Berlin, Alexanderplatz

Transforming Place in a Unified Germany

Gisa Weszkalnys

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781845458355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

A benchmark study in the changing field of urban anthropology, Berlin, Alexanderplatz is an ethnographic examination of the rapid transformation of the unified Berlin. Through a captivating account of the controversy around this symbolic public square in East Berlin, the book raises acute questions about expertise, citizenship, government and belonging. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the city administration bureaus, developers' offices, citizen groups and in Alexanderplatz itself, the author advances a richly innovative analysis of the multiplicity of place. She reveals how Alexanderplatz is assembled through the encounters between planners, citizen activists, social workers, artists and ordinary Berliners, in processes of popular participation and personal narratives, in plans, timetables, documents and files, and in the distribution of pipes, tram tracks and street lights. Alexanderplatz emerges as a socialist spatial exemplar, a 'future' under construction, an object of grievance, and a vision of robust public space. This book is both a critical contribution to the anthropology of contemporary modernity and a radical intervention in current cross-disciplinary debates on the city.

Chapter I

Introduction

Alexanderplatz exists as writing on street (square?) signs and as a combination of letters in the novel by Döblin. Two worlds. Even at the time when the novel was written, Döblin’s square did not exist… We have to accept [Döblin’s square] as an image, otherwise we are hopelessly lost. But we may not confuse them: this fiction and this empty space. (Kieren 1994: 12–13)

This book is about a place in time and a time in place. It tells a story about Alexanderplatz, a public square of outstanding symbolic significance in contemporary Berlin. Alfred Döblin’s celebrated novel Berlin Alexanderplatz – The Story of Franz Biberkopf, first published in 1929, has turned Alexanderplatz into a famous trope of fiction. Döblin cast Alexanderplatz as a conduit of the complexities of a city transformed by the Great War, new forms of transportation and means of communication. Its intensity seemed to defy narrative conventions, and Döblin borrowed from cinematic montage to combine incongruent images, documents and disparate voices. In this way, as Walter Benjamin observed in his reading of the novel, Döblin could convey the cacophony that made up the square whilst asserting its authenticity, grounding the text in the life of people he had encountered (Donald 1999: 128). This book may be seen as a kind of ethnographic homage to Döblin. Its aim is to demonstrate Alexanderplatz as a multiplicity generated in the conflicting practices and agendas of people in contemporary Berlin.

The vantage point of this book is a moment in the 1990s when Alexanderplatz was invoked, not for the first time in its existence, as an antithesis to urban ideals. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Germany’s Wiedervereinigung (‘reunification’) in 1990 had set in train a dramatic process of urban renewal and restructuring. It provided an important arena for impassioned public debate over the meaning of existing sites and the city’s future shape. Alexanderplatz, too, became an object of planning and debate. Rebuilt in the 1960s German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a central element of ‘Berlin – Capital of the GDR’, Alexanderplatz was quickly identified as a problem of urban design. A design competition was held in 1993. The winning design by the architects Hans Kollhoff and Helga Timmermann led to a proposal for a new Alexanderplatz, adjusted during several years of deliberation and redrafting. It envisages ten high-rise buildings that will supplant the square’s existing layout. They will provide offices, shops and apartments for the New Berlin, to be built in public-private partnership with several real-estate developers. In the future, Alexanderplatz is to be a ‘People’s Place’ and a supposed revaluation of Berlin’s eastern centre (Senatsverwaltung 2001). In a brochure on the project, Berlin’s then Senator for Urban Development declared, invoking a comparison with Potsdamer Platz, another post-unification flagship project:

Whilst Potsdamer Platz was a project born of the time immediately after the Wall fell and, in its position on the border between East and West Berlin, is a symbol of outer and formal reunification, Alexanderplatz, as a project in the centre of Berlin, will be a special symbol of the inner reunification so important for the identity of Berliners. (Strieder 2001: 3)

The new plans for Alexanderplatz merge concerns about space, development and the nation into a teleology of city planning that has particular salience in a unified Germany. The controversy around Alexanderplatz, which this book charts, is in many ways about the uniqueness of the planning of Berlin as the old and the new German capital. As a condensation of the political, economic, social and ultimately moral concerns surrounding Berlin’s development, Alexanderplatz is an excellent case in point. I try to look through the spectacles of those who – as city planners, critical citizens, property developers or youth workers – have made this place matter. But this book is not just about Berlin. Alexanderplatz raises questions that point beyond its geographical context – questions about, for example, citizenship and belonging, expertise and planning, time and space, the nature of ethnography and the object of anthropology.

