Browsing 29 posts in Berlin

Berlin

The Disneyfication of the Berlin Wall

by · 08/09/11

Twenty-two years after the fall of the Wall, a long-reunified Berlin is still in the midst of trying to adequately commemorate the years spent separated by four feet of concrete.

The border to East Berlin at Niederkirchner Straße (via www.berlin-wall.org)

Frank Hornig, writing for Der Spiegel, notes that Berlin’s most creative entrepreneurs have been the first to profit from Berlin’s not-so-distant past, to the chagrin of many. Business ventures like André Prager’s “Trabi Safaris”—a once-in-a-lifetime experience that essentially comprises getting into a notoriously terrible East German car and touring the route of the Wall while fearing a simulated traffic stop—have seen great success. Panhandlers and students alike have found it profitable to dress up like Stasi officers and East German police officers. Entertainers dress like Allied soldiers and pose with tourists at Checkpoint Charlie.

The portrayals of life in the time of the Wall have become so attractive to tourists that secondary entrepreneurs have started their business ventures nearby—not because they are close to the Wall, but, rather, because they are close to the tourists. They dress up like Disney characters and put on a show for visitors, perhaps not even realizing what the concrete divider between East and West has now become: a meaningless form that renders Germany’s painful post-WWII history easy to swallow.

The state of the Wall has prompted a lot of discussion amongst politicians and conservators, fearful that Berlin might become a theme park for twentieth-century totalitarianism and oppression. In effect, as Hornig suggests, we are witnessing the “Disneyfication” of the Wall and its history. What was not so long ago a very real experience for so many Germans has become a hyperreal fantasy land that supports itself through a kind of song-and-dance interpretation of history.

This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the construction of the Wall. Official commemorations have been organized: the president, the chancellor, and other top officials are expected to attend a solemn event at the Berlin Wall memorial on Bernauer Straße. Simultaneously, business will be as usual at the Brandenburg Gate for those who have found profit in recent German History.

A performer dressed as Darth Vader in front of the Brandenburg Gate. (via Der Spiegel)

World leaders from former Czech President Vaclav Havel to former US Secretary of State James Baker to former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas have collectively called for the construction of a new museum at Checkpoint Charlie. However, little progress has been made in official German circles; it seems that few German politicians are interested in the museum.

Little can be done about the performers and entrepreneurs, which is probably for the best. It is, after all, an intractable conflict between respectful commemoration and liberal freedoms—a Hegelian tragedy in the making. Concerned parties, then, must focus—for the time being—on trying to contextualize the Wall in a respectful, historically accurate way. Considering politicians’ disinterest in the matter, it is private citizens who must create respectful spaces of contemplation and learning between the Disney characters, two-stroke East German cars, and Darth Vader.

Read Hornig’s article here. For more on Germany, monuments, and memory, check out Habitus’ Berlin issue.

Berlin | Cities

“How do we honor the dead artistically?” — George Heymont on monuments

by · 08/05/11

George Heymont, an arts critic with The Huffington Post, has published an interesting piece on the nature of memorials.

When we lose someone important to us, Heymont tells us, we sometimes hire an artist or an architect to commemorate the life of our loved one; maybe we create a special place ourselves that reminds us of them. However, without diminishing the importance of memorials in granite or marble, Heymont suggests that monuments can take more abstract forms than that of the gravestone or the reflecting pool.

Considering music that honors the dead, Heymont cites several pieces that he thinks best epitomize the notion of a monument: amongst many others, he mentions Wagner’s “Sigfried’s Memorial March,” from Gotterdammerung; Gershwin’s “My Man’s Gone Now,” from Porgy and Bess; and Berlin’s “Supper Time,” from As Thousands Cheer. While each piece differs greatly in terms of form and content, each represents an intrinsically human reaction to bereavement: art.

It is in this spirit that Heymont dedicates a section of his article to the award-winning documentary In Heaven Underground: The Wiessensee Jewish Cemetery. Written and directed by Britta Wauer, In Heaven Underground chronicles the 131-year history of Berlin’s Wiessensee Jewish Cemetery, the largest active Jewish burial ground in Europe. Untouched by the Nazi regime, Wiessensee is the final resting place for over 115,000 Jews.

A tree blooms in the Weissensee Jewish Cemetery (via http://www.thefestivalagency.com)

Wauer’s challenge was to create a film about a cemetery that was not just a heavy-handed tribute to those 115,000 Jews—creating a film about death and death alone would not do Wiessensee’s history justice. Wauer, in her director’s statement, writes: “To reduce the dead of Weissensee to their sad ends is a falsification. Many of those buried there completed unusual things, achieved something special, or experienced something strange.”

