Institute of Contemporary Arts

Berlin Babylon

Date: 5 August 2007

Berlin carries a lot of weight on its shoulders: Nazis, war, division, The Wall. At times, with its holocaust monuments, preserved Gestapo basements and streetside historical plaques, you could fear that it might ossify into some kind of atrocity exhibition. But it carries the burden lightly: like any capital city it has its cultural splendours, its beautiful restaurants and its architecturally stunning new government buildings. Berliners are a civilised, friendly and urbane bunch, too. Those who've left London to return to the city claim to miss London's diversity and general happeningness but I could easily exchange the noisy aggression of Hackney and Lewisham for the wide streets, trams and spacious beer gardens of Prenzlauerberg. 

Even the old divisions between East and West have realised new value for the city: the apartment blocks of the east have become desirable urban dwellings in neighbourhoods full of trendy bars and restaurants. In one of the vacant spaces blighted by the wall, Potsdamer Platz, the hideous Sony Centre and its family of corporate sub-skyscrapers have sprung up like corpse flowers. Near the massive new train station, the enormous Hamburger Bahnhof, complete with renovated train sheds, hosts one of the largest collections of contemporary art I've ever seen: four hours isn't quite enough to exhaust it. The collection belongs to Friedrich Christian Flick, grandson of German industrialist and Nazi Friedrich Flick, who liquidated the family fortune to buy a vast collection of late modern and contemporary art. Once again, historical tension has been realised as cultural value.

Following the course of the old wall is strictly for the tourists... a narrow double line of bricks traces its ghost through once-divided neighbourhoods that are now whole. Checkpoint Charlie is a circus - men dressed in American soldiers' uniforms pose for photos in front of the old ‘You are now leaving the American sector' sign, and souvenir shops sell postcards attached to plastic bubbles containing tiny spraypainted concrete chips of the True Wall. Elsewhere, across the river from Kreuzberg in the East Side gallery, there is a ‘Detour to the Japanese Sector' painted by cheeky visiting artists. 

Lost among all this is the death strip. When you first see a remaining slice of the Berlin wall, a thin slab of cast concrete with a wide stabilising base and its characteristic pipe-shaped top, you wonder that such a fragile structure was capable of keeping a city in two parts. What reinforced the wall, always butting up against the Western sector, was a ‘death strip' inside the Eastern zone (charted in an artwork by Franz John), patrolled by DDR soldiers on foot, overseen by watchtowers, and rigged with automatic guns triggered by tripwires that unleashed volleys of shot through funnels into the bodies of those attempting to flee to the west.

Some of these are on display in the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, alongside accounts of the ingenious ways in which people attempted to flee East Germany. Tucked into hidden compartments in minuscule cars, in scuba kits assembled from contraband parts, and even in a homemade light aircraft built with a Trabant engine, many people successfully fled the East. For the most part the escapees seem to have been smart young working class people with the skills to build such contraptions, rather than the politically-tortured middle class intelligentsia portrayed in The Lives of Others. Escaping was a practical choice for a better life or a family reunion, rather than an ideological broadside in the Cold War. But then again, few fled from West to East. 

One of the unlucky ones was Peter Fechter. Together with his friend Helmut Kulbeik, the eighteen-year old bricklayer attempted to leap from a window, sprint across the death strip and climb the then merely two metre high wall. Kulbeik made it, but Fechter was shot in the pelvis. In full view of both GDR and US soldiers and an increasingly angry Western crowd, he cried for help that didn't come, and bled to death in full view of everyone.

His story occupies a whole wall in the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, displayed alongside the wooden cross that was placed on the western side of the wall near where he fell (when the area was redeveloped after Die Wende a sober and secular metal stele replaced it on Zimmerstr). Though many tried and died, and Fechter wasn't even the first (that was Günter Litfin who died nearly a whole year earlier), the pointless death of a young man is a symbolically hideous and bloody episode that reflects no better on the American forces of ‘freedom' who stood by under orders not to intervene, than it does on the more obviously ‘tyrannical' DDR. 

Next Saturday, I'm going to take part in artist Mark S. Gubb's reconstruction,  The Death of Peter Fechter, as a US soldier. I'm slightly fascinated with the Wall, and also with the walls that have followed it. Both the ‘security fence' across the southern border of the United States and the wall dividing Israel from its occupied territories have heavy echoes of the wall that Ronald Reagan so pompously demanded be torn down. I also often experience an in intense hatred for people in uniform: the armed security people at the top of Whitehall that I pass on my way to work; police officers directing and corralling anti-war demonstrations, and it must be something like this hatred that I imagine Berliners felt for both Americans and Germans who refused to save the life of a teenager.

I imagine the performance is going to be something quite powerful to witness, for the audience to take the part of the crowd watching a young man die. Personally, and aside from the objectives of the performance, I want to feel the focus of all those hatreds, the recreation of the tension that held Berlin in stasis for thirty years before giving birth to a new city. If history is played out first as tragedy and then farce, perhaps the third time around brings enlightenment.

In order to post a comment, please log in:

E-mail:

Password:
Login
Forgotten your password?
Then enter your e-mail in the box above and click: Send Password

Not Registered? Then register here now.