To start I want to give you a very brief history into this exhibit space from the perspective of the different uses it has taken on. It was originally built during the Second World War as a part of a 61 city wide bunker selection program made by the Nazi party. It could house 2,400 guests on any given evening and was used to show that Hitler could protect the inhabitants of the city when war struck. After the war it was a part of Eastern Berlin controlled by the GDR. During this time it was used as a P.O.W. Camp and a secure site to hold meetings where the Allies could not interfere, later it was used to store food, specifically fruits from Cuba during the Cold War, where it got its name the Banana Bunker. When the wall fell it was semi abandoned and used for rave culture and paintball fights. In 2003 the current owners bought it. The renovations took five years, which means it has only been a gallery for the past eight years. The two owners of the bunker live in a house constructed on the top of this building where they have 130 pieces from 23 different artists that they support to varying degrees. This is a treasure trove of intellectual art supported by elite ideals. It was both hard to swallow and awe inspiring all at once.

With this idea in mind I want to do some, quite possibly grotesque, surgery here and deposit a couple quotes from Georges Didi-Huberman’s piece entitled Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs From Auschwitz and just let them sit in relation to the image of a surviving Nazi bunker being used as a modern art exhibit and home.

“Images in spite of all: in spite of our own inability to look at them as they deserve; in spite of our own world, full, almost choked, with imaginary commodities.” P3

“It is troubling that a desire to snatch an image should materialize at the most indescribable moment, as it is often characterized, of the massacre of the Jews: the moment when those who assisted, stupefied, had room left for neither thought nor imagination. Time, space, gaze, thought, pathos – everything was obfuscated by the machinelike enormity of the violence produced.” P7

The pieces at this exhibit have no names, no plaques, no words to show what they are at all… Except for the guide that gives you information and a personalized interpretation on how to experience the work. The only way we know anything about these works is through our own contact and the stories of those who know better. You must not take images of any of the pieces… But you can buy books full of them at the front desk. There lingers a sense that one has gone beyond Hitler and the GDR, but that beyond only stands because of the view it looks out from which lies inside this reign. The walls look different now.

Going down below the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe to the Information Center was like stepping into the mass graves scattered across these countries. It takes you step by step through the process of how the holocaust came about. It shows you six victims pictures blown up so you can get a sense as to who was targeted.

The first of four rooms gives you numbers in estimation of the Jewish people killed in each of the countries occupied. On the floor in patterns that echo the stelae above there are notes from diaries, letters, postcards thrown from mass transport trains where people stood packed sometimes for 30 plus hours. One that caught my eye was the brief letter to her father saying that they were taking them off to die today and how they wish they could live but alas they are to die.

The second room gives you an image of different families from different regions that were put to death, again on the stelae pattern as above, only now instead of lights on the floor they are pillars that don’t quite reach the ground.

The third is a room where four projectors are constantly telling the stories of different names of individuals that lost their lives and placing their names on the blank walls. I couldn’t stay in this room for very long as it was maddening to hear the monotony with which the speakers told their stories, like listing off numbers on a document, like a roll call when no one is present.

The last is a room of sites where these massive murders took place. You can listen in on stories and brief histories of a few of these places, and then look at the map and see they are only a drop in the bucket of sites. All the while the same undulation that is seen above on the ground you walk through the stelae on can be seen on the ceiling in these chambers. I got a sense of looking from underwater towards the surface of a wave above only there was no image you could see beyond the wave. The wave barred life entrance.

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The Topography of Terror was kind of odd to me. I can understand the choice in architecture and grounds layout. They seem to impose a certain terrible foreboding quality. Maybe it is just because of all of the other images I have seen from World War II, but I couldn’t help but feel like this site didn’t get the point it was trying to make across to the audience as well as some others.

I would say the information is all well laid out and organized according to what part of the National Socialist structure they are wanting to emphasize. I feel like I got the sense that there was supposed to be this feeling that since we can see how this was all laid out we can somehow make sure to never make this same mistake again, but by the end of the hanging placards of information I realized that many of the people who were a part of this regime were never punished for their crimes. It makes a good point though in asking how do you punish any one individual for the crimes committed so anonymously or out of fear of death.

