The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  Some of them started with graffiti. For a long time people had been coming from around the world to deface the Berlin Wall. The border guards might have kept a close watch on the eastern side, but they could effect no jurisdiction over its western face, which by 1989 had become a riot of abusive color. When the bulldozers broke down the Wall, artists streamed through to attack its inner, eastern face, which had hitherto remained pristine. They created trompe l’oeil murals that poked gaps in the structure upon which they had been drawn. A painted desert glimpsed through a painted hole evoked the sandy void of No Man’s Land. A tinny little East German car—the Trabant—crashed through the concrete. The president of the Soviet Union locked himself in a passionate tongue kiss with the president of the German Democratic Republic. The stories painted on the surface of the Wall weren’t just pictures: they challenged its very right to exist.

  But for others, paint seemed like weak punishment. The people took their hammers and chisels, their sledgehammers and crowbars, and they went to the Wall. Berlin in winter is a city of extraordinary echoes, particularly at night, and people didn’t sleep much in those days. The pecking of metal against concrete echoed down the dark, treeless streets of the city center, and those who chipped away at the Wall that had contained them became known as the Mauerspechte, the “wall woodpeckers.”

  The Mauerspechte were destroying the Wall in anger, but they did not discard their peckings. Many of them carefully collected, cataloged, and bagged their fragments. Sometimes they set up little stalls and sold their harvest to wandering tourists, complete with hastily contrived certificates of authenticity. Others hired their home tools out to visitors, who could then proudly display their bag of chips and honestly say that they had helped bring down the Berlin Wall. Some, like Volker Pawlowski, were more ambitious.

  All over the world there are tiny pieces of the Berlin Wall, hoarded and revered as if they were fragments of something awesome and numinous. The Japanese ceramicist Tokusen Nishimura once ground a chunk of the Wall into dust, mixed it with clay, and fashioned it into a vessel for the solemn tea ceremonies of Kyoto. The writer Araminta Matthews recounts the tale of a piece of the Wall that was passed from Berlin to lover to lover to her—until she offered it to her intended, and he, not understanding its significance, handed it back. Reader, she dumped him.

  Six months after the opening of the Wall, the East German government itself joined the ranks of the Wall profiteers. At a gala event at the Metropole Palace Hotel in Monaco, the Antifascist Protection Rampart was auctioned off to help pay the debts accumulated by the Socialist Workers’ Paradise it had been built to protect. Three hundred and sixty chunks of the Wall were photographed and listed in a glossy catalog, with the provenance of each fragment carefully noted. Pieces covered with beautiful graffiti fetched particularly high bids.

  The Wall can now be found in a bewildering array of locations: the CIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., the campus of Honolulu Community College in Hawaii, the urinals in the Main Street Station Hotel in Las Vegas. A slab of Grenzmauer 75 adorns the piazza of the small Italian hill town of Albinea, and another decorates a children’s playground at Trelleborg in Sweden. A segment of the Wall in Moscow carries the graffiti “BER.” The “LIN” is on a separate slab in Riga, Latvia.

  As the bidding was going on in Monaco, bulldozers returned to the ruins in Berlin and resumed their work. It took them about four months to clear away what was left. (Most of it was ground down into the rubble that now lies under the roads that reconnected Berlin to itself.) Then, three months after the auction of its border rampart, the German Democratic Republic reached the end of its own history. In October 1990 it abolished itself and ceased to exist.

  UTE DIDN’T STAY with her sister for too long; their reunion wasn’t what she had expected it to be. Her sister looked drawn and nervous. She still had nightmares, she said, about what the border guards had done when they’d caught her. She told the same torture stories as Ute: there had been the pool of freezing water, the humiliating exercise with the mirror, the cries echoing down the corridor. She suffered from terrible migraines, too. But the government of the German Democratic Republic had treated Ute’s sister to one additional debasement. They had sold her: she had been dumped in West Germany in exchange for hard currency, along with a load of dissidents and criminals. The police had packed her on her way with a warning. “Our agents are everywhere,” they said. “Keep your trap shut, or what happened to you will happen to everyone in your family.”

  Ute didn’t stay with her sister, but she didn’t go back to Berlin either. Like the fragments of the Wall, she went off to discover the world and make her fortune.

  IN THE PRESENT-DAY happily ever after, Jacqueline Röber is a community councillor and a lawyer who lives and works at one end of Bernauerstrasse. Röber is an expert on property law—something of a burning issue in a neighborhood like hers, where rents were capped at GDR prices until the pressures of gentrification blew the Berlin housing market wide open. A child of the East zone, Röber didn’t expect much from the newly unified Germany, and although she’s done well for herself she hasn’t forgotten her roots. These days, she is an advocate for the erstwhile citizens of her vanished nation.

  Her campaigning has led her into direct confrontation with another inheritor of the same legacy. When Germany was reunified and the state railway corporations of the East and the West were merged, a company called Vivico was established to run the railways’ extensive property portfolio. It has since become a major player in the German real estate market.

  Once upon a time, decades before the Wall, there had been a railway station at the end of Bernauerstrasse. The railway tracks divided the inner districts of the city in two: to the west was Wedding, to the east Prenzlauerberg. The station was flattened in the war, and Hagen Koch’s line ran between the two districts along the center of the deserted railway tracks. As the Wall grew, the tracks to the east disappeared beneath concrete and sand and barbed wire, while a makeshift labyrinth of private gardens was planted over them to the west. Everyone forgot that there had ever been a railway station in No Man’s Land, or that the area had belonged to anybody in the first place.

  After the Mauerspechte and the bulldozers had done their work, there was nothing left of the Wall—nothing apart from nothing, that is. And with the border guards no longer tending No Man’s Land, the ground began to bloom with the pigeons of the plant kingdom: purple mallow, lilac, yellow goldenrod, and all those other scruffy, colorful species that thrive on abandoned urban soil. Where the attack dogs had raced up and down, old ladies now ventured for a walk. Where two world systems had faced each other across the sand, rival Turkish gangs showed up to play their evening football. Where searchlights had raked the void, lovers came to conceal themselves in the foliage.

  In 1994, as part of a bid for the Olympic Games, the city had the No Man’s Land landscaped to a design by the Hamburg architect Gustav Lange. Berlin didn’t get the Olympics, but it did get a new park. The Mauerpark became a hangout for punks and teenagers, who drank and smoked and did deals on the hill. Occasionally they rioted. Mostly they did nothing. There is a wall in the Mauerpark that might or might not have been the Wall. This wall blazes with colorful graffiti, but it is not the art of protest and satire. It is a gallery of abstract hieroglyphs meaningful only to the impenetrable coteries of local delinquents who stake their ever-changing, arbitrary claims to a territory that belongs to no one.

  No one except Vivico, that is, since it owns all the land that had once belonged to the railways on both sides of the Wall. The company donated some of its parcels to the Berlin city council for the Mauerpark, with the landscaping funded by the city on the basis of environmental conservation. Now Vivico wants to build houses on the remainder of the land it owns, but the city won’t give it a building permit: the city says that the construction would harm the ecosystem of the park. The people, represented by Jacqueline Röber, are campaigning for the city to buy the land to p
rotect and expand the park, but Vivico is asking for a market rate that the city can’t possibly afford. The city can’t buy. Vivico can’t build. The people make do with half a park, and the land is suspended, as it has always been, in limbo.

  UTE WENT TO London, to make her fortune and see the world. She found work as a pastry chef in a smart restaurant, she worked hard, and she made good money. She could buy whatever she wanted, but she wasn’t happy. Ute had never been abroad before, and she didn’t speak English easily. She found people false and cold. “They always ask you over for a cup of tea, and say how nice it is to see you,” she’d complain, “but they don’t mean it.”

  About five years ago, Ute went home. She moved back into the flat in East Berlin she’d left a decade before. The plumber came around and removed the old coal boiler in the living room and put in central heating instead. She bought a new kitchen, painted the bathroom, had a telephone installed, and got a television. The street outside was unrecognizable: all the buildings had been replastered and painted in bright colors. There was a shopping mall across the road, incomprehensible computerized ticket machines at the U-Bahn station, and endless, endless coffee shops.

