THE WALLS OF BERLIN: Architecture And Oblivion

prosecution

The Baltic Wall

In extremis: all urban surfaces are screens, their strata forming apertures to project out their ineradicable histories and their charges of memory, and to propel the eye that intimately touches them, from immediacy to immediacy.

Urban surfaces, vivified both by superficial gestural sweeps and deep tactile embeddings of the eye, manifest their infinite manias and preoccupations, their damagings and scars, non-erasable inscriptions and entrenched derelictions, outlandish markings and graffiti lineages, fractures and fissures and openings, proliferating layers and mutating outgrowths, strange veerings and oscillations across time, pervasive corporeal residues, and mysterious urban vanishings. Urban surfaces comprise the blocked-up mouths of the city, that demand an unleashing in order for their languages and their images to disgorge. And for such transformational memories and obsessions to be released, urban surfaces may also exact a meshing of their preoccupations with those of film and visual art, so that the city instigates and creates its own films and its art-images, at the same time that its filmmakers and artists are provoked and engulfed by those surfaces, entering into the endless narrative abyss of what makes up a city.

While travelling in the Baltic cities, I was stopped-dead by a wall, along an alleyway of derelict, emptied-out sixteenth-century houses, that led to a city’s boarded-up film museum. I touched that wall, frozen and damp, dense and open. A ragged scattering of machine-gun bullet-impacts had choreographed its way vertically up or down that surface, during one or other of the numerous conflicts that had assigned that city to Soviet or German empires. A human body had once stood before it, in combat or in readiness for execution, and the constellated gougings had multiple variants, according to the angles of fire, and their penetrations of that surface or their deflected ricochets. Or could some ferocious form of pulverising urban disintegration exactly mirror the impact of a spray of bullets? At the most intensive impact-site, the iridescent algae-green surface appeared to have largely effaced itself, as though in shock, down to a pale primrose hue, while far darker green patches of mutated cement, or whitewash, had amassed around that zone, in places concentrating into a deliquescing near-black, or to blue. At several points, a further layer of wall-coating had once been applied, but had friably cracked and mostly dispersed, and misfired, as though unable to adhere itself to that tumultuous surface. And visible deep within the bullet-impacts, and at the perimeters of that zone, the original brickwork infrastructure was exposed: the manual work utterly irregular, in places made of small rectangular ochre bricks, at others of jagged chunks of stone, with cracked and petrified objects maladroitly thrust into the voids of the long-gone mortar, against the grain and perhaps in desperation, to somehow maintain the disintegrating building upright, as a disjuncture and a wound, and as a living element of the city, its surface as intense and immediate as that of any image from film or art.

And so, from the point of origin of that seminal Baltic wall, I involuntarily started thinking about Berlin: the supreme, unique site for revelatory urban surfaces. Berlin forms a miraculous city of voluble walls whose profound traumas, ecstasies and obsessions constitute its urban media.

And, simultaneously, Berlin holds a vanished, silent city within itself: that of East Berlin, erased from one moment to the next, on 3 October 1990, as an urban conjuring trick whose power exceeded all others, while the figures that had inhabited it continued to live in that vacuumed space. Berlin is a city of protests and political revolutions – almost always failed revolutions – and of consumerist mutations and grandiose corporate architectures, with those two contrary forces pinioned together, unsteadily and deliriously mismatched, with a visual impact like that of a fist that takes two disparate handfuls of ashes, crushes them together, then sweeps that mixed substance across the face of an oblivious urban surface, for which memory is either too glaring or else forgotten. And with that abrupt compulsion to look at, into and through Berlin’s urban surfaces, I left the Baltic wall behind, headed for the airport and took a flight to the city.

As the aeroplane made its westward approach into Berlin, through mist and cloud, I tried to catch glimpses of the city, each urban flash filtered and obscured by weather-conditions that delineated and controlled the time and parameters of those visions. The vast artery of the Karl-Marx-Allee materialised for a split-second. Then the entire city disappeared, caught within a last-minute storm. As though to compensate for those limitations and erasures, a sudden rush of film and art images of Berlin filled my eyes, and I realised how, above all other cities, the film and art images of Berlin always collided and intersected with the contemporary city, and were a creation of Berlin, just as they determined its perception, from the first-ever film images of the city conjured by the Skladanowsky Brothers in the 1890s, and the imageries of the then-accelerating, mutating city and its peripheries, painted by its artists, onwards, through digitised media, to the present moment. To look into the urban surfaces of Berlin, and explore their essential emanations, those surfaces need to hold, embedded within them, the film and art of the city.

