Did a performance at Good Blood Bad Blood this past friday (the 29th) with Ben Filler. We were supposed to do a talk but decided it would be fun to do something different.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
Philippe Rahm
Interesting Article on Philippe Rahm a favorite of mine in the world of physiological architecture. He has created rooms that do everything from increasing melatonin levels in the observer using electromagnetic wavelengths to triggering sexual desires using paint colors. He has also delved into the architecture of decay, creating a house made of concrete whose composition degrades into top soil, ending the building life cycle with a nice flower patch. Or a pavilion made of waffles, which slowly crumbled from a mixtures of environmental forces and animal ingestion. I will try to write an article on him later chronicling these pieces and their possible implications for society. For now enjoy this well written article on the subject.
http://www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=425&id=3935
http://www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=425&id=3935
Berlin: Cinema, Landscape, and Memory
Here is an essay I did for a class on the intersections of film, city, and memory as they relate to Berlin and its contemporary constructions and reconstructions of history and memory.
Berlin: Cinema, Landscape, and Memory
Berlin, and Germany as a whole, is a site of complex history and memory. Given their particular circumstances of being almost wholly leveled by war and GDR negligence, and thus lacking an abundance of physical remnants of history, the process of understanding history and memory is further complicated. This difficulty of remembering with the absence of physical grounding is exemplified in Homers dialogues throughout Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. Post-reunification, the process of reconstruction of national and local memory began. This reconstruction has manifested itself in several different ways. In the case of Potsdamer Platz, memory is re-inscribed as an abstract concept with remnants of the authentic framed by capitalism. With the Hotel Adlon, as with the Holocaust film within Wings of Desire, the process of remembering is manifested as a simulacrum, exploiting the original for the sake of furthering consumption. Finally, Stefan Ruzowitsky’s The Counterfeiters and the site of Sachsenhausen present an explicitly political and ideological framing, and reconstruction of history and memory, which combines numerous forms of reiteration and representation. By examining these films and sites one can develop an understanding of the complex negotiation of history and memory in modern day Germany.
The re-articulation and the reoccupation of Potsdamer Platz presents an altogether distinct paradigm with which to approach the subject of memory and of historical reconstruction. As was illustrated in Wings of Desire, Potsdamer Platz, pre-unification, was a veritable void, not only physically but mnemonically as well. Situated, as it were, in the “no man’s land” between two competing empires and ideologies, it was neglected by both and discarded as a vacant lot. This lot, devoid of all mnemonic indications of what had occurred there and indeed what had existed there prior to the war, became a vacuum of history and memory. Homer’s stroll through its barren landscape in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire, underscores this point. He wanders through attempting to reconcile his memories of the square’s Weimar-era opulence; however he finds it difficult to ground his subjective memories and indeed historical fact in the absence of the physicality of the original, not to mention a memorial or reconstruction. He constantly repeats the statement “I am looking for Potsdamer Platz, I will not stop looking until I find it again,”1 as if the very earth upon which it stood is no reconciliation to memory. It is as he asserts, robbed of any sense of place or actuality, it is as Walter Benjamin notes devoid of its inherent aura. However, Homers reminiscing is not only grounded in his subjective recollection of specific landmarks, but is also rooted in his desire for the feeling of the former place, its sense of hustle and bustle, its sense of community, and most importantly its sense of centrality as node of culture and society.
This abstract desire to reinvigorate Potsdamer Platz as a center of culture, society, and economics is in fact what informed its re-articulation in the post-reunification era. As Rolf J. Goebel notes in his book Berlin's Architectural Citations: Reconstruction, Simulation, and the Problem of Historical Authenticity;
“The new Potsdamer Platz also represents visual remnants of the past, if in a thoroughly dispersed manner. The prewar square, its mixture of rapid-transportation technology, commerce, and vibrant cultural life providing a premier locus of Weimar Republic modernity, was a visually open, star-shaped meeting point of major avenues.”2
In this sense the newly constructed square with its re-inscription of the street layouts, transportation networks, and avenues of consumption hearkens back, in an abstract sense, to the Weimar-era original. The evocation of specifically Weimar-era built form and symbolism is without a doubt a politically and ideologically motivated decision. In this sense, the reunified Berlin is re-inscribing a landscape ravaged in the era of National Socialism and neglected in the time of division, with an abstracted memory of its former vivacious capitalist self. It is attempting to forge a sense of the continuity of history, neglecting almost completely the memory of National Socialism and division, and instead re-appropriating the Weimar-era history as a way to reassert itself as the ‘New-Old’ center.