Thus, this book attempts to give, through the use of ethnography, a particular account of place. Ethnographic convention has it that the ethnographer should first select a locale, usually equated with a particular people, and subsequently lay out its diverse constituents (politics, economics, ritual, kinship system, etc.). My account inverts this procedure,¹ as I examine how a locale, Alexanderplatz, comes into being in different domains and to different effects. That is to say, what I do is not attempt to describe the diverse ‘constituents’ of Alexanderplatz, but rather to suggest how Alexanderplatz is multiply constituted.

Figure 1: Vision Berlin Alexanderplatz by Yadegar Asisi

Where?

I want to begin with a story of arrival. More specifically, with multiple instances of arrival, at Alexanderplatz – the place that Berliners fondly, or some might say lazily, refer to as ‘der Alex’. ‘Nobody lives in Alexanderplatz’, an impatient administrator told me, prior to fieldwork, when I enquired about the effects of the envisaged building works on Alexanderplatz’s residents. By implication, everyone who is in Alexanderplatz has to arrive there somehow. The use of stories of arrival has been popular in anthropology to convey evidence of ‘having been there’, in that unfamiliar place whose hidden meanings the researcher claims to uncover (Hirsch 1995: 1; Okely 1992: 14; Pratt 1986). My aim here is different. It is to lead the reader into an account of what sometimes appeared to be different Alexanderplatzes that people told me about. In the end, however, Alexanderplatz as it emerges in the pages of this book will inevitably be in some sense my own.

The most appropriate way of arriving at Alexanderplatz, some people say, the one that makes you appreciate its physical impact most intensely, is by car. This imagery was invoked by the East German urban design historian Simone Hain in a public discussion concerning Alexanderplatz in the summer of 2002. She described her experience of sitting in a car sweeping along the vast Karl-Marx-Allee approaching Alexanderplatz from the East, whilst the setting sun shed its golden light onto the surrounding buildings. Her words conjured a feeling of elation sensed at the speed of the vehicle, the flurry of passing images, and the realisation that Alexanderplatz constitutes the grand finale of a comprehensively orchestrated environment.

By contrast, after a dangerous bicycle ride along the same Karl-Marx-Allee, a friend suggested that Alexanderplatz appeared like a safe haven. Or again, disembarking from the tram in the early morning, I was often one of those hastily crossing Alexanderplatz to reach the underground or city trains taking people elsewhere, and for whom the square is merely a thoroughfare for commuters. Being spilled out into the square, from the dark underground tunnels, as part of a swarm of co-travellers can be a profoundly disorienting experience as you find yourself in this open space, both celebrated and loathed for its vastness.

In 2001, entering Alexanderplatz from the train station, one would pass through a narrow passage lined with food stalls on one side and, on the other, two long concrete benches camouflaging air-conditioning shafts. There, in front of the department store Kaufhof with its white seventies-style façade, people would often sit at midday, eating Chinese noodles, sausages and chips bought at the stalls, waiting, or simply watching passers-by. A handful of vendors would offer a selection of jewellery, including cheap beaded bracelets, conspicuous finger-rings and more expensive silver necklaces, carefully displayed in portable stalls lined with black velvety material and with their sides folded back. Looking right, one spots the Brunnen der Völkerfreundschaft (‘Fountain of the Peoples’ Friendship’) built in the socialist 1970s. Water gushes out of this vibrantly coloured structure. When the weather is fine, people crowd on the edge of its basin, some licking ice cream bought opposite at Janny’s Eis. Sitting there, I would sometimes gaze up at the blue-checked Forum Hotel, on which the shadow of the nearby television tower is cast like a gigantic sundial.

Alexanderplatz is a space of watching and gazing, a well-known empty space and simultaneously a feast for the senses, embodied, smelly and noisy. The smell of Bratwurst and the perfume of a woman walking past mingle with exhaust fumes. Along with the smells go the sounds: the droning and screeching of cars, the buzzing of the tram, scraps of conversation, the repetitive calls of a man selling newspapers, another selling lottery tickets. Whilst fumbling for cigarettes in my pocket, the woman next to me offers me her lighter, smiling and asking: ‘Isn’t it strange how one is observed at Alexanderplatz? This is Alexanderplatz, isn’t it?’

