Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (46 page)

It was Petit who found me a copy of Godard’s
Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro
. Like Berlin itself, the film was new to me, even though I was in the habit of describing it. At length. Constantine, eight years after his experience with Petit, was back in Germany, hat on head, briefcase in hand, wearing a heavy coat like a shroud draped over a statue of Beethoven. He wanders the land: one of the undead on a fated pilgrimage. Godard’s meticulously edited essay reminded me of structural elements in the films of Patrick Keiller. Industrial wastelands frozen in steady-stare compositions. Pertinent texts quoted. And misquoted. Constantine was twice exiled: from America – I’d witnessed him in Reno, a bit as a casino thief in Phil Karlson’s
Five Against the House
– and then again from Paris, where he growled through Lemmie Caution programmers, before achieving apotheosis as a comic-strip hero in Godard’s
Alphaville.
Like Keiller’s invisible Robinson (drawn from Kafka), Constantine has the ambition of becoming a spy, but he isn’t sure who to approach. With marmoreal gravitas, he transfers the Daniel Defoe
Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain
to Germany: double-agent, elegiac poet, haunter of borders. A man with the profile of a dynamited rock sculpture. A spectre drifting through ruins, railing against the non-spaces of global capital, rasping the last breath of romanticism.

Old Berlin haunted my part of London. We were the Osties, but our wall hadn’t disappeared, it was newly erected in blue plywood. Urban planners and local politicians, honouring the Stalinist paradigm, returned from their sponsored excursions, the hospitality of Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, with eyes shining and visions of imposing a new social order on the Lower Lea Valley. An order expressed by the destruction of historic theatres, inconvenient Georgian terraces, early-modernist factories, to make way for utilitarian blocks rapidly assembled in the cheapest possible materials. Secretly, we envied Berlin its iconic symbol: the 155-kilometre barrier that the artist Joseph Beuys plotted to destroy by adding five centimetres to its height. He understood that a minimal shift in the proportions of the wall would be enough to make the world aware of the absurd
lack of proportion
in the original intervention.

1936, 2012: build the stadium and the world will come. As Christopher Hilton pointed out in
Hitler’s Olympics
(2006): ‘Goebbels understood that the Germans had the first organised global press relations triumph within their grasp.’ Newspapers, under orders to ‘use the Olympic Games and preparations for them for extensive propaganda’, were advised to avoid inflammatory or racist editorials for the duration of the athletic competition. ‘No attacks against foreign customs and habits should be reported.’

Following the blueprint of the construction of Berlin’s Olympic Stadium and Park, New Labour were ruthless about acquiring real estate for the two-week extravaganza. Hilton explains that if Goebbels ‘wanted an amphitheatre on the site, accommodating 100,000 spectators, this is what he would get’. Hitler decreed that land operated by a popular racecourse would be taken over. The owners were compensated. Short-term sacrifices must be made for future generations and a spurious ‘legacy’.

Coming out of the clouds over the flat Brandenburg plain, with its neat clusters of red roofs, managed forests, traffic flowing on white roads, I put aside the queasy rhetoric of Leni Riefenstahl and
Triumph of the Will
, the throb of the engines, the man of destiny, and shifted my role-play to the romance of the burnt-out case. The English spook, hard-drinking, short-sighted, returning to a divided city to oversee some botched escape from the East. Berlin was the borderline between cynicism and sentimentality. Coffee-and-cigar breakfasts in a bar that never closes, where men in fur-collared coats play along with the pretence that a fondly recalled black market in nylons and penicillin is still active. And red-mouthed women with high heels and raw blisters can be bought on the promise of an introduction to Fritz Lang. Hitler understood legacy very well: apocalypse, firestorm, death of the gods. An architect
manqué
, he patronized the obliging Albert Speer and his ‘theory of ruin value’. Speer floated the notion that civic structures should be conceived as future monuments. Broken pillars and domes excavated from smouldering rubble. Athens, with its clear, hard light, its Acropolis, was to be spared the devastation of bombing,
the ruins were already in place
. Hitler’s Greek invasion was the act of a warped aesthete, a compulsive collector. It was a perverse homage to Heinrich Schliemann and his unearthing of the treasures of Troy. Imposing museums, secular temples stacked with colonial plunder, become the cultural ballast of the benignly democratic new Germany. Contemporary Berlin, bereft of its iconic symbol, the Wall, settles for an identity as a permanent City of Culture, positioned on the European map between Paris and St Petersburg. Museums are provided with their own island, surrounded by tributaries of the Spree. This is a city of museums, accessed by wide steps, propped on Corinthian columns, weighed down with overblown statuary.

