Nazi Buildings, Cold War Traces and Governmentality in Post-Unification Berlin

Clare Copley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350081550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia alemana

Bringing together approaches from cultural and urban history, as well as German studies and political theory, Clare Copley's probing study reflects on post-unification responses to iconic Nazi architecture to reveal insights into power, legitimacy and memory politics in the Berlin Republic. Analysing public debates, physical interventions into the buildings and the structuring of the memory landscapes around them, the book demonstrates that the politics of memory impact not just upon the built environment of the post-dictatorship city, but upon the way decisions about it are made. In doing so, Nazi Buildings, Cold War Traces and Governmentality in Post-Unification Berlin makes the case for conceiving of a specifically 'post-authoritarian' governmentality and uses the responses to constructions like Goering's Aviation Ministry, Tempelhof Airport and the Olympic complex to explore its features.

Part 1

Theoretical approach

1

Governmentality and the politics of the past

The analysis in this book draws on the study of governmentality, an approach that encourages us to unpick the techniques and rationalities which inform how we are governed and which shape our ideas and actions. Developing the concept in his lectures at the Collège de France in February 1978, Foucault identifies a shift which took place between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries from the overt imposition of controls and restrictions upon subjects towards the cultivation of a collective mentality, which would immerse subjects within a particular body of knowledge and truth and shape their behaviour. This shift was, he argued, underpinned by the developing ‘art of government’ which became necessary as traditional structures were challenged and an increasing need emerged for rulers to derive their legitimacy from elsewhere. According to Foucault, advisers to the rulers became increasingly concerned with ‘a problematic of government in general’: the questions of ‘how to govern oneself, how to be governed, by whom should we accept to be governed and how to become the best possible governor’.¹ Correspondingly, the objective of the exercise of power shifted from the retention by the prince of his territory, and thereby his position, towards economy. Already recognized within the family sphere as the means to securing prosperity through the correct management of individuals, goods and wealth, the introduction of economy into political practice saw the introducing of the ‘meticulous attention of the father towards his family into the management of the state’.² Population became the object of governance in this new way of thinking, and government thereby had the task of optimizing the utility of this resource. Given the growing realization that ‘if one governed too much one did not govern at all’,³ this was to be achieved not through laws and regulations but through the forming of a subject through shaping their comportment, both internal and external, as is aptly summarized in Foucault’s oft cited reference to le conduire des conduits or the ‘conduct of conduct’.⁴

In developing his ideas around governmentality, Foucault aimed to see if it was possible to approach the state in the way that he had done with institutions such as prisons, armies and schools. Here he had moved beyond focusing on the functions of these institutions and instead sought to locate them within wider technologies of power by interrogating the ideas about truth, knowledge and rationality by which they are constituted and which they, in turn, consolidate.⁵ In exposing the ‘genealogy’ of these institutions, he highlighted the plurality and fluidity of the power relations that lie behind them, thus exposing their instability and showing how rather than standing as rigid structures, they can be permeated and modified by a vast range of processes.⁶ In a similar way, a study of governmentality is concerned with moving beyond the functions of the state and revealing the relations of power that lie behind it. To analyse a particular governmentality, then, means to identify techniques of government, to analyse the rationalities and aspirations behind them and, ultimately, to expose the contingent nature of, and perhaps destabilize, the regimes of truth from which they emerge. As Lemke succinctly summarizes: ‘It is not possible to study the technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality underpinning them.’⁷

