by Wendy Lesser
I felt this very strongly on the day I was taken, with a handful of other Academy fellows and staff, on a visit to the Reichstag's art collection. I had seen the Reichstag before, in its more public aspects: the imposing façade with its inscription “To the German People”; the lovely, airy, vertiginous dome from which you can get the best views of surrounding Berlin; and the vast chamber, with its cantilevered balconies and purplish-blue upholstery, where the parliamentary delegates meet. But the art collection is housed in more intimate parts of the building, those in which the parliament does its routine business. One aspect, in fact, of that routine business is the selection and commissioning of the Reichstag's art, a job which is done entirely by a subcommittee of elected delegates—the art committee being one of the regular parliamentary assignments, just as Appropriations or Armed Services might be in America. These delegates may listen to the advice of art critics or art historians while they are coming to their decision, but they argue the issues and cast their votes on their own, with no expert intervention.
What they had voted for, thus far, included a number of monumental works that kept before the delegates’ eyes, on a daily basis, the darkest moments of recent German history. One particularly memorable piece by Christian Boltanski, for instance, consisted of facing walls of rectangular plaques (reminiscent, in their slightly corroded appearance, of the stacked drawers of cremated ashes one might find in an old cemetery) naming all the previous members of the German parliament: those who had been killed by the Nazis were marked in a special way, and the era from 1933 to 1945 was represented simply by a black space. Every delegate to the present parliament had to pass by these walls daily on the way into the voting chamber.
Another installation, this one in an inner courtyard visible from all the flanking windows, featured a rather endearingly and very un-Teutonically messy garden, in which was embedded a series of luminous letters. The garden (which the curators were forbidden to modify in any way, unless its growth began to obscure the letters) had sprung up from seeds brought by the delegates from their various districts; and the letters (which caused such a controversy that the entire parliament, and not just the art committee, had to vote on this commission) spelled out the German words for “To the Population.” This phrase, which clearly alluded to all the non-citizens and non-Aryans who had come to reside in present-day Germany, was intended by the artist, Hans Haacke, as a direct response to the outer façade's more exclusive “Dem Deutschen Volke.”
These are not, either of them, exactly my favorite kind of artwork, but in their place, and arising as they had arisen, they seemed to me just right. I was moved by the earnestness and honesty with which they had been selected, and by the quiet power the finished works emanated. And I couldn't help thinking, as I looked at them, how differently we do things in America, where oblivion and cultivated ignorance are the government's chief mechanisms for getting through the day, and where commemoration of our national misdeeds—especially through any kind of publicly funded art—would seem to be unthinkable.
My other exemplary experience of German moral scrupulousness took place on the Berlin trains. I spent a lot of time on the trains in Berlin, partly because Wannsee was so far from the center, but also because the public transportation system was itself a work of art, with S-Bahn, U-Bahn, bus, and railroad lines all blending together to create a practical, punctual, far-reaching network that could take you anywhere you wanted to go. You could buy a one-month pass starting on any day you chose, and it allowed you, for something in the range of sixty or seventy dollars (less if you were unemployed), to ride any bus, train, or subway in the city. The beauty part was that you didn't have to show your Monatskarte to a ticket-taker or pass it through a machine: you just kept it with you and flashed it when asked, which might happen twice in a day or only once in three weeks, depending on how many conductors were riding your trains. This in turn meant that you could leap aboard any train or bus just as it pulled in, without taking the time to fumble for a ticket (or waiting for other people to fumble for theirs). In that vast majority of moments when you were not being asked to show your pass, it was as if you owned the city's transportation system and could ride anywhere for free. A certain code of honor needed to prevail, of course, but that it did prevail was evident in the fact that even teenage punks—pierced, tattooed, and swigging whiskey directly from the bottle—scrambled to retrieve their Monatskarten when the conductor came through. I found the whole system liberating and delightful, and said so repeatedly, to the point where visiting friends accused me of being a paid employee of Berlin Public Transport.
