Deutschland 09 – 13 Kurze Filme zur Lage der Nation (2009)
Der Weg, den wir nicht zusammen gehen (dir. Domink Graf & Martin Gressmann)
Berlin’s Babylonian theme of construction and demolition is revisited in Dominik Graf and Martin Gressmann’s contribution to Deutschland 09, a short-film compilation by Germany’s leading filmmakers (Fatih Akin, Wolfgang Becker, Sylke Enders, Dominik Graf, Christoph Hochhäusler, Romuald Karmakar, Nicolette Krebitz, Dani Levy, Angela Schanelec, Hans Steinbichler, Isabelle Stever, Tom Tykwer und Hans Weingartner), who present different critical points of view of what Germany stands for, symbolizes, and propagates in 2009. Graf, a native of Munich and the director of Der Rote Kakadu (2005), teamed up with the cinematographer Martin Gressmann to combine elements of architectural nostalgia with techno-nostalgia in Der Weg, den wir nicht zusammen gehen (The Path We Do Not Walk Together).
Along with the thirteen short films selected for official presentation, the DVD and the film website include other short films submitted for the competition. The website introduces the film collection concept and the significance of the year 2009 as follows:
"Over 60 years after the end of the Second World War, 40 years after the students’ protests in 1968, 30 years after the "German Autumn" of 1977, 20 years after the fall of the Wall in 1989 and in the middle of the social upheaval of the "Agenda 2010" towards the globalized world of the 21st Century, a group of directors living Germany came together to assemble their individual points of view of a panoramic picture of the social and political situation of today's Federal Republic. Each of the participating directors interpreted his or her own personal perception and cinematic view of today's Germany, abstract or concrete, free to choose the format and content. The individual contributions can be short films, documentaries, essayistic or experimental."
Along with the thirteen short films selected for official presentation, the DVD and the film website include other short films submitted for the competition. The website introduces the film collection concept and the significance of the year 2009 as follows:
"Over 60 years after the end of the Second World War, 40 years after the students’ protests in 1968, 30 years after the "German Autumn" of 1977, 20 years after the fall of the Wall in 1989 and in the middle of the social upheaval of the "Agenda 2010" towards the globalized world of the 21st Century, a group of directors living Germany came together to assemble their individual points of view of a panoramic picture of the social and political situation of today's Federal Republic. Each of the participating directors interpreted his or her own personal perception and cinematic view of today's Germany, abstract or concrete, free to choose the format and content. The individual contributions can be short films, documentaries, essayistic or experimental."
It is not surprising that the film came out in 2009, like Cynthia Beatt’s The Invisible Frame, in time for the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Graf and Gressmann’s essayistic documentary film is particularly useful for my analysis of nostalgia. It portrays "A range of architectural images across the country and in Berlin, shot on old Super-8 film stock, a documentation of disappearance:
"like bodies that still retain the ghosts of German post-war past. What is not told in all the museums, and fully renovated patrician houses, and all the historically reconstructed city centers, and rebuilt city palaces in Germany – is told in these buildings and places. These bodies of stone, now approved for demolition, because we want other bodies. Not that all these houses, these old bodies, were particularly nice – they're like old faces, they have wrinkles, tears, stains, they are withered and rotten. But destroying the abode of ghosts has always brought bad luck."
The metaphor of bodies and ghosts applied to dilapidated architectural structures (“bodies of stone”) is also a Berlin trope of the 1990s and 2000s (originated by Brian Ladd and taken up by contemporary novelists, graphic novelists, essayists and photo journalists like Chloe Aridijis, Anna Winger, Raul Zelik, Norman Ohler, Simon Burnett, Jason Lutes, and Arno Specht). Over the course of the later 1990s and the early 2000s, the ghosts have been replaced by new Berliners, as can be seen in films such as In Berlin (2009).
"like bodies that still retain the ghosts of German post-war past. What is not told in all the museums, and fully renovated patrician houses, and all the historically reconstructed city centers, and rebuilt city palaces in Germany – is told in these buildings and places. These bodies of stone, now approved for demolition, because we want other bodies. Not that all these houses, these old bodies, were particularly nice – they're like old faces, they have wrinkles, tears, stains, they are withered and rotten. But destroying the abode of ghosts has always brought bad luck."