This is why my reflex metaphor, new Hackney as old East Berlin, was so inadequate. Surveillance, security barriers, grand projects carried through despite the objections of local interests, we had them all in London. Our Olympic Park, according to surveys based on wartime records, was planted with unexploded ordnance. We were obliterating communities, tearing up allotments, expelling scrap-dealers, artists and travellers, to make space for a self-assembly rip-off based on Werner March’s elegant oval, the 1936 Olympic Stadium. The smart aspect of March’s design is that the running track, which surrounds a central area wide enough to be used by the Hertha Berlin football team, is sunk into the ground; from the air, flying in, the stadium is impressive without feeling the need to overwhelm. London has opted for the approximate model in kit form. The stadium alongside the Northern Sewage Outfall has no predetermined height. The story changes according to the latest surveys, popularity polls, responses in the media. It might be sold off to a rugby franchise. It might, with a wink and a nudge from Newham Council, and a bunch of overlapping quangos desperate not to renege on airy promises, go to West Ham. It might be wholly or partly dismantled. The best bet is another Earth Centre eco-wilderness: before O2 step in with an offer that can’t be refused for a music venue and multiscreen cinema complex.

Fortuitously, at the moment I decided to make my first visit to Berlin, I was devouring a distressed copy of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel,
Berlin Alexanderplatz
. I found it in a seemingly abandoned conservatory in Orford, Suffolk, where customers were trusted to put a coin or two in a box by the door. How I had lived without it, up to this point in my life, was a mystery. As was my shaming inability to read the book in the original or to speak one word of Döblin’s language. When W. G. Sebald arrives in Orford, in
The Rings of Saturn
, he sees the shingle spit, with its Secret Weapons Research Establishment, as ‘a penal colony in the Far East’.

Francis Stuart, an Irish writer with a sublime gift for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, sat out the 1940s in Berlin, half-heartedly teaching the English classics, making propaganda broadcasts and angling for a ticket to Moscow; where he hoped to fulfil his gambler’s destiny as the Dostoevsky of tragic literature and spoilt loves. A good walker but a lousy linguist, Stuart developed a phonetic system for coping with German. He broke down standard phrases into sounds he could spell out on a card, symbols which approximated to the basic requirements of his exile. When I interviewed him in his old age, another kind of exile in a bungalow beside a long, straight road, an hour out of Dublin, his grunts had diminished to a single phrase: ‘That’s right.’ Red bulb of nose, pitted like a raspberry. Pudding-basin of shock-white hair. Watery eyes drifting away to a drowned landscape. Beads of rain sliding down a greasy window. ‘That’s right.’ Yeats. Beckett. Iseult, his beautiful wife. He fiddles with the tie holding up custard-coloured cricket flannels. And remembers the sound of wet tyres, as he sat with an English newspaper in his favourite Kurfürstendamm restaurant. My questions grew longer, with more subordinate clauses, to compensate for silence like the silence of an ancient tree. After such a life, what was there to say? Berlin brought the best out of him: ruin and treachery, flight and displacement. The novels thrive on shame and lacerating confession:
The Pillar of Cloud
,
Redemption. Black List, Section H.
Lovers crawling through rubble with cardboard suitcases. Hanging around crowded offices waiting for identity papers.‘That’s right.’ Admit everything, reveal nothing.

When Berlin prepared itself for the Russian tanks in April 1945, the pro-Nazi Irish Nationalists at Ireland-Redaktion were one of the last satellite broadcasting stations to fall silent. They went out on the attack, accusing the Anglo-American axis of handing Europe on a salver to the ravening Slavic tribes. Francis Stuart, like P. G. Wodehouse and Ezra Pound, was given better access to the microphone, as an honoured alien, than at any other period of his doomed career. In a city under siege, poets are free to speak, on the understanding that their next monologue will be drafted in the dock. Metaphors ran wild. A major defensive slab, flak tower and bunker, was sited in Berlin’s Zoo. Lions died in their cages. Hippos boiled in the tanks. Surrealism recaptured the streets. Orgies were reported at the Grossdeutscher Rundfunk on the Masurenallee, where two-thirds of the surviving staff were women, many of them drunk and fearful of what was to come when the Russians stormed the building. ‘There was indiscriminate copulation,’ Antony Beevor reported, ‘amid the stacks of the sound archive.’