The particular incident I found so instructive happened late one night on the regional express, as my husband and I were going back out to Wannsee. We had previously remarked to each other on the rude behavior of Berliners in crowded compartments—the way they would, for instance, put their backpacks or packages on the seat next to them, and not remove them even if you eyed the seat balefully or longingly; you had to ask if the seat was free in order to get it. (This wasn't just discrimination against foreigners, either: most of the time I saw it happen, the seatless petitioner was another German.) But that night we saw a different kind of train behavior. The express, which normally ran all the way to Potsdam, had come to an unexpected halt in Charlottenburg. The public address system announced that we should all get off the train and cross the platform so as to catch the next train out. My German wasn't good enough for me to figure out exactly what was happening, but at least my husband and I knew enough to get off the train. One young guy, though, his ears completely covered by headphones, was left behind on the empty express. He leaned sleepily against the window, oblivious to his fate, and we were just beginning to wonder what would happen to him when one of those heavyset German women, the kind who habitually took up one and sometimes two extra seats with her packages, went back to the train and rapped loudly on the outside of his window. He looked up, startled, and took in the woman's gestured instructions just in time to get himself across the platform to the waiting train.
Later, we reported this incident to a German friend of ours, a man who was born in West Germany in 1956 and who made his living editing a leftwing magazine. We contrasted the boorishness of the casual seat-hogging behavior with the public attentiveness of the late-night warning to the stranger on a train. “No way,” we said, “would you call that kind of attention to yourself at midnight on the New York subways. If some strange guy was about to miss his train, you'd just let him.”
Martin's explanation of the incident drew on his own postwar schooldays. “We were always taught,” he said, “that if someone is in trouble, indifference is not a sufficient response. You cannot just look the other way. Because we had seen what could happen when people did look the other way.”
I have since told this story to a number of German-Americans, both Jews and non-Jews, and they tend to interpret the incident differently. Rather than enthusing about the woman's public-spiritedness, they see her behavior as a sign of typical German officiousness, or rule-mongering, or excessive orderliness, or some other unpleasant national characteristic. And no doubt those qualities do enter into it. But Martin's view rings truer to the feeling I had at the time: that she was actively, disinterestedly, and somewhat selflessly saving the boy from the fate that would otherwise have befallen him. The impersonality of her gesture—the fact that, as an individual, he meant nothing in particular to her—was precisely part of its charm.
I do not actually have a feel for Germany as a whole, since I barely spent any time outside of Berlin. Berliners themselves think of their city as a special case, and I agree with them. I suspect that even if I never live there again, I will feel uncannily and permanently attached to it.
It is not an inherently lovable city. It is not beautiful like Paris or San Francisco, not exciting like London or New York, not charming like Barcelona. Its greatest charm may even be this very lack of charm, this blunt refusal to manipulate and cajole—just as certain
people can be charming because they are so evidently not trying to charm. And, as with such people, you feel about Berlin that it is your discovery alone, that you are the only one who really sees it well enough to love it, since it is not asking to be loved.
In many neighborhoods of Berlin, you can walk for blocks—nay, miles—without coming upon a picturesque sight. It's true that there are some wonderful examples of modern architecture, Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie and Norman Foster's Reichstag Dome being perhaps the best; and there are also a few lovely older buildings, like Schinkel's grand Konzerthaus in the Gendarmenmarkt. It's also true that the city has a vast amount of green space, which makes it surprisingly livable on a daily basis (a factor which was even more important in the days when West Berliners, hemmed in by the Wall, couldn't simply drive out to the nearby countryside). But there is no quaint medieval quarter, no hill with views, and very little, aside from the areas around Fasanenplatz and Kollwitzplatz, that is built on a comfortably human yet densely urban scale. Much of Berlin was bombed out of existence during the Second World War, and even more succumbed to redevelopment in the years since then, so that almost nothing is left, in a physical sense, of Christopher Isherwood's or George Grosz's Berlin, not to mention Theodor Fontane's or Adolph Menzel's nineteenth-century city.
