Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (47 page)

‘He is back in Berlin. He breathes Berlin again,’ Döblin wrote. Our smart, post-Wall hotel is in Potsdamer Strasse. As you stand at the desk, going through the formalities, a young woman in a grey uniform presents a silver tray on which repose two tightly rolled white flannels. They are damp and they remove the evidence of travel. Now we are here, we are welcome. Water features trickle alongside Matisse lithographs. A glass-fronted lift, carrying us to the ninth floor, offers a dizzying urban prospect of corporate regeneration, a merchandising spectacle underwritten by Daimler and Sony. Anna admires the sleek and regular bus service, the absence of advertising slogans, pure yellow. At home, every ride is submersion in a viral torpedo, a headache-inducing cacophony of mobile-phone chatter; dirty-weary humans surprising each other with unprovoked violence or spontaneous gestures of good will. The young Brazilian who offers up his seat to the burdened woman. The vodka-coshed Russian, sprawled on the floor of a bendy 149 at 7 a.m., who is rolled like a rag doll by a sudden stamp on the brakes, and who staggers forward to strangle the driver.

Looking down from our vertical glass coffin, I see monochrome meadows, the waist-high grass and wrecked sofas of recent history, the dead-zone wandered by characters in the Wenders film
Wings of Desire.
Now there is a multiplex cinema, Cinemax, showing the same films you’ll find in London’s Docklands or the Trafford Centre in Manchester:
Public Enemies
,
Harry Potter und der Halbblutprinz
,
Brüno
,
Ice Age 3 – Die Dinosaurier sind los.
Across the street, fronting the Sony Center, which resembles a collaboration between the two Walts, Disney and Benjamin, is that unnecessary thing, a museum of film: film
is
memory, even when, or especially when, we don’t remember it. The pattern of tourists, citizens, Wall peddlers, when observed from the smoothly rising elevator, is a form of cinema. A restaurant-bar, parasitical on the Film Museum, is called
Billy Wilder’s.
Wilder, in his early guise as a Berlin journalist and writer, was part of the team responsible for
Menschen am Sonntag
, that languorous portrait of a summer city floating between stolen documentation and affectingly cynical poetry. When he returned, after the good years selling film noirto Hollywood, it was to a divided city: Marx and Coca-Cola.
One, Two, Three
, made in 1961, is an ugly work with a furious velocity. As if Wilder couldn’t wait to get back to California, never imagining, some way into the future, this branded bar with its production stills and ersatz memorabilia.

The leaflet for another film museum, the one in Potsdam, has a location photograph from
One, Two, Three
on its cover. Wilder, trademark flat cap and heavy glasses, brandishes a fat cigarette like a pen with a burning tip. Pamela Tiffin: full lips, yards of distracted hair. And a name that sounds like a cocktail. Jimmy Cagney resting a fatherly hand on the shoulder of Horst Buchholz, who must be exhausted from one of the most wearisome exhibitions of overacting since the glory days of German silent cinema. In the background, the Brandenburg Gate.
ACHTUNG: YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE WESTERN SECTOR
.

Wilder’s machine-gun gags, his exploitation of Cagney’s gangster mythology, gives the film its defining quality. Pace, going nowhere, emphasized by a punchy score. The politics, sexual and otherwise, are crude. This epic of product placement – Coca-Cola, Pan Am and the rest – should have been produced by the CIA. It makes the coming Berlin Wall not only inevitable but also desirable, a cultural prophylactic. We need a wall to save the old Alexanderplatz from this American satellite, the steel-and-glass buildings staffed by former Nazis. True speed is only to be found in Döblin’s novel. An open square swirling with trams, taxis, horses, newspaper sellers, prostitutes, businessmen, hustlers and beggars. Biberkopf is a victim of mechanized hustle, being flung from one car and run over by another. His right arm is amputated, thereby saving him, symbolically, from giving the Nazi salute. But the drumming paragraphs and repeated refrains of Döblin’s novel are balanced by intervals of inertia, meditation, melancholy. Fassbinder, in his fifteen-hour television adaptation, catches these moments with well-judged sympathy. Günther Lamprecht, as Biberkopf, orders three beers and a kümmel. He croons to the bottles before swallowing their contents. The whole business is enacted in a single take. Time is time. We drink the golden light of vanished afternoons in smoky cellars.

