Walter Benjamin famously said that 19th-century railroad technology—first iron, later steel—inspired and enabled the burgeoning architecture of modern skyscraper-filled cities. Railroad tracks became steel beams, and with it a horizontal technology became a vertical one. The modern skyscraper, as it first appeared in New York and, almost more interestingly in architectural terms, in Chicago, became not only the symbol of post-1870 capitalism, but also its literal scene.
Inside, it housed the offices that spawned and managed the new industrial revolution, along with its products and services. Upon his arrival in the United States in January 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre aptly summed up this transformation when he described New York as the ugliest city in the world. Viewed horizontally, because vertically it is the most beautiful.
Between 1870 and 1914, New York and Berlin shared and repeatedly vied for the status of the new leading world metropolis. Both had good arguments why they should replace London and Paris as global commercial and cultural centers. Berlin claimed a cultural vanguard within Europe, while New York tried to be as European as possible.
This came about, for example, through the founding of institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1872 and the Metropolitan Opera in 1883 as upholders of European traditions, on a scale that was to far surpass their European models. Then, in 1898, the five New York boroughs were incorporated and linked by the Brooklyn Bridge (1898) and the subway system (1904).
After 1945 Berlin had to heal wounds – New York continued to grow
The New York subway, modeled on the London subway, made it possible and required that workers live far from the city center and, regardless of the distance, be able to get to work at the same fare. The same applies to Berlin: the line that is now the U1 was opened in 1902. In 1920, the Greater Berlin Act unified and expanded the boroughs, including central Old Berlin and its seven surrounding communities.
The two cities parted ways in 1945. While Berlin was recovering from the near-fatal wounds of World War II and the first signs of the Cold War were already looming on the horizon, New York continued to expand. For almost two thirds of the 20th century, from 1933 to 1989, the globalization of Berlin was interrupted.
Today New York is oversaturated, inaccessible, expensive
However, after 1989 and reunification, for many – and certainly for many New Yorkers too – Berlin increasingly seemed like a version of New York that the city itself had once conquered but has since lost. New Yorkers (like me) understood that our city had become vertical in too many negative aspects, both socially and architecturally. Oversaturated, inaccessible, expensive.
On the other hand, Berlin seemed to be celebrating a new horizontality after 1989. Physically open again, reunited after three decades of traumatic division, the city and its cultural landscape could now be understood as the positive horizontalization of New York’s negative verticality: as a global and generous city. Open, accessible, spacious, relatively affordable and more or less hassle free.
Unlike its New York counterpart, Berlin’s infrastructure has been renewed to patch East and West together. We have three opera houses, which has become a popular subject of local bragging rights, even among those who don’t really enjoy going to the opera. New York currently only has one opera. Admission prices in Berlin were and are cheap, and tickets – unless Domingo or Netrebko are singing – are usually available.
And the square in Berlin! I don’t mean Berlin’s parks, because no green place is as beautiful and inviting as Central Park, but simply the spaciousness of the streets; the way restaurants put their tables outside at the beginning of summer. Public space must always be a space that can be used collectively, where the gathering of a large number of strangers in public feels safe and where the delicate balance between privacy and human contact can be negotiated in a relaxed manner. In New York, any eye contact between strangers is taboo, whereas in Berlin it seems unproblematic.
Horizontality means greater accessibility, but also negotiating differences. This is the promise of Berlin, the Berlin feeling that makes the city so hospitable.
Not that the open city of Berlin overcame its differences or even tried to suppress them. The merging of East and West continues to reveal cracks. When the State Opera temporarily moved to the Schillertheater in 2010, some employees expressed their displeasure at the daily commute to the west. And as long as the Staatskapelle played two concerts on consecutive nights, one in the Philharmonie and one in the Konzerthaus, each attracted a noticeably different audience: global and West Berliners in the Philharmonie; East Berlin in the Konzerthaus.
In 2018 there will be a new comparison: Berlin – Jerusalem
But horizontality also means social integration, a part of Berlin’s history that continues to prove difficult but has also been successful: from the steady incorporation of Turkish residents from mere workers to citizens to the political and literary mainstream and the eclectic public and private commitment to refugees.
Berlin/Paris, Berlin/Moscow, Berlin/New York: these are urban and cultural juxtapositions, comparisons, competitions that are well known to us. Nevertheless, they are always worthwhile. Currently in Berlin for 2018 is a new and unexpected juxtaposition coming up: Berlin/Jerusalem.
I am referring to the “Welcome to Jerusalem” exhibition, which will occupy much of the public space of the Jewish Museum in Berlin until April 2019, while its permanent collection is being revised. It has a different focus, but springs from the same spirit as the museum’s core focus, the history of German Jews. The Jerusalem Exhibition tells a secular story about a holy city where its diversity is presented as a key historical fact.
The “security wall” around Jerusalem seems familiar to Berliners
The exhibition consists of various sequences that follow one another in an elegant circle. At the beginning and at the end there is a representation of the three monotheistic religions and their relationships to Jerusalem and the claims to the city. It continues with various practices (ancient and modern) and ritual objects. It finally ends with a video installation that summarizes the conflicts between the three cultures in the 20th century, when religious differences were politicized in the context of the Ottoman Empire, British colonial rule and the post-colonial period.
The narrative culminates in the construction of the “security wall” separating Israel from the Palestinian territories. The video ends with a full-screen image of this wall. The “security wall” is both a symbol and a physical reality of social disintegration. Although not explicitly named, a Berlin viewer is unlikely to miss the parallel between the Security Wall and the Berlin Wall.
In any case, a group of music students from Nazareth, whom I was able to introduce to a group of my American university students here in Berlin a few years ago, did not escape the juxtaposition of the two walls. The theme of our week-long seminar was hospitality: the relationship between host and guest in the ambivalent context where openness, which is now called welcoming culture, is combined with hostility.
One evening we attended a performance of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre together, which begins with hostile hospitality between the characters Hunding and Siegmund. However, our discussion took place in the rooms of the Barenboim-Said kindergarten, which was located in a GDR building on Leipziger Strasse. The students from Nazareth, all between fifteen and eighteen years old, Christian and Muslim Arabs with Israeli nationality, eloquently recounted the formal and informal differences in status and civil rights between Arabs and Jews that they experienced on a daily basis.
The conversation turned to the history of Jews in Germany, a topic that was generally new to them. We spoke about the context in which Jews, formally and informally, were made strangers in their own land, what Michael Blumenthal describes in his book on German Jewish history as the third or “invisible wall”. As we stepped out of the building on Leipziger Strasse, everyone noticed that we were crossing the border from East Berlin back to the West, across the line where the Berlin Wall once stood.
Michael P. Steinberg is President of the American Academy Berlin. Translation from the American by Tina Reis.
The Berlin Monitor shows your opinion on the major issues in the capital. If you register, you contribute to better results. More information here.
–