The concept of governmentality has gone on to inform a vast scholarship across disciplines including sociology, psychology, criminology, history, political science, social policy and urban studies.⁸ Rather than a coherent body of work unified by a particular methodology, these studies are connected through the questions they ask of their diverse objects of study and their aims of exposing the rationalities and technologies that shape them. In parallel with this growth of studies informed by governmentality, a literature has also developed which identifies both flaws in Foucault’s ideas and shortcomings in the work that is founded upon them. This has, in turn, been met with a vein of scholarship that challenges and rebuts these criticisms. Prominent among the critics of Foucault’s work are those who see it as identifying a totalizing form of power which allows no capacity for individual agency or resistance. Scholars with this view argue that if conduct is, indeed, conducted, then any scope for contestation or alterity must be eliminated. Furthermore, if the oft cited ‘positive, productive’ view of power that Foucault expounds becomes such as it encounters, and then counters, different forms of resistance, this suggests that resistance strengthens rather than weakens the dominant power structure.⁹ To Stephen Legg, however, this draws on a ‘caricature’ of Foucault’s work, one that overlooks the nuance of his analysis of ‘plebeian’ resistance to normalization, forms of counter-conduct and rights as basis for resistance.¹⁰ A second key strand to the criticisms of Foucault’s governmentality is the accusation that his focus on the plural nature of power actually underplays the very real power of the institutions of state.¹¹ Kim McKee counters this by pointing out that what Foucault rejects is not the idea of the state as a key node of power but a conception of ‘the state’ which sees it reduced to a ‘unified and monolithic all-powerful ruler’. Rather, she argues, governmentality pushes us to identify the multiple voices and power relations that constitute ‘the state’.¹² This does not necessarily mean, of course, that this is found in all studies using the governmentality concept. Their concurrence with McKee on this issue notwithstanding, Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann and Thomas Lemke find that many studies using governmentality do tend to use the state as a source of an ‘archaic and repressing form of exercising power’ and address this in their own edited volume.¹³ A third strand of criticism is that discussed by Pat O’Malley, Lorna Weir and Clifford Shearing who find that too many studies deploying the governmentality framework are so abstract that they overlook the ‘messy actualities’ of ‘what actually happens’ on the ground.¹⁴ This then leads to an ov erlooking of struggle and resistance and limits the capacity of the scholarship to critique what it is exploring, leaving it behind critical approaches such as those informed by Marxism, feminism and queer theory and risking irrelevance. This issue is, the authors say, ‘not immanent to governmentality studies’ but one which needs to be addressed.¹⁵ While acknowledging that many studies which draw on the governmentality concept do have such blind spots and omissions, Lemke explains how it is in the making visible ‘the depth and breadth of processes of domination and exploitation’ that governmentality allows for critique.¹⁶ This ongoing conversation about the strengths and limitations of the governmentality concept is a positive one. It compels those who use it in their work to continually reassess both Foucault’s ideas and their own application of them while also encouraging ongoing dialogue between scholars with very different worldviews. In using the concept of governmentality to inform a historical study such as that in this book, these concerns are most effectively allayed not through recourse to Foucault’s work but through the careful selection and interpretation of the empirical sources which inform the analysis. The sources deployed in this book, as discussed more fully in the introduction, have been chosen to reflect the plurality of voices and power relations that interact in the debates around how the buildings should be responded to while also revealing the ‘real world’ complexities around the implementation of particular ideas. The issue of resistance is inherent to the analyses of the interactions between different nodes of power and becomes overt in discussions of the work of different memorial activists and citizens initiatives as they challenge the responses or silences constructed around particular elements of the past or (re)configurations of the built environment.

Within the vast scholarship which now draws on and develops Foucault’s ideas, various forms of governmentality have been identified: the ‘police’ form of governmentality of the eighteenth century; the liberal governmentality which emerged in the nineteenth century; the authoritarian governmentality which some states experienced in the twentieth century; and the advanced liberal governmentality which emerged in many Western states in the 1980s.¹⁷ It is not, however, suggested that these mentalities of government are fundamentally different from one another. Rather, they are understood as different realizations of the same technologies and practices; the variation is more of aspiration and extent than means and techniques of governance.¹⁸ Neither should they be seen as static, monolithic categories, and although they are often presented as periodization, they should not be considered to seamlessly segue into one another; even across apparent political, social and cultural ruptures some technologies of governance endure, others are consciously rethought and rendered obsolete, others simply fade away while still others are adapted.¹⁹ The argument in this book is that none of these existing conceptions of governmentality allows us to take into account the extent to which the politics of the past can inform the rationalities, strategies and practices which constitute governmentality in certain states which have within living memory undergone a period of authoritarian rule. It is suggested instead that it is necessary to conceive of a specifically post-authoritarian governmentality and that the Berlin Republic is a prime example of this. It will use the built environment to gain an insight into the nature of that governmentality.