In his analysis, Heymont puts emphasis on the role that music plays in In Heaven Underground. “It is the original score by Karim Sebastian Elias,” writes Heymont, “that sets so much of the film’s tone in critical scenes.”

It seems that Elias’ music contributes a sense of connectedness to the film that might not have been possible solely through dialogue. A film about 115,000 deaths is going to be a film that mourns each individual in a complex and inarticulable way. The tone that Elias sets with his score is one that somehow, paradoxically, acknowledges Weissensee’s sheer facticity while it simultaneously rejoices in the cemetery’s natural beauty and in the role it played in the lives of so many German Jews during times of peace and times of strife.

Read Heymont’s article here, and watch the trailer for In Heaven Underground here.

 

Berlin | Cities

Maya Zack’s Living Room

by · 08/02/11

Living Room, a installation by Israeli visual artist and filmmaker Maya Zack, is on exhibition until October 30th at The Jewish Museum. Developed in collaboration with Manfred Nomburg, a German-born Jew who fled Berlin in 1938, Living Room consists of four life-sized 3D prints that represent Nomburg’s abandoned home in Germany. Zack’s renderings came solely from a series of intensive interviews with Nomburg that now narrate the exhibition. Nomburg, seventy years and 1,770 miles away from Berlin, recounts in loving detail the material minutiae of his former home—the chairs, the wallpaper, the carpets. Speaking about these details, in turn, seems to jog Nomburg’s memory; he intersperses his description with anecdotes relating to the people with whom he shared his living room.

Much like Zack’s film Mother Economy, exhibited at The Jewish Museum in 2008, Living Room tries to make sense of the often-ignored intersection between personal histories and broad historical events. Zack’s close examination of Nomburg’s life demands that the viewer consider, at least for the moment, the individual dramas of the Holocaust.

Click here for the exhibit listing at The Jewish Museum.

For more, read our Berlin issue here.

 

 

Berlin

German-Jewish literature returns from exile

by · 07/19/11

Helen Whittle, of Der Spiegel, recently wrote an article on the Goethe Institute‘s recently developed program to bring historical pieces of German literature, previously owned by German Jews who escaped Nazi persecution, back to Germany.

Picture courtesy of the Goethe Institute

In the looming shadow of the Holocaust, countless Jews escaped to modern-day Israel and brought with them innumerable books. Their children and grandchildren, now owners of these books, oftentimes cannot read German and are left with crates of unreadable books that, at the same time, have enormous sentimental value.

Several schools in the Münster region of Germany have partnered with the Goethe Institute to use some of these books as tools to demonstrate the individual costs of the Holocaust. Alongside the annotations and scribblings that reflect a reader’s most personal thoughts on a work, each book comes with a painstakingly researched biography on the book’s owner. The books range from children’s books to cookbooks; from travel guides to philosophical tracts. Ultimately, irrespective of genre, each book offers an insight to a life that was irreparably altered by the Nazi regime.

Read the whole article here.

Berlin

Nazi crimes and contemporary public memory

by · 07/13/11

As the collective public memory of World War II seems to fade, two recent articles underscore how the (sometimes selective) memory of the Nazi regime’s crimes plays out in contemporary art and culture.

The first—Alan Cowell’s Keeping Alive the Fading Memory of World War II, published in the New York Times—juxtaposes an artistic tribute to those murdered by the Nazi regime with the lack of a cultural memory of Hitler’s campaigns in Russia. The former, an ongoing project by German artist Gunter Demnig, is an ambitious project that seeks to relate the individual tragedies that concatenate into the whole of the Holocaust. Since 1993, Demnig has placed 30,000 small bronze plaques around Europe, each recounting with near-brutal brevity the stories of those deported to concentration camps across Europe.

One of Salomon's gouaches.

Despite the massive popularity of Demnig’s plaques, Cowell reminds us that the public memory of the Nazi’s war crimes oftentimes seems to stop short of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi offensive into the Soviet Union that, ultimately, resulted in 26.6 million Soviet deaths.

The second article, by The Examiner’s Murray Paskin, takes us to San Francisco, where the Contemporary Jewish Museum is exhibiting nearly 300 of the pieces that comprise Charlotte Saloman’s semi-fictional artistic autobiography

“Life? or Theatre?” Killed in Auschwitz at 26, her powerfully conceived paintings relate her coming of age alongside her escape to the south of France from Berlin, Nazi oppression, and her own personal and familial tragedies and joys. Read the whole article here.

 

For more, see our Berlin issue.

