Public Memory in Berlin

A woman I met at a bar asked me what I thought about Berlin. Then, interrupting my own answer, she offered her own emphatic one: "I hate all this history shit. I am so over with it. Blah, blah, blah, wars. I'm done."

This is at first blush hardly an encouraging thought to a professor with some minor historical inclinations, but I think we should all take it in stride. For one, my conversation partner here was Ukrainian, and I venture that there's probably a narrow range of war-related topics that seem interesting and worth the affective price of admission to her right now. 

For another, I kind of get it. I react with my own distaste to the idea of visiting Germany and caring a little bit too much about rehearsing 20th century events. Doubtlessly, there's a way of bringing a kind of History Channel energy to the endeavour that is unappealing to everyone around you and boxes you in to a story that has a fixed beginning and end. Who has literal or physic time for that?

That said, I do have to confess that I let my inner history nerd out while visiting. Well, if not history nerd, then critical history nerd. The way that institutions and monuments present history, and evidence the choices they've made in that work here, is super fascinating. If you're someone who likes thinking about the politics of metanarratives and public storytelling, you're going to have a good time in Berlin.

Here's my thesis on all this: when you're thinking about history in these Berlin institutions, you almost always have to consider both the content and the frame. The structure through which you can access stories and physical materials from the past, and the people and institutions through which those stories and materials have been preserved, are right there, super noticeable, a constitutive part of the whole experience.

This has not been true of my experiences lurking around and working in North American historical spaces. There, respectful anonymous distance is king--the scalar difference of a monument, the bars between you and a diorama---or else an endless pursuit of immersion. To give a sense of that latter ideal, I used to tend bar in a reconstructed 1920s hotel, in the middle of a historical park, where paid actors gamely asked visitors with blue hair whether or not they'd fallen into a vat of paint earlier that day. Or, at the Smithsonian, I literally manned a station where visitors were invited to pose like Rockwell paintings, complete with period props. The goal was to either heed the boundaries of the frame, or try to completely obliterate them.

But look at this exhibit in the basement of the Bode Museum.

 

We have a perfectly ordinary (see how quickly one gets jaded in museum vaults!) stucco relief of the Madonna and a bebe Jesu. Except---see how fucked up it is? It got bombed by the Allies in 1942, and then taken by the liberating Soviets back to Russia, who valiantly attempted to put the whole thing back together. Then they let the sad thing sit in a box for decades. Maybe we can admit that they mostly didn't succeed. But now the curators are pulling it out of the vault to show it to you, but only as a way of telling you this whole story. They want to talk about the scars.

Or, more obviously, head to the Stasi Museum. Maybe go on a little tour, like I did, pondering the line of travel from the DDR to the GDPR (Germans love privacy for a reason!). But, get to the top floor you'll find that there's a whole section on how the museum's collections came to become historical documents. Turns out, they had to be saved from hasty, career- and face-saving destruction by officers as the wall fell. Hundreds of people marched in demonstrations, occupied buildings, and pressured the government to pass new laws ensuring that the archive of state surveillance wouldn't be destroyed. They had to do this daily. For weeks. They were frequently disarmed by false promises and feints, but they got it done. The documents you're seeing were saved by the hands of everyday people, with purpose.

 

 Now think back to the exhibits on the floors below. Remember how certain people in these hard-won files, the obvious bastards of history--the brutes, the informants, the banally evil office workers, all have their names and faces given, front and centre? See how this contrasts with a different class of people, those persecuted by the bastards, or merely caught up in their machinations? Then think about who made the choice to anonymize some, but not all, people in these records. Think of who secured them so that choice could someday be made.

 

Or, maybe you notice this dynamic before you even get to the museum, just in figuring out which museum to go to. Berlin has a fairly lavish number of them, in part because as a divided city each side needed a suitably palatial setting for statecraft and fine art. The re-allocating of all the cultural patrimony after unification is a bit haphazard, and bears the marks of a rather retroactive effort at coherence ('Oh no, you want the Old National Gallery, not the Old Museum, if you want to see the Impressionists. The New Museum, meanwhile, has that Nefertiti bust you've seen a bunch of times on tote bags.')

All this stuff makes the attempts at immersion, where you do find it, stick out all the more. There's a "hands-on" DDR museum whose gift shop I browsed, and which disinclined me to browse further (like, yeah, wearing a goofy Lenin shirt in Berlin is probably a little discourteous). I did, however, go to a DDR themed restaurant promising vintage recipes. These were tasty and, I presume to those who lived it, highly nostalgic. Yet, the feeling keeps on going beyond the menu and the plate. The whole restaurant is decorated like an East German apartment, complete with couches, commemorative glasses, grandmotherly tchotchkes, portraits on the wall, and lovingly dusted radios. The invitation, clearly, is to step inside a memory--not to learn, but to inhabit and to feel.[1] And, as an outsider to that experience, it feels kinda weird. It makes you wonder more about the inclinations of the people chasing that feeling, and its consequences.

Another example of this: the god damn Pergamon Museum Panorama. This thing is a wonderful monstrosity and gaudy monument to the German (but not only) desire to step into an imagined Ancient history, where maybe you've been quietly composing 'elevated' OC fanfiction for years. We're talking 4 stories of 360 degree composite images--a big beautiful photoshop--of a Roman city in 129 AD. Not only that though: there's a sound system piping in ambient noises and diegetic song, and theatre lighting that dramatically cycles across night and day. 

(Alas, my camera work is not equal to the effort)

Obviously we're doing immersion here. Obviously it's a little stupid. There's too many very white models, dressed in perfectly clean garments of questionably synthetic character, posed in an excess of delights and solemnities. There is also an implied sex zone, where all the cool Roman sex stuff is probablyjust about to happen (but uh, only in a straight way--and let's not think too hard about the hard line gender/spatial policing of women in Rome means that we're almost certainly looking at the fake smiles of sex workers and enslaved women here, yeah?). Centuries of German classicists with lewd imaginations: I see you. I see you in the way a librarian sees someone eating in the library.

But also, all the mediated efforts to bend and erase the frame also make it kind of obvious at times. That's the bargain you strike with spectacle. Maybe you're a little out of breath after climbing the stairs to the top? Or maybe you're both impressed and unimpressed by the effort to use day glo paint, lit by black light, to make the fires of the sacrificial temple glow during the night segment of the experience?

It's giving art historian who's a little too interested in neologisms and wants to convince you that the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of one of them. It's giving laser quest. 

This is all to say: it's absolutely worth your time, but not your respect.

Anyways, that's my stranger's account of the overdetermined historical landscape of Berlin. It was great and I'm glad absolutely no one asked me if I wanted to pose with a prop at any time.

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[1] I know there's a whole lot of work in museum studies on post-Soviet nostalgia that likely has more to say on this score (I remember catching a few papers a decade ago at a conference?). But hey what I want to know is: has food studies got in on the action? I'd love to stumble on a paper about the use of food--and its particular sensory registers--in the work of public history...