BERLIN NOW -
THE RISE OF THE CITY AND THE FALL OF THE WALL - PETER SCHNEIDER
All roads don't lead to Rome, they lead to Berlin. And why? Because Berlin is an anomaly. A muddled, messed up ball of confusion where you end up whether you take either the right turn or the wrong. Berlin is a representation, a hall of mirrors reflecting the logical and simultaneously illogical outcome of all decisions, all paths and all flights of fancy. Berlin is the Cinderella of European capitals, a city though often compared to New York is actually more comparable to Detroit in its sense of devastated ephemerality and rejuvenation.
How exactly do you write about a city? With great difficulty I imagine because just as the night has a thousand eyes a city has a million stories. You need passion, enthusiasm and an awareness of not only the physical life overground but the unreported and oft times unspoken life underground. An awareness as possessed by Peter Schneider who puts it to full effect in Berlin Now, his ode to that most fascinating of cities.
How exactly do you sing about a city? Or to be more precise, how exactly do you sing about Berlin? Lou Reed named a whole LP after it, an LP that just happened to be one of the most bleakest ever recorded. In Holidays In The Sun, the Sex Pistols likened it to an end of the world tourist attraction. David Bowie in Heroes depicted it as a place where dreams can rule supreme, whilst in his Where Are We Now? he reflected upon it with much affection.
Berlin is whatever you make of it and ultimately whatever you want it to be.
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the explosion of places and types of entertainment in the city was unprecedented, spurred by a surfeit of abandoned warehouses and factory sites. Caught off guard by the fall of the Wall, the owners of these sites had little idea of what to do with them though the movers and the shakers of West Berlin's alternative culture had no such hesitancy and swiftly moved in and took them over. This was the time it should be remembered when Ecstasy was becoming everyone's preferred drug of choice and Techno the accompanying soundtrack.
'What these clubs promised was the possibility of another life,' writes Schneider 'one that celebrated the moment, the now. They were driven above all by the desire to escape from the real, everyday world of capitalism and to create a parallel world according to one's own rules.' Just like Bowie's Heroes, in fact.
Berlin became the stuff of legend where young people from all corners of the world flocked to immerse themselves and to soak-up non-stop drugs, dancing, sex, protest and a hitherto unprecedented approximation of freedom.
When Schneider tells his grown children he is planning to write a book about Berlin, they look at him with indulgent scepticism as if to say 'sure, go for it if your target group is the fifty-plus generation', presuming he won't be writing anything about what matters to younger people such as the bunker and tunnel parties and clubs that open only after midnight on the weekends and don't close until the following Monday or Tuesday.
To be fair to Schneider, however, he doesn't shirk from his research and attends and reports back from a variety of nightclubs, inadvertently ending up as one of the oldest swingers in town. He concludes, in fact, that a lot of great artists whose work has now been canonised as masterpieces didn't just come from nowhere but built their reputation on the foundation of a highly politicised culture of street theatres, variety clubs cabarets, cafes, bars, and nightclubs whose performances were considered low art at the time. Alternative culture is always the springboard.
That's not to give the impression that Berlin Now is solely about club culture and alternative lifestyles because it's not. Schneider also looks at Berlin's architecture, the fall of the Wall and it's consequences, the Stasi legacy, the American occupation after the 2nd World War, Jewish life in Berlin, gentrification, and so on. Interestingly, he mentions at one point that it's actually misleading to speak of the 'fall of the Wall' because the Wall didn't fall on November 9 or even in the ensuing days; instead, several openings were broken into it with the help of cranes and then specialised companies were brought in to cart it off piece by piece.
And what became of the Wall in the end? Well, whilst a lot of it was reprocessed and ground down to sand to be used in the building of new highways in the former East Germany, a lot of it was also distributed around the world - to at least 125 different places to be precise including America and even Tonga and Hawaii.
Interesting also is the subject of Berlin and gentrification, a subject of relevance to most major cities throughout the western world these days. Schneider describes gentrification as meaning expulsion - the displacement of an area's traditional inhabitants by more well-off nonlocals with deep pockets, this being as good a description as any. The question, however, is 'what to be done about it it?'.
Whilst the Berlin militants and its Autonome scene shout "Burn the tourists!" and launch attacks on luxury cars and cafes selling latte macchiato, some Left-leaning district city councils particularly in the former East German parts of the capital are now starting to demand that money not be the last word and that the cultural values of certain areas be given priority over market value. Needless to say, the heralds of the free market economy and other market fundamentalists are up in arms against them. More so than around race and ethnicity, gentrification and class are the areas where the future of Berlin is going to be decided, it would seem. And likewise, of course, for every other major city throughout the world.
Peter Schneider is a good writer but then if you're going to make a book about a city be of any interest then you're going to have to be because let's face it, it can easily be a pretty dry subject. Throughout the book you get the sense that he's doing his utmost to remain politically neutral though every now and then his personal opinions seep through between the lines, sometimes revealing his liberalism and then sometimes revealing his conservatism. But that's okay and even understandable because Berlin is a city of extremes that almost forces passion, making it near impossible not to sound forth. Berlin is a city that everyone should try and visit at least once in their life and Berlin Now succeeds in demonstrating why.
John Serpico