Liberal governmentality

Emerging towards the end of the eighteenth century, ‘liberal governmentality’ has at its centre the seemingly contradictory objective of governing through freedom. This paradox of ruling through freedom is realized through the positing of certain spheres, such as the self and the family as being beyond the reach of government while simultaneously employing a range of techniques to structure the conditions within which the exercise of the autonomy of these entities is possible. The technologies of liberal governance can be recognized in almost every arena where individuals interact with each other, with some manifestation of the state or with non-state actors. As Foucault explains, they are seen in the ‘thoroughly heterogenous ensemble of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions’.²⁰ Much of this builds on the techniques and ideas associated with the emergence of ‘biopolitics’, the production of knowledge about the population itself and the environment within which it lives in order to facilitate the governing of that population.²¹ This is manifested in the collection and compilation of calculations and measurements of statistics about births and deaths, health, fertility and illness, which are then collated, analysed, interpreted and presented as constituting an objective ‘knowledge’ of a population. This information can then inform interventions into that population in order to manage it more effectively. These may take the form of promoting insurance or savings schemes or campaigns for awareness and action around public health or sexual behaviour.²² Unlike the more regulatory forms of power that had previously prevailed, the aim of such interventions within a liberal governmentality is not to force mere external compliance to law or social mores but to find a balance between freedom and regulation which produces a self-governing subject, instilled with the middle-class values of hard-work, decency, thrift and sobriety. Studies of liberal governmentality expose the power relations within such apparently neutral, objective processes. They reveal that as a territory and its inhabitants becomes subject to the gaze of the statistician, the bureaucrat or the map-maker and then, subsequently to the readers of the statistics, records and maps that they produce, that population or territory becomes visible, knowable and therefore governable from afar.²³

Advanced liberal governmentality

Since the late 1980s, much of Europe, North America and Australasia have seen the development of what Rose terms ‘advanced liberal democracies’.²⁴ Characterized by a post-war move beyond welfarist government and Keynesian economics towards a critique of excessive government and the valorization of individual freedom and responsibility, this shift has frequently been analysed in terms of neoliberal ism.²⁵ Following the work of Dean, however, scholars of governmentality highlight that neoliberalism is just one of the multiple rationalities of government, alongside neo-conservatism and communitarianism, for example, that is in contestation within contemporary mentalities of government.²⁶ In short, neoliberalism should be understood as just one ideological strand of advanced liberalism. ‘Advanced liberalism’ refers to societies where responsibility for governance has gradually been delegated from the state to a range of agents, starting with the individual, whose effective self-governance is seen as the cornerstone of both individual and national well-being and prosperity. This then radiates outwards into multiple social actors such as teachers, parents, bodies of experts, community groups, private companies, trusts and associations. It is, in essence, a move beyond attempts to govern through society towards attempting to govern ‘without governing society’.²⁷ This shift has sought to reconfigure the citizen as an active agent, to empower him/her to realize their own potential and fulfil their own needs rather than to depend on the state for assistance: ‘the ideal of the “social state” [has given] way to that of the “enabling state”’.²⁸

Just as in nineteenth-century liberalism, however, the autonomy of these actors is only considered to be conducive to the well-being of the nation if it takes place within certain parameters. The field of possibilities open to them is therefore delimited through a range of techniques. The power of the expert, for example, whose research, reports and analyses shape aspects of life from education and health to civil engineering and transport, is curtailed by the ‘technologies of performance’.²⁹ Comprised of strategies such as the introduction of performance indicators, benchmarks and the devolution of budget setting, these technologies subject the expert to monitoring and thus ensure that apparently autonomous agents can be assessed and governed and their conduct can be shaped remotely.³⁰ In addition, the study of ‘new prudentialism’ identifies the way in which the citizen and the community become responsible for monitoring risk and so it becomes rational and prudent for them to invest in their own security through private health insurance, neighbourhood watch schemes and private pensions.³¹ The role of the citizen is further reconfigured through what Dean refers to as the ‘techn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Theoretical approach
• Part 2 Plurality? Performing post-authoritarian governmentality at the former Aviation Ministry
• Part 3 Rationality? Negotiating post-authoritarian governmentality at the Olympic Stadium
• Part 4 Freedom? Transcending post-authoritarian governmentality at the former Tempelhof Airport
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright