ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on Berlin's recent history and its effect on the city's buildings and ruins, their removal or afterlife in relation to Neubauten. Neubauten's work moved from inciting the implosion of the new buildings of West Berlin, to reflective criticism of the city's layers and holes in more recent work. As marginals, rag-pickers lived on the edge of consumerism; outlawed from the arcades of commerce, they assembled urban detritus, collected what others no longer desired and refunctioned this making it useful once more. The Europa Building and the Fernsehturm were clear symbols of the Cold War, both asserting that the other side' was still there. Since reunification, the West appears to have been far more destructive with German Democratic Republic (GDR) buildings than with those remaining from the Third Reich in 1945; there are few surviving East Berlin markers of architecture and life left.
