Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (48 page)

Anna fancied an ice cream at a stall in the Sony Center. It was the nearest thing she could find to the real street. Up on a giant screen I watched an account of how the Esplanade Hotel, a token representation of the magical Berlin of the 1920s, was placed on railway lines and trundled into the interior of this pleasure dome. To be preserved behind perspex. Thus fulfilling the developers’ promise to retain a significant historical structure. Within the microclimate of the Sony Center there is no interior, no weather. The crowd moves, slowly, without collisions, without overt surveillance. They are cowed and respectful. They can enjoy the metropolitan pleasures of eating and drinking at a café table, without getting wet or breathing petrol fumes. They gaze at promotional film clips without really seeing them. I wonder how many of them have read their Len Deighton thrillers? In
Berlin Game
Deighton has an explanation for the crazy geometry of the Wall. It came from a wartime conference at Lancaster House in London. The city was being divided up by the invading armies. The only map to be found in Whitehall came from the era of Döblin’s
Alexanderplatz
. They used the administrative borough boundaries of 1928. ‘It didn’t seem to matter too much where it cut through gas pipes, sewers and S-Bahn or the underground trains either. That was in 1944. Now we’re still stuck with it.’ Nothing changes, but the will to change. After much debate, a temporary solution. Which matures into a permanent disaster.

From the first, artists eyed up Fernsehturm, the TV tower overlooking Alexanderplatz (and the rest of the city). Back in the 1960s we were all constructing these things, paranoid snoop-stations barnacled with listening devices and equipped, as a sop to PR, with panoramic restaurants. Fernsehturm, at 365 metres, announced itself as ‘Europe’s second-tallest structure’. A pre-Viagra thrust worthy of East Germany’s pharmaceutical laboratories, the ones who dished out steroids to athletes, shaping a generation of bearded female shot-putters and flat-chested 800-metre runners who would demonstrate, through weight of medals, the superiority of their political system. Fernsehturm was redundant science fiction, but an invaluable asset, when the time came, for conceptual art by cutting-edge westerners. Tacita Dean’s 2001 film, shot in colour with an anamorphic lens, was a highlight of the genre. Sitting in Tate Britain, or some other cultural oasis, you drift for forty-four minutes through a German heaven: the installation is on a loop, stay as long as you like. Indistinct cityscape. Daylight thinning. Calling her piece
Fernsehturm
made the revolving restaurant a destination of choice for a better class of visitor. London’s version, the Post Office (now British Telecom) Tower in Cleveland Street, remains closed to the public, on the grounds of security: after an unsponsored intervention by the Angry Brigade. But looking down on the spectacle of the city, from Primrose Hill or Parliament Hill, you feel the buzz of malignant radio waves.

‘Which museums would you recommend?’ I asked Brian Catling, one of Fernsehturm’s visiting performance artists.

‘Museums? I had no time for museums, Berlin has some of the best bars in the world.’

Our walk across Berlin on 12 August 2009 began at Fernsehturm. In the square alongside Marienkirche, where I inspect an angel with swan wings, discreet vagrants occupy benches and reach into bags and sacks to secure their bottles. I flip, once again, to Hackney: the early-morning canal, the drinkers on their perches, the brisk walkers, dressed in black, having intense conversations in German. As our estranged artists move out of warehouse squats in Hackney Wick for somewhere cheaper and more interesting in Kreuzberg, young German professionals return the favour: journalists, architects, photographers. They sometimes engage me in conversation as they search for the mythical Dalston bars and cafés they have heard so much about. The slender spike of the mosque, away to the south, on the road to Shoreditch, was like a faint echo of the TV tower.

Today the revolving restaurant is closed to the public, a white wedding. The queue we have experienced, the complicated ticket procedure, is a reminder of the former East Berlin. But the panorama of the city, the vision of angels tapped by Wim Wenders, allows us to align ourselves and to preview the road we intend to follow to the far west and the Olympic Stadium. Most impressive is Karl-Marx-Allee: blots of vegetation, a concrete alphabet of lovingly restored high-rise estates.

When we descend into Alexanderplatz, it’s not there. We’ve been translated into another east: Barking, Dagenham, Romford. A soulless piazza with ill-considered post-architectural interventions, a railway station and a choice of uninviting cafés. Bemused tourists carve solid pastries, glug ersatz coffee. Anna remarks on the absence of dogs and cats. We are in the wrong part of town, I tell her. Around here you have to feed on deep memory, the dogs have been eaten. Dining that evening with the editor of a Berlin magazine, I was told that dogs are plentiful in outlying areas. This was a city of foxes, he said, living in the cellars of abandoned Nazi buildings. Of wolves emerging from the surrounding woodland. Of stoats taking up residence in motor vehicles, gnawing the wires. And an army of ghosts too, the last hold-outs. Root-chewers in rags, with skulls for faces. French SS units who are never going home.

