Ghosts of Berlin

Chapter 4 - Nazi Berlin
"The Third Reich's architectural legacy in Berlin goes far beyond Hitler's personal plans"

Nazi architecture has three primary roles in the creation of its new order:  Theatrical; Symbolic; Didactic. In addition, the Nazis saw architecture as a method of producing buildings that had a function, but also served a larger purpose. A stage in which the grandeur of Nazi propaganda to be unveiled.  

Theatrical:  The stage was set in common mundane buildings to some of the most elegant, grandest building found in Germany.  The stage was used to generate a legitimate historical link to the German history.  Their construction tell a great deal about and are symbols of those who created them, when they were created and why they were created. Designs of this kind occasionally occur by accident; however, the architectural styles speak to the tastes of those who constructed the building or paid for its construction. It also speaks to the tastes of the general architectural movements of the time and the regional variants that influenced them. Nazi buildings were an expression of the essence of the movement, built as a National Socialist building should be, regardless of the style used.

Symbolic: Symbolism, graphic art and hortatory inscriptions were prominent in all forms of Nazi-approved architecture. The eagle with the wreathed swastikas, heroic friezes and free-standing sculpture were common. Often mottoes or quotations from Mein Kampf or Hitler's speeches were placed over doorways or carved into walls. The Nazi message was conveyed in friezes, which extolled labour, motherhood, the agrarian life and other values. Muscular nudes, symbolic of military and political strength, guarded the entrance to the Berlin Chancellery

Didactic: The Nazis chose new versions of past styles for most of their architecture. This should not be viewed simply as an attempt to reconstruct the past, but rather an effort to use aspects of the past to create a new present. Most buildings are copies in some form or other, but for the Nazis, copying the past not only linked them to the past in general but also specifically to an Aryan past. Neoclassical architecture and Renaissance architecture were direct representations of Aryan culture. Volkish architecture was also Aryan but of a Germanic nature. The role the Nazis hoped architecture would play in the creation of a new order was like that of a book: to provide a place to hold the message, the symbols to impart it and a teacher to read it. Architecture, like every other art form, would be produced to serve the new Nazi order. For them, if this meant following existing architectural styles or providing analogues of other buildings, then so it is.

Hitler once stated, "Architecture is not only the spoken word in stone, but also is the expression of the faith and conviction of a community, or else it signifies the power, greatness and fame of a great man or ruler." On September 1937, at Nuremberg, he affirmed that the new buildings of the Reich were to reinforce the authority of the Nazi party and the state and at the same time provide "gigantic evidence of the community."  The architectural evidence of this authoritative legacy can still be seen very dominate in Nuremberg, Munich and Berlin.

Chapter 5 - Divided Berlin
"Tens of thousands of buildings had been destroyed, more were badly damaged, and hundreds of thousands of people has lost their homes." (176)
The 20th century has been crueler to Berlin than to most any other major city in the world.  Berlin is a city with a haunted past that can been seen in a multitude of facets founds across the city.  A half-century after World War I, the Berlin found itself demolishing the past and rebuilding the future to portray the new image of a global power with the Utopian housing tracts of the 1920s; then the Nazis' megalomaniacal neoclassicism in the '30s; the devastating Allied bombing raids in the '40s; the redoubled, misguided urban renewal of the '50s and '60s; and, of course, the Communists' lobotomizing Wall.

The burden of the past is heavy and confused. Powerful stylistic traditions compete and clash amongst one another, such as the, baroque vs. volkisch, modernist vs. neoclassical, Karl Friedrich Schinkel vs. Walter Gropius, and each is politicized, freighted with connotation. Berlin is an ambivalent city, a city of uneasy architectural taboos. Albert Speer's  Nazi splendors must be condemned no matter how handsome they sometimes seem during this era of classical revival. The Wall, horrid as ever, has nevertheless become the great built symbol of the city, a folk-brutalist icon. The city that tore itself apart under the Nazis and again under the progressives is now unbudgingly preservationist.