The metaphor of bodies and ghosts applied to dilapidated architectural structures (“bodies of stone”) is also a Berlin trope of the 1990s and 2000s (originated by Brian Ladd and taken up by contemporary novelists, graphic novelists, essayists and photo journalists like Chloe Aridijis, Anna Winger, Raul Zelik, Norman Ohler, Simon Burnett, Jason Lutes, and Arno Specht). Over the course of the later 1990s and the early 2000s, the ghosts have been replaced by new Berliners, as can be seen in films such as In Berlin (2009).
In an interview also found on the film’s official website, Dominik Graf states: “The idea is to convey a feeling that what is planned for demolition can show all its dignity for one last moment, like a criminal before the death sentence is carried out. Actually it is about nostalgia.” Graf uses the German word Wehmut to connote the nostalgic sentiment, which can be translated as melancholy, wistfulness, poignancy, and nostalgia. Wehmut in German is made up of two words weh (pain, ache) and mut (courage). Thus the film can be interpreted to show courage to reveal a cultural longing and pain in relation to the past, in relation to the German past, German childhood, ruins, gentrification, emotionality, and self-representation.
As the online interviewer pointed out, nostalgia turns to anger, as we are presented with archival footage from a city council meeting of 1982, when urban planners gathered to determine the future of Bahnhof Zoo, and the film footage is amplified with black-and-white photographs from the meeting breaks in the hallway and the voice-over narration commenting on these photographs. The issue at hand was the gentrification of the area, and specifically the elimination of the marginal groups (drug addicts and dealers, male and female prostitutes, criminals and homeless people) from the train station. As Graf explains in the interview, the urban planners, social workers, and the employees of Deutsche Bahn were essentially discussing the end of their own tenure at Zoo station, and the eventual result became the glass, bench-less, allegedly transparent structure of the new Hauptbahnhof (main train station).
But why re-create this type of nostalgia (Westalgie) for “The Children of Bahnhof Zoo”? Bahnhof Zoo has been captivating Western imaginaries through literature and film (Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, the Zoo Palast Kino was home of the Berlinale Film Festival before reunification since the 1950s), as well as music (U2’s Zooropa, Achtung Baby, etc.), and served as the first point of arrival into West Berlin. It is significant that the social problems that the urban planners and Senate commissioners could not solve in 1982, were resolved in the era of architecture of transparency (glass structures and surveillance cameras designed to prevent criminal activity and lingering) in post-reunification Berlin. Hauptbahnhof was completed just in time for the FIFA World Cup in 2006, and Bahnhof Zoo was reduced to regional-train traffic, making it and the adjacent shopping streets of former West-Berlin irrelevant to the global tourists. With the current construction sites around Zoo Fester and the Bikini Haus, the whole area around Bahnhof Zoo has become another Potsdamer Platz, another Babylon, and will be re-imagined by developers and investors once the construction and gentrification is complete.
But why re-create this type of nostalgia (Westalgie) for “The Children of Bahnhof Zoo”? Bahnhof Zoo has been captivating Western imaginaries through literature and film (Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, the Zoo Palast Kino was home of the Berlinale Film Festival before reunification since the 1950s), as well as music (U2’s Zooropa, Achtung Baby, etc.), and served as the first point of arrival into West Berlin. It is significant that the social problems that the urban planners and Senate commissioners could not solve in 1982, were resolved in the era of architecture of transparency (glass structures and surveillance cameras designed to prevent criminal activity and lingering) in post-reunification Berlin. Hauptbahnhof was completed just in time for the FIFA World Cup in 2006, and Bahnhof Zoo was reduced to regional-train traffic, making it and the adjacent shopping streets of former West-Berlin irrelevant to the global tourists. With the current construction sites around Zoo Fester and the Bikini Haus, the whole area around Bahnhof Zoo has become another Potsdamer Platz, another Babylon, and will be re-imagined by developers and investors once the construction and gentrification is complete.
