Berlin, a city rich in public sculpture, is the site of a distinctive body of recent work in which artists use the physicality of the city itself to reflect on and draw from the history of Berlin as a city. These sculptures grow out of and respond to the critical processes of social-historical and urban-historical investigation by architects, planners, citizen—activists, historians, and others, undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s. They intervene in recent architectural debates to challenge currently dominant conceptualizations of the urban ground plan and to reimagine historical and spatial relationships parallel to the urban reunification process. This article examines selected examples that provide a sense of how the city is taken as contemporary sculptors’ subject in both direct and complex forms.
I do not discuss here any of the numerous temporary sculptures constructed in Berlin over the past twenty years, nor significant architectural memorials and debates over them, such as the Topography of Terror and the Palace of the Republic. For discussions of these, see Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and Jennifer Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).
2.
Alois Riegl, "The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origins," trans. K. Forster and D. Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 21-50.
3.
See, e.g., Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, trans. Lauren M. O’Connell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Rudy Koshar, Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the 20th Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
4.
For an analysis of developments in the U.S. context, see Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
5.
Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Skulpturenboulevard Kurfürstendamm Tauentzien: Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Berlin 1987, Projekt- und Künstlerdarstellung (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1987); Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Kunst im öffentlichen Raum Berlin 1987: Skulpturenboulevard Kurfürstendamm Tauentzien, Diskussionsbeiträge (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1987); Hans Dickel and Uwe Fleckner, eds., Kunst in der Stadt: Skulpturen in Berlin 1980-2000 (Berlin: Nicolai, 2003).
6.
See note 5.
7.
Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 190.
8.
Siegfried Giedion, "The Need for a New Monumentality," in New Architecture and City Planning: A Symposium, ed. Paul Zucker (New York: Philosophical Library , 1944), 550.
9.
Senatsverwaltung für Bau- und Wohnungswesen, Kunst im Stadtraum (Berlin: Städtebau und Architektur Bericht 29, 1994); Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 152-54. Also see Till, The New Berlin; and James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
10.
Berlinische Galerie, Gedenken und Denkmal exh. cat. (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1988). This intentional monument is related to similar signboards that were originally functional but that became memorials as a result of historical change, such as directional signs in West Berlin posting cities that were in the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR), Soviet Union, or Poland, as recorded in photos in Ewan Butler, City Divided: Berlin 1955 (New York: Praeger, 1955). A monument identical to the one on Wittenbergplatz can be found on Kaiser-Wilhelm-Platz.
11.
Robert Musil, "Monuments," in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author (New York: Penguin, 1936/1995), 61. See James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), for his discussion of "countermonuments," another recent sculptural solution to this predicament.
12.
See, e.g., Hardt-Waltherr Hämer, Idee, Prozess, Ergebnis: Die Reparatur und Rekonstruktion der Stadt (Berlin: Senator für Bau- und Wohnungswesen, 1984).
13.
Koshar, Germany’s Transient Pasts, 310. The excavation of the Topography of Terror is an example of this; see Till, The New Berlin.
14.
Eva-Maria Klother, "Denkmalplastik nach 1945 bis 1989 in Ost- und West-Berlin" (diss., Frei Universität am Fachbereich Geschichtswissenschaften, 1997).
15.
Another link in this network is the pedestal for an unrealized statue of Liebknecht that has been placed again at Potsdamer Platz.
16.
Helmut Caspar , Marmor, Stein und Bronze: Berliner Denkmalgeschichten (Berlin: Berlin Edition, 2003).
Daniel Libeskind , The Space of Encounter ( New York: Universe, 2000), 23-29.
19.
Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 112-14.
20.
Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, KunstStadtRaum: 21 Kunstprojekte im Berliner Stadtraum (Berlin: Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, 2002); Senatsverwaltung für Bau- und Wohnungswesen, Kunst im Stadtraum; Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 51-63.
21.
Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 149-51.
22.
Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, KunstStadtRaum; Senatsverwaltung für Bau- und Wohnungswesen, Kunst im Stadtraum; Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 108-9.
23.
Senatsverwaltung für Bau- und Wohnungswesen, Kunst im Stadtraum.
24.
Nelly Sachs, O the Chimneys (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), this poem translated by Michael Roloff.
25.
Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, KunstStadtRaum; Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 56-57.
26.
Kaldemorgen, Berliner Gedenkorte, 50-51.
27.
See Till, The New Berlin.
28.
"Houseball" was originally created for Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s 1995 retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Its history goes back another decade, however, to their performance at the Arsenal in Venice in connection with another work, "Knife/Ship." "Houseball," in that context, incorporated the belongings of "Georgia Sandbag," van Bruggen’s character in the performance piece, who represented Georges Sand reincarnated as an itinerant travel agent. See Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology ( New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995 ).
29.
Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, KunstStadtRaum, 30.
30.
Kunst im Stadtraum (Berlin: Senator für Bau- und Wohnungswesen, 1988), 3. Also see Karin Schittenhelm, Zeichen, die Anstosserregen: Mobilisierungsformen zu Mahnmalen und zeitgenössischen Aussenskulpturen (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996).
31.
Brian Ladd, "Center and Periphery in theNew Berlin Architecture, Public Art, and the Search for Identity,: " PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. 22, no. 2(2000): 18.
32.
See Ute Heimrod, Günter Schlusche, and Horst Seferens , eds., Der Denkmalstreit-das Denkmal? Die Debatte um das Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Berlin: Philo, 1999).
33.
Hiltrud Ebert , "Ereignisse und Opfer," in Verlorene Inhalte, Verordnetes Denkmal: Beiträge zum Wettbewerb 17. Juni 1953, ed. Neuen Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (Berlin: NGBK , 2000), 8.
34.
Ibid., 35.
35.
On this response, also see Wolfgang Kil , "Der 17. Juni-ein Erinnerungsdiktat?" in Gründerparadiese: Vom Bauen in Zeiten des Uebergangs (Berlin: Verlag Bauwesen, 2000), 112-17.
36.
Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, KunstStadtRaum; Dickel and Fleckner, Kunst in der Stadt, 45-47.
37.
Andreas Huyssens , "The Voids of Berlin,"Critical Inquiry24 (Autumn 1997): 58.
38.
Ibid., 71.
39.
This land was the site of the Ministerial Gardens, hence it belongs to the state. It lay within the leveled strip of the Wall zone during the time of the DDR regime. For further discussion of its development as a memorial site, see Jordan, Structures of Memory.
40.
Debates concerning architectural change, especially those over the razing of the DDR-era Palace of the Republic and planned reconstruction of the Hohenzollern Palace that preceded it, similarly indicate wide-ranging civic engagement with the spatial expression of social and urban history. These are beyond my scope here.
41.
Riegl, "Modern Cult," 34.
42.
Henrik Reeh, Ornaments of the Metropolis: Siegfried Kracauer and Modern Urban Culture ( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994).
43.
Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), introduction by Mary Douglas, 5; Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). On memory and history, also see M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); and Young, The Texture of Memory.
44.
Riegl, "Modern Cult," 38.
45.
Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 197. For discussions of how particular sites become memorialized, see Till, The New Berlin; and