Had I come on a cold winter’s day, I might not have experienced any of this. Then, the square often appears grey and dreary, with only a few people, bent under umbrellas, hurrying into the warmth and shelter promised by the shops, and scraps of paper and plastic bags being blown across the square. I might have come to inspect the small jewel of modernist architecture standing in the southeastern corner of the square, the carefully restored Alexanderhaus, designed by architect Peter Behrens in the 1920s. I’m appalled to discover that its twin, Berolinahaus, has apparently been left to deteriorate. I remember visiting the Mitte district administration which used to have its home in this building on a day in 1995, taking what must even then have been a rare example of a paternoster lift. With a knowledge laden with historical consciousness, I go closer to inspect the building, the shop signs left over from GDR times, and the thick plaster of posters shredded and faded, stuck on after Berolinahaus had been closed down and before a wooden fence was erected to protect it from trespassers.

Figure 2: Alexanderplatz on a summer’s day in 2001

Swivelling the postcard rack at the small newspaper stall in front of Alexanderhaus, I find various pictures of Alexanderplatz: sepia reprints from the early twentieth century, contemporary images resembling the photographs I took and a lushly coloured drawing depicting what the square might look like in ten or twenty years’ time. Is Alexanderplatz of the past, present or future? These postcards differ from those that my father picked up for me in a flea market in my hometown in West Germany, which show an even barer 1970s Alexanderplatz. Since unification, flowerbeds and grass and a line of potted trees have been added to embellish the square. However, when asked what has changed about Alexanderplatz, a woman waiting under the famous Weltzeituhr (‘World Time Clock’), a couple of metres away, tells me that the most significant alteration has been the reintroduction of the tram in 1998. As in the 1950s, it now traverses the square from north to south, slicing the empty plane.

Almost hidden behind trees, I can glimpse a graffiti-sprayed container – a surprising sight which some feel adds refreshing splashes of colour and life. On the basketball field in Alexanderplatz’s northeastern corner, young people are swiftly passing a ball to each other. Across the humming street, I recognize Haus des Lehrers (‘House of the Teacher’) with its distinct mosaic, created by Walter Womacka in 1964. It iconically depicts peace and war, work and culture, science and society in socialist harmony. When I sit down on the grass to have a rest, I can feel the vibration from the trains speeding through the tunnels below. It reminds me of all those parts of Alexanderplatz concealed beneath its surface.

This sketch, taken from fieldnotes from 2001 and 2002, raises some of the theoretical concerns of this book. The first is with the inherent temporality of my anthropological object, Alexanderplatz, as indicated here by the fleetingness of my description. Since then, the Kaufhof department store stands expanded and redesigned by Josef Kleihues, the architect who directed West Berlin’s 1980s International Building Exhibition (IBA) and who has been prominent in the shaping of Berlin’s unified cityscape. Forum Hotel has a new multinational owner and a new name. Berolinahaus has been renovated and filled with shops. The square’s surface was ripped open to allow for the installation of lifts and air conditioning shafts that will be part of an improved underground train station. People have come to fill the stairs and benches that embellish the square after a €8.7-million makeover, and the chewing gum stains on its light-grey granite paving have already become the object of new controversies.² A shopping mall has been built adjacent to the square, a seeming testimony to its development potential. These are some of the things that, at the time of my fieldwork, were still very much held in suspension. In this book I decided to keep them as possibilities rather than facts, although the writing has inevitably been influenced and be made more difficult by their appearance.

My second concern is to show that out of the myriad ways in which Alexanderplatz can be described, heard, smelled or embodied emerge different Alexanderplatzes. This book sets out Alexanderplatz as a multiplicity. I now speak, borrowing from Mol (2002), of ‘Alexanderplatz multiple’.³ The inspiration, however, came from a number of intellectual endeavours. Since the early days of anthropological post-structuralism, reality has come to be understood as forged from metaphorical complexes which cannot be peeled away to find a truth underneath (e.g., Parkin 1982). It is no longer a novel point to say that a thing is things, or that a place is places (e.g., Kopytoff 1989; Rodman 1992).⁴ Multiplicity has appeared as an epistemological and, more recently, as an explicitly ontological issue in anthropology. Within Science and Technology Studies (STS), there were similar attempts to destroy the unity of objects. For example, Actor Network Theory (ANT) illuminated the distributed networks of people and things. However, it seemed to retain an assumption of discrete and identifiable human and non-human actants thus conjoined, and focused on the relationships between them that form the network (e.g., Law and Hassard 1999). Partly dissatisfied with ANT, anthropologists and STS scholars have now begun to speak of ‘assemblages’ (Collier and Ong 2005; Latour 2005). Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), assemblage has become an extremely productive term, which expresses a sense of the decentring of the subject (and the object) and of the emergence, contingency and instability, though not incoherence, of forms – not unlike what I see in Alexanderplatz.

