatisfied with regimes at home.
Considering the way in which Berlin has been filmed is, of course, not new. But this collection is unique in the way in which its analysis of the built environment is organized. In place of a chronological narrative or indeed a tour of the city that follows a cartographic path, the authors analyze pairs of buildings in terms of their fate over time or, in one final and particularly meaningful coupling, their purpose. While scholarly analyses of Berlin have for 30 years been dominated by the theme of memory, Wilson and Kaçmaz Erk's typological focus on fate of buildings generates fresh pairings and perspectives that provoke us to think in new ways about how the life cycles of buildings affect our experience of the cities they shape. The transformation of their appearances, purposes and meanings across time are presented here in ways that challenge us to think anew about the multiple ways in which specific sites contribute to shaping our experience and understanding of the city as a whole.
In assembling a list of more than a thousand films that feature Berlin – and that a list this long is not comprehensive says a great deal about the city's unique role in the history of the medium – Wilson and Kacmaz Erk provide a guide to future scholars, film buffs and Berlin fans. Meanwhile, their collages of the way similar views out over the city or of places within it have been captured or recreated across time reminds us that, despite the enormous changes in the appearance of the city that these films chronicle, there is also often startling spatial continuity across contradictory political regimes and that films not just reinforce but also invent a sense of this.
Film has, of course, also played a prominent role in establishing the now platitudinous idea that Berlin is a city haunted by its complex past. Wim Wenders's iconic Wings of Desire (1987) provided the point of departure for the way in which many of its viewers experienced the city's frayed edges once the champagne corks stopped popping after the exuberant celebrations that marked the fall of the Berlin Wall. And film itself, as anyone who has glimpsed fragments of the equally celebrated Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927) in the corners of museum exhibitions knows, can preserve artistically staged representations of a long-vanished present as apparent facts about the past. This book returns again and again to the ways in which attitudes towards a particular struct