Cultures in Conflict: Visual Arts in Eastern Germany since 1990 [PDF]

Deshmukh, M.F. (ed.) (1998) Cultures in Conflict: Visual Arts in Eastern Germany since 1990. [Online] http://www.aicgs.org/documents/gdrart.pdf [15/05/2010]

Reality Bites: Making Avant-Garde Art in Post-Wall Germany [PDF]

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum [2010] Reality Bites: Making Avant-Garde Art in Post-Wall Germany. [Online] http://kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/files/rbeducationguide.pdf [15/05/2010]

Why the Berlin Wall Fell

From Truman to Reagan, the benefits of moral clarity.


THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In the debate over who deserves credit for causing the Berlin Wall to collapse on the night of November 9, 1989, many names come to mind, both great and small.

There was Günter Schabowski, the muddled East German politburo spokesman, who in a live press conference that evening accidentally announced that the country's travel restrictions were to be lifted "immediately." There was Mikhail Gorbachev, who made it clear that the Soviet Union would not violently suppress people power in its satellite states, as it had decades earlier in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. There were the heroes of Poland's Solidarity movement, not least Pope John Paul II, who did so much to expose the moral bankruptcy of communism.

And there was Ronald Reagan, who believed the job of Western statesmanship was to muster the moral, political, economic and military wherewithal not simply to contain the Soviet bloc, but to bury it. "What I am describing now is a plan and a hope for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history," he said in 1982, to the astonishment and derision of his critics. Now, there was the audacity of hope.

All of these figures played their part, as did a previous generation of leaders who insisted that the West had a moral duty to defend the little enclave of freedom in Berlin.

Fulfilling that duty came at a price—71 British and American servicemen lost their lives during the Berlin Airlift—that more "pragmatic" politicians might have gladly forgone for the promise of better relations with the Soviets. Not a few NATO generals thought the defense of Berlin needlessly exposed their forces in a militarily indefensible position while giving the Russians an opportunity to blackmail the West as they advanced on strategically more vital ground, particularly Cuba.

Yet if the West's stand in Berlin demonstrates anything, it is that moral commitments have a way of reaping strategic dividends over time. By ordering the airlift in 1948, Harry Truman saved a starving city and defied Soviet bullying. As importantly, he showed that the U.S. would not abandon Europe to its furies, as it had after World War I, thus helping to pave the way for the creation of NATO in April 1949.

By holding firm for 40 years, Truman and his successors transformed what was supposed to be the Atlantic alliance's weakest point into its strongest. To know what the West stood for during most of those years, one merely had to go to Berlin, see the Wall, consider its purpose, and observe the contrasts between the vibrant prosperity on one side of the city and the oppressive monotony on the other.

Those contrasts were even more apparent to the Germans trapped on the wrong side of the Wall. Barbed wire, closed military zones and the machinery of communist propaganda could keep the prosperity of the West out of sight of most people living east of the Iron Curtain. But that wasn't true for the people of East Berlin, many of whom merely had to look out their windows to understand how empty and cynical were the promises of socialism compared to the reality of a free-market system.

Yet it bears recalling that even these obvious political facts were obscure to many people who lived in freedom and should have known better. "Despite what many Americans think, most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy," said CBS's Dan Rather just two years before the Wall fell. And when Reagan delivered his historic speech in Berlin calling on Mr. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," he did so after being warned by some of his senior advisers that the language was "unpresidential," and after thousands of protesters had marched through West Berlin in opposition.

It is a tribute to Reagan's moral and strategic determination, as it was to everyone else who played their part in bringing down the Wall, that they could see through the sophistries of Soviet propagandists, their Western fellow travelers, and the legions of moral equivocators and diplomatic finessers and simply look at the Wall.

"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle," George Orwell once said. That is what the heroes of 1989 did with unblinking honesty and courage for years on end until, at last, the Wall came tumbling down.

The Wall Street Journal (2009) Why the Berlin Wall Fell. [Online] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704013004574515850127019522.html [15/05/2010] 

Survey finds support for return of Berlin Wall

AFP

BERLIN — Nearly one in four Germans "sometimes think it would be better if the Berlin Wall were still there," according to a new poll published on Monday.

The Emnid poll of 1,001 people for mass circulation daily Bild also showed that 16 percent of people thought a rebuilding of the once-hated barrier "would be the best thing that could happen."

The survey found little difference of opinion between those that used to live on either side of the Wall, with 23 percent of east Germans and 24 percent of west Germans saying they could be in favour of another Wall.

The 155-kilometre (96-mile) barrier, erected overnight by communist authorities on August 13, 1961, split the city of Berlin in two and came to symbolise Cold War division.

