So I went to Berlin recently. I love Berlin, its beautiful and ugly like an old man who's had an interesting life. I drank beer by the litre and walked the streets of Prenzlauerberg pretending I was Sally Bowles and he was Christopher Isherwood. What more could you want from a mini-break.
Here are some of my photos. They aren't very good; my camera is awful.
A tiny bike.
Teacups and graffitti
Dog in a fountain in Volkspark Friedrichshain
more grafitti in Prenzlauerberg
Posters, grafitti, bulletholes and some very old looking signage (above the door). Palimpsests.
Building a new socialist future
Berlin is great for urban studies geeks. The history of western Europe is inscribed and reinscribed upon its axes just as the violence of European history is rearticulated as violent, aggressive urban forms slashing through older spaces leaving a bizarre, unfinished and disjointed landscape. Bismark’s Berlin was created brutally on top of an older city; in the interwar period the city was made again as a wholly new imperial city; during the cold war era wide roads, tower blocks and industry, not to mention the Wall, created a brutal modernist form equal in scale and grandeur but wholly separate in orientation to the imperial cities which lay underneath. Today, this sense of dissonance seems only to be ameliorated by the continuing impact of the Berlin Wall on the landscape of much of the city (both in presence and in absence) and the barren, windswept and expensive bureaucratic district coming into existence beside the old Reichstag. Each generation punches its vision of modernity through the city’s landscape so that the city consists today of unrelated, jarring, incomprehensible urban forms.
But these layered modernities are constantly disrupted. Amongst this constant recreation and shattering, renewing images of the future is the constant lure of the past. The large scale urban forms are tempered by beautiful details and small images: the art deco interiors of Hackeschen Markt, the plaques in the pavements where Jewish families once lived, the overgrown graveyards of Judischer Friedhof and Griefswalder Str. Graffiti—ubiquitous and covering the spectrum of artistic merit—is also a key part of Berlin’s aesthetic. In Britain it’s a signifier of urban pathologies but in Berlin it is strangely beautiful, disrupting and reformulating Berlin’s hard lines, articulating a conscious resistance to bureaucratic urban policies.
In many ways, graffiti was key to my understanding of Berlin, because in many ways Berlin was a city I did not understand. It is a walled city with the wall removed, leaving traces in the layout of roads and the orientation of structures which no longer have an relevance to the spaces around them. As an outsider, and as a tourist, its centreless geography is hard to comprehend; as a pedestrian Berlin’s topography makes little sense. Moreover, the social signifiers which structure and decode urban life in Britain—litter, graffiti, demolished sites—seemingly had very different readings and meanings in the German capital. For hundreds of years Berlin sat on top of the fault-line of world politics, and today those tectonic plates have shifted. With this absence of competing powers the city defies and resists interpretation, and that is exactly the reason why it is so wonderful.