Berlin | Contributors | Home Page | News | Tidbits

A fascinating tale of gender from Elke Steiner

by · 06/07/11

German comic artist Elke Steiner–whose stirring portrayal of Rabbi Regina Jonas appeared in our Berlin issue–now tells the incredible story of Catharina Margaretha Linck, a woman who lived most her life in 18th-century Germany as a man. After serving in several armies and marrying another woman, Linck was eventually discovered and executed for sodomy in 1721. She was, according to Steiner, possibly the “last woman in Europe to be sentenced to death for having sex with another woman.” Read the whole story here. Steiner’s pieces on Rabbi Jonas and Catharina Linck were translated by Edna McCown. For more of Steiner’s work, check out her website.

Berlin | News | Tidbits

A translation blog (and new book) from Susan Bernofsky

by · 05/10/11

Walser coverOur friend and contributor Susan Bernofsky maintains an excellent blog called Translationista that should be of interest to Habitus readers. Susan is also the translator of a soon-to-be-published book from New York Review Books, Robert Walser’s Berlin Stories. An enticing description of the new title:

In 1905 the young Swiss writer Robert Walser arrived in Berlin to join his older brother Karl, already an important stage set designer, and immediately threw himself into the vibrant social and cultural life of the city. Berlin Stories collects his alternately celebratory, droll, and satirical observations on every aspect of the bustling German capital, from its theaters, cabarets, painters’ galleries, and literary salons, to the metropolitan street, markets, the Tiergarten, rapid-service restaurants, and the electric tram.

Be sure to pay her site a visit.

Berlin | Events | Photography

Gallery: Berlin Launch with James E. Young

by · 03/29/11

Our event at the JCC in Manhattan with James E. Young was a big success. Have a look at some images from the event and we hope you’ll consider joining us for our next program.

Berlin | Features | Journal | Poetry

Eight Poems

by · 03/13/11

I crept beneath Berlin
and lived like a rat
from the drains of people
who sat around the table.
When the bells tolled
we cowered and winced
and held our Jewish ears

Read more »

Berlin

Errata

by · 02/17/11

The editors of Habitus would like to apologize for errors in our new Berlin issue.

We made a pagination error on pages 108 and 109, which resulted in two of Esther Dischereit’s poems being run together.

The first poem should end, as follows, with the line “and was resolved”:

I crept beneath Berlin
and lived like a rat
from the drains of people
who sat around the table.
When the bells tolled
we cowered and winced
and held our Jewish ears

When the collection no longer tinkled
bread and milk sloshed from the stairway
which creaked beneath us one day
My face hungered after the sun
Draft between the floorboards
let me know August was hot and here
so it seemed three times June in March

Lying all crumpled on our beds
in suits and dresses and yellow knit waistcoats
we were ready to talk with books
A pounding of hard steps
went through our hands and heads
and we hid
behind the lid of His eye

One day we crept up the stairway
into my frenzied heart
for the final years
and how much harder it beat
careering after me to other countries
until I came home to my cellar
and was resolved.

The second poem begins, as follows, with the line “The day smells like fresh mint”

The day smells like fresh mint
you raised your eyelids this morning
looked into my face
and at my hands
I went into the street
bright flecks fell upon me
People touched me
on the shoulder
I turned my eyes elsewhere
entered a shop
Sunspots on the stairs
leading down
At the subway exit
I climbed the steps
A woman with a bunch
of fresh mint
was pushing a bicycle along.
I walked behind her
for a while.

And on page 121, the final six lines of “Ferry to Wannsee/then on” were omitted. The poem in full should read:

Ferry to Wannsee/then on

Light across the mirror of the water
on with the ticket for the S-Bahn
people packing away fireworks
in the boat and some their sandwiches
the passengers travelling up to their hips
in the lake
only their arms stay above water
those sitting outside
can have a smoke
cheesecake Swiss-style
said the man and filled up
our Turkish glasses
he used to be at Osram
his families were here too
sitting in the café watching
some stranger ask for a bockwurst
Now and then one of them got up
and helped make coffee.
Salsa came out the socket
Christmas baubles next to the ice-box
stacked like giant
rum-truffles champagne and beer glasses
with antlers. Restroom for
non-clients 50 cents.
I doubt I’ll find the place again.
Perhaps it won’t be here
next time.

On page 222, we inadvertently omitted copyright information for Barbara Honigmann’s memoir Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben, from which the piece is taken.

It should read:

Barbara Honigmann’s selection is excerpted from Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben. © 2004 Carl Hanser Verlag München The excerpted translation was previously published in Dimension2.

Find out more about the book at the Carl Hanser Verlag Web site.

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