In a bloodless revolution on November 9, 1989, the Wall, officially called an "anti-fascist barrier" by the communists, was yanked down and hundreds of thousands of East Germans streamed across to the West.

The 20th anniversary of this momentous day was marked recently with an emotional ceremony at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, attended by dozens of world leaders, topped off by a surprise video message by US President Barack Obama.

AFP (2010) Survey Finds Support for Return of Berlin Wall. [Online] http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gRSmyZgbVwp9q-wu8_nSOVgSKErw [15/05/2010]

Widow of East German leader insists life was better behind the Wall

THE IRISH TIMES

AFTER 20 years of capitalism, former citizens of the East German Democratic Republic (GDR) have begun to realise they had it better behind the Berlin Wall.

That is the conviction of Margot Honecker, widow of former GDR leader Erich Honecker, expressed at a private party to celebrate the 60th birthday of the vanished socialist state. While the rest of Germany gears up for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall next month, the 82-year-old widow of the man who co-ordinated its construction is rueful, but unrepentant.

“Okay, so we didn’t manage it , but still, 40 years isn’t so bad. It certainly left an impression,” said Ms Honecker in a video on YouTube filmed in Chile, her home since 1992.

A year earlier she left Germany with her husband before his death from cancer in 1994. “There is no news programme, no film that doesn’t try to discredit the GDR, but they haven’t succeeded,” she said under the old GDR flag, after singing a verse of The Internationale. “Fifty per cent of East Germans say ‘we have a worse life under capitalism, we had a good life in the GDR’. People are thinking more and more about what they had in the German Democratic Republic.”

Among young people, in particular, she said there was a “huge interest”. “The left wing is there, getting ever more votes and support as the larger parties are punished for their anti-social politics,” she said, noting the 12 per cent of the poll in September’s general election for the Left Party, a successor to the ruling SED.

“Things in Germany are going downhill for the working class, so things are looking good for the left,” she said. “I’m optimistic, always was and always will be.”

Ms Honecker, who served as education minister in the GDR, was accused, but never charged, of involvement in organising forced adoptions of children of dissidents to loyal party members.

Attitudes to the vanished East Germany vary widely in surveys, depending largely on the question asked. Some 80 per cent of Germans quizzed by Stern magazine this week say they are happy that the Berlin Wall fell.

About one in seven former East Germans quizzed said they would like to see the wall back. In a survey in June for the Emnid polling institute, some 49 per cent of 600 former easterners quizzed said the GDR had more positive than negative sides.

Meanwhile, a former prisoner of the Stasi secret police has locked himself in his former cell – and is streaming the images on the internet – to recall GDR oppression.

Carl-Wolfgang Holzapfel donned his old blue uniform yesterday and entered the cell at Berlin’s Hohenschönhausen prison, where he served nine months in 1965. “We have to remember the leaden years before, the courage of people who were hounded by the authorities, and the revisionist politics of the Left Party.” His website is www.stasi-live-haft.de

DEREK Scally, D. (2009) Widow of East German Leader Insists Life was Better Behind the Wall. [Online] http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2009/1031/1224257766778.html [15/05/2010]

Steffenhagen, J. (2009) Die Mauer im Kopf von Margot Honecker. [Online] http://www.welt.de/fernsehen/article5024563/Die-Mauer-im-Kopf-von-Margot-Honecker.html [02/05/2010]

Plans for monument to German unity cause some division

THE NEW YORK TIMES

BERLIN — Plans for a monument to celebrate German unity and freedom are causing a stir 18 years after the Wall fell, with some accusing Berlin of building too many memorials and others saying the whole project is pointless.

The lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag, is to discuss the proposed monument on Friday - the 18th anniversary of the 1989 opening of the Berlin Wall, which brought an end to Communist East Germany and opened the door to German reunification less than a year later.

The winning design for the "Memorial to the Freedom and Unity of Germany" was by Bernadette Boebel, a 25-year-old student. It consists of two steel semi-circles 10 meters apart which appear as a full circle when viewed from a certain perspective.

Norbert Lammert, president of the Bundestag, said at the award ceremony for Boebel's design that a monument to post-Cold War German freedom and unity was "long overdue" in a city full of memorials recalling the Nazi and communist dictatorships.

But not everyone shares his enthusiasm.

Nikolaus Bernau, a prominent architectural expert, says a steel monument can never hope to evoke abstract concepts like freedom and unity, let alone the euphoria of the 12 months leading up to reunification in 1990.

"Based on all the experience people have with building and preserving monuments, this concept is at best naive," Bernau wrote in the Berliner Zeitung newspaper.

He said 1989 would be better remembered in celebrations, exhibitions, museums, films and other works of art.