  At least her old friends were the same, she thought. But, actually, they weren’t; they were as emptily friendly as the people she’d met in England. Once upon a time, they had all lived in one another’s pockets, hand to mouth, closely connected to one another by their mutual fear of the state. Now they’d say, “Let’s go for a drink sometime,” and then she’d never hear from them. Berlin felt like nowhere in particular, inhabited by millions of people who were no one in particular. While she was away, it had turned into a no-man’s-land.

  HAGEN KOCH NOW lives happily ever after as a tour guide in Berlin. He works in the old Secret Police headquarters, which is now a museum, and takes children and tourists on walks around the city looking for traces of the Wall. He has amassed the largest collection of Wall memorabilia in existence, including histories, photographs, and, of course, maps, marked again and again with the line he painted on the pavement that summer morning in 1961. It was the same Hagen Koch who, twenty-nine years later, coordinated the removal of the fragments of his Wall to Monaco, where they were sold off to the highest bidder and dispersed across the globe. Now he is the guide and the guardian of what’s left of his creation. There’s not much.

  There is still one section of the Wall on Bernauerstrasse. Back in 1989 it was decided to cordon off a piece from the bulldozers and the chisels just in case someone, somewhere, at some point in the future, might want to know what it was like. Nothing happened for years, until in 1995 a competition was held to solicit proposals for this fragment that had somehow managed to survive the end of history.

  There were no winners, which pleased the locals. They didn’t want anything to happen. They had been imprisoned behind the Wall and had torn it down; they couldn’t see the point in trying to preserve it now. Eventually, though, the contract was awarded to one of the runners-up in the competition, a West Berlin firm by the name of Kolhoff and Kolhoff, and exactly nine years after the Wall had come down its memorial was completed.

  The memorial is precise in every detail. There is the post-and-slab construction of the hinterland wall. There is the void of No Man’s Land, with its raked sand, its crooked concrete path, and its lights on their tall curved stalks. There is the proud outer face of Grenzmauer 75, standing there calmly, aggravating no one, resisting fascism. But this is just a wall, an exhibit in a minor suburban museum. At either end it is book-ended by gigantic sheets of steel, their polished surfaces reflecting the concrete back and forth to an infinity that no longer exists.

  There are monuments to the Wall all over Berlin now, as people struggle to remember what it had all been like not so very long ago. The oldest of these attractions was established just two days after the Wall was built, in a flat on the western side of Bernauerstrasse. (It was moved a couple of months later to Checkpoint Charlie.) Its owner, the enterprising Rainer Hildebrandt, used to help people escape over the Wall, and then used their stories as exhibits in his museum.

  In 2004, his even more enterprising widow, Alexandra, tried to rebuild the Wall. In a vacant lot across the road from their museum, about thirty feet away from where the actual Wall had stood, she cobbled together some 450 feet of wall from broken chunks she’d picked up here and there. But her no-man’s-land belonged to someone else, and soon this second wall, too, was brought down.

  Checkpoint Charlie is now one of the chief sights of Berlin. Students dress up as border guards, American or Russian, and pose for photographs with tourists. The little shed the Americans had used as a guardhouse has been reconstructed, and so has the famous sign that warns “You are now leaving the American sector” in English, French, Russian, and German. The original placard was stolen in 1989 and now hangs over a sofa somewhere in the United States.

  Behind the Ostbahnhof station, a section of the Wall that graffiti artists flocked to in 1989 is now known as the East Side Gallery. Conservators are hard at work on the murals. They have begun the painstaking task of restoring the flaking paint, as if the crumbling concrete bore a priceless cycle of Renaissance frescoes.

  There are remembrances of the Wall farther afield as well. In Sweden there is a collection of hand-crafted models of the Wall made by a woman who calls herself Eija Riitta Berliner-Mauer. She married the Wall, she says, back in 1979, in a small ceremony at Gross Ziethenerstrasse. Now she laments his demise by writing him love poetry. She reconstructs him again and again in balsa wood on her living room floor, as her cat jumps from East to West on the carpet.

