The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape [Paperback]

For those who find Lowenthal's discussion (The Past is a Foreign Place and The Spoils of History) about heritage long-winded and ill-focused (he eschews detailed case studies in favour of a whole world canvass) Ladd's book is a tonic, being focused upon one particular, well chosen case study, with an awareness that Berlin is only a special case in that the discontinuities between governing regimes, from empires, through Nazis and Communists, to gloating liberal capitalists, makes ubiquitous, world wide processes more readily apparent, as political issues are fought out in the decisions over city planning, land use, and redevelopment: Berlin's history remains embedded within its very structure. Every place, every building, even every street layout across Berlin is in some ways compromised by whose idea it originally was, who decided to keep it, and who decided subsequently to preserve or destroy it.

Berlin is a haunted place, full of symbolic meanings to which locals and visitors in their often disparate ways are deeply attached, and which planners, developers and architects mess with at their peril. And such meanings are not restricted to formal monuments but include practical structures whose symbolic meanings have become intertwined with their mundane functions. Berlin is particularly of interest to students of modern cities as it is the city that has often been seen as the most American of Germany's cities, given the frequency with which the city has been rebuilt, renamed, and indeed, reinvented. Even the central core, immediately east of the Brandenburg Gate is laid out on a grid pattern, as anyone walking down Unter den Linden and turning south into the Friedrichstrasse soon realises: and with the recent modernisation it's almost like walking around K Street in Washington DC.

As we approach the millennium Berlin's civic identity, indeed its whole urban landscape, remains peculiarly problematic. It is not that other European cities have not had to address the tensions inherent in seeking both redevelopment and preservation. But in Berlin such tensions are perhaps most obvious. Partly this is because urban redevelopment projects in Berlin generate such contentious and heated debates. This is not due to the urban fabric having any particular intrinsic worth not evident in other world cities, such as Paris or London. Rather the tenor of such discussions in Berlin is largely due to the heightened degree of cultural meanings invested in the city's urban landscape as a result of Germany's recent history. For many, Berlin is Germany in microcosm, where Imperial, Weimar, Nazi, Communist and Capitalist legacies collide as in no other place.

Beginning with the most obviously recognisable Berlin landmark, the infamous Wall, Ladd explores the ways in which issues of preservation, destruction, or even marking the outer wall's former position in cobbles in the street, strongly divides Berliners East and West, for such matters are not just about city planning and historic reservation but touch at the basic identities with which people make sense of the world in which they grew up and now must live. But it is not just the most recent end of the German Democratic Republic that has left Berlin with disputed surroundings. Ladd explores both the buildings and monuments left by each stage in Berlin's development. Fortunately he does not resort to a dull cataloguing of remnants, era by era. Rather he explores each period's remnants in terms of how its remains continue to present problems. What should be an appropriate civic response to these various periods of Germany's troubled history? What should be preserved as is, what restored, and what destroyed, issues that arise not in the abstract but when any new highway or building project is envisaged.

Given that little of medieval times survives (so insignificant were the original settlements along the Spree) should the modern city return to the supposedly 'safe' neo-classical standards Karl Schinkel developed, even where these served expansionist Prussian kings and German emperors? Are the modernist buildings that followed acceptable, but only in comparison to their imperial predecessors or to the subsequent gargantuan public structures of Hitler's favourite architect Albert Speer? Are the new traditions of a post-war divided city to be written off as equally compromised by Berlin's unnatural role as showcase for both Stalinist orthodoxy and capitalist liberalism? To come to terms with the remnants of each era is to address not questions of architectural aesthetics or even archaeological worth but to face vital questions about people's responses to Germany's traumatic past, and Berlin's role within that story. Should the new capital of a reunited Germany start upon a tabula rasa or with full, yet troubling, daily recognition that it was from this city that the Nazi project to dominate Europe was organised? But what of Red Berlin, the city that most resisted the Nazi take-over, half of which then became the capital of an avowedly anti-fascist yet totalitarian state? Should Berliners uniquely be reminded daily of what Germany at large did in the twelve year Reich, one few personally now remember? Should one city become a national scapegoat while the rest of Germany gets on with its business? This issue comes forcefully to the fore in the debate over an appropriate Holocaust Museum planned for the site of Hitler's Reichs Chancellery, north of the revitalised Potsdamer Platz, a deliberate irony or merely the convenient use of land left idle as the death strip of the GDR's "anti-fascist rampart/Wall of Shame". Strangely Ladd makes no mention of one suggestion: having the Brandenburg Gate torn down, crushed and buried in lime, loosing rather than gaining a memorial being a more appropriate response to the city's involvement in genocide.

Berlin's new civic identity is emerging through the changing and often disputed historical meaning of Berlin's urban landscapes and its individual structures. Or rather there is a recognition that there has never been and can never be one single, all encompassing civic identity. The history behind particular structures or ruins is presented as but a precursor to the "controversies over their disposition". Ladd places a wide array of landscape features within an appropriate historical context as a necessary precursor to exploring how such features, and thus their histories, are interpreted today. This involves a fluid movement between past and present, a city history being used to draw the reader into the debates over the past as much as over the future for a post-division capital city.

The most recurrent motifs in this book are Nazism, which most agree actually provides the least disputed public response, and GDR Communism, which initially at least seemed to stand in equal disgrace. The Nazi era legacy is however far from being entirely unproblematic. Should surviving Nazi buildings be destroyed, reused, or labelled in some way? What is a Nazi building? Architectural historians still argue as to whether, for instance, the Olympic Stadium is a Nazi building or a building merely mis-used by the Nazis but subsequently redeemed by popular democratic use. A long-running dispute over how the site of the demolished Gestopo headquarters (with its minimalist 'Topography of Terror' exhibition) will only intensify as such central building sites become ever more sought after for redevelopment. And this particular site is further complicated by being adjacent to Goering's Air Ministry, from which it is separated merely by one of the few surviving central city stretches of the Berlin Wall. Should the existing focus on Nazi terror be extended to encompass Communist repression, or would that lead to an uneven equating of two unpleasant but very different regimes? Even more problematic has been the development of suitable responses to GDR public history, with a widespread and growing reluctance, in the east of Berlin at least, to accept the automatic removal of all markers, statues, and public buildings from the GDR years, with a concomitant questioning of the automatic survival of certain names and places of dubious provenance in the western part of the city, such as the Victory Column in the middle of the Tiergarten. Hitler relocated this very public paean to imperial glory to enhance the east-west axis of his planned capital Germania. Is it therefore fatally tainted? As any modern guide book will indicate, so many streets of the eastern part of the city have been renamed finding an old address can be a nightmare. But should all old communists have their names removed? What about one's that died fighting Hitler? What about Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whos