Tränen, Trümmer, Träume

Where I went on my Holiday Teil Zwei: the City of the Future



There’s a wonderfully Teutonic compound word to describe the peculiar kind of block of flats that still makes up much of the capital: Mietskaserne, or ‘Rental Barracks’. Typically, these begin with a street façade of 4 or 5 storeys – originally usually ornamented in neoclassical or baroque style, though most of this was stripped off post-war for its inherent ludicrousness – and then inside there is courtyard after courtyard. When they were built, the further inside the complex one was tended to denote social status. From around the ‘20s until the 80s, these were seen as utterly inhuman structures: dark, dank, without lifts or balconies (for the most part), usually having at least one family crammed into small flats, which nonetheless tended to have incongrously opulent high ceilings. Since they became fashionable in Kreuzberg squatland in the early 80s, they have tended to be the model for all kinds of ‘critical reconstruction’, albeit without the cherubs and twisty ornament that originally festooned them: although I’ve seen a block in Friedrichshain where someone had painted the long-stripped frippery back on. The most grimly beautiful are those Mietskaserne still scattered round Prenzlauer Berg where the ornament is still in place – as are the bullet holes.

‘These are the unmistakable signs of a truly collective building, building which captures the sense of totality and which is the most beautiful expression of a supra-personal sensitivity’
Bruno Taut on his Hufeisensiedlung



But Berlin has been the site for all manner of attempts at building the city of the future, and interestingly, with a few (mostly Eastern) exceptions, one has to do a fair bit of research to find its traces in a city still dominated by the Mietskaserne. The earliest, and perhaps most heroic attempt, was that made by the socialist building society GEHAG from 1925 to 32. Along with Swedish rates of unemployment benefit and the NHS, this is one of a few moments in the history of Reformism about which one can be almost unambiguously positive – there doesn’t seem to have been much of a caveat or catch, no clause for the ‘deserving’ poor…Martin Wagner, the SPD town planner, envisaged a series of more futuristic variants on the garden city, and his instrument in this was a building society run by the trade unions and co-operatives. The chosen architect was Bruno Taut. After spending the 1918-9 period working with the anarcho-communist Arbeitsrat fur Kunst, and nearly appointed a minister in the Bavarian Soviet Republic, Taut’s first draft of the city of the future was a glass fantasy of jagged, Caspar David Friedrich sublimity, but by the mid-20s he’d had the obligatory conversion to Sachlichkeit, as can be seen in his first major project – the Hufeisensiedlung, designed in 1924.



At the edge of Neukolln, a KPD stronghold later to be immortalised by Bowie on ‘’Heroes’’, this is a mix of rows of cherry geometric blocks and multicoloured terraces, leading to the Hufeisen itself: a horseshoe shaped block of flats, with a landscaped park inside – which has become beautifully overgrown, and is still faced by a Constructivist terrace restaurant, now serving Croatian specialties. It’s also notable that here the City of the Future got an immediate response from the city of the past: DEWEGO, run by the white collar unions, erected a line of Volkisch housing in front of the Hufeisen, as if to spite it – the gables and rusticism refusing to let the illusion sustain itself. Likewise, another Taut designed settlement, the Waldsiedlung, served by the Onkel-Toms-Hutte U-Bahn, and often named after it – the rather ambiguous politics of the project are summed up nicely in that name – is also set off against rival hipped roofs and Bavarian tweediness, though here too, Taut’s combination of overgrown, semi-rural and uncompromisingly urban, angular, discordantly coloured blocks and houses still seems like a perfectly viable vision of what the future ought to look like. Interestingly though, these are places devoid of hipsteriness: edgy urban Berlin generally rents (outrageously cheaply) in the Mietskaserne, while the GEHAG adverts scattered about these estates tend to show wholesome looking families in the Barratt mode, albeit in incongrously well-designed locales.



