You know you`re getting close to the Berlin Wall when you hear the chipping-the chorus of tapping hammers and clinking chisels that echoes all around the Brandenburg Gate, along the Wall`s most famous and photogenic stretch. I`m in Berlin to cover the 40th Berlin International Film Festival for the Tribune, and I want my piece of the Wall to bring back home.
Those wielding the hammers are called ”The Wallpeckers” on the satirical postcards that have sprung up since the Wall`s opening on Nov. 9, 1989, though they probably deserve a more dignified name than that.
Young, apparently unemployed and predominantly Turkish (the city`s largest and most discriminated against minority group), the Wallpeckers are in fact the handworkers of history, under whose ministrations the Wall will be reduced to a pile of gravel and diffused throughout the world, much of it in little plastic bags labeled ”original,” ”authentic.”
Thus protected and certified, the fragments of stone will go into desk drawers, shoeboxes and back closets from Cape Town to Chicago (a fragment was recently installed in Tribune Tower), reminding those who come across them that there was a time when governments could imprison entire populations. Conceived in cold brutality, the Wall will vanish on a note of fairy tale whimsy: as a fountain of small, brightly colored stones flying all over the world.
In ”Citizens,” his study of the French Revolution, historian Simon Schama writes about Pierre-Francois Palloy, the enterprising patriot who secured the rights to demolish the Bastille after its fall and transformed its rubble into souvenirs he then sold throughout France. With every sale, the ideology of the revolution spread a little farther, as the lowest profit motive and the purest idealism went hand in hand to promote the new idea of liberty.
Two hundred years later, the same thing is happening in Berlin, though with the added irony that the world`s most imposing symbol of communist tyranny is disappearing behind an antlike buzz of primitive private enterprise. The dozens of dealers near the Brandenburg Gate, with their goods spread out on blankets or card tables, appear to be participating in some Stone-Age (or possibly post-apocalyptic) economy, trading in piles of pebbles that seem to possess magic powers.
That the magic is in the stones, or was, is indisputable. At the height of its powers, between its construction in 1961 and its collapse last fall, the Wall functioned as a kind of religious object, a totem or fetish that gathered into itself all of the oppressive might of the state. Actually two walls in most places, an inner and an outer separated by a terrifyingly empty strip of no man`s land, it radiated a confident, deadly force; even from the West, it wasn`t easy to approach without trepidation. You hesitated before touching it, as if the cold concrete could bite.
Once, the Wall seemed to stand at the center of the world-the world defined by the Cold War. A metaphor made reality, it was the Iron Curtain: It divided East from West, communism from capitalism, totalitarianism from democracy, slavery from freedom-or so the propagandists said, who found in the Wall the most potent image in their repertoire. Never before had a state provided so blatant a symbol of tyranny (though the East German government explained to its citizens that the Wall was to keep capitalists out) and few were the politicians, from Kennedy to Reagan, who could resist posing in front of it.
On the Western side, the Wall became a stage, a backdrop. Important speeches were made in front of it, major demonstrations were staged around it- whatever took place in its shadow acquired the importance of history, for here was history made (literally) concrete.
At the same time, it was a powerful stimulus to fiction-the source of a thousand stories. Even before the Wall was constructed, the divided city of Berlin had become a favorite location for movies; the highly charged sense of space that the medium depends on was already there, inherent in the political situation.
Such films as Nunnally Johnson`s ”Night People” (1954) and Carol Reed`s little-known follow-up to ”The Third Man,” ”The Man Between” (1953) used the divided city as the image of a divided soul, drawn between good and evil, lightness and dark, life and death. In his 1961 ”One, Two, Three,” made before but released just after the construction of the Wall, ex-Berliner Billy Wilder turned the imperfections of the division into the stuff of comedy: The film is about the panic that ensues when the teenage daughter of a Coca-Cola executive marries a handsome young communist. (Interestingly, a musical version of ”One, Two, Three” is currently playing at West Berlin`s largest legitimate theater-the only clear reference to the new political situation on the entire cultural front.)
When the Wall did go up, it only intensified the cinematic qualities of the city, providing a magnificent outdoor set. While the Wall was often crudely exploited for purposes of suspense-from Robert Siodmak`s 1962 ”Escape from East Berlin” (digging under it) to Delbert Mann`s 1981 ”Night Crossing” (flying over it, in a hot air balloon)-it also provided a powerful image of alienation and entrapment in such films as Martin Ritt`s 1965 adaptation of John LeCarre`s ”The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.” German filmmaker Wim Wenders uses the East German border to suggest the limits of possibility for the two heroes of his ”Kings of the Road”; in his recent
”Wings of Desire,” an angel`s supernatural powers are most memorably established by the ability to inhabit the No-Man`s Land between the inner and outer wall. Only the god-like can pass through these boundaries between worlds.