The physical momentum of the prose in
Berlin Alexanderplatz
was exhilarating, like the rush of Walter Ruttmann’s film from the same period,
Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt
. Language and image cut fast. Trains. Bars. Songs. Black marketeers. Whores of all sexes. Surgeons. Detectives. Berlin in the late 1920s was the world city, city of war-damaged grotesques out of George Grosz and Otto Dix. How dynamic Döblin’s book now seems, an outgrowth of the energies of place, and how muted, in comparison, how lightweight and strategically charming, the Berlin snapshots of Christopher Isherwood, which were laid out between 1930 and 1933. Isherwood’s material lends itself to Hollywood schmaltz, with his English girl, Sally Bowles, swallowed alive by a full-throttle Liza Minnelli.
Berlin Alexanderplatz
is scrupulously, sweatily, reimagined and composed afresh by Rainer Werner Fassbinder: a tapeworm epic for ourown times, funded by new German television money in Cologne. Actors, taken to the edge, perform miracles of choreographed self-exposure. They are crushed but not obliterated by the claustrophobic sets that contain them. And by the troubling memory of a book more honoured than read in a Europe that is not quite prepared to revive it.

Döblin’s protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, released from Tegel Prison, endures the shudder of the city. He leans against walls that tremble. He finds himself in an apocalyptic vision painted by Ludwig Meidner: cracked streets and tumbling houses skewed by shock waves running out ahead of the next war. Biberkopf’s tram to Alexanderplatz belongs to that cinema of lyrical documentation, to Ruttmann or
Menschen am Sonntag
(made in 1929 by Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer). He is rescued from his depressive fugue by an Orthodox Jew who brings him out of the sunlight, into a domestic interior, and tells him a story.

My Berlin quest begins with a name: Alexanderplatz. It was everywhere, in all the books I skimmed as background research. And the DVDs I rented from the shop in Broadway Market: ‘Alex. Alex. Alex.’ Haunting paranoid Fritz Lang thrillers as a source of power, police headquarters. And in films about the Red Army Faction. Characters in Len Deighton thrillers look east ‘to where the spike of the East German TV tower rose out of Alexanderplatz’. Francis Stuart, typically, abstains. ‘Whatever was going on in Alexanderplatz … he’d forgo until he’d deciphered the urgent messages reaching the fringe of his mind.’

Reporting from Berlin, in a couple of days, was madness. I decided to walk from Alexanderplatz to the Olympic Stadium in the west of the city, by way of that triumphal avenue, Unter den Linden. Somewhere in my scrambled geography was a memory of the final stand of the Third Reich, a strip of fifteen kilometres from Alexanderplatz to the Reichssportfeld, a last redoubt guarded by Hitler Youth detachments and the terminally sick. Like Döblin’s shambling bear, Franz Biberkopf, I started by finding transport from Tegel. A system of equivalents. Prison = Airport. Tram = Taxi. That familiar disorientation, the shuttle with a temporary guide, from airport to hotel. The hoardings you find in every city, the allotments, traffic lights, and walkers in shorts and loose T-shirts pushing infants in buggies.

Angela Merkel hangs from lamp posts at busy junctions. An election is pending. Colour multiples of so many politicians, willing to serve, and willing you, with hypnotic stares and professional smiles, to approve them. The women, groomed and handsome, look very much like models chosen to advertise spectacles. The style you favour is a badge of seriousness. As a politician you are not frivolous, but you are prepared to make the best of your appearance. European football managers, taking up appointments in England, demonstrate their character – firmly progressive, modestly wealthy – by their designer spectacles: Sven-Göran Eriksson, Fabio Capello. The male politicians in their airbrushed studio portraits remind me of smoothed and well-fed versions of the English cricket captain, Andrew Strauss: fit for purpose, middle management with unexceptional opinions, hard work rather than suspect brilliance. The truth is that football is now the real politics and politics a sport for those who are not quite good enough for anything else. A chance to appear on television. In the way that all Tory candidates for Mayor of London – Steve Norris, Lord Archer, Boris Johnson – opened their campaign with a minor sex scandal, enough to get them invited on
Have I Got News for You?
And thus to achieve a populist profile. The failure of New Labour, in the end, was the lack of zip in their adulteries.