In Architecture and Utopia, Manfredo Tafuri’s inadvertently proto-pomo diatribe against social democratic Modernism’s Keynesianism and technocracy, a very salient point about the Reformist future city is made: that it has to leave the real city, the one where most still live and work, almost entirely unchanged. In the 20s it was left to rack up its contradictions regardless of what Taut and Wagner did on the outskirts, and seeing as Berlin is a city of Mietskaserne in 2007, Tafuri is hard to argue with here. The tract does mention a few attempts that actually harnessed the contradictions to make a montage architecture of shock and disjunction – partly Wagner’s Siemensstadt estate, designed by Hans Scharoun (and faced by the obligatory Heimatschutzstil response) but mainly the signature architecture of Erich Mendelsohn. Best known today because of a tower for Einstein and a pavilion for Bexhill, Mendelsohn’s Berlin buildings have no trace of the garden city about them. The Mossehaus, for instance, is a futurist invention shoved into the frontage of a newspaper offices wrecked in the Spartacist uprising; the Schaubuhne maybe the first Modernist cinema; and the IG Metall trade union offices a sweeping, curved incursion into the street’s linearity. There are other totally urban fragments of the city of the future from the 20s here and there – the very imposing Kathreiner Hochhaus by Bruno Paul at Potsdamer Strasse, or Emil Fahrenkamp’s irresistible fantasy, Shell-Haus, or a few blocks by Hans Poelzig at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (including the lovely Kino-Babylon) but these are mostly sachlich precursors of the office blocks of today, with little latent utopianism to them, for all their brilliance. Then there’s 12 years of volkischness and neoclassical bombast, and then most of the city is flattened…



After the war, the Soviet occupiers gave Wagner’s old job to Hans Scharoun, who envisaged a totally new city on the ruins, doing away completely with the Wilhelmine street plan. Tafuri’s comrade and Berlin ‘critical reconstructor’ Aldo Rossi was more keen on the sinister exercise in retro-utopian planning that this eventually became – the Stalinallee, which he called ‘Europe’s last great street’. After a first segment planned by Scharoun and designed by Ludmila Herzenstein in ‘20s fashion, politburo edicts imposed the Stalinist Empire Style, roping in former Modernists like Hermann Henselmann and Richard Paulick to devise tile-clad palaces for workers and functionaries, and appropriately it was the construction workers here in 1953 who first proved the usefulness of the very wide streets for tank movements. The Stalinallee/Karl-Marx-Allee is a street as architectural museum, ranging from the early 50s ‘workers palaces’ to a return to functionalism from the end of that decade, as one approaches Alexanderplatz. It’s also clearly held in more popular esteem than the West Berlin equivalent, the Hansaviertel – a pretty but somehow unresolved scattering of blocks in the Tiergarten, which lacks Taut and Wagner’s conception of totality as much as it does Walter Ulbricht’s.



This wasn’t quite the last of the city of the future – there was Marzahn in the East, a huge plattenbau new town which I haven’t visited, and the Western equivalent to that, Gropiusstadt. This was planned by the Bauhaus director himself (then under fire for the Pan-Am tower in New York, and several decades past his best) as a 4-5 storey garden city, then after the wall went up in 1961, it ballooned into 30 floor blocks rammed up against each other, and was setting for smack & Bowie extravaganza Christiane F. It looked rather pleasant on a very brief visit, if lacking in the sense of the uncanny one gets from, say, Alexanderplatz. And then the city of the future more or less gives up. The ‘80s IBA, a successor to the Hansaviertel, resulted in some interesting buildings, but was all about filling in the gaps left by the war and the wall – then in the tabula rasa at the former Wall ‘death strip’, Potsdamer Platz, the city of the future was squandered for stone and brick skyscrapers. The dominant look imposed by Hans Stimmann is almost comically stern and Prussian, and one should remember exactly who pioneered this particular aesthetic in the city. There are still little parts that put anywhere else to shame in their futurism: the new Hauptbahnhof, maybe the Sony Centre. Yet the most politically and historically curious thing about the Century’s numerous stabs at the future city in Berlin is just how little mark most of them have made. This is still mostly a 19th century city, save maybe for a few Eastern segments of the 60s. At the same time though, it’s a city of fragmentations, ruptures and scars, lacking the laissez faire barbarity and speculative meanness of certain other mainly Victorian capitals one could care to name – and perhaps this is a legacy of the futures that have been attempted in its interstices…

Rubble, Tears and Dreams

Where I went on my holidays. Part One: Alexanderplatz



In Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood claimed that 1920s Berlin had two centres - the garish commercialism around Bahnhof Zoo or the Imperial Pomposity of Unter den Linden and the Museum Island. Today you'd have to add a third, rather less lauded, except by Alfred Doblin and Fassbinder, who were depicting a very different place: Alexanderplatz, and the Stalinist plazas and squares that radiate out from it, with their vast streets, prefab towers, wide open roads and fragments of socialist realist public art - a place where, aesthetically at least, the Cold War never ended.