Wiemar-era Potsdamer Platz
Modern day Potsdamer Platz
The way in which the physical remnants of the Weimar-era are preserved and presented is even more telling of the post-nationalist global capitalist agenda. As Goebel notes:
“Soon the visitor discovers that the new buildings incorporate uncanny remainders of Berlin's prewar era: the miraculously preserved Weinhaus Huth (a famous 1912 restaurant and wine store), as well as a remnant of the exterior facade and other parts of the Grand Hotel Esplanade (1911), destroyed in World War II. The hotel's Friihsttickssaal (Breakfast Room), its fragments reassembled on the ground floor of Helmut Jahn's Sony Center, has been designated to house the bar of the revived Café Josty, a legendary prewar meeting spot for artists, writers, and politicians.”3
These preserved fragments of Weimar-era history encased in the hypermodern ahistorical edifices which occupy the new Potsdamer Platz, exemplify the global capitalist approach to history in which all historical memory is embodied in the perpetual present. All memory is free for appropriation and re-contextualization by postmodernism, all of history is able to be reframed as an object of consumption. This notion is exemplified by the re-contextualization of the Esplanade’s Kaisersaal (Emperor’s Hall). The ‘gilded neobroque and rococo stucco’ building typical of the Wilhelminian Empire has been hydraulically relocated from its original location to the Sony Center where it is encased in a glass and stainless steel framework as if it were a museum piece.4 As Goebel notes; “For the novelist and essayist Martin Mosebach, the Esplanade remains have been archaeologically preserved like a dinosaur skeleton, a curiously touching, helpless fossil that seems almost crushed by the gigantic girders carrying the modern luxury apartments above.”5 Further, “In his opinion, the most adequate term for this stylistic collage may be not 'preservation of monuments' but 'exploitation of monuments.”6 Therefore, the newly restored Kaiesersaal is not in actuality a genuinely concerted effort to reconstruct the ‘authentic’ memory or aura of the place but instead a reduction of history as an object to be consumed alongside the other wares of global capitalism. Furthermore, the object is used to re-inscribe the old within the new, and to legitimize the squares claim to historical gravity, and by way of doing so transforming it into a space of historical pilgrimage in the form of tourism. However, given that the object has been de-contextualized and literally framed by capitalist hypermodernity it no longer retains what Benjamin calls ‘the aura of place’. In this sense Homer’s desire for the return to the aura of the place has not been actualized in the ‘authentic’ but has been abstracted and reframed for a capitalist ideological and political agenda, but has nonetheless managed to re-capture the vivacity and centrality of its former self.
Esplanade’s Kaisersaal at the new Potsdamer Platz
The Hotel Adlon, of Jackson baby dangling fame, poignantly presents an alternative to the negotiation of history and memory. Unlike the Sony Center, which constructs an ahistorical casing with which to house remnants of the authentic, the Hotel Adlon is entirely re-constructed with little regard for the original. Originally open on the 23rd of October 1907 under the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II, it functioned as a luxury hotel and diplomatic convention site till the 1930’s.7 As Goebel informs us; “At the end of World War II, it was used as a military hospital until it sustained heavy damage by fire in 1945. Converted into a dormitory for apprentices, its remains suffered final demolition in 1984.”8 The Hotel Adlon reopened on the 23rd of August 1997, however as a completely new building. As Goebel notes:
“(The new Hotel Adlon) displays a facade that imitates the neoclassicist style of its world-famous predecessor in considerable detail without being an accurate replica. Most notably, the new venue has one more floor than the original, while its interior combines modern hotel technology with an eclectic mix of styles. Paradoxically, the immaculate sheen of the new Adlon's historical trompe l'oeil facade only underscores the building's lack of historical authenticity, its appearance as a pleasingly theatrical simulacrum.”9
Nevertheless, the hotel in its brochures and advertisements continually calls to the attention of its visitors its illustrious history. Goebel quotes several of these brochures as evidence of this conscious re-construction; “with the new Adlon, the past literally returns in the present,”10 and “Nine decades after it first opened, one of the most famous hotels in the world has returned to its historic site.”11 They go further to cite important guests who had stayed at the Adlon in its previous incarnation, as if the temporal distance and moreover the complete physical reconstruction of the site does nothing to impede the continuity of history and the supplanting of memory into simulated spaces. Fredric Jameson helps make sense of this post-modern negotiation of memory by attributing it to the “cultural logic of late capitalism.”12 As Goebel elaborates:
“Jameson defines this type of historicism as the "random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general... the increasing primacy of the 'neo'" (18). For Jameson, the danger of this arbitrary pastiche of fragmentized traditions lies in the effacement of genuine memory and the disappearance of the traces of authentic history in the self-referential labyrinth of (inter)textuality, stereotypes, and aesthetic image series.” (1269)
This danger of the effacement of genuine memory is evident in the case of the Hotel Adlon where there is no longer a desire for the physicality of the authentic. Aura is evoked as a plastic medium, no longer rooted in the primacy of the artefact. The Adlon transcends fact, it becomes as Goebel asserts: “a site of free-floating cultural signifiers that reconfigure the realities of the Weimar Republic and reunified Berlin into a dizzying melange of name-dropping.”13 Furthermore the choice of the Hotel Adlon as a site of reconstruction was, as Potsdamer Platz, a politically and ideologically motivated decision. The hotel was a shining symbol of Weimar-era opulence and was throughout the period of National Socialism disliked by Hitler. Thus this evocation was in a way an act of historical revisionism and an integral part of the normalization discourse.
The Original Hotel Adlon
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The New 'Authentic' Hotel Adlon
The Hotel Adlon can be seen as analogous to the holocaust film being shot within Wings of Desire. Both artefacts are complete reconstructions of either historic places (the hotel) or historical events (the holocaust), however, both lack a sense of specificity and are in fact abstractions more of an idea than of an actuality. The film in Wings of Desire is shot on a set with no historical precursor and furthermore tells a detective story which references the holocaust merely as a backdrop or set consideration. This is reinforced by the scene in which Peter Falk is trying all the different hats on, moving seamlessly through hats that represent different time periods professions and personages. He is in this act trying to find a hat that represents the ‘genuine’ article, the hat that is most effective in reproducing the aura of a specific character in a specific time period. This exercise is in itself a representation of capitalism and post-modernism’s seamless traversing and appropriation of history and its preoccupation, not with the ‘authentic’, but with representative simulation. In this way Wenders is coming to terms with and commenting on the malleability of the holocaust memory. Levy and Sznaider, in their essay Cosmopolitan Memory, elucidate this point: “The holocaust is continuously reformulated, reinterpreted, discussed, evoked, and even at times denied. Along the way, the Holocaust is reaffirmed as the touchstone for a disoriented, de-territorialized humanity searching for moral clarity amid constant uncertainty.”14 So in recognizing the inability to represent the Holocaust as a purely ‘authentic’ artefact free of constructions, Wenders is instead using the very idea of the fact to represent an abstract and universal condition of humanity. He is also coming to terms with the transmutability of memory in a media-oriented, global capitalist society. Levy and Sznaider further this idea: “Globalization transforms culture and the vocabulary used to produce meaning. This transformation becomes most evident when the particularities that make-up a culture are ripped from their original spatial (i.e., local and national) contexts.”15 In this sense, memory becomes a floating object, with no allegiances to specific cultures or time periods, but instead exists as an abstraction which is easily appropriated by numerous global localities. This abstraction of memory is perfectly in line with the global capitalist project of profiting from history and memory. By making memory and the lessons that come with it universal it is more easily marketed to a global community, thereby extending the relevant market. In this sense the representation of the film within Wings of Desire further relates to the Hotel Adlon in its reframing and reconstruction of history as something unconcerned with the preservation of the ‘authentic’ artefact but instead rooted in mnemonic exploitation for the sake of making returns.
This representation of memory is wholly different in the Stefan Ruzowitsky’s The Counterfeiters. The film attempts to represent factual events that had occurred at Sachsenhausen in the counterfeiting operations. However, since the film was shot on a completely constructed set in Babelsberg, irregardless of its historical accuracy, is still inherently a construct and a mediated representation of memory. The events and the physical structures themselves in the film are not simulacra but instead are citational projects as they reference in great detail the ‘original’. However despite this, details such as dialogue and the day-to-day events that surrounded the Sachsenhausen operations can never be represented in a way that is not rooted in a subjective reiteration of memory, as by the surviving inmates and the director’s/writer’s interpretations of the events. In such reiterations, revisionism and construction are inherent in the message of the film and its choice of the depiction of specific events. In this sense the film is inescapably a politically and ideologically motivated construct with the goal of reforming subjective events into objective truths. This does not however work to devalue the film as text, in fact as Levy and Sznaider note: “Cultural representations enable social groups to develop historical self-awareness and thereby also determine their relationship to other groups… (Furthermore) different eras develop distinctive mnemonic forms and content.”16 Thus, cultural representation, even when it is wholly constructed, still has a value in an abstract sense, it allows posterity to come to terms with their past and with that approach their future, informed. As Levy and Sznaider reiterate, the form and content with which memory is propagated changes with different generations as the tools for the dispersion of information change. These new communicative tools do exist as completely mediated constructions, devoid of the aura of the original, however still serve to propagate memory. The Counterfeiters, however, is not completely unconscious of itself as a construct and a mediated iteration of memory. This self-reflexivity is evident in the scene in Herzog’s house, where his wife is addressing the audience. In this way the director is using a Brechtian sense of alienation to make the audience self-aware and in doing so understand their role in engaging in a construct. This is furthered by the jump cuts used in the scene which break the sense of continuity and temporarily peel away the suspension of disbelief, making the audience aware of the film as a wholly constructed and mediated representation of memory.
