ABSTRACT
The ‘place memory work’ discussed in the previous chapter becomes codified in forms of display which establish the paradigm of the city as a museal space in itself between 1984 and the early 1990s, spanning the caesura of the fall of the Wall. This is evident in the outcomes of the IBA-Neu and -Alt projects, and then a series of projects related to the 750th anniversary of the city’s founding in 1987, which establishes a new technique of place memory production: the installation as ‘collective’ event. The 1986 Mythos Berlin exhibition on the site of the Anhalter Bahnhof illustrates site-specific urban memory production (‘the city as museum’) as a specific technology in the evocation of past time and experience, but also as a development of an embryonic event culture. An extended analysis of Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1986) focuses on how the film shapes the viewer’s encounter with the ‘empty spaces’ of the southern Friedrichstadt, the Anhalter Bahnhof and the Hotel Esplanade. Wenders curates the city in such a way as to (re) formulate the viewer’s experience of the cityscape through the undoing of the sensory-motor habits of the urban environment. The Nikolaiviertel reconstruction in East Berlin allows for a broader consideration of the display of the urban and its role in monument preservation and reconstruction in the period, especially in comparison with the aims of the West Berlin IBA-Neu. It is read alongside the late GDR film, The Architects (1991) which revisits the themes of critical visual culture, the built environment and the urban gaze that were also visible in Chapter Two. The Architects points to a continuity in the museal urban gaze that is to be found in a number of works from the immediate post-wall era. Jürgen Bottcher’s documentary film about the fall of the Wall and its aftermath, Die Mauer (1991), works with the visual language of obsolescence we are familiar with from the GDR – not however now as a tacit form of state dissidence, but as a form of resistance to the synchronic time regime and the new post-unification order with its associated historical narratives. A similar continuity is evident in Christian Boltanski’s Missing House, and Shimon Attie’s Writing on the Wall, both of which are explicit interventions in the urban fabric that foreground the palimpsestic city as simultaneously repository, archive and museum.