This book forms a sequence of forty journeys into Berlin, and through its urban surfaces, with those preoccupations with film and art always held close at hand. For every ocular journey that may excoriate and probe the face of the city, a film or an art image (including those from the GDR era) works to delineate and focus whatever is exposed, and to release the vital charge of history, memory, obsession, passion that had been concealed or abandoned there, intentionally or involuntarily. Each exploration of an urban surface is marked by an initiating photographic image – an image always saturated in memory and time, and by corporeality – that serves as a conduit to activate whatever can be discovered, in language, about that surface. A city is nothing, and nowhere, unless it is extreme, and all of the worldwide century-long fascination with Berlin stems from its vital aberrance: its inability to behave as cities habitually do, so that it insurges, is apocalyptically destroyed, creates manically, divides and falls, and sensationally pleasures itself, located in urban excess. Berlin projects its scarred and adorned surfaces, simultaneously profound and capricious, always held in tension and complicity with film and art.

The Skladanowsky Projector

The Skladanowsky projector, the ‘Bioskop’, constructed by the Berlin magicians Max and Emil Skladanowsky in the summer of 1895, and used for the first-ever screening of films for a public audience, at the Wintergarten Ballroom of the Central Hotel in Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse on 1 November 1895, forms the originating vision machine for the memory-seared city, for all of its time and space, and for every urban surface it contains. Since Berlin is a city that generates itself through its projections, pre-eminently those held by its film and art images, and through the intersection of those projections with its urban surfaces, the Skladanowsky projector constitutes the seminal organ of perception able to conjure the city into life. Berlin’s art images are located in the urban matter of the city itself, without any unique origin, and their points of contact with the city are indelibly meshed into the walls of Berlin themselves, but its film images, together with those images’ materialisation within the face of the city, originate solely in the extravagant dreams and ruined urban obsessions held by the Skladanowsky projector.

From the Berlin airport in the south-east, I took the train straight through the city, as though in oblivion, skimming over its endless transmutations, eyes averted, out to Potsdam, just beyond the south-western perimeter of Berlin. Across the river from the Potsdam station, the Skladanowsky projector stood in the foyer of the town’s film museum, confined in a glass case, semi-abandoned and overlooked. Max Skladanowsky had already been experimenting with film cameras for two or three years, shooting films from the roof of a building in the Prenzlauerberg district and in the northern streets of Berlin, when he devised and hand-built his idiosyncratic projector, in order to show those films to public audiences. Possessing none of the technological sophistication or resources of the era’s other film-pioneers, he had conceived of his dual-lens ‘Bioskop’ projector out of the blue, with a sense of urgency, as an outlandishly botched, unprecedented, but still somehow operational device. Not knowing how to build a film projector, he had done it anyway, like the young bell-founder in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, and it had miraculously worked. I stood and looked into the one exposed lens of the projector, its counterpart obscured by the serrated mechanism which enabled hand-perforated film-images to be illuminated by each lens in alternation. But once I had looked into that lens, I had allowed an irreparable ocular inhabitation to take hold, from the very origins of film. And I realised that all of the urban surfaces I would explore in Berlin would now be envisioned and impelled directly through the seminal aperture of the Skladanowsky projector’s lens – with the film images of Berlin alternating with its art images, just as the projector alternated its own two separate inputs of images – in the form of visual and textual conjurations of the city.

The first journey undertaken through Berlin, launched and directed by the Skladanowsky projector, was one which tracked the scattered traces within the city of the Skladanowsky Brothers themselves, as near-forgotten and vanished instigators of film. From the immediate tangible contact with the Skladanowsky projector, I left the Potsdam film museum and headed for the centre of Berlin on foot, across the Glienicke bridge and through the dense lake-side forests on the city’s south-western expanse, passing by the tiny forest cemetery where the singer Nico – the haunting presence in the films of Philippe Garrel, and the bewitching provocateuse in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita – had been buried.