The representation of memory in the Sachsenhausen site itself is far more complex and exists as a synthesis of all the previously discussed negotiations of history and memory. As one enters there are several buildings that have been renovated to their original condition, such as the towers and the gatehouse, as well as the perimeter wall; these renovations are an attempt by the curators to restore and preserve the ‘authentic’ artefact to its ‘original’ condition. However, by the very process of renovating them, they are reconstructing history and attempting to reinvigorate the ‘original’ aura, which is paradoxically lost in these renovations as they lose the weathered marks of time. This act of reconstructing history is even more evident in the two buildings that house the exhibitions. These buildings (with the exception of the cellar) are complete reconstructions of the ‘original’ and are therefore citational projects. This presents an interesting conundrum concerning the value of aura. Caroline Wiedmer in her essay Sachsenhausen elucidates this point: “The idea that aura is inherent in the object, or in the site, that it ‘conquers’ its audience, as Benjamin writes, must be rethought. Today’s audience seems quite ready to be conquered, even by ‘auras’ that are themselves patently, and paradoxically, reproduced. Aura is in the eye of the beholder, after all.”17 This reconstruction of aura and in fact the utter disregard of it is seen in the memorials erected by the GDR. These monuments, as with the Holocaust film within Wings of Desire adopt memory, not as an actuality rooted in the authentic but instead as an idea to be represented abstractly.
There is however still a primacy of the ‘authentic’ artefact within the site. This is seen in the exhibitions of ‘original’ objects as well as in the preservation of the crematorium site. These artefacts however do not stand on their own as didactic objects encrusted in meaning they are, as everything else in the site, mediated and framed by interpretation. Not only are their inscriptions informing one of the significance of the objects, but the objects themselves (and the site, as in the case of the crematorium) are literally encased by modern constructions (glass displays and in the case of the crematorium a modern structure). Wiedmer elaborates on this point:
“There is no such thing as a pure site affording access to a knowledge of the Holocaust untouched by interpretation or construction. And a historically significant site can not necessarily speak for itself. Hence the theoretical bind: without representation there can be only limited memory; and with too overbearing a framework of interpretation, with too much narrative, there is the danger that memory may be distorted, fragmented, or destroyed altogether.”18
Thus, there is always a mediation, an iteration of the object, even in the case of the authentic’. The Sachsenhausen site and its collection of objects and monuments, is not without a projected political and ideological aim. It is intrinsically part of reunified Germany’s continued atonement, which functions, among other things to continue its good standing in global politics and the market. This mediation however, unlike the film within Wings of Desire and the Hotel Adlon does not attempt to capitalise on history and memory in a direct sense, and in doing so attempts to preserve memory more in the factual than in the abstract.
Sachsenhausen Guard Tower in the Nazi-Era
Sachsenhausen Reconstructed Guard Tower
There is within the site a conscious understanding of the transformation of memory and the new ways in which it is represented in a media oriented society. This is most explicitly seen in the exhibition detailing not only the history of the counterfeiting operation but the making of the film depiction itself. Wiedmer helps explain this phenomenon; “The Holocaust has become a narrative so worn as to have elicited specific consumer expectations in which the idea of originality, the representation of ‘the authentic,’ is executed better by Hollywood than in ‘real’ life.”19 By presenting the exhibition of the making of the film adjacent to historical objects of ‘authenticity’, the curator is in a way equating the power of both mediums in translating and mediating memory. In this sense, the film is being legitimized as a factual representation of the events and in this sense becomes itself a historical text. This does not however work to devalue the physicality and aura of the ‘original’ site but instead recognizes the complexity of the way memory is transmitted and understood by a younger generation. Wiedmer notes:
“the significance of such authentic sites has changed considerably over the fifty years since the camp was liberated…there are fewer and fewer people around for whom the stones elicit or bring back a direct memory of National Socialism; for younger generations the site itself becomes the memory, not the medium for recalling the events that took place there.”20
Thus, there is a necessity for loading the site with meaning and a mixture of objective and subjective iterations of memory so that posterity can understand it in their own terms and furthermore develop a deeply meaningful emotional connection to the site.
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Soviet Memorial at Sachsenhausen
Through the examination of the representations of memory in Wings of Desire and The Counterfeiters, in relation to specific sites in Berlin and Sachsenhausen, one comes to understand the complex reiteration of memory. As was seen, the new Potsdamer Platz abstracts memory into a global capitalist framework, where the aura of the original is discarded for framed mnemonic consumption. The Hotel Adlon and the Holocaust film within Wings of Desire take this further by disregarding specificity, and transforming the idea of the ‘authentic’ into a simulacrum for the purpose of consumption. Finally, as was seen in The Counterfeiters and the site of Sachsenhausen, memory is negotiated through a multiplicity of iterations so as to advance to a media-oriented generation a framed political and ideological reading. Thus one comes to understand the unique complexity of Germany’s task in negotiating and renegotiating memory in a post-modern global capitalist media-oriented world. There is still a large task ahead with many sites and memories itching to be revived and celebrated, the way in which these will be dealt with will have a profound effect on the way history will be remembered and memory will be shaped in the future.