At the beginning I assumed that all of what I saw would be the face of evil and by the end what I saw were terrifying acts of murder under the pressure of a force that no individual could possibly hope to stand up to. The survival instinct of most of these individuals heavily outweighed their ability to do otherwise. That being said, there was something lurking beneath the surface that seemed far to close to home with the situations the world is currently tensioned under.

This place was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I want to stay away from describing the history of this place because it is intricate and complicated and there are many things to say about the experience of it that is somewhat separated from that intellectual history in my mind. With that being said I do want to give you a sense of what you are walking into when you step inside this crumbling facade. It’s original purpose was a children’s hospital intended to combat the rising infant mortality rate in Berlin. This building has since changed ownership and purpose many times over the course of its life. Since 1997, when it last changed hands, it has been unused and abandoned because it failed to meet many of its funding goals and struggled to file the correct bureaucratic documentation required to move forward with renovations and reconstruction. It has since experienced many fires, various structures collapsing, decaying, and/or purposefully being destroyed. Along side this destruction is the appeal of why you would even consider going here. The artwork.

And the artwork.

Tags!

Architecture!

Murals!

Nature!

Colors!!!!!

And this is only a small part of the work there. It’s is like diving into an abyss of color, texture, space and light unlike any possible museum. I was amazed to be immersed in this subject of culture that is coming from the ground up. It has as little influence from the higher forces of society because it is intentionally temporary and transitory, always under danger of being smashed, painted over, defaced, crumbled, etc. It has no possible monetary gains to be made by the artists. It shows how these peoples individual culture shows through in their work. So it is a part of society and possibly the overhanging powers of society are dominating these individuals in their own lives which then projects itself into their work. I get this sense of convulsing within that control though. Of seizing in it as the body rejects that authority when they do this work. Those spasms shape the work out of a madness or maybe just onto a chaos that can transmute these flailings into something of value.

Adorno says in his essay The Autonomy of Art, “art is not autonomous in the sense that it is metaphysically removed from and independent of society. It is autonomous in that it is not reducible to the requirements of society, namely in the presentation of a harmonious and meaningful whole… relevant parts of Leibniz’s theory are… They reflect the universe from their own individual perspective.” p240

Another meet up with the group and get a tour day! So glad that we have all of these opportunities to visit these places around Berlin and see how they have preserved history. This tour was particularly interesting because of its specific implementation in the community. Before I get into this however, I want to briefly touch on the two documentaries we watched onsite directly before we engaged with the wall itself.

The first of these documentaries showed us a look into how this wall came into formation and what was happening in the communities of citizens on both sides of the wall once it was in place. I was surprised to learn that the tensions between these superpowers of the GDR and the Allies known as the Cold War started a mere three years after the end of the Second World War. With this information alone I cannot imagine what it would have been like to be a German citizen at the time. To have survived the War only to find yourself stuck between governments that have their own conflicts of interest could only have been maddening. It was only during the tour we were told that both sides put Nazi leaders in places of leadership simply because they knew the people and the situation best.

The second film was a computer engineered reconstruction of both the Berlin Wall and the East/West boarder that divided the country in half. It focused largely on the wall itself and each of the components were laid out in a series to show what it would have taken to be successful in crossing this boundary. Two walls on either side of a “death strip” also known as no-man’s land where there was any combination of trip wires, “Stalin’s Lawn” (a blanket of vertical iron rods laid out on a grid), anti tank barricades, barbed wire, guard towers, trip lights, land mines, etc. In various escape attempts or just misfortunate events, such as children falling into the river and drowning in no man’s land, the wall claimed a total of 136 lives.

When we walked out into the light of day to look at this monument to the wall it was hard not to be immersed physically and emotionally in what this place meant. We walked along a portion of the wall that was reconstructed after it was torn down to show that liminal space between a world of capitalism and a world of communism. This was personally very hard for me to understand. It seemed a little perverted to build the wall again, in a place where this was a reality for residents who may still live in this neighborhood. This specific location was particularly hard hit with casualties because the gap between the two sides was so narrow. A church destroyed because it concealed a portion of the wall from view along the boarder, metal markers that represent the tunnels made to evacuate from East Berlin, faces of the victims(mainly young men, but some women and children as well) who fell at the wall, and finally a recreation of the death zone enclosed between two iron barriers. Even though the experience was sickening at times to contemplate, I couldn’t help but be in awe of the ingenuity and the general gumption of those who made it across. It wasn’t easy for them once they made it either; often bringing only a few belongings or nothing, often disowned by family members left behind, exiled from everything they knew it was certainly an isolated existence to stay or go.