And yet something of the spirit of that old city survives—not as a preserved bit of architecture or landscape, but as a feeling, a possibility. Berlin is a place that is always in the process of becoming something else. Its primary allegiance is to change, to novelty, to self-invention or reinvention. But this constant transformation is mysteriously and eternally anchored to the solid rock of history. Berlin never forgets its own past, and it never lets you forget it. So all the newness you see there is self-consciously displayed against the invisible oldness whose place it has taken. Whether it's the Berlin Wall or a Jewish synagogue, the Royal Palace or a tree-lined street, the absent structure refuses to give way entirely to the present one that has usurped its position. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that even the present-day buildings—some of them huge and overbearing in the extreme—carry with them the whiff of their own mortality, the sense (unusual in modern-day skyscrapers) that they will someday disappear, just like the constructions that preceded them.
If Venice, say, is about timelessness, then Berlin is about a very particular moment in time: this moment, the moment you happen to be there, which is singularly apparent to you because it is so evidently distinct from the historical moments on either side of it. Living in Berlin, you picture its past and also its future, so that you have no hope (as you might imagine you have in most other cities) of holding onto the place you have fallen in love with. Before you have time to act on that love—learn German, buy an apartment, find local employment—the city will have changed, becoming something other than what you thought you had finally found. Just as the construction cranes define the skyline, throwing up new buildings between one week and the next, the rapidity of all the other kinds of change forces you to acknowledge that the word “finally” has no place in Berlin.
Arriving there in 2003, I was very much aware of the precise historical moment I inhabited. In Germany, the Wall had been down for fourteen years, Berlin had once again become the capital, the euro had recently replaced the Deutsche Mark, and Gerhard Schroeder's leftish central government was struggling with the effects of having swallowed East Germany whole. The place I came from was at a particular juncture, too: it was an America which, six months into its invasion of Iraq, was run by the most venally rightwing administration of my adult life. The voters in my home state of California were about to elect a movie-star muscle-man as governor, the best newspaper in the country was effectively reducing its culture pages to pap, and television consisted increasingly of lurid reality shows that bore no relation to anyone's idea of reality. The shock of going from one culture to the other was intense, and bracing, but it was also rather terrifying to be able to see myself and everything else so clearly from the outside, as if I were a character in history.
By the time I got to Berlin, the only visible piece of the Wall was a preserved chunk of it not far from Potsdamer Platz, a thin, puny, pathetic-looking remnant that didn't seem as if it would have kept anybody from going anywhere. The vast acres of no-man's-land that had previously stretched between East and West Berlin had been completely filled in by construction, most of it high-end shopping and office buildings. Friedrichstrasse Station, once the heavily guarded exit from East Berlin, was now the busy center of my beloved transportation network. Physically, the city felt unified. And yet virtually all Berliners over the age of twenty-five or so routinely referred to neighborhoods as being in the “former East” or the “former West,” and in fact continued to view themselves as coming originally from West or East Germany. The traces of this recent past (and all it entailed, ideologically, socially, economically) were very much a part of the living present, even for newcomers like me whose experience of it was entirely secondhand. It gave the citizens a rich collective memory of self-division, and this in turn meant that the performing arts, which in Berlin still very much relied on concepts like “dialectic” and “alienation,” had something quite specific on which to draw.
I saw many performances that hinged on this recent history, but two in particular stood out. One was a production of Beethoven's Fidelio at the Komische Oper. Of the three professional opera companies in Berlin, the Komische has always defined itself as the most local: it catered to its relatively unworldly East German audience by translating every opera into German, and was still, in 2003, adhering to this linguistic rule (though that did not, of course, affect Fidelio). The building itself bore its history in layers, with a Victorian jewel-box of an auditorium set inside a garishly modern lobby-snackbar-cloakroom structure that dated from the postwar Communist era. And the night I was there, even the audience members looked, to my eye, different from those at the placidly bourgeois Deutsche Oper or the comparatively hip Staatsoper: they seemed more dressed-up than the latter, less comfortable in their dressed-up clothes than the former.