1.Goebel, Rolf J., “Berlin's Architectural Citations: Reconstruction, Simulation, and the Problem of Historical Authenticity” from PMLA, Vol. 118, No. 5, pp. 1268-1289, Modern Language Association Stable, 2003.
2.Levy, Daniel and Sznaider, Natan, “Chapter 2: Cosmopolitan Memory” from The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, pp. 23-38, © Temple University Press, 2006.
3.Wiedmer, Caroline, “Sachsenhausen” from In The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France, pp. 164-199, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.
Berlin: Cinema, Landscape, and Memory
Berlin, and Germany as a whole, is a site of complex history and memory. Given their particular circumstances of being almost wholly leveled by war and GDR negligence, and thus lacking an abundance of physical remnants of history, the process of understanding history and memory is further complicated. This difficulty of remembering with the absence of physical grounding is exemplified in Homers dialogues throughout Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. Post-reunification, the process of reconstruction of national and local memory began. This reconstruction has manifested itself in several different ways. In the case of Potsdamer Platz, memory is re-inscribed as an abstract concept with remnants of the authentic framed by capitalism. With the Hotel Adlon, as with the Holocaust film within Wings of Desire, the process of remembering is manifested as a simulacrum, exploiting the original for the sake of furthering consumption. Finally, Stefan Ruzowitsky’s The Counterfeiters and the site of Sachsenhausen present an explicitly political and ideological framing, and reconstruction of history and memory, which combines numerous forms of reiteration and representation. By examining these films and sites one can develop an understanding of the complex negotiation of history and memory in modern day Germany.
The re-articulation and the reoccupation of Potsdamer Platz presents an altogether distinct paradigm with which to approach the subject of memory and of historical reconstruction. As was illustrated in Wings of Desire, Potsdamer Platz, pre-unification, was a veritable void, not only physically but mnemonically as well. Situated, as it were, in the “no man’s land” between two competing empires and ideologies, it was neglected by both and discarded as a vacant lot. This lot, devoid of all mnemonic indications of what had occurred there and indeed what had existed there prior to the war, became a vacuum of history and memory. Homer’s stroll through its barren landscape in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire, underscores this point. He wanders through attempting to reconcile his memories of the square’s Weimar-era opulence; however he finds it difficult to ground his subjective memories and indeed historical fact in the absence of the physicality of the original, not to mention a memorial or reconstruction. He constantly repeats the statement “I am looking for Potsdamer Platz, I will not stop looking until I find it again,”1 as if the very earth upon which it stood is no reconciliation to memory. It is as he asserts, robbed of any sense of place or actuality, it is as Walter Benjamin notes devoid of its inherent aura. However, Homers reminiscing is not only grounded in his subjective recollection of specific landmarks, but is also rooted in his desire for the feeling of the former place, its sense of hustle and bustle, its sense of community, and most importantly its sense of centrality as node of culture and society.
This abstract desire to reinvigorate Potsdamer Platz as a center of culture, society, and economics is in fact what informed its re-articulation in the post-reunification era. As Rolf J. Goebel notes in his book Berlin's Architectural Citations: Reconstruction, Simulation, and the Problem of Historical Authenticity;
“The new Potsdamer Platz also represents visual remnants of the past, if in a thoroughly dispersed manner. The prewar square, its mixture of rapid-transportation technology, commerce, and vibrant cultural life providing a premier locus of Weimar Republic modernity, was a visually open, star-shaped meeting point of major avenues.”2
In this sense the newly constructed square with its re-inscription of the street layouts, transportation networks, and avenues of consumption hearkens back, in an abstract sense, to the Weimar-era original. The evocation of specifically Weimar-era built form and symbolism is without a doubt a politically and ideologically motivated decision. In this sense, the reunified Berlin is re-inscribing a landscape ravaged in the era of National Socialism and neglected in the time of division, with an abstracted memory of its former vivacious capitalist self. It is attempting to forge a sense of the continuity of history, neglecting almost completely the memory of National Socialism and division, and instead re-appropriating the Weimar-era history as a way to reassert itself as the ‘New-Old’ center.