Luc Jochimsen, cultural spokeswoman for the Left party, said the monument focuses on unification and ignores more important aspects of the 1989 revolution.

"We think Berlin is the wrong place. We think its focus should be on Leipzig, not Berlin, and on Oct. 9 (1989), not Nov. 9," she said, referring to demonstrations in the eastern city of Leipzig that marked the beginning of the end of Communist rule.

Others say Berlin already has more than enough monuments.

Within a stone's throw of the Brandenburg Gate in central Berlin are the new Holocaust Memorial, a permanent exhibition honouring Germans killed trying to cross the Wall and a monument commemorating the Soviet army's liberation of Berlin.

A new center remembering Germans and others expelled from eastern Europe after World War II is also planned.

One reason why a memorial marking German unity is under discussion may be that most traces of the Wall that separated east and west Berlin for nearly three decades are gone.

Many Germans still have mixed feelings about reunification, making the debate over the new monument even more complicated.

Klaus-Peter Schoeppner of the Emnid polling institute says the majority of Germans still think of the former Communist east as a "second class Germany."

A recent survey showed that one out of five Germans would like to have the Berlin Wall back.

© Stiftung Aufarbeitung

KJ (2008) German Reunification Memorial Initiators Awarded National Prize. [Online] http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,3417566,00.html [15/05/2010]

The New York Times (2007) Plans for Monument to German Unity Cause Some Division. [Online] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/09/world/europe/09iht-09wall.8269616.html?_r=1 [14/05/2010]

Forgetting Why the Wall Fell

Benjamin R. Barber
In the orgy of Reagan revisionism and capitalist triumphalism that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, we have largely forgotten how and why the Cold War came to an end. It would be almost impossible to discern its real origins from today's Disney style celebration of the "Mauerfall" that began on Thursday evening with musical celebrities (e.g., Bono and Beyonce) and the European MTV awards in front of the Brandenburg Gate and ends this evening in the same place with a gala featuring political celebrities (e.g., Hillary Clinton) and sundry Nobel Prize winners (e.g., Gorbachev), a performance of Beethoven's Ode to Joy (the Ninth Symphony) and a symbolic wall happening. A thousand large painted domino blocks stretching from Pottsdammerplatz to the Reichstag (that have actually divided the two Berlins again this week since cars can't get through!) will topple domino style -- sort of the way the Eastern bloc countries and then the Soviet Union did after November 9, 1989.

Nowadays it is easier to accede to the received wisdom that the events that brought down the wall were the outcome of President Reagan out-producing the Russians in the arms race and then shouting "Tear down this wall!" Or the result of Gorbachev's Perestroika and Glasnost policies in the Soviet Union that brought both him and his empire to grief.

Truth is, however, that the wall came down because of a decade or more of grass roots democratic organization in Poland (Solidarity), Czechoslovakia (Vaclav Havel and the Velvet Revolution) and, of particular consequence for Berlin, by Neues Forum, that informal bottom-up syndicate of students, workers and intellectuals whose meetings and broadsheets and courageous demonstrations in Leibzig, Dresden and Berlin softened up the East German regime and put enough holes in the German Democratic Republic's ideological architecture to make the collapse of its physical architecture inevitable.

But Neues Forum and its locally based associations and publications were quickly swallowed up once the wall was down by the West's quick and aggressive takeover of East Germany (remember the Treuerhand Trust that converted the "people's property" to private property?) and by the triumphalist notion that it was not so much democracy but capitalism that had won the Cold War.

The New European Man who emerged after the wall was not the new European citizen but the new European consumer. Shopping, not voting defined the new paradigm. To this day, Europeans talk with regret about a "democratic deficit" that has permitted the new Europe to flourish in ways determined by the Euro rather than the European.

Yet the standard paradigm continues to believe in liberation from the outside -- to imagine that some combination of Reagan's hard power politics and West German soft power television along with consumerism's endless seductions pulled, pushed and shoved the East into surrender and then freedom. Presto! Down came the wall.

Only that's not how it happened then, and it isn't how it happens now -- not in the German Democratic Republic and not in Iraq or Afghanistan either. Might as well bring the troops home, they will no more "liberate" Afghanistan than Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher liberated East Germany.

We still pursue the illusion that democracy can be imposed from without, that a people can be leveraged into liberty by suasion and force, that people can be seduced to embrace democracy. As it was in 1776 in the British colonies, and in 1989 in Berlin, democracy grows from the inside out, bottom up.

No people can become free unless they mount their own struggle for freedom. Liberty cannot be gifted from the outside, and certainly cannot be engendered by force or occupation or the threat of invasion.

East Germany -- and with it Eastern Europe and Russia too -- overcame tyranny from the inside out. West Berliners helped pull down the wall but East Berlin citizens unmoored it from its foundations.