Alexanderplatz was my first proper sight of Berlin on my first visit a few years ago, and with the instrumental half of "Heroes" playing on my headphones it was the most perfect meld of sound and location I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing. Alexanderplatz and environs is perhaps the most sublime example of East German planning. There is a sense of incredible vastness here - not because the buildings are all that high, apart from the TV Tower they're all pygmies by Canary Wharf standards. Rather, there's an uncanny Scale: everything is too wide, rather than too tall. This collection of towers and Spaceage accoutrements (the best of which being the wonderful atomic clock) is being actively cut down to size by the 'critical reconstruction' demanded by Hans Stimmann, a planner bent on restoring a Wilhelmine 19th century unity that never really existed, with pointless roads cutting into the public space. His blank, ponderous contribition to urbanism is catalogued in Igor Paasch's excellent short film 'Danke, Hans'.



The metallic Kaufhaus has already been 'critically' reconstructed into a stripped classical block that evokes Nazi architecture more than anything else (and more of that later). In the 1920s Berlin's socialist head of planning, Martin Wagner (more of whom later too) commissioned the likes of Erich Mendelsohn and Mies van der Rohe to remake Alexanderplatz into a Modernist showcase, something only really achieved under the DDR in the 1960s: fittingly, the individual buildings aren't exactly wildly individualistic, but as an ensemble they have an undeniable power that most affect to find intimidating - yet Jane Jacobs-types should note that it worked just fine as the public space where protests forced the collapse of the DDR. The most remarkable of its buildings, Hermann Henselmann's Haus des Lehrers, is notable for being rather sweet, with its glittering Walter Womacka mural of jolly proletarians.



Henselmann, designer of the towers of the Stalinallee/Karl-Marx-Allee, the one time 'Leninplatz', and the first draft of the TV Tower, is a fascinating character. A bauhaus modernist banned from practice by the Nazis, he was a pal of Brecht's, one one of whose Herr Keuner stories concerned Henselmann's dilemma when he was required to adopt the Stalinist wedding cake style for this colossal boulevard, designed to demonstrate the DDR's anti-modernist populism and grandiose ambitions. Mr Keuner reassures the architect that after a few years the ornament will crumble off and the pure lines could shine forth. Which it did, but post-renovation the Stalinallee towers are in pristine condition, encrustations and all, so the lines in question are encumbered by richly fascinating and perverse over-ornamentation. The nearby Leninplatz is perhaps what he would have done without Party pressure: curvaceous, brightly coloured, prefabricated and stripped down, topped with a stepped central tower and a whacking great statue of Lenin: replaced, on its 1990s renaming as United Nations Platz (from action to inaction) with some random boulders.



Leninplatz was Henselmann's only essay in Plattenbauten, the standardised prefab construction method that pervades practically all East German building, high or low rise. Plattenbau has long been a fetish of hipster folk in the city, and its easy to see why - for all its quite astonishing lack of inspiration or originality, this is naif architecture: childishly simple blocks upon blocks upon blocks, with pretty 60s patterns and tiles strategically placed. Accordingly, one of the Alexanderplatz towers, the Haus des Reisens, now has a club on top, WEEK12END, which I went to for Ellen Allien and Sascha Funke. Alas, despite the rather terrifying view, the club was decidedly frumpy. Annoyingly, I've never managed to find the place in Berlin where the people look good and the music is loud. A few years ago I was fixated with the Des Essientes disco of people like Ada and Superpitcher, or Michael Mayer (circa 'Amanda' or 'Falling Hands') with their neurasthenic elegance and precise blurts of noise, but I've totally lost touch with microhouse, minimal or whatever we're calling it now. The flip towards electro-house might have been the reason for this - I liked the records, but look at a picture of Booka Shade or Tiefschwarz - eurgh. And when something is described as 'the new Daft Punk' my heart sinks (the best house things I've heard in the last couple of years are the decidedly un-hep recent Armand van Helden stuff so my opinion is perhaps moot). Nonetheless, if anyone has any recommendations, please do comment and help me not to miss the boat, again.



Much, much more fun was sitting watching the clones a-jacking to some rather punishing techno in the stunning red leatherette Ostmoderne Cafe Moskau basement, further down the Karl-Marx-Allee - which resembles an Eastern Bloc Eames in its pretty glass surfaces and cubic elegance. Nonetheless, the missing link that aesthetically joins the minimalism of one period/art form with another is still somewhat mysterious.

Next up: what the various versions of the City of the Future of the DDR, the BRD and the GEHAG are like on a day trip. Title, btw is from the self-description of the Karl-Marx-Allee's Cafe Sibylle. And ta again to my hosts...