Wiemar-era Potsdamer Platz
Modern day Potsdamer Platz
The way in which the physical remnants of the Weimar-era are preserved and presented is even more telling of the post-nationalist global capitalist agenda. As Goebel notes:
“Soon the visitor discovers that the new buildings incorporate uncanny remainders of Berlin's prewar era: the miraculously preserved Weinhaus Huth (a famous 1912 restaurant and wine store), as well as a remnant of the exterior facade and other parts of the Grand Hotel Esplanade (1911), destroyed in World War II. The hotel's Friihsttickssaal (Breakfast Room), its fragments reassembled on the ground floor of Helmut Jahn's Sony Center, has been designated to house the bar of the revived Café Josty, a legendary prewar meeting spot for artists, writers, and politicians.”3
These preserved fragments of Weimar-era history encased in the hypermodern ahistorical edifices which occupy the new Potsdamer Platz, exemplify the global capitalist approach to history in which all historical memory is embodied in the perpetual present. All memory is free for appropriation and re-contextualization by postmodernism, all of history is able to be reframed as an object of consumption. This notion is exemplified by the re-contextualization of the Esplanade’s Kaisersaal (Emperor’s Hall). The ‘gilded neobroque and rococo stucco’ building typical of the Wilhelminian Empire has been hydraulically relocated from its original location to the Sony Center where it is encased in a glass and stainless steel framework as if it were a museum piece.4 As Goebel notes; “For the novelist and essayist Martin Mosebach, the Esplanade remains have been archaeologically preserved like a dinosaur skeleton, a curiously touching, helpless fossil that seems almost crushed by the gigantic girders carrying the modern luxury apartments above.”5 Further, “In his opinion, the most adequate term for this stylistic collage may be not 'preservation of monuments' but 'exploitation of monuments.”6 Therefore, the newly restored Kaiesersaal is not in actuality a genuinely concerted effort to reconstruct the ‘authentic’ memory or aura of the place but instead a reduction of history as an object to be consumed alongside the other wares of global capitalism. Furthermore, the object is used to re-inscribe the old within the new, and to legitimize the squares claim to historical gravity, and by way of doing so transforming it into a space of historical pilgrimage in the form of tourism. However, given that the object has been de-contextualized and literally framed by capitalist hypermodernity it no longer retains what Benjamin calls ‘the aura of place’. In this sense Homer’s desire for the return to the aura of the place has not been actualized in the ‘authentic’ but has been abstracted and reframed for a capitalist ideological and political agenda, but has nonetheless managed to re-capture the vivacity and centrality of its former self.
Esplanade’s Kaisersaal at the new Potsdamer Platz
The Hotel Adlon, of Jackson baby dangling fame, poignantly presents an alternative to the negotiation of history and memory. Unlike the Sony Center, which constructs an ahistorical casing with which to house remnants of the authentic, the Hotel Adlon is entirely re-constructed with little regard for the original. Originally open on the 23rd of October 1907 under the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II, it functioned as a luxury hotel and diplomatic convention site till the 1930’s.7 As Goebel informs us; “At the end of World War II, it was used as a military hospital until it sustained heavy damage by fire in 1945. Converted into a dormitory for apprentices, its remains suffered final demolition in 1984.”8 The Hotel Adlon reopened on the 23rd of August 1997, however as a completely new building. As Goebel notes:
“(The new Hotel Adlon) displays a facade that imitates the neoclassicist style of its world-famous predecessor in considerable detail without being an accurate replica. Most notably, the new venue has one more floor than the original, while its interior combines modern hotel technology with an eclectic mix of styles. Paradoxically, the immaculate sheen of the new Adlon's historical trompe l'oeil facade only underscores the building's lack of historical authenticity, its appearance as a pleasingly theatrical simulacrum.”9
Nevertheless, the hotel in its brochures and advertisements continually calls to the attention of its visitors its illustrious history. Goebel quotes several of these brochures as evidence of this conscious re-construction; “with the new Adlon, the past literally returns in the present,”10 and “Nine decades after it first opened, one of the most famous hotels in the world has returned to its historic site.”11 They go further to cite important guests who had stayed at the Adlon in its previous incarnation, as if the temporal distance and moreover the complete physical reconstruction of the site does nothing to impede the continuity of history and the supplanting of memory into simulated spaces. Fredric Jameson helps make sense of this post-modern negotiation of memory by attributing it to the “cultural logic of late capitalism.”12 As Goebel elaborates:
“Jameson defines this type of historicism as the "random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general... the increasing primacy of the 'neo'" (18). For Jameson, the danger of this arbitrary pastiche of fragmentized traditions lies in the effacement of genuine memory and the disappearance of the traces of authentic history in the self-referential labyrinth of (inter)textuality, stereotypes, and aesthetic image series.” (1269)
This danger of the effacement of genuine memory is evident in the case of the Hotel Adlon where there is no longer a desire for the physicality of the authentic. Aura is evoked as a plastic medium, no longer rooted in the primacy of the artefact. The Adlon transcends fact, it becomes as Goebel asserts: “a site of free-floating cultural signifiers that reconfigure the realities of the Weimar Republic and reunified Berlin into a dizzying melange of name-dropping.”13 Furthermore the choice of the Hotel Adlon as a site of reconstruction was, as Potsdamer Platz, a politically and ideologically motivated decision. The hotel was a shining symbol of Weimar-era opulence and was throughout the period of National Socialism disliked by Hitler. Thus this evocation was in a way an act of historical revisionism and an integral part of the normalization discourse.
