Walls of the mind

Today is the 49th anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall. The beginnings of the Wall date from 13 August 1961. Back then few thought the hastily-constructed barrier would stand for over twenty-eight years. At the time it was conceived as a way of stopping the flood of East Germans out of their dysfunctional country and into the more promising West. For a while it seemed to have the desired affect and the East German economy began to stabilise. People settled in and began to find a way to co-exist in the shadow of the Cold War.

Almost fifty years later, and over twenty years after the fall of the Wall in November 1989, the division of Germany is still present in many respects. Surveys show that only 61 percent of former East Germans are pleased with today's unified Germany. In the former West the figure is 71 percent. Economic differences remain pronounced. Progress toward the reduction of wage differentials between the two former states has been slow.

The continuing after-affects of the Wall is testimony to the power of mental barriers, the walls in people's minds. Many conflict zones around the world still have walls and there are many other more (slightly) subtle barriers that are designed to keep poor people out of wealthy western countries. The East Germans government built its wall to keep people in. Today most western governments are building virtual (and real) walls to keep people out. Either way, the most inhibiting walls, barriers and boundaries are in the heads of politicians and their short-sighted supporters.

Photo: one of the few remaining sections of the wall in its original location. Taken in January 2010.

Questions on going to Berlin

I am going to Berlin next month. My timing is good, because the German capital is flavour of the month in the media at the moment. The papers are full of reports about the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago this month and there have been plenty of TV documentaries on the city. I have been reading and watching with great interest and making notes-to-self on things to see and do.

But then I got thinking about how best to approach a visit to a city such as Berlin. There is much more to Berlin than just the Wall and the Third Reich. Is it "right" to visit the city with pretty much only those two historical events in mind?

As an aside, something that was largely forgotten in the celebrations surrounding the twentieth anniversary of the collapse of the wall this week, was that 9 November was also the date of the November Pogrom in 1938 (also known by the Nazi term Kristallnacht) when 91 people were killed.

But back to the questions. How, in this case as tourists, should we value the relative importance of events in history? It would be easy to spend four or five days in Berlin viewing nothing but the wall, the Holocaust memorial, the Stasi musuem etc. etc. But wouldn't this skew our appreciation of history? What about the contemporary arts scene in Berlin? What about the Berlin of the nineteenth century? What about its art collections and galleries? What about following the footsteps of famous people who have lived in Berlin as you would in many other great cities. The list includes Edward Munch, Marlene Dietrich, Vladimir Nabokov, Kurt Weill, Felix Mendelssohn, Hegel and Humboldt to name but a few. And what about the great Berlin cabaret tradition?

There is more to Berlin than is currently meeting the eye courtesy of our slavish and simplistic media. For my guide, tune in next month.

Photo: Wolfgang Staudt

Art and politics before the Fall

The media are a buzz with stories about the fall of the Berlin Wall. Tomorrow is the twentieth anniversary of this historic event, the most important moment in the protracted end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War in Europe was a political milestone that also had far-reaching implications for the arts.

Isolated from the West for over forty years, artists in the countries of the Communist Bloc developed their own artistic language. They lived under oppressive and dictatorial regimes that left little room for free expression or dissent. But while many artists produced compliant art in the service of the all-seeing state, others were able to subtly or secretly pursue more radical forms of expression in a game of cat and mouse with the authorities.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain and the "triumph" of the West, the work of most artists from the former East suffered the same fate as the political and economic system and was discarded to the bust bin of history or at best to the cabinet of curiosities we in the West use to convince ourselves that we know (and knew) best. Only now are the first exhibitions and film festivals starting to ask whether the art of the Eastern Bloc might have some merit, at the very least as historical documents. The German Historical Museum in Berlin (Deutsches Historisches Museum) is currently hosting the exhibition Art of Two Germanys / Cold War Cultures. The show features 350 works by various artists and writers from East and West Germany and contrasts the differing approaches in the two countries without indulging in simplistic conclusions. Hopefully it is just the beginning of a more extensive of a more sensitive and less jingoistic assessment about how art and politics mix.

Image: A.R. Penck, Der Übergang, 1963, Ludwig Collection, Aachen

The Iron Curtain: twenty years gone

This year is the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Yes, just twenty years. Twenty years ago crowds of demonstrators defying the infamous Stasi East German secret police took hammers, chisels and pickaxes to the Berlin Wall and tore down the final legacy of the monumental defeat of Hitler’s Germany. The Cold War – Act Three of Europe’s horrifying twentieth century tragedy that began in 1914 – had finally ground to a halt. The weapons may have fallen silent in 1945, but the fear had only subsided, not evaporated. In East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956 and Prague in 1968 the Soviet Red Army reminded the world that a secure peace based on individual and national freedom remained a dream.