The other couple in the glass-fronted lift at the Mandala Hotel make noises of appreciation. What a view! They are wearing smart-casual training gear and have laminated badges around their necks. Insiders, with clearance to enter the Olympic Stadium, for the World Athletic Championships due to begin at the end of the week. Berlin, as a whole, is not hyperventilating with excitement at the prospect. Most Berliners are away for one of their regular holidays. Recolonizing Greece ahead of the approaching economic shitstorm.

Bruce Chatwin reports a remark by Werner Herzog: ‘Walking is virtue, tourism deadly sin.’ They met when Herzog visited his brother-in-law, an Anglican vicar in Northumberland, to do a little fishing. On my first evening in Berlin, in response to Herzog’s anathema, I was a pedestrian tourist. The long walk, as a cure for deep-seated neurosis, was itself neurotic: as with Herzog’s famous and egotistical winter trudge from Munich to Paris, to exorcize the sickness of Lotte Eisner. The director rages at the quantity of material he has to process as he limps along. I vanish into movement, erasing the obstacle of the body like a set of faded marks on paper: new ground.

Potsdamer Platz, on the sepia-tinted tourist postcard I bought, was a non-space as formulaic as a landscape by Claude. The Wall as a barrier was no more intimidating than any obstacle in the industrial edgelands of Britain. Its function was aesthetic, to cut a diagonal across the composition. A cancelled road. Unexploited wasteground with huts and wire. As a marketing device, the Wall was unbeatable. Witness, tonight, how tourists seethe and cluster to record something that isn’t there. In the rubble of the devastated city, in 1945, a diarist recorded how women with blood-soaked ration cards remained motionless in long lines. ‘They stand there like walls.’

On the north side of this square, in 1932, the modernist architect Erich Mendelsohn presented his Columbus House. According to Brian Ladd, in
The Ghosts of Berlin
(1997), ‘the smooth horizontal bands of its curved façade accentuated the tempo of the square’. Mendelsohn embraced dynamism and discarded static forms. Photographs of Potsdamer Platz showing Columbus House in a frenzy of traffic, a blaze of electric signs, operate as one of the blueprints for the new Berlin. Mendelsohn’s building was demolished. He came to England, where, in collaboration with Serge Chermayeff, he was responsible for that unlikely marine pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea.

But it wasn’t just Jewish architects, or poets and scholars, who were threatened, moved out, eliminated. The famed Berlin department stores, cities within cities, the essence of urbanism, came under attack. Isherwood in
Goodbye to Berlin
has a telling passage in which he visits one of these retail cathedrals.

‘Landauers’ was an enormous steel and glass building, not far from the Potsdamer Platz. It took me nearly a quarter of an hour to find my way through departments of underwear, outfitting, electrical appliances, sport and cutlery to the private world behind the scenes.’

Palatial shops, evolving from the stalls of Alexanderplatz traders as the Hollywood dream-factories emerged from their tent-show beginnings, were operated by tight families. Their replacement, the Sony Center, is corporate. Everything about it simulates urbanism. In the shuffling tourist mob you do not experience reality, you experience a facsimile of experience. An experience that has been tried and tested, on your behalf, by computer simulations. Tomorrow the whole set, under the calculated awe of its dome, could be taken down and reassembled.

Like any good tourist, I obeyed the prompts of the brochure and struck off towards that notorious photo-opportunity Checkpoint Charlie. The former wasteland, the obliterated Potsdamer Platz, was a collage of slick architectural ‘statements’, monster billboards masking
trompe l’oeil
building projects (while they wait for budget approval), and low-level, grassed pyramids that seem to be hiding underground bunkers. There were chunks of the Wall with customized graffiti. And a plinth of dark bricks that stands as a memorial to the martyred socialist Karl Liebknecht. To the idea of individual responsibility and a people’s revolution.

Advancing on Friedrichstrasse, my steps slowed; it was overwhelming, the gravity of the past, the way that every structure had to argue for its survival. This granite museum with its baroque trimmings and bombastic statuary might be a culture hoard or a war ministry. A section of the Wall, with no pedestrian access, marks out the Topography of Terror; a strategic solution to the problem of how to represent the former Gestapo and SS headquarters. No other city would be capable of attaching biographiesof victims and torturers to the same fence, alongside a glimpseinto preserved underground cells. And, beyond that, the Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum of Decorative Arts.