  Once upon a time, it was dangerous even to look at the Wall, but now it has been made safe by all the prophylaxis of the curated exhibit. The glass case, the tasteful lighting, the souvenir shop, and the audio guide sanitize the squalor and the cruelty and the sheer strangeness of what actually happened. And because it is safe now, the Wall is not readily forgotten. There is even a word for the longing that the former inhabitants of Ostdeutschland, the erstwhile socialist workers of the East, experience for their vanished paradise. They call it Ostalgie.

  UTE DOESN’T SUFFER from Ostalgie very much. When she was a child, she says, she was forced to go on endless history trips to museums and memorials—to gaze at the piles of hair and teeth in concentration camps, to see the war graves of Russian soldiers and the empty ground above Hitler’s bunker, to look at the bridge from which the communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg had been thrown. She couldn’t bear it then, and she can’t bear it now. It all seems so intrusive. People’s teeth and hair, their dead bodies, the places where they died should be private to them, she thinks; and so should their lives. The Wall has joined all the other abominations in the whole “lest we forget” parade, the circus of German horrors with which Ute’s generation was punished for the sins of their fathers.

  Ute takes her granddaughter out walking in the evening. “I’ll show you where I saw my sister over the Wall,” she says. “It’s not far.” They wander in the old No Man’s Land for hours, but for the life of her Ute can’t find the place. She looks around, takes a drag on her cigarette, and utters a throaty laugh. “Scheisse!” She can’t remember.

  The Venetian, Las Vegas

  In Which History Is So, Like, Over

  VENICE TO MACAO

  Image created by Ludovico De Luigi, Venetian

  painter of impossible views.

  SPECTACLE

  Turn away from the Parthenon and you’ll encounter countless souvenir stands selling marble statuettes of gods and satyrs and, of course, the Parthenon itself. The temple swims in snow domes, adorns tea towels, and crowns countless paperweights and ashtrays.

  Nearly all the other buildings whose secret lives have been recounted in this book have suffered the same fate. The Berlin Wall was once the edge of the world, but since the “end of history” it has become a quarry of souvenir chips and scraps. Ayasofya is now a museum, Gloucester Cathedral serves as Hogwart
s in the film versions of Harry Potter, and the Alhambra is such a popular attraction that visits to it must be booked three months in advance. Venice, meanwhile, has become a museum of itself, maintained more for the delectation of tourists than for the use of the people who live there.

  Buildings that our barbarian ancestors ruined, stole, and appropriated, that our medieval forebears transformed through repetitive rituals, that our Renaissance progenitors translated into classical languages, that our more modern predecessors imitated and restored are now displayed as historical exhibits, to be viewed with the impassivity of Thomas Cole’s architect reclining on his isolated column. The Architect’s Dream itself, which was painted to hang in an architect’s studio, is now safely housed in the climatically controlled conditions of a museum.

  It has been argued that the prototype of the contemporary city is the expo and the theme park. Nowhere is this clearer than in Las Vegas, a city of spectacles, whose chief reason for existence is the provision of amusements for the jaded visitor. Ironically, Vegas is filled with attractions modeled on European cities that have themselves become tourist traps. Cruise the Vegas Strip today and you will find a Bellagio, a Monaco, a Paris, and a Venice as packed with vacationers as the originals. It is The Architect’s Dream made real—or as real as can be fabricated out of fiberglass in the middle of a desert.

  Vegas is an extreme case, a mirage, a desert oasis. But now, in a further irony, it is itself being imitated for the pleasure of tourists. The Vegas brand of Venice has just arrived in China, where centuries ago Marco Polo stood before Kublai Khan and described the unlikely city from which he had come. Translated through centuries and transported across continents, this Venice is nothing like the robber republic that Marco Polo described. It’s a place for a relaxing weekend, nothing else. After the end of history, we take a break, sip a coffee, and take our snaps of monuments that used to change with history—and used to change it, too. They don’t seem to, anymore.