Transnationalism and the German City

J. Diefendorf, J. Ward, J. Diefendorf, J. Ward

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137390172
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Too often, scholars treat transnationalism as a conflict in which the local, regional, and national give way to globalized identity. As these varied studies of German cities show, though, the urban environment is actually a site of trans-localism that is not merely oppositional, but that adapts itself dialectically to the forces of globalization.

PART I

CONTESTED URBAN PUBLICS

CHAPTER ONE

ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE EUROPEAN CITY: RETHINKING GERMAN URBANISM AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

Daniel Purdy

Resistance to the leveling economics of globalization expresses itself in Germany today not only at the level of street demonstrations and leftwing politics, but also in the offices of city planners and municipal officials, who at times develop far-reaching policies under the name of preventing worldwide trends from erasing local identities and traditions. City planning and architecture are two of the more visible arenas in which this juxtaposition between “the local” and “the global” has been invoked to justify government policies. Within German urbanism, the contrast between a friendly local identity and an ominous global trend is distributed quite often across a wide spatial scale. At times, the “local” that planners claim to defend turns out to be quite vast. It can, for example, be defined in terms of a single city, a nation, or all of Europe. Indeed, the two levels are often blended into each other, such as when local contests are debated for their European consequences. This nuanced rhetorical move is plausible only because these spatial dimensions are always also set against an even larger “global” context.

One specific local constellation has had increasing prominence in German discussions about architecture and city planning, namely, the “European city.” This term seeks to naturalize two distinct spatial scales, a city and a continent, by suggesting that Europe is a precondition for a certain kind of urban order, and that a particular type of city is a manifestation, or expression, of European identity. While discussing the history of this phrase, I will argue that the current invocation of the “European city” reflects conservative Germans’ contradictory attitude toward the spread of capitalism into previously Communist countries. At the same time, the urge to restore cities to a European tradition also represents the latest wave of German post–World War II reconstruction—a drive to replace the 1950s and 1960s Modernism with a less functionalist design tradition.

The European city’s mixture of cartography and urban sociology shows just how interdependent spatial scales are on each other. For, as it turns out, it is not really so unusual to talk about a city and a continent together in one breath. Indeed, I argue in this chapter that one of the most basic spatial distinctions in political thought, the difference between the public and the private, shares many contradictory qualities with the European city. The concept of the European city is built on a long political history of the public and the private, whereby the public forum as a site for politics and commercial exchange is set in contrast to the private realm of property and personal intimacy. The presumption is that private space is a container sealed off from the public, just as the city itself is a walled entity bluntly marking off its difference from the surrounding landscape.¹ Rather than consider spaces in terms of polar oppositions, I maintain that as commercial cities developed historically, private spaces became increasingly compartmentalized even as long-distance trading networks expanded. The wider the reach of commercial enterprises became, the less they depended on marketplaces and other openly accessible forums. Over time, the sequestered rooms of the commercial and administrative classes emerged as the most productive sites of public discourse and global commerce. Private business chambers are ultimately as important to the economic and political vitality of a city as its squares and meeting halls. In an era of mass tourism, it is difficult to celebrate the small desk in the back room, but this is precisely where many of the most important public statements were read, written, critiqued, and dispatched. Thus, when considering the history of cities in Europe, we must remember the narrow, quiet corners as well as the crowded piazzas and packed clubs.

The notion of the European city has a two-faced relation to globalization: on the one hand, the many economic, political, and cultural relations that join cities together into the European market system constitute one of the large-scale networks of the global economy that historians can trace back to the height of the Middle Ages; on the other, the term is invoked today in order to draw a boundary and insist on a distinction so as to preserve a quality that is considered fundamentally European. This distinctly urban character is associated with public spaces that foster democratic institutions. Since the Middle Ages, the argument runs, European cities have been designed to preserve openly accessible fora for democratic politics and capitalist exchange.

The preservation of European democracy often tends to be correlated with the maintenance of these urban places. Global economic and medial networks are viewed as a threat to these distinctly local sites of democracy. It is worth reexamining the history of these ambitious claims. My aim is not only to critique some of the ideologies that accompany the concept of the European city, but also to challenge the correlation between democracy and public space that today plays such a significant role in German urban politics. I will argue in the second half of this essay that the emergence of the early modern public sphere and capitalism’s first long-range trading networks were matched by an increasing compartmentalization and specialization of domestic space. As public discourse and business became more complex, the bourgeois practitioners of these two exchange systems withdrew into secluded rooms, such as the study, the family library, and the intimate salon. We must recognize that even today our most compelling ideas and arguments are often generated in isolation. My survey of early modern architectural treatises in the second half of this essay will show that the Bürgertum recognized the need for privacy in the midst of urbanity.