The Original Hotel Adlon
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The New 'Authentic' Hotel Adlon
The Hotel Adlon can be seen as analogous to the holocaust film being shot within Wings of Desire. Both artefacts are complete reconstructions of either historic places (the hotel) or historical events (the holocaust), however, both lack a sense of specificity and are in fact abstractions more of an idea than of an actuality. The film in Wings of Desire is shot on a set with no historical precursor and furthermore tells a detective story which references the holocaust merely as a backdrop or set consideration. This is reinforced by the scene in which Peter Falk is trying all the different hats on, moving seamlessly through hats that represent different time periods professions and personages. He is in this act trying to find a hat that represents the ‘genuine’ article, the hat that is most effective in reproducing the aura of a specific character in a specific time period. This exercise is in itself a representation of capitalism and post-modernism’s seamless traversing and appropriation of history and its preoccupation, not with the ‘authentic’, but with representative simulation. In this way Wenders is coming to terms with and commenting on the malleability of the holocaust memory. Levy and Sznaider, in their essay Cosmopolitan Memory, elucidate this point: “The holocaust is continuously reformulated, reinterpreted, discussed, evoked, and even at times denied. Along the way, the Holocaust is reaffirmed as the touchstone for a disoriented, de-territorialized humanity searching for moral clarity amid constant uncertainty.”14 So in recognizing the inability to represent the Holocaust as a purely ‘authentic’ artefact free of constructions, Wenders is instead using the very idea of the fact to represent an abstract and universal condition of humanity. He is also coming to terms with the transmutability of memory in a media-oriented, global capitalist society. Levy and Sznaider further this idea: “Globalization transforms culture and the vocabulary used to produce meaning. This transformation becomes most evident when the particularities that make-up a culture are ripped from their original spatial (i.e., local and national) contexts.”15 In this sense, memory becomes a floating object, with no allegiances to specific cultures or time periods, but instead exists as an abstraction which is easily appropriated by numerous global localities. This abstraction of memory is perfectly in line with the global capitalist project of profiting from history and memory. By making memory and the lessons that come with it universal it is more easily marketed to a global community, thereby extending the relevant market. In this sense the representation of the film within Wings of Desire further relates to the Hotel Adlon in its reframing and reconstruction of history as something unconcerned with the preservation of the ‘authentic’ artefact but instead rooted in mnemonic exploitation for the sake of making returns.
This representation of memory is wholly different in the Stefan Ruzowitsky’s The Counterfeiters. The film attempts to represent factual events that had occurred at Sachsenhausen in the counterfeiting operations. However, since the film was shot on a completely constructed set in Babelsberg, irregardless of its historical accuracy, is still inherently a construct and a mediated representation of memory. The events and the physical structures themselves in the film are not simulacra but instead are citational projects as they reference in great detail the ‘original’. However despite this, details such as dialogue and the day-to-day events that surrounded the Sachsenhausen operations can never be represented in a way that is not rooted in a subjective reiteration of memory, as by the surviving inmates and the director’s/writer’s interpretations of the events. In such reiterations, revisionism and construction are inherent in the message of the film and its choice of the depiction of specific events. In this sense the film is inescapably a politically and ideologically motivated construct with the goal of reforming subjective events into objective truths. This does not however work to devalue the film as text, in fact as Levy and Sznaider note: “Cultural representations enable social groups to develop historical self-awareness and thereby also determine their relationship to other groups… (Furthermore) different eras develop distinctive mnemonic forms and content.”16 Thus, cultural representation, even when it is wholly constructed, still has a value in an abstract sense, it allows posterity to come to terms with their past and with that approach their future, informed. As Levy and Sznaider reiterate, the form and content with which memory is propagated changes with different generations as the tools for the dispersion of information change. These new communicative tools do exist as completely mediated constructions, devoid of the aura of the original, however still serve to propagate memory. The Counterfeiters, however, is not completely unconscious of itself as a construct and a mediated iteration of memory. This self-reflexivity is evident in the scene in Herzog’s house, where his wife is addressing the audience. In this way the director is using a Brechtian sense of alienation to make the audience self-aware and in doing so understand their role in engaging in a construct. This is furthered by the jump cuts used in the scene which break the sense of continuity and temporarily peel away the suspension of disbelief, making the audience aware of the film as a wholly constructed and mediated representation of memory.
The representation of memory in the Sachsenhausen site itself is far more complex and exists as a synthesis of all the previously discussed negotiations of history and memory. As one enters there are several buildings that have been renovated to their original condition, such as the towers and the gatehouse, as well as the perimeter wall; these renovations are an attempt by the curators to restore and preserve the ‘authentic’ artefact to its ‘original’ condition. However, by the very process of renovating them, they are reconstructing history and attempting to reinvigorate the ‘original’ aura, which is paradoxically lost in these renovations as they lose the weathered marks of time. This act of reconstructing history is even more evident in the two buildings that house the exhibitions. These buildings (with the exception of the cellar) are complete reconstructions of the ‘original’ and are therefore citational projects. This presents an interesting conundrum concerning the value of aura. Caroline Wiedmer in her essay Sachsenhausen elucidates this point: “The idea that aura is inherent in the object, or in the site, that it ‘conquers’ its audience, as Benjamin writes, must be rethought. Today’s audience seems quite ready to be conquered, even by ‘auras’ that are themselves patently, and paradoxically, reproduced. Aura is in the eye of the beholder, after all.”17 This reconstruction of aura and in fact the utter disregard of it is seen in the memorials erected by the GDR. These monuments, as with the Holocaust film within Wings of Desire adopt memory, not as an actuality rooted in the authentic but instead as an idea to be represented abstractly.