Graf also plays with elements of techno-nostalgia, purposefully choosing Super-8mm film stock over digital film. In the same interview he explains:
"Today, with the digitalization of all photographic and cinematic images everything is already clean per se. This gruesome deficit is becoming gradually apparent, and one makes incredible effort to make things and images dirty, so that, for example, you can see the air caught on film as in earlier club scenes. Not surprisingly, Tom Tykwer has listed a “dirt-manager” in the end credits of Perfume because when it comes to smelling and dirt, one has to throw tons of dirt into this material. In a way the film material adapts to the purging-tactics of investors culture. But the old Super-8 material is in itself hard, and has a much more physical quality in the chemical process of light, changes in lighting, and sunlight effects, than today's hyper-sensitive material. And this quality we use on these old buildings, so that hopefully you can almost smell them in the film."
"Today, with the digitalization of all photographic and cinematic images everything is already clean per se. This gruesome deficit is becoming gradually apparent, and one makes incredible effort to make things and images dirty, so that, for example, you can see the air caught on film as in earlier club scenes. Not surprisingly, Tom Tykwer has listed a “dirt-manager” in the end credits of Perfume because when it comes to smelling and dirt, one has to throw tons of dirt into this material. In a way the film material adapts to the purging-tactics of investors culture. But the old Super-8 material is in itself hard, and has a much more physical quality in the chemical process of light, changes in lighting, and sunlight effects, than today's hyper-sensitive material. And this quality we use on these old buildings, so that hopefully you can almost smell them in the film."
This privilege of old 8mm film over digital film is also similar to the old Bahnhof Zoo’s legacy over the new glass architecture of the Hauptbahnhof. Like the old stories and imaginaries surrounding Bahnhof Zoo, so the old film stock can capture light effects and “dirt” and thus has a different relationship to history (of the city but also history of technology) than the new digital technology and glass architecture. Again, we see a desire to preserve and capture (through a particular choice of film technology) something fleeting, ephemeral, something vulnerable against time. In this case, old buildings function in the exact same way as the voids of Berlin, serving as reservoirs of meaning, significance, and history. When asked about the reference of the “we” in the title of the film, Graf replied:
In the '70s and '80s, I had the feeling of belonging in this country. Since the 90's, I have a feeling it’s turning in a direction that has nothing to do with what I imagined for a home country. It's certainly a moment when one’s own identity – at least in my generation, the post-1968ers – is in stark contradiction with one’s country. And not only politically, but artistically: The way the film industry has developed, one can see the same structures for change. The television program will indeed soon be as polished and smooth as the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. The film business I was raised with was a form of discourse: you open your mouth and tell the truth, and sometimes you get one in the ears, but nonetheless discover similarities. This is completely lost now. People keep their mouths shut, and everyone builds his or her escape tunnel. There is no more place for discourse about which aesthetic is actually worth preserving, which can be developed further and which cannot. One has the feeling that it's almost a tactic of the industry to diversify the artists from each other, and to say to each: "Seek your own niche. Do your own thing!" It drives people in the film industry into non-communication, non-confrontation, and eventually apart.
This nostalgic loss of community (of filmmakers, or in society at large) is also symbolized by the loneliness of the abandoned buildings within urban settings. The opening scene of the film shows an abandoned factory in Aubing near Munich, followed by a sequence of shots of ruined, old buildings, or empty lots, and construction sites (Duisburg, Frankfurt am Main, West-Berlin, Essen, Köln, Düsseldorf, East-Berlin). The voice-over narration compares the buildings to bodies (as mentioned in an earlier quotation), adding, “it’s as if they contain a mixed odour of stew, lino, and polish that reminds one of childhood. Good childhood, bad childhood, whatever. It’s our own, German childhood. These bodies of stone are up for demolition because we want other bodies. We. Who is that?” the narrator asks. Then another, female voice-over interjects, like a reportage: “A kind of architectural euthanasia program has gripped post-Cold-War Germany. The destructive frenzy of a generation of investors and officials exposes the present, more than any Trojans of the Interior Ministry ever could, as a new petty bourgeois dictatorship.”