The same will have to happen if Iraq and Afghanistan and Iran are to establish their own liberty. So we might as well bring the troops home. Because until a people commits fully to achieving its own freedom, foreign boots on the ground will only push them further into servitude.

Barber, B. R. (2009) Dispatch from Berlin: Forgetting Why the Wall Fell. [Online] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/benjamin-r-barber/dispatch-from-berlin-forg_b_350671.html [11/05/2010]

Amie Siegel

Berlin Remake (2005) is a 14 minutes long 2-channel video installation by Amie Siegel. The artist projects scenes shot by East German State Film Studio alongside "'remade' version" of the present, creating space "where chronological time becomes simultaneous and where physical and cinematic landscapes coincide in an uncanny juxtaposition of past and present, making history (like the GDR) simultaneously present and absent, dramatic and banal, ruptured and reconnected" [Siegel, 2010a].

“Approaching a film, or a film scene, like a text or musical score, as performance. To approach a cultural output— images from a national film studio—as an index of time & place. Re-making cinematic spaces, shot architectures and angles, the movements of extras. Remaking but leaving things out. The shot pulls focus through emptiness. So the performance becomes a performance of the camera, a performance of estrangement. A performance of absence. A haunting, a doubling, a replica. The historical event that usually goes unseen suddenly so close at hand. A conjunction of virtuality & presence, correspondence & contradiction. A feeling of unease.” [Siegel, 2010a]

DDR/DDR (2008) is a HD, 135 minutes film with colour/sound, also by Amie Siegel, "Dream-like and propositional, works in this series mirror shared concerns of voyeurism, psychoanalysis, memory, surveillance and modernist architecture. These films engage in a self-reflexive inquiry into non-fiction film practices, including objectivity, authority and performance" [Siegel, 2010b]. It reveals "the lingering ghosts of the past to be still very much in the minds of both the older and younger generations living in the now unified nation" with interviews of former GDR citizens and survailance and training films from the Stasi archives [Harvard Film Archive, 2010].

"[DDR/DDR] is a mosaic of interviews and incidents that gradually connect, allowing issues of history, state control, personal identity, and memory to emerge. A man walking across streets and fields as if on a tightrope is a recurring motif—an apt metaphor for the East-West divide... The ruminating psychological and intellectual content of Siegel's works posits that everything is subject to shifting interpretation." [Kaufman, in Siegel, 2010b]

Harvard Film Archive [2010] Three Films by Amie Siegel. [Online] http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2010janmar/siegel.html [09/05/2010]
Siegel, A. [2010a] Berlin Remake. [Online] http://amiesiegel.net/project/berlin_remake [09/05/2010]
Siegel, A. [2010b] DDR/DDR. [Online] http://amiesiegel.net/project/ddr_ddr [09/05/2010]

D'Ambrose, R. [2010] DDR/DDR. [Online] http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/ddrddr/4799 [09/05/2010]
Siegel, A. [2010] Deathstar / Todesstern. [Online] http://amiesiegel.net/project/deathstar_todesstern [09/05/2010]

Manon Awst and Benjamin Walther

Manon Awst and Benjamin Walther began their collaboration in Berlin in 2006, with their work ranging from sculpture, performance, drawing and installation. Their backgrounds in architecture and theatre, allowing them to explore "into intimate relationships between human beings and their physical and socio-political environment", and with their "subtle yet critical approach... put society's governing values and accepted codes of behavior under scrutiny" (Awst & Walther, 2010).

"Awst & Walther's most recent work engages the architectural, temporal and metaphysical notion of a ‘threshold’. They investigate the ambiguous area between A and B (i.e: inside and outside, private and public, self and other) through a series of sculptures and interventions. This series incorporates specific industrial and ephemeral materials including gelatin, plaster and ice. The resulting objects and settings are unassuming and alluring, as they confront the viewer with an awareness of his or her own expectations and vulnerability." (Awst & Walther, 2010)

Awst, M. & Walther, B. (2010) Biography. [Online] http://www.awst-walther.com/ [09/05/2010]

CNN (2009) Ice Wall Honors Fall of Wall. [Online] 

http://edition.cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2009/11/09/ad.uk.ice.wall.cnn [09/05/2010]

German Embassy London (2009) Ice Wall in London Commemorates the Fall of the Berlin Wall. [Online] http://www.london.diplo.de/Vertretung/london/en/Mauerfall__archive/Projects/Ice__Wall/Ice__Wall__Bildergalerie.html [09/05/2010]

Rain, A. (2009) Commemorating the Fall of the Berlin Wall. [Online] http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/11/09/world/1109-BERLIN_7.html [09/05/2010]