Berlin as a Palimpsest
I feel as though there is a chaos to Berlin, a cultural and architectural entropy about it’s various states of being, where the past meets and conflicts with the present and the future.
Andreas Huyssen described the city as a palimpsest; its own text, where buildings and streets are ‘superimposed’ over old, showing traces of earlier forms. But walking through the centre, it feels, to me, that some parts of the text have been redacted, leaving absence. Just beyond where U Stadtmitte separates the traffic, south towards Checkpoint Charlie, there is such an absence of space, an absence of life; only cold or empty buildings, littered with Einstein Kaffees and fast food chains. Here, everything boring feels permanent, and anything interesting (Charlie’s beach, Die Mauer Panorama) feels temporary. It is a chaos that leaves Berlin fragmented.
This superimposition makes new of old; dolled up warehouses become the city’s finest galleries and clubs. Elsewhere, though, it feels like a messy cut-and-glue job, as a rusting memorial plaque that reads of German Soldiers hung by ‘inhuman SS bandits’ is forgotten about entirely by the world, as it lies next to threshold of a true commercial attraction: McDonalds. Friedrichstraß remains like this, a constant conflict between shiny, glass modernity and haunted ornamentality, competing forces of old and new.
Throughout central Berlin, structures of the past are inhabited by the present, in a way that exudes the entropy of the city’s culture. I think of Kaufhaus Jonaß, that stands on the corner of Prenzlauer Allee. As the first credit department store in Berlin, turned to the Hitler Youth headquarters, then to the Marxist-Leninist institute, the building now stands as Berlin’s Soho House: an exclusive, private members club and hotel to the rich and famous. The place now, as I have seen it, perfectly manicures and curates a replica of it’s past, yet it’s patrons, cocktail in hand, are unaware of the foundations of amnesia that lie beneath. As I have looked out on it’s balcony, only a visitor, I have seen what they see; no roads below, no disparity, only the sky, and the buildings that compete in height. Kaufhaus Jonaß is a projection screen, a shell filled by each ideology that has consumed Berlin; Capitalism, National Socialism, Communism, and now Neoliberalism. It is a blank slate to be drawn on, a grade II listed mirror that reflects the times, in the greatest extremity. And it is not the only one of its kind.
I have stood and watched this city, I have walked it’s pavements. Its culture is alive, but contradictory, its districts are the same. If Berlin is a palimpsest, it is one that is disorderly, as its streets reflect a muddled identity of all its pasts and none of them at the same time, emulating what it wants to be and what it once was. In entropy, the disorder of the city becomes it’s decline.
Culture of Youth 