BERLIN: MONSTER OF MODERNITY

If Paris earned the title of “Capital of Modernity,” the city of Berlin in the mid-twenties could have been labeled “Monster of Modernity,” an avant-garde Charybdis, so to speak. Not only a functional architecture became the mark of the city, but also chaos, speed and noises played a special role in the configuration of its identity. “The incessant movement of Berlin was the embodiment of hypermodern urbanity,” says Brian Ladd in his book The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape, along with a mixture of neon lighting, advertising, heavy traffic and polished window-panes. Even a character like Franz Biberkopf, who inhabited the underworld, felt smashed by the mechanics of the street when he got out of jail in 1928, as described in the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin. He got swallowed by visual effects, so he had to learn to apprehend the new psychology and the spirit of the city. Berlin’s “discourse of purity” seemed concerned with the appearance of glass, hygiene and transparency, in connection with other issues like public and private spaces, as well as nakedness and fashion within the city. As Nicole Shea argues, “By the mid-twenties, Berlin had everything that one expected of a glamorous and sexy metropolis” (31).

The female body happened to be one of the most fashionable/functional objects in Berlin. Women were employed in advertising (culture of the future) and the surface culture. The idea of women as sexual symbols is addressed in Döblin’s book as well as in Phil Jutzi’s cinematographic version of it. Women played the game of make-believe, by offering themselves as objects of desire. Men also turned into objects manipulated by the city, and they had to either adapt to the new urban rules or succumb within them. Biberkopf, for example, wanted to live a decent life, but he could not do it because his surroundings seemed stronger than he was. He was absorbed, trapped into a spider web. Biberkopf became a part of the milling architecture of the German society. After losing his right arm, he went back to prohibited places. The city made people involved in an aggressive action-reaction pastime. Trash and violence appeared to be legitimate components of industrialization, and they were exposed through the ornamented façades and transparent walls.

References

Shea, Nicole. The Politics of Prostitution in Berlin Alexanderplatz. Studies in Modern German Literature Vol. 110. Bern: Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, 2007.

 Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997: 28.