Finally, I reached the site in the Friedrichstrasse of the Wintergarten Ballroom, where the Skladanowsky projector had unwittingly instigated the all-powerful, worldwide regime of the cinematic spectacle (only a month or so before the Lumière Brothers staged their own first public projections, in Paris’s Grand Café), the film-images shown on a side-stage as a minor, subsidiary attraction as part of an evening-long programme of magic-acts and dancers. The vast entertainment palace of the Wintergarten Ballroom, with its ornate glass roof, together with the lavish Central Hotel which enclosed it, had been utterly destroyed by an RAF bombing raid on 21 June 1944; its location, in the multiply-rebuilt Friedrichstrasse, had eventually been taken by the Rossmann pharmacy-supermarket. In Franz Kafka’s novel Der Verschollene ( The Man who Disappeared/ Amerika), Rossmann is the name of the young outcast who vanishes by train into the interior of America; and during the final winter of his life, 1923-24, living in Berlin at a time of acute economic turmoil with his lover Dora Diamant, the ailing Kafka had frequently visited the Friedrichstrasse in his search for restaurants able to alleviate his tubercular starvation, before finally abandoning Berlin for Vienna to fade out of existence in a convalescence clinic. But within the contemporary urban surfaces of Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse, and the erasure of his cinematic traces, Max Skladanowsky is ‘the man who disappeared’.

From the site of the Wintergarten Ballroom in the Friedrichstrasse, I walked to the junction of the Kastanienallee and the Schönhauserallee; on the roof of the nineteenth-century apartment-building at that junction (the ‘Ecke Schönhauser’), Max Skladanowsky had shot the first-ever film of Berlin, one second in duration, of his brother Emil dancing, with the innumerable industrial towers, chimneys and spires of northern Berlin visible in the background. Max Skladanowsky had subsequently been so eager to disappear backwards into time, to enhance his status as a film-pioneer, that he had backdated those urban images to 1892, when they had actually been made around two years later. From that roof, high above the city, the panorama of northern Berlin appeared almost identical to the moment of the Skladanowsky Brothers’ inhabitation of that space, the chimneys and spires diminished by wartime bombing, but supplemented by the prefabricated housing-towers of the GDR era. A mosaic had been embedded into the paving stones in front of the apartment-building, with the single word ‘Skladanowsky’ part-submerged by construction debris and a pile of red earth. Further north along the Schönhauserallee, the site of the Café Sello – where the Skladanowsky Brothers had staged experimental test-runs of their projector in the summer of 1895, in front of an oblivious clientele of unsuspecting beer-drinkers, in preparation for their Wintergarten Ballroom film-screening – had been erased and replaced by a neighbourhood cinema and then by a supermarket, its garish facade awrily disconnected in time and space to the now-stranded commemorative mosaic installed on the pavement in front of that site’s earlier incarnation, with the date and name of the Skladanowsky projector: ‘1895 Bioskop’. The traces of the Skladanowsky Brothers’ presence appeared to be gradually disintegrating in the mutating terrain of Berlin, with only the infinite power of their projector’s urban illumination, and its capacity to permeate and reveal the city’s surfaces, conversely enduring, and proliferating. The Skladanowsky Brothers’ cinematic experiments had collapsed in acrimony only a year after their Wintergarten Ballroom screening; far more technologically adept filmmakers and exhibitors rapidly superseded them, their trade licenses were arbitrarily suspended by the Berlin authorities, and their film-career ended almost before it began. The two brothers, Max and Emil, quarrelled and split-apart, with Emil falling out of history. Heading further north, I finally reached the cemetery of the Pankow district of Berlin, where the gold-engraved word ‘Bioskop’ led my eye to Max Skladanowsky’s tomb. By the end of his life, three months into the Second World War, the Nazi regime, with its own filmic obsessions, had vaunted his innovations of over forty years earlier, and Goebbels sent a wreath to his funeral.

From Max Skladanowsky’s tomb in the Pankow cemetery, I walked back through Berlin and its peripheries to the Potsdam film museum and the battered-together projector of serrated metal, glass, nails and wood, and stared back into the lens of that unique medium of urban