Revolutionary demonstrations and rallies may require wide-open places, but, as Georg Simmel noted, “the mental attitude of the people of the metropolis to one another may be designated formally as one of reserve.”² One implication of this tendency toward restraint in urban spaces is that many public political statements are formulated first in places where individuals feel least subject to surveillance. For urban public spaces to accomplish their political and economic ends, they have always required the exclusive private room. Nowhere is this juxtaposition more important than in the Enlightenment institution of Öffentlichkeit. The spaces that make up the city are not always public or even inherently urban. In fact, some of the most important places within the city are intended for escaping the physical presence of other people. In the end, personalized rooms are just as important for establishing the media network that enable democratic politics or market exchange. This history of privacy constitutes an important component in globalization.

We can see just how readily local city debates in Germany can assume a European dimension by reviewing the contentious debates in the 1990s about how to rebuild Berlin Mitte.³ In response to criticisms of the Berlin Senate’s strict architectural guidelines for new construction in the historic center of Berlin, proponents of the official policy argued that it set an example far beyond the confines of the new capital to include not just other German cities but most of the European Union as well. The question of how to build in Berlin was transformed into a discussion of the European city.⁴ In the 1990s, Berlin’s powerful building director, Hans Stimmann, was often quoted as declaring that he wanted to return Berlin to the European traditions of the nineteenth century: “What we want to create here is a European building culture.”⁵ Upon his retirement in 2006, the New York Times summarized Stimmann’s zoning policy with the following quote from him: “Berlin is a museum for every failed city planning attempt since 1945 . . . I wanted to go back to a city structure that I call a European city. I wanted to make Berlin readable again.”⁶ Josef Paul Kleihues, the initiating architect behind the blueprint of Berlin’s Critical Reconstruction, reiterated the point as well: “What was accomplished in Berlin is the rediscovery of the European city. Here we have the best example of a city’s critical reconstruction. And it is perhaps the first case where urbanity was thematized again. In Berlin we are building the city of tomorrow.”⁷ This innocuous German phrase has become a source of considerable concern among urban planners, architects, and sociologists, because the European city is consistently described as under siege—by a great variety of forces: globalization; the decline of municipal funding leading to either the neglect or commercialization of public space; star architects whose signature styles ignore local conventions; immigration from outside Europe; and, of course, the Internet. At stake is an idealized perception of the German urban experience that is closely associated with the history of European civilization, the emergence of liberal democracy, personal freedoms, and the market economy as a localized exchange that could be regulated by the state.

Despite these more modern connotations, the originating type of this European city is medieval, wherein well-preserved historic buildings are aligned along irregular streets open only to pedestrians. The type of urbanity considered typical of today’s European city predates the Enlightenment and most certainly has little in common with industrialization. The network of commercial cities founded between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries first in northern Italy, and then later in Flanders, southern Germany, and along the Baltic coast and waterways are held up as the founding sites for the tradition. This question of whether to preserve this long legacy continues to stir controversy within city planning. Nuremberg, Freiburg, and Münster were, for example, ridiculed in the immediate postwar decades for their loyal reconstruction of medieval façades and streets.⁸ Today the decisions of these cities to preserve historic lot sizes, roof lines, and building materials—a policy Jeffry M. Diefendorf has described as “determined preservationism”—are held up as models of postwar reconstruction.⁹ Indeed, today the old medieval city is praised for having survived both the aerial bombing and functionalist designs of the twentieth century, suggesting a distinct separation between the democratic politics ascribed to the modern public sphere and the urban spaces within which it takes place. In 1958, the Modernist architect Hans Scharoun complained about the layout of Berlin’s medieval and eighteenth-century neighborhoods: “We drag this street system with us as an inheritance without really understanding its present-day meaning or its transformation”; whereas Hans Stimmann writing in 2009 referred to the free composition of the Hansaviertel as a second destruction of the city after the bombing raids of World War II.¹⁰ The postwar town fathers in Münster anticipated Stimmann’s later perspective, though they made a rhetorical distinction between their local bürgerliche tradition and the “big city arrogance” ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction   Transnationalism and the German City
• Part I   Contested Urban Publics
• Part II   Crossing Boundaries in Modern German Planning
• Part III   City Cultures and the German Transnational Imaginary
• Part IV   German Urban Heritage for a Transnational Era
• Notes on Contributors
• Index