In the '70s and '80s, I had the feeling of belonging in this country. Since the 90's, I have a feeling it’s turning in a direction that has nothing to do with what I imagined for a home country. It's certainly a moment when one’s own identity – at least in my generation, the post-1968ers – is in stark contradiction with one’s country. And not only politically, but artistically: The way the film industry has developed, one can see the same structures for change. The television program will indeed soon be as polished and smooth as the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. The film business I was raised with was a form of discourse: you open your mouth and tell the truth, and sometimes you get one in the ears, but nonetheless discover similarities. This is completely lost now. People keep their mouths shut, and everyone builds his or her escape tunnel. There is no more place for discourse about which aesthetic is actually worth preserving, which can be developed further and which cannot. One has the feeling that it's almost a tactic of the industry to diversify the artists from each other, and to say to each: "Seek your own niche. Do your own thing!" It drives people in the film industry into non-communication, non-confrontation, and eventually apart.
This nostalgic loss of community (of filmmakers, or in society at large) is also symbolized by the loneliness of the abandoned buildings within urban settings. The opening scene of the film shows an abandoned factory in Aubing near Munich, followed by a sequence of shots of ruined, old buildings, or empty lots, and construction sites (Duisburg, Frankfurt am Main, West-Berlin, Essen, Köln, Düsseldorf, East-Berlin). The voice-over narration compares the buildings to bodies (as mentioned in an earlier quotation), adding, “it’s as if they contain a mixed odour of stew, lino, and polish that reminds one of childhood. Good childhood, bad childhood, whatever. It’s our own, German childhood. These bodies of stone are up for demolition because we want other bodies. We. Who is that?” the narrator asks. Then another, female voice-over interjects, like a reportage: “A kind of architectural euthanasia program has gripped post-Cold-War Germany. The destructive frenzy of a generation of investors and officials exposes the present, more than any Trojans of the Interior Ministry ever could, as a new petty bourgeois dictatorship.”
Another, male voice reports: “Demolish, gut, let go, reduce employment density, well-trained staff resources, competence team, logistics department... Every dictatorship changes the language, then the architecture. The second takes longer than the first.” Here, Graf and Gressmann’s critique of the present-day status quo with its contested and contradictory projects of memory, gentrification, and branding, seems to be linking contemporary democratic leadership to former dictatorial pasts. The original narrator resumes his contemplation and engages in a nostalgic observation:
"It is not that all these buildings were particularly beautiful. They’re like old faces, with wrinkles, warts, lines, fatty spots, discolorations. They are withered and frail. But destroying the ghosts’ abode only brings bad luck. But before we mourn, we feel something else. The ruin awaiting demolition is more beautiful than the past and certainly much better than what will take its place. These buildings are like sinking ships. The crew have fled to safety, leaving these rusting tankers, these crumbling monsters to await their doom."
"It is not that all these buildings were particularly beautiful. They’re like old faces, with wrinkles, warts, lines, fatty spots, discolorations. They are withered and frail. But destroying the ghosts’ abode only brings bad luck. But before we mourn, we feel something else. The ruin awaiting demolition is more beautiful than the past and certainly much better than what will take its place. These buildings are like sinking ships. The crew have fled to safety, leaving these rusting tankers, these crumbling monsters to await their doom."
In the face a looming threat of the erasure of history, we are confronted with nostalgia. It is a projected nostalgia “before we mourn” – the buildings have not been demolished yet, but the dice of gentrification have been cast, the mourning can begin, but before it begins, we are invited to see the buildings through a nostalgic lens, captured in a nostalgic light, on nostalgic film stock, to situate ourselves in a relationship with that space, and to see it with a humanity that has been disembodied from it. Another narration voice reports critically: “Look, this apparent transparency of modern architecture is a lie. It has been stolen from modernity, and it claims, in the name of the state and the economy, a transparency which is actually total control.” This takes us back to Graf’s juxtaposition of Bahnhof Zoo and Hauptbahnhof in the online interview.