The once divided city still today shows its rebuilt history through it's urbanization, economy, architecture, and infrastructure.  One plan to revive the city sought a decentralized and functional division of the city.  That is, they envisioned the creation of  many individual "cells,"  with a few thousand residents each.  While some of his plan was followed through with the platz system found with in the city.  Many other ambitious plans and ideas for Germany were lost in translation leaving a certain disproportionate focus function found in the West vs. East.  The west is a very transparent city populated with commerce and public aspects of to be viewed as a dominate power and more superior.  Whereas the East, much of the splendor was found with in the Governmental sector.  It was a showcase to the west that their government was more superior.  

The Wall Jumper

My thoughts after reading this book was utter confusion.  While reading the narrator tends to ramble and jump from subject to subject quickly without notice for the reader to follow along, but after consideration of Berlin's history, this approach seems to make sense for the time period he is trying to portray.  The short novel, The Wall Jumper, takes place in post WWII Berlin, Germany.  It's during a time where Germany is divided in two different governmental and economical positions, capitalistic and communistic.  Berlin is the central focus of this shot novel.  At this particular point in time Berlin is not only divided by different governments but also also literally by a wall, The Berlin Wall.  The Wall Jumper was intentionally written to communicate the understanding of this time period, fragmented, incoherent, and confusion.

As Scheinder intentions becomes apparent as he jumps around from story to story of personal  accounts of this era, much in the same way a documentary is presented.  The Wall is the central metaphor of the novel, providing a semiotic system of disjunction and junction. The S-Bahn and the telephone are images of interconnection, whereas the Wall with its watchtowers and border guards represents disconnection or separation. All other images are subject to this binary system of division and flow.  It's about the relationship between man, city, and history. The narrator realizes that, like history, the city of Berlin is a text to be read, a text which he can read but not comprehend.

The Chaple of Reconciliation

The first Church of Reconciliation was built in 1894 was destroyed by the GDR, East German border guards in 1985. The church had stood on the border of East and West Berlin, with the building falling within the Solviets’ sector and most of the parishioners in the neighboring French Sector. After the Berlin wall was built in 1961, the church was in the “death zone,” inaccessible to everyone except the border guards. Between 1961 and 1985 the church tower was used as an observation post, but otherwise the church was abandoned until it was destroyed in 1985 “to increase security, order, and cleanliness on the state border with West Berlin.” Less than five years after the church was destroyed the wall fell, and the Reconciliation Parish had considered the future of the site where its church had once stood. The parish was aware of the responsibility to keep the site as a symbol of remembrance for Berlin’s division and particularly to those that had lost their lives.

The result of these concerns is the Chapel of Reconciliation, which as completed in 1999 with help from the volunteers of Open Houses. The Chapel stands on the site of its predecessor and returns the bells and alter which were saved from destruction, to their former positions. The chapel itself is a rammed-earth constructionand so remains cool in summer and requires no heating in winter. At midday from Tuesday to Friday, there is a service for the victims of the wall, in which a biography of one of them is read.

Lecture in the Park

Zaha Hadid's Phaeno

Porche and Mercedez Benz Museum

Doner Kebab?

Recently I have found a heavenly food called a Doner Kebab.  I pretty sure the little Turkish man who prepares these tasty delicacies sprinkles crack in the meat for assured repeat business.  I believe you must know the history of the Doner before I unveil an image to the world.

Doner kebab (Turkish: doner kebap or doner kebabı, literally "rotating roast", often abbreviated as doner, also spelled donair, donar, doner, or sometimes donner), is a Middle Eastern dish made of lamb meat (or so I have been told) cooked on a vertical spit and sliced off to order. Two similar dishes are called shawarma in Arabic and gyros in Greek, although ingredients and sauces differ. The English term kebab in some countries refers specifically to doner kebab.

Before taking its modern aspect, as mentioned in Ottoman Travelbooks of the 18^th century,the döner used to be a horizontal stack of meat rather than vertical, probably sharing common ancestors with the Cağ Kebabı of the Eastern Turkish province of Erzurum.  In a Biography, İskender Efendi from the 19^th century Bursa claims that "he and his grandfather had the idea of roasting the lamb vertically rather than horizontally, and invented for that purpose a vertical mangal". With time, the meat took a different marinade, got leaner, and eventually took its modern shape. The modern fast food doner was invented by Mahmut Aygun, a Turkish immigrant in Berlin, in 1971.