BERLIN AFTER 1989

In accordance with the memorial urgencies of the 1990s, Berlin felt in need to deal with its Nazi and communist past. The city became a site with an irregular, discontinuous history pervaded with collapses, confrontations, shameful events, and the impossibility to find an accurate method to acknowledge and address those issues within the plans of reconstruction of the city. Upon the fall of the Berlin Wall, old time memories blended in an intermittent space filled with joy, pain and uncertainty for the future. In the German movie Goodbye Lenin! that gives a panorama of how capitalism came to East Berlin after the fall of the Wall, for instance, we see that, at some point, Alex Kerner spends a great amount of time searching for bottles displaying old communist labels. Alex uses the bottles for storing pickles from Holland, which may offer a symbolic reading of the architectural/political process of reconstruction that took place in East Berlin, trying to offer content and the new image of the city somehow respecting traditional structures.  Histories and imaginary architectures built a culture of disappearance in the city, with shadows of the victims from the Holocaust and the shattered socialist dreams. The plans to rebuild important places seemed concerned with constructing an image that would help to alleviate uncomfortable memories, and yet major buildings still managed to permeate Berlin with the aura of the past.

How to represent an agonizing past without trivializing the German crimes against the Jews? How to convey collective guilt, mass murder? Daniel Libeskind’s project to reconstruct the Jewish Museum in Berlin articulated the human relationship with memory, inevitably packed with voids, a broken link that would translate into a searching-for-meaning architecture. The “empty” –sometimes inaccessible- spaces were to be filled, if at all, with silences and people’s imaginations. Although Libeskind tried to make visitors experience the Jewish Museum as though they were experiencing history itself, his architectural designs couldn’t escape from the realms of representation.  (Representation inevitably refers to the notion of interpreting, mediating as well as manipulating conditions, documents, feelings, and events). So, how can we experience compassion and humbleness in a space that has been “prepared” beforehand to make the public feel that way? Does the Jewish Museum really show respect or an image of it? Maybe, Libeskind did not need to “represent” the trauma of the guilt in the Jewish Museum, which became merely a tourist attraction. Even if Berlin developed into a high-tech product after 1989, memories of suffering and affliction would always haunt the city.