The element of (enforcing) control applies both to gentrified architecture and urban spaces, and digital film technology, where image can be fully manipulated in post-production. 8mm film stock also allows for elements beyond the filmmakers control, like the sunlight effects Graf refers to above. The collage of voices going from critical to nostalgic allows us a spectrum of views and contemplations on what these ruins of modernity signify, what kind of mirror they hold up to us, and what they will cease reminding us of once they are demolished.
In the closing scene we go back to the original, male voice-over narrator, who continues his critical analysis over images of old buildings and structures:
"Yes, “emotional” – a crucial word in the German culture of the last 20 years and Germany 09, in politics, film, music, finance and in advertising... We always have to captivate people emotionally. The artists, the politicians... Architecture is now emotional too. Representative architecture. But it always has been, even in Germany’s darkest periods. But since the Nazis, no one has stressed it like the Germans in the 20 years after reunification. Maybe the officials’ architects’ and politicians’ strange emotionalism, perhaps all this feeling is just a smoke screen behind which real German history is disposed of. All that remains are backdrops and city castles. Everything sinks: the buildings, the sun, the German Reichs, those of the Nazis and the Stalinists. Even these colors will sink. The wonderful colors of this film material. No film material in the world can make this wall look the same. Only this one. We know all about walls. Everything disappears. So what?"
The impermanence of buildings and structures is compared to the impermanence of film material. This is an example of a techno nostalgia. Contemplating the abandoned buildings (modern and industrial ruins of the 20th century) represents a lament of the ephemerality of impermanent structures and forms. The rapid gentrification process in Berlin has given rise to voices of discontent, criticizing how rapidly this process sweeps across inhabited space, not leaving enough time for reflection. The nostalgic sentiment springs from the dust raised by the speeding train of progress, as the ones who are left standing gaze back.
"Yes, “emotional” – a crucial word in the German culture of the last 20 years and Germany 09, in politics, film, music, finance and in advertising... We always have to captivate people emotionally. The artists, the politicians... Architecture is now emotional too. Representative architecture. But it always has been, even in Germany’s darkest periods. But since the Nazis, no one has stressed it like the Germans in the 20 years after reunification. Maybe the officials’ architects’ and politicians’ strange emotionalism, perhaps all this feeling is just a smoke screen behind which real German history is disposed of. All that remains are backdrops and city castles. Everything sinks: the buildings, the sun, the German Reichs, those of the Nazis and the Stalinists. Even these colors will sink. The wonderful colors of this film material. No film material in the world can make this wall look the same. Only this one. We know all about walls. Everything disappears. So what?"
The impermanence of buildings and structures is compared to the impermanence of film material. This is an example of a techno nostalgia. Contemplating the abandoned buildings (modern and industrial ruins of the 20th century) represents a lament of the ephemerality of impermanent structures and forms. The rapid gentrification process in Berlin has given rise to voices of discontent, criticizing how rapidly this process sweeps across inhabited space, not leaving enough time for reflection. The nostalgic sentiment springs from the dust raised by the speeding train of progress, as the ones who are left standing gaze back.
Graf and Gressmann show that the whole country is filled with reminders of the obsolete, dysfunctional, and failed attempts of constructing ideological, economic, functional narratives, places of ghosts, places of childhood, places of memory. How do we make sense of them? On the one hand, there is a drive to quickly get rid of these reminders (especially in Berlin) and build the brand new, sparkly glass structures that show a new, functionalist ideology. On the other hand, there is resistance to mindless, quick, and commercial reconstruction, as demonstrated by the long public debates around the Palace of the Republic, the Holocaust Memorial, and even the new international airport.
When confrontations with the different pasts are as constant and frequent as in Berlin, one has to adopt a coping strategy. In Berlin it is dual in nature, dialectical, Janus faced: the memory project and commemoration practices on the one side, nostalgia on the other. One is looking forward, towards the future generations; one is looking backwards to childhood and trauma.
When confrontations with the different pasts are as constant and frequent as in Berlin, one has to adopt a coping strategy. In Berlin it is dual in nature, dialectical, Janus faced: the memory project and commemoration practices on the one side, nostalgia on the other. One is looking forward, towards the future generations; one is looking backwards to childhood and trauma.
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