I went with a friend from the Academy who spoke German fluently and who had already been to the Komische a number of times, both before and after 1989. The production itself (performed to a half-empty theater on a Saturday night, with a brave soprano fighting off a cold) was described in its own one-page program as being Brechtian, and it was indeed truer to that method—of performers morphing into characters and back again, of history visibly presented, of art that simultaneously moved you and made you think—than anything I saw at the Berliner Ensemble. The singing was very good and the acting was unusually persuasive, but what made me feel I was really seeing something for the first time was the utter conviction with which the actor-singers conveyed their Romantic-era story of imprisonment and liberation.
“Can you tell what they're doing?” my friend asked me as the first-act curtain came down. I thought about the cheap street-clothes the performers wore, and the massive, slightly abstract set which created an impassable barrier out of functioning stage machinery, and the answer came to me without a pause. “East Berlin,” I said, and my friend nodded.
The other occasion on which the past seemed particularly alive was a concert given by the Maryinsky Orchestra and Chorus, under the charismatic and somewhat unnerving leadership of Valery Gergiev Visiting from St. Petersburg as part of a major German-Russian cultural exchange, the orchestra performed two pieces of Russian music, both of them written in 1936: Prokofiev's Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of the October Revolution, and Shostakovich's Symphony Number 4. In choosing the Prokofiev, Gergiev must have known he was asking for trouble. Musically, the piece is already risky enough: it involves a number of unusual sound effects (a train whistle, a siren, the stamp of marching feet) and a wider-than-average collection of instruments in the orchestra (including, for this performance, the Berlin Police Department's brass band and eight or nine accordion players). But what
brought about the reaction in Berlin were the words of the cantata. Sung in Russian by a chorus of nearly a hundred and projected onto the proscenium arch in large German supertitles, these verses emphatically and repeatedly celebrated the Bolshevik Revolution, the birth of Communism, the triumph of the workers, etc., etc. At one point a man dressed up as Lenin came out onto the stage and harangued the audience with Lenin-style gestures, an intrusion that was clearly built into the score. All this was a bit more than certain elements of the Berlin audience could tolerate. For these former East and West Germans now attending a performance in what had once been West Berlin—as well as for the many Russians who had recently immigrated to the city, and who were probably represented at this Maryinsky concert in larger than usual numbers— Communism was far from a dead issue. So when the last notes of the music had sounded, the intense applause that met the orchestra's undeniably impressive achievement was punctuated by loud, threatening boos, clearly aimed not at the quality of the performance but at the meaning of the cantata's words.
I had heard booing before in a theater, but I had never heard boos that were this loud or sustained. They were just this side of scary, especially since the applause sector responded by clapping even louder, which in turn caused the boos to intensify. Gergiev took his bows with a small, ironic smile on his face, and then he briefly left the stage. When he returned, he brought Lenin with him—and the actor proceeded to acknowledge his curtain call with appropriately Leninesque arm gestures. The booing faction was so offended by this that there was a momentary pause, as if for an intake of affronted breath, and then the boos came back louder than ever, as did the applause, which refused to die down until the booing was over. It was thrilling to hear music taken this seriously, and I had the sense that nowhere else in the world would the Prokofiev have created quite that response: this was musical history brought vigorously to life, so that the piece referred to its precise moment of performance as much as to its origins. That the objection had been purely political was confirmed at the end of the concert's second half, when the final notes of the astonishing (and astonishingly well played) Shostakovich symphony were greeted by a long, reverential silence, and then by thunderous applause on the part of the whole audience, including the first-act naysayers.