Multiplicity is inherent, but grasping this multiplicity and its implications is not easy. I began to understand Alexanderplatz as assembled and multiple when rushing across town to attend a get-together of citizens, here, and a meeting in the planning administration, there; when having to decide whether I would gather more pertinent ethnographic material by attending a public discussion on Berlin urban development or by observing a demonstration of the Republikaner party of the political right happening, at the same time, in Alexanderplatz. In interviews, people would show me documents and drawings, old leaflets and letters they had written – bits and pieces of the Alexanderplatz debate. I participated in countless meetings – of planners, citizens, youth workers, etc. – where people assembled, bringing together insights, grievances and objects that together constitute the place in question.

Importantly, this assembling of Alexanderplatz in various contexts and locales refers not simply to its spatial distribution. As already noted above, Alexanderplatz is also distributed across time; and it is indeed its historicity that has been critical in the contemporary controversy around it. My use of the term assemblage, though inspired by people quite literally assembling, thus works more broadly to suggest how a place, such as Alexanderplatz, continually becomes in different ways. When speaking of different discourses, practices or social forms from which Alexanderplatz springs, this is not to suggest that the different Alexanderplatzes they generate are discrete. As a multiplicity, Alexanderplatz contains both fissures and overlaps. The multiple Alexanderplatzes, as I show, whilst recognizable to each other are not commensurable; they are incongruous and, at times, incompatible.⁵

Berlin (in) Alexanderplatz

My depiction of Alexanderplatz as a space of arrival is not accidental. Alexanderplatz is often considered to have marked an entrance to Berlin – in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the space outside the city gates where roads from north and east converged; or since 1886, as an important train station; or today, as a place where newly arriving punks, young people in search of alternative life styles, come to meet like-minded people. In narratives of arrival, Alexanderplatz sometimes stands as a pars pro toto for Berlin. The manager of a café in Alexanderplatz I interviewed for this research, an East German woman in her mid-thirties, recalled how she arrived at Alexanderplatz in the late 1980s, as a young girl from rural Mecklenburg-West Pomerania determined to make it on her own in the city. Her only thought was: ‘No matter what happens, you are in Berlin!’ Such comments point to the metonymic quality of Alexanderplatz, as it ‘stands in’ for Berlin as a whole.

Alexanderplatz as an entrance to, and a pars pro toto for, Berlin also emerges from the artistic imagination. When first screened in 2001, the film Berlin Is in Germany enjoyed considerable popularity in both East and West Germany. It is the story of an East German prisoner who is released after eleven years and, with his now devalued possessions, including a GDR passport, driver’s licence and money, arrives at Alexanderplatz. Overwhelmed by the changes brought about by the fall of the Wall, an event he had experienced only from his prison cell, the protagonist struggles to set up a new life; but his criminal past keeps coming back, putting obstacles in his way. I went to see the film with my friend Thomas, an urban planning graduate who was involved in various citizen activist groups. After the film, Thomas pointed out to me that Berlin Is in Germany is in many senses a reworking of Berlin Alexanderplatz, Döblin’s celebrated novel. It was Döblin who helped Alexanderplatz attain its special place in the German cultural imagination, a place sustained, for example, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s television adaptation, originally broadcast in 1980, and by the surging interest in the modernist city in recent literary and urban scholarship.

Döblin’s compelling fiction has thus become constitutive of Alexanderplatz as a plural time-space (Reed 2002). On an icy morning in early December 2001, I joined a guided tour bringing together an eclectic group of people, including both Berliners and tourists of different ages. Aided by our tour guide, we set out to retrace the steps of Franz Biberkopf in the narrow streets and courtya...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Chapter I Introduction
• Chapter II Constructing a Future Berlin
• Chapter III The Disintegration of a Socialist Exemplar
• Chapter IV Promising Plans
• Chapter V The Object of Grievance
• Chapter VI A Robust Square
• Chapter VII Whose Alexanderplatz?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index