But what was this final act like? And why did it end with a whimper and not with the much-feared World War III? The Cold War is receding into memory even though our fascination with retro design, fashion and living is breathing new life into our selective memories of the 1950s and 60s, a time when we all lived under the threat of nuclear Armageddon. The Cold War was a time of monumental change the outcomes of which we are still living with.

In the West these were the glory days of democracy. The de-mobbed soldiers returning from the devastated cities of Europe were not going to accept a return to the old social structures of the 1930s. In Britain the new Labour government introduced a universal health care scheme and brought public education into the twentieth century. Black GIs returned to the US with their eyes opened about racial segregation. Many Afro-American GIs had experienced more civil liberties as members of the occupations forces in post-Nazi Germany than they had ever know at home in the “land of the free”. The civil rights movement was heating up.

Ancient power structures were under threat and technology was aiding and abetting the new trend. The age of mass communication was dawning. The march of the radio, record player and the TV set had begun. Popular opinion among the entire population was becoming important as everyone now had the vote; man and woman, rich and poor. And mass public opinion was being shaped by the new player on the political football field: the media. As Anthony Giddens has pointed out, in this new world order revolutionaries no longer head for the Bastille. It is the TV and radio stations you need to control.

The Cold War world was also a period of burgeoning personal wealth for the common man. Automobiles, refrigerators, televisions and holiday travel became affordable for the average wage earner. The world began to shrink and the global village was born. In Europe people became tourists in nearby countries that had been enemies a generation before. Tourism and international travel became an important source of inter-cultural exchange and understanding.

This was also the golden age of cultural diplomacy. The Cold War was a battle for hearts and minds and culture became a potent weapon. Film, radio and popular music were all important elements in the Western message about how good life was in the "free" West. In the early years of the Cold War the US occupation included exhibitions of American consumer products and domestic wares. An idealised image of ‘the way America lives’ was projected into Germany’s ruined cities and accompanied by a unique amalgam of democracy, consumerism and mass-communication technology. It was a potent mix and became the essential tonic in the attempts by the Western allies to rehabilitate Germany as a member of the international community.

Twenty years on, some feel that the triumphant West has gone from "moral supremacy" to decadence and arrogance. A glorious age of peace has certainly not materialised. International cultural exchange remains important if we are going to reach a sustainable peace.

Barbed wire and cuckoo clocks

In November 2009 it will be twenty years since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain that separated West and East Germany for forty years. Germany is gearing up for various commemorative events to remember the victims of the Communist regime in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), commonly known as East Germany.

One of the most ambitious projects is an exhibition called Art of the Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures (Kunst und Kalter Krieg / Deutsche Positionen 1945 - 1989). Curated by Stephanie Barron, Senior Curator of Modern Art, LACMA and Dr. Eckhart Gillen, Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH, the touring show started at Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and next opens on 5 October in Berlin at the Deutsches Historisches Musuem.

For most of the Cold War and the twenty years since its end it has been customary to see the ultimate failure of East Germany as an indictment of its political and economic systems. It was also widely assumed that this failure could be directly transferred to the culture of East Germany. Surely the work of artists living under a Communist dictatorship would be inferior to that of their colleagues who enjoyed the artistic freedoms that existed in liberal democracies. For most of the last two decades since the West got unfettered access to the art of East Germany that certainly seemed to be the assumption. The Art of Two Germanys exhibition now goes some way to reassessing such crude assumptions. The interplay between political systems and artists is rarely straight forward. Orson Welles in the film The Third Man (see last blog) put it nicely if a little cynically:

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

p.s. Those lines are not the work of Graham Greene, who wrote the story of the Third Man. Orson Welles added them while shooting the film.

© Brian Long 2009

Happy Birthday, Third Man

If you have never seen Carol Reed’s Oscar-winning film The Third Man, you should get hold of the DVD and reserve the couch for a great cinematic experience. The film first screened on 2 September 1949 and on its sixtieth birthday is as watchable as ever. It stars Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles, the screenplay is based on a book by Graham Greene and the best-selling soundtrack is a classic of film music.

The film was shot in the streets of bombed-out post-war Vienna and could almost serve as documentary with its shots of “real-life” rubble piles and fractured buildings. The wonderfully suggestive suspense sweeps you up and keeps you enthralled to the end.

The film captures the bleak days between World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. The cynicism of Harry Lime (Orson Welles) and the dog-eat-dog emphasis on individual survival at the heart of the film bring home the moral, political and ethical climate at the beginning of the post-WWII world. Indeed, we should ask if much has changed. As Harry Lime stands looking at people on the street below he is asked whether he thinks about his victims.

You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays. Sound familiar?

© Brian Long 2009