It is easy to look back and say well they just could have waited the 28 years the wall was in place and then had their freedom, but they were under the impression that this would always be the case. These are people being led by fascism that took advantage of a desperate time to fortify its own standings. I can only imagine the palpable insanity of the situation.

What started with at a pillow fight ended at a fake checkpoint.

That being said this tour was incredibly informative and well led. The ten minute history blitz of Germany that took us from all the “Friedrichs” to the fall of the Berlin Wall was a great refresher on the formation of Germany as a country. This helped to situate us among the different monuments and buildings that surrounded us. A few notable ones were the Brandenburg Gate itself, the Victory Column, the Reichstag Building, and the US and French Embassies.

Within the majestic nature of these structures there was always an implication of what was even if it was only applied through the structure of what is now. The Reichstag Building is a perfect example. It was originally situated outside the city walls as a symbolic representation of how much the leaders of the time paid head to power of this parliament. The culprits of the building burning in 1933 remain unknown, and somewhat inconsequential, but Hitler capitalized on the event as another step towards elimenating the other parties in opposition to the NSDAP. It stood vacant Throughout WWII and was only partially renovated in the sixties where it sat mere meters away from the Berlin Wall on the Western side. Only in June of 1990 was the reconstruction started and was finished in 1999. The new clear dome that overlooks the parliament is only the present phase of the symbol this building has become. With tours of this dome open to the public one can see down into the proceedings. Although it still sits outside the gate it is no longer outside the scope of the citizens of Berlin.

This was our first glimpse into this city’s determination in it’s intention to take responsibility for its convoluted and often painful past. It was important for me to remember that these symbolic monuments were intented to somewhat permanently remember in order to never repeat the past, and was not meant as reparations for those actions.

The next site on our tour was The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. As we came up to this entire city block that has been filled with 2,711 concrete, rectangular pillars I found it hard to witness people laughing and playing in and around these man made stones. Having been to the Jewish Cemetery just recently in Prague, where I was told the artist who rendered the memorial found inspiration, I found the people running around all of these faceless, grave like pillars to be incredibly disrespectful. Our guide made sure to tell us straight away that the artist had intentionally attached no meaning to the piece other than the name. There was no plaque or instructions as to how to think about the site. The only rule enforced was one was not allowed to stand on the pillars. When pushed to answer what this space meant, even though he had intended a purposeful meaninglessness in it, he said it was meant to show how a man made structured and ordered system can still be chaotic and even maddening. With this in mind we walked through the pillars.

I was immediately struck by how the children were racing through them playing tag. I saw a little girl laughing for just a moment flash in front of me… And then she was gone. Another moment later and I could hear her soft footfalls and rapid breathing running past me down another row, but this time I didn’t see her. I saw the faces of my colleagues or sometimes just their backs as they stepped into line with my row and then disappeared again around a corner. In my mind I couldn’t help but displace these encounters over a longer period of time or in a different context that was more threatening and more permanent. When I I merged on the opposite side it was as though I was surfacing out of a lake, even though I was able to breathe freely throughout the experience there was a sense of releasing a held breathe and gasping for air again. My initial feelings of the laughers, and players, and all other sorts of being within this piece, was washed away allowing them to be as much a part of the memorial as the pillars were not. We briefly discussed with our group what our individual experiences of this were and moved on to the next site. I had a hard time leaving.

I don’t want to go too much further in depth about any of the other places we encountered that day because they all pale in experience to this sacred moment for me. That being said the other tour sites were also moments of important and conflicting duality. From Hitler’s bunker site that is now just a gravel parking lot to the tourist trap that is a mere representation of what Checkpoint Charlie was, it was certainly provoking to see how these places were inhabiting the city today.