Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture

7. The Nation’s New Windows

240 Throughout most of the Cold War era, Berlin—West and East—served as a display window for highly contested cultural, economic, and political attractions . Large state subsidies transformed the city’s western half into a showcase of cultural experimentation and cosmopolitan openness, a vibrating outpost whose function was to demonstrate the superiority of liberal democracy and the free-market economy. The eastern part, by contrast, was transformed into a monument to socialist unity and proletarian solidarity, a self-confident capital to which the workers and peasants from the provinces could proudly look up. On either side of the Wall, Berlin’s urban landscape thus provided meanings and values far beyond the city’s historical traditions and socioeconomic possibilities. Though it largely relied on external resources to sustain its material status, Cold War Berlin played the role of a national imaginary. Different frontier myths here intermingled with front experiences and forefront avantgarde imageries, situating Berlin as a unique playground of the imagination, a site crisscrossed by competing fantasies, anxieties, political utopias, and historical recollections. Yet the two Berlins of the Cold War era were places not only to look at but also from which to look out. They functioned as framing devices, shaping attention and defining different viewing positions. Display and supervision, spectacle and panoptic mastery, public exhibitionism and private voyeurism were here often closely related. To climb on special platforms in order to peek at eastern paucity was as much a part of the many visual regimes of pre-1989 Berlin as gazing at eastern television sets broadcasting western entertainment 7 The Nation’s New Windows 241 programs. Public discourse in both German states may have constructed the Wall as an expression of radical separation. In truth, however, the Wall also operated as a kind of inverted interface, as an area of contact between and separation of different templates of temporal and spatial experience. The Wall’s concrete surface simultaneously divided and connected, obscured and revealed, estranged and associated. It engaged the mind and inspired imaginary travel while at the same time arresting bodies in their physical locations. Deeply marked by the omnipresence of the Wall, the visual culture of Cold War Berlin became highly charged with political energies and frictions. No matter where you looked or what you looked at, acts of looking negotiated the fragile boundaries of community, alterity, and otherness. No matter what you put on display—in both halves of the city—sight and the framing of visual attention were crucial to competing constructions of political belonging and national identity. The final chapter of this book investigates the extent to which German unification has transformed this Cold War politics of sight and spatial framing . Berlin public architecture and urban design since the fall of the Wall has been obsessed with endowing the new German capital with symbols of national unity and an “emotionally appealing addition of state representation .”1 Whether we consider the revamping of older government buildings or the construction of the new Chancellery, post-Wall Berlin has become a site where democratic politics and impressive architecture are supposed to go hand in hand again. As importantly, however, the frenzied remaking of the city since 1990 has served the purpose of improving the city’s location in the transnational reorganization of capital, of enhancing Berlin’s attraction and marketability on a worldwide scale. A negligible economic force prior to 1989, postunification Berlin has been charged to become a global city and hence a window onto the world: a self-assured metropolis coordinating the evermore global flow of moneys, technologies, labor forces, images, sounds, pleasures , and meanings. Yet rather than create a city whose surface simply mimics other first-tier cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, or Tokyo, Berlin’s city planners have, among other things, endorsed images of locality and historicity in order to increase the city’s competitive advantages. In stark contrast to the self-restrained architects of postwar Bonn, Berlin’s chief designers have chosen to develop highly choreographed environments that enhance local prestige by gratifying desires for historical continuity, livability, and territorialization . In September 1999, the newsweekly Der Spiegel boasted: “Last year, New The Nation’s New Windows Framing Attention 242 York was promoted as the American ‘Capital of the World.’ . . . Now, New York is facing a competitor: ‘New Berlin.’ The allusion is deliberate, for the German capital has everything it needs at its disposal to...