Intimations of the World Athletic Championships were on display in the window of a department store: bloodless albino figurines, pound-stretcher versions of Leni Riefenstahl’s Aryan champions, kitted out in the appropriate colours for their nations. Nederland. Australia. Korea. White as lard sculptures. Muscles toned on the exercise machines visible in the gym at the base of Fernsehturm. Reflected behind the models, in a waft of cloud, are the block-buildings of the square. A city on fire. My local informant said that the authorities were nervous in the run-up to the elections: there had been a number of troubling incidents, Muslims stabbed in parks. With serious German involvement in the high-tech aspects of the Afghan campaign, people remembered the Madrid bombings. Arrests had been made, incomers and native Germans, in a house in the country. ‘It’s everywhere now. There are no boundaries.’

The editor pointed out that the government of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, at the time of catastrophic economic collapse in the early 1930s, decreed savage cuts in social programmes. Teachers’ salaries and unemployment benefits were slashed. A conservative administration preached parsimony – for everything except themilitary. Money was found for new battleships. The alien within, the Jew, was demonized. Germany moved towards the grand project: world war. By way of a building blitz underwritten by the 1936 Olympic Games, symbol of a nation’s rebirth.

Unter den Linden sweeps us along, as it is intended to do, towards the Brandenburg Gate. A refreshing shower cools us. There is so much to absorb that we scarcely appear to be walking. We’re on an airport travelator, a moving pavement pulling us through sites of approved memory. Isherwood recalls an incident, shortly before he left Berlin, when ‘a group of self-important S.A. men’, chatting and laughing, blocked free passage down this avenue. Walkers were forced to detour through the gutter. The English writer, knowing that a pivotal period of his life is over, studies the reflections of the great civic buildings in the windows of fashionable shops. He stares ‘with a mournful fixity’, as if to impress these images on his mind, to carry them away. To reconstruct them as marketable fiction.

The Brandenburg Gate, living up to its reputation as the location where the Wall was finally breached, is a barrier of a different kind: street performers, spontaneous musical groups, a thrash of tourists. A person dressed as a storm trooper out of
Star Wars
stands in my way. The franchise is inescapable. A lumbering Berlin bear takes off its head, to beg a cigarette from a corpse-green vampire soldier. Who has been made up to look like an oxidized military statue. The smoking bear reminds me of a card from the film museum showing Brigitte Helm in
Metropolis
, in her pre-
Star Wars
robot outfit, being given a straw to suck a drink held by a woman in a white coat. While an assistant with a hairdryer deals with the sweat.

On the north side of the avenue, Gary Cooper, that dignified American icon, marching out of
High Noon
, advertises Solidarity. ‘Yup.’ The sheriff triumphs before he turns in his badge. Exiled Hollywood leftists like Carl Foreman,
High Noon
’s scriptwriter, warp Western mythology. And are warped, right here, in their own turn. Coop stands tall at a frontier that is no longer a frontier. Pedestrians, and even well-behaved cyclists, are forbidden to pass through the Gate. We have to turn left, divert into the Tiergarten. Which makes us feel very much at home. The outwash of a grand project, as experienced in London, is confirmed by the closure of paths, security barriers across public highways, locked stations.

Tour guides try to nudge us into the group headed towards the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe: Peter Eisenman’s ‘maze of reflections’, a garden of sharp grey blocks. But we are caught in a crocodile of elderly, poncho-wearing cyclists who obediently push their bicycles into the permitted entrance to the park.

The Berlin editor told me that when he cycles through the Tiergarten on Sundays he encounters ‘Beckett characters’, vagrants with bundles, humorous malcontents. He might, I thought, have encountered the after-image of Beckett himself; not the world-famous, lightning-struck playwright, back to oversee another austere production in the Schiller-Theater, but a young unknown wanderer, philosopher of solitude. A myopic Dubliner edging close against the paintings in the museum of loneliness. He spoke, in his German diaries, of being ‘done in the eye’.

At the dawn of his career, in 1936, Beckett embarked on a voyage, hoping to visit relatives in Germany, to inspect galleries and make contact with painters. ‘What will Germany be?’ he wrote. ‘Six months walking around.’ Alone in his cabin, he read L.-F. Céline’s
Death on the Instalment Plan
. The perfect choice for an unknown city: delirium and derangement to set against stasis and elective exhaustion. Trapped within a Berlin that was not yet an island, Beckett tramped for hours in the Tiergarten. You can still feel the pattern of his stride in the sandy paths. And the invocation of Céline as the ultimate outcast, pariah and poet: a man with enough shrapnel in his head to act as a devil’s compass, leading him onwards into the storm. In
North
(1960), on the run from retribution in Paris, the crazed doctor delivers a cumulative itinerary of disasters, from spa town to Berlin bunker to Prussian estate; betrayed and betraying, undecided as to whether he’d rather face the Russians, the last Nazis, or justice at home.

Strasse des 17 Juni, when we are allowed to rejoin it, has aspects of the Mall, Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace. And aspects of Phoenix Park in Dublin. Memorials glimpsed through a curtain of well-tended greenery. Wars in stone or bronze. Victory columns. I am impressed by the park workers, the neat fashion in which they arrange their tools, the way they labour to sweep paths, trim trees and water plants. When I pause to photograph a lime-green caravan with the logo of a whetted cleaver and the word
CARNIVORE
, two cyclists pass close enough for me to feel their slipstream. ‘Kinski. Klaus Kinski!’ one of them shouts.

A bowl of soup for lunch, on the pavement at Bismarckstrasse, is a welcome change of temperature. For one thing, the English of the man preparing the soup is on a par with our German. The police sirens Anna was missing are back in force, louder than Hackney. I’m not sure of the status of the Comfort Hotel across the street, but the local demographic takes a distinct lurch towards Fassbinder. Two attractive, long-haired Thai women wait, in conversation, at the U-Bahn station. A West African lady in dramatic lace tights and vivid jewellery sways through the café, down the street, and back again. Modelling boredom. There are bookshops in this area, film stores, grocery operations on a modest scale. You can try Prana yoga or patronize LSD, an outfit retailing sex videos.

After inspecting the window of a gallery displaying watercolours of the Olympic Stadium surrounded by a pack of small bears with upraised arms, I come, unexpectedly, on the confirmation that we are still following the right route. A plaque publishes the news that Alfred Döblin, novelist, playwright, essayist, lived and practised as a psychiatrist in this house from 1930 to 1933. He left Germany for Switzerland, ‘one day ahead of a Nazi arrest warrant’, before settling in Paris. It was at Döblin’s house in Hollywood that Fritz Lang met Brecht, before they worked together on
Hangmen Also Die!
Depicted on a DDR stamp, with his monkish spectacles and prominent nose, Döblin looks not unlike the founder of Fianna Fáil, Irish prime minister and president, Eamon De Valera. Döblin: Dublin. Doubling. The author of
Berlin Alexanderplatz
denied, at the period when he composed his masterwork, any familiarity with that other Homeric European wanderer, Mr James Joyce.

A late-afternoon sun casts the shadows of the five Olympic rings, like manacles, on to the clean flags of the Osttor approach to the stadium. The rings are strung on a wire between twin brick pillars, topped with searchlights. Access to the stadium is strictly forbidden. Tours are suspended for the duration of the World Games.

Our approach was oblique, through a wooded area that reminded me of the Highgate district of London. Detached properties, houses, villas, chalets, cohabiting in a bucolic retreat. Flat-roofed modernist experiments, obedient to Bauhaus principles, rubbed along, in perfect harmony, with pastiched Tyrolean mountain huts and interesting constructions in pink tin. Statues in gardens. Art-machines glimpsed through picture windows. An enviable zone with none of the bristling surveillance systems, private security in cruising cars, that would be encountered in leafy Surrey or the Epping Forest footballer fringe. No wrought-iron gates with black lions.

In the Cold War spy fiction by which Berlin was sold to the British, Olympiastadion had another role: it was where the spooks hung out, a centre for covert intelligence. Spooks like parks. The former identity of this place, imprinted through newsreels of marches and triumphs, was the Reichssportfeld. Renaming a perimeter road Jesse-Owens-Allee doesn’t exorcize the way in which the film of 1936 was cut, to give the impression that Hitler refused to shake the hand of the triumphant black athlete. Agonies of conflicted opinion were endured as Berlin’s grand avenues were named and renamed, in the effort to achieve a balance between political correctness and respect for the past. We should never forget that among the last Jews held in the Schulstrasse transit camp, a former hospital in the northern suburbs, were a group of those whose racial inheritance was ‘forgiven’ while they helped to organize the Olympic Games.