I am most comfortable with the wild-flower wastelots. The empty spaces disguised by fake buildings painted on canvas, with scaffolding like a provocative artwork. Otherwise, the Wall is being flogged hard: headline incidents displayed as posters on a wooden fence. Tourists, dutifully, solemnly, contemplate images of images. And take more of their own to carry away. Tony Paterson in his ‘Berlin Notebook’, written for the
Independent
newspaper, reports that, with so little of the original Wall left to be viewed, tour buses are now filling the gaps with computerized animations. Fragments of the Wall are preserved like the tolerated remnants of London’s Roman Wall, still to be found between the Tower of London and the Barbican. Making a museum of the city is one way to control access routes into the past. The contraflows of history. With appropriate signage.

By one of those predictable coincidences of urban wandering, the fence alongside the Wall at the Topography of Terror exhibition now features dot-matrix multiple reproductions of Joseph Beuys in hat. An antidote to Angela Merkel. A missing person smeared with a blood-red line.
AUS PROPORTIONALEN GRÜNDEN SOLLTE DIE MAUER UM FÜNF ZENTIMETER ERHÖHT WERDEN
.

Although I didn’t set foot in Berlin before August 2009, I had seen, touched and admired the Wall. They assembled it in Dublin’s Smithfield in 1965, when I was a student in that city: for Martin Ritt’s film version of John le Carré’s
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Fifty workmen spent the month of February constructing a seventeen-foot-high replica in hessian, timber, plaster and tarred felt, topped with barbed wire. Richard Burton, drinking hard to keep out the cold, and Elizabeth Taylor, huddled in her mink coat, bivouacked in the Gresham Hotel, Dublin’s Adlon. O’Connell Street, with its republican scars and heritage memorials, its galleries, museums, tourist traps and beggars from the east, is a diminished provincial replica of Unter den Linden. (In Dublin they blew up the triumphalist victory column, Admiral Nelson at its summit, and replaced it with a bizarre spike, on which to stack outstanding invoices when the Celtic Tiger ran out of puff.) The Dublin Checkpoint Charlie, with its wet cobbles and sixteen faithfully reproduced curved lamp posts, couldn’t disguise the fact that the low houses and tight shops were wholly Irish. Bars and grocery shops with stacks of peat briquettes. But the Wall, as a brand, was ripe for export; long after it disappeared from Berlin, duplicates were built across estates in Belfast, to separate Catholics and Protestants. When the Smithfield Wall was broken up, sections migrated all over Ireland. The guards’ hut, salvaged from a municipal dump, became a makeshift school for the children of travellers at Ballyfermot. Bertrand Russell sent a cheque for £25 with which two oil stoves were purchased. The Bewley family, owners of a popular Grafton Street coffee shop, provided the young pupils with free milk and rolls.

Burton, blowing on frozen hands for the obligatory Checkpoint Charlie opener, impersonates a spook called Alec Leamas. A nice echo of the Irish politician who took part in the 1916 Easter Rising, and who was Taoiseach at the time when the film was made: Seán Lemass. Now the guards’ hut on Friedrichstrasse is the fake, the set occupied by actors in uniform, a parody of all those divided-city thrillers:
The Quiller Memorandum
,
Funeral in Berlin
,
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
.

After the death of the fleeing man at the start of Le Carré’s novel, Leamas takes off, lost in a melancholy fugue, like the traumatized bus driver after the London bombings on 7 July 2005, the day after we’d been given the Olympic Games. ‘They tell me you walked all night,’ says Control, the London spymaster, ‘just walked through the streets of Berlin.’

Nocturnal Berlin is a good place to wander. It’s like being on the biggest film set in Europe. A location where history contrived its most lurid dramas. ‘There was no one to be seen; not a sound,’ wrote Le Carré. ‘An empty stage.’ The present stage is heaving with beggars carrying babies, touts, tour guides. The same riff-raff, Chris Petit told me, who used to hang around a film shoot. The crowd among whom Fassbinder chose to live and work, and whose small conspiracies and betrayals he articulated to such good effect.

Better call it a day, I thought. I retreated to Potsdamer Platz. In a recently commissioned survey into spatial awareness, it was discovered that experimental subjects invited to walk a straight line, out into the desert, invariably described a circle in the sand. That’s what our interior compass does when we are denied familiar objectson which to bounce our radar: we slouch back to the nearest-Travelodge (or its upmarket equivalent).