Between Alexanderplatz and Schlossplatz

Around the turn of the year 1999/2000 I took photos for the series Kulisse. I walked through Berlin for days. I tried to find my place, my center. Construction was going on everywhere. The paralyzing standstill that had characterized the last years of the GDR and the various attempts of the inhabitants to appropriate public space gave way to increasingly present large-scale building activities.

Stefan Melle wrote at the time about my view of the city:

Whoever wants to see a city must be attentive to it. He must be able to look at its floor and read its landmarks, he has to look up the walls and understand its stigmas, he has to notice the closed and open perspectives from buildings, trees, light poles that divide this territory into rooms. Anyone who wants to see a city must also dare to look its people in the face for longer than is proper. Ultimately, however, anyone who wants to see a city must also accept that there are many things he will not see. The combination of the living and the material from which a city is formed is too complex. Too diverse and ambiguous in this are the people and the individual objects of their urban furnishings: houses, traffic facilities, supply systems, green spaces and other things with which they try to tailor the fitting shell for their lives, to furnish their city „livable“.

In his text he also laments the backward-looking Berlin city planning at the time. The desire to rebuild the palace became more and more entrenched.

The preliminary climax of carelessness, thoughtlessness and lack of imagination, however, is represented by the increasingly serious considerations, now supported by Chancellor Schröder himself, to rebuild the Berliner Schloß, although there are not even ruins left of it after wartime destruction and blasting by the Ulbricht government. Proclaimed as a repair of the old cityscape and a return to history, this reconstruction would be nothing more than an inadmissible repair of this very history, in which then no war consequences and no political decisions of the GDR would be visible any more. As a badge of the new Berlin Republic, instead of a new building for people that truly represents modern Berlin, the museum backdrop of a time that is anything but progressive would be created. Modern Berlin has so far been a fiction that, despite all its staging, imagination, and eloquence, has hardly surpassed the status of a mirage. One throws the historical anchor in order not to sink completely in the sea of one’s own spiritlessness.

While looking at my negatives for this blog post, I noticed that the colors have already visibly changed. The material is now 20 years old. For a long time I assumed that the durability of photographic material is a question for the future. Well, from my perspective, it seems to have begun.