There is however still a primacy of the ‘authentic’ artefact within the site. This is seen in the exhibitions of ‘original’ objects as well as in the preservation of the crematorium site. These artefacts however do not stand on their own as didactic objects encrusted in meaning they are, as everything else in the site, mediated and framed by interpretation. Not only are their inscriptions informing one of the significance of the objects, but the objects themselves (and the site, as in the case of the crematorium) are literally encased by modern constructions (glass displays and in the case of the crematorium a modern structure). Wiedmer elaborates on this point:
“There is no such thing as a pure site affording access to a knowledge of the Holocaust untouched by interpretation or construction. And a historically significant site can not necessarily speak for itself. Hence the theoretical bind: without representation there can be only limited memory; and with too overbearing a framework of interpretation, with too much narrative, there is the danger that memory may be distorted, fragmented, or destroyed altogether.”18
Thus, there is always a mediation, an iteration of the object, even in the case of the authentic’. The Sachsenhausen site and its collection of objects and monuments, is not without a projected political and ideological aim. It is intrinsically part of reunified Germany’s continued atonement, which functions, among other things to continue its good standing in global politics and the market. This mediation however, unlike the film within Wings of Desire and the Hotel Adlon does not attempt to capitalise on history and memory in a direct sense, and in doing so attempts to preserve memory more in the factual than in the abstract.
Sachsenhausen Guard Tower in the Nazi-Era
Sachsenhausen Reconstructed Guard Tower
There is within the site a conscious understanding of the transformation of memory and the new ways in which it is represented in a media oriented society. This is most explicitly seen in the exhibition detailing not only the history of the counterfeiting operation but the making of the film depiction itself. Wiedmer helps explain this phenomenon; “The Holocaust has become a narrative so worn as to have elicited specific consumer expectations in which the idea of originality, the representation of ‘the authentic,’ is executed better by Hollywood than in ‘real’ life.”19 By presenting the exhibition of the making of the film adjacent to historical objects of ‘authenticity’, the curator is in a way equating the power of both mediums in translating and mediating memory. In this sense, the film is being legitimized as a factual representation of the events and in this sense becomes itself a historical text. This does not however work to devalue the physicality and aura of the ‘original’ site but instead recognizes the complexity of the way memory is transmitted and understood by a younger generation. Wiedmer notes:
“the significance of such authentic sites has changed considerably over the fifty years since the camp was liberated…there are fewer and fewer people around for whom the stones elicit or bring back a direct memory of National Socialism; for younger generations the site itself becomes the memory, not the medium for recalling the events that took place there.”20
Thus, there is a necessity for loading the site with meaning and a mixture of objective and subjective iterations of memory so that posterity can understand it in their own terms and furthermore develop a deeply meaningful emotional connection to the site.
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Soviet Memorial at Sachsenhausen
Through the examination of the representations of memory in Wings of Desire and The Counterfeiters, in relation to specific sites in Berlin and Sachsenhausen, one comes to understand the complex reiteration of memory. As was seen, the new Potsdamer Platz abstracts memory into a global capitalist framework, where the aura of the original is discarded for framed mnemonic consumption. The Hotel Adlon and the Holocaust film within Wings of Desire take this further by disregarding specificity, and transforming the idea of the ‘authentic’ into a simulacrum for the purpose of consumption. Finally, as was seen in The Counterfeiters and the site of Sachsenhausen, memory is negotiated through a multiplicity of iterations so as to advance to a media-oriented generation a framed political and ideological reading. Thus one comes to understand the unique complexity of Germany’s task in negotiating and renegotiating memory in a post-modern global capitalist media-oriented world. There is still a large task ahead with many sites and memories itching to be revived and celebrated, the way in which these will be dealt with will have a profound effect on the way history will be remembered and memory will be shaped in the future.
1.Goebel, Rolf J., “Berlin's Architectural Citations: Reconstruction, Simulation, and the Problem of Historical Authenticity” from PMLA, Vol. 118, No. 5, pp. 1268-1289, Modern Language Association Stable, 2003.
2.Levy, Daniel and Sznaider, Natan, “Chapter 2: Cosmopolitan Memory” from The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, pp. 23-38, © Temple University Press, 2006.
3.Wiedmer, Caroline, “Sachsenhausen” from In The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France, pp. 164-199, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999.
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