But if the Wall has been incorporated into countless works of art, it also has become a work of art in itself. Its Western side must offer the longest stretch of blank canvas in the world, and to it have been drawn the world`s most dedicated graffiti artists, amateur and professional. The creations that cover the Western side of the Wall range from hastily scrawled obscenities (in several languages) to elaborate, pre-planned, multi-colored compositions of the sort seen on New York City subway cars (and executed with a similar hand). Yet the important thing is not the individual element, but the riot of form and color, created by the whole, itself constantly shifting as the more popular sections are painted and repainted, over and over again.
Just as a primitive market economy has emerged these last few weeks in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, so has the Wall been magically able to stir, for a period of almost 30 years, a primitive artistic impulse in those who visit it. At its most elemental, the impulse is to make a mark, to leave a trace-in other words, to assert an identity in the face of (on the face of)
that object that best represents enforced conformity, mandated anonymity. To dirty up the East German`s nice, clean Wall was an act of petty and safe rebellion, but rebellion that carried a strange, childish satisfaction. To make a mess is one way for a child to get back at a parent; it is also a small way for a citizen to get back at a state.
One wonders whether the Wallpeckers` impulse didn`t begin in a similar, mark-making urge, which they carried one crucial, mercenary step further. Cutting away at the Wall is hard work, and what is destroyed is not the Wall
(six inches of steel-reinforced concrete) but the graffiti skin that covers it. One has moved from painting to sculpture; the mark is more violent, more physical. The wish to assert has become the need to obliterate.
Asked about the opening of the Wall, West Berliners invariably reply,
”We never thought this would happen in our lifetime”-an answer that sounds appropriately awed the first five or six times, until you begin to hear the doubt and anxiety that lies beneath it. We never thought about it because we didn`t really want to think about it. Berlin without the Wall will be a different city, and no doubt a much more ordinary one.
Director Helma Sanders-Brahams titled her 1985 film about Berlin
”Laputa,” after the flying island city full of foolish philosophers that appears in Swift`s ”Gulliver`s Travels.” West Berlin is indeed an abstract, lighter-than-air place, an artificial city supported largely for propaganda reasons-as a showcase for the glories, cultural and material, of the West.
Massive subsidies from Bonn keep in place the large population of artists and art students; the young people who fill the streets have largely been drawn there by the immunity to the West German draft that residency in Berlin provides; many of the office towers in the center of the city are filled by phantom bureaus-fictive West Berlin branches of West German businesses, opened only to secure the tax breaks that come with a Berlin connection.
A low-density reality prevails in Berlin: If the city sometimes seems claustrophobic and cut-off, it can also feel cozy and womb-like, protected from the harsh exterior world. There are so many ghosts in the city-so much history, from the Kaiser and Weimar to Hitler and the Cold War-that the present seems to have lost its power. There is little ambition here, little drive for improvement or change, but instead a mood of dreamy contemplation
(again, beautifully captured by Wenders in ”Wings of Desire”), a sense of standing to one side, drawing on a cigarette and sipping on a weissbier and watching real life rush by.
On Feb. 19, near the end of my visit to Berlin, the East German government announced that it would begin tearing down the Wall around the Brandenburg Gate. The government, having gone into the wall-selling business itself, apparently wanted to get the jump on the Wallpeckers and pry loose some relatively undamaged sections, the better to peddle as museum pieces and coffee table tops.
The demolition was scheduled to begin at 10 p.m., suspiciously close to the deadline for American network news, but the crowds had gathered by 8, anticipating what would probably be the last great piece of street theater in the Wall`s rapidly concluding saga. My friend and I managed to find a hole in the Wall behind the Reichstag and slipped through to the East German side, stepping directly into the once-desolate no-man`s land, now filled with revellers and the heavy machinery of a construction site.
The crowd cheered and applauded as an East German soldier-a beefy teenager, really, his face betraying not a sense of his moment in history but a little boy`s pleasure in smashing things up-rammed his bulldozer over and over into the section of the Wall nearest the Gate, loosening up the slabs so that a crane could move in and spirit them away. The beauty of the evening was there, as the first slab, suspended on a thin cable, flew over the heads of the crowd, twisting to reveal both its somber Eastern and graffitied Western sides, and then settled slowly into the bed of a dusty green dump truck.
Relieved of its Wall, will Berlin finally be relieved of its history? If the city becomes, as many believe it will, the capital of a reunited Germany, it will no longer be able to indulge so fully the luxuries of remembrance and grief; it will become a present-tense place, indistinguishable from the business centers that cover the Germany to the west. As Easterners and Westerners regarded each other through that newly opened hole in the Wall, on that Monday night in February, no one made a move to walk through-it was as if the Wall were still there. Too strong an image ever to be fully dispelled, it, too, has become one of Berlin`s ghosts.
