Berlin Contemporary: An Editorial

This special theme issue, Berlin 2000, evolved from the nine-month stay in the city that Gautam Dasgupta and I had in 1998-99, living at the new American Academy in Berlin, which was situated on the Wannsee, the beautiful lake district in the southeast corner of the city, near Potsdam. He was one of the inaugural Fellows of the American Academy, working on a Heiner Müller project, and I had a Fulbright to teach at the Free University. We have been going to Germany, especially to Berlin, for many years and, as PAJ readers know, published translations of many German plays and texts, and reports on theatre and the cultural scene, from the start. This extended trip provided the opportunity to meet and converse with many journalists, artists, academics, diplomats, historians, businessmen, representatives of cultural institutions, and students, as well as to experience day-to-day life in a foreign city as more than just tourists.

In this particular period and immediate afterwards, there were several events of historic significance: the summer just before our arrival President Clinton came to Berlin to celebrate the fifty-year anniversary of the Berlin Airlift; November 1998 marked the commemoration of sixty years after Kristallnacht, eerily coincident with the date, November 9, the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989. In the spring of 1999 the Reichstag reopened, with Sir Norman Foster's new dome. Earlier in May of this year, Germany counted fifty years of its post-war constitution.

Germany has been the focus of considerable press attention ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent reunification, and with the recent move of the German government to Berlin from Bonn the two Berlins have been joined in a massive rebuilding effort. Rebuilding is occurring on every level: political, social, cultural, economic, spiritual. No one knows yet what the new Berlin will become though there are plenty of skeptics and naysayers, whether on political or aesthetic grounds. Berliners are highly articulate about their politics and social realities, and over a long period of time one can't help but be drawn into the discourse of a society in which the subject of cultural life is so central.

But trying to unravel the complexities of Berlin and the role of the new Germany is no simple matter, for the perspectives change according to generations and social and economic classes and whether one is from the former East Germany, or from Berlin, or another part of Germany, where it matters less. There are those in the former DDR who feel themselves "occupied," their culture totally obliterated by the juggernaut of the West German economic miracle. As for questions that had preoccupied us during our stay, What is socialist culture? Where is it?--I cannot say that we found many answers, other than a few generalities which even former East Germans now question as they begrudgingly acknowledge the good things that have happened in their transformed lives. What we did learn is how little eastern Germans and western Germans know of each other and their different ways of life, and how unbridgeable the gaps are now. About 40% of those who had lived in West Germany have still not traveled to the eastern part of the country--many Berliners I met have never even been to Dresden or Warsaw, just a few hours away. People in the communist countries know far more about the West.

Today everyone speaks of the invisible wall inside the heads of Berliners, and some hold the view that the former two Germanies comprise entirely separate peoples and cultures who should not have been reunited, though for students and younger generations these issues matter little. Many others are still frozen in variations of Cold War rhetoric or sixties leftism or Marxist theory, each purveying some political distortion or another. Mostly, everyone agrees that it will take a generation to ease the transformation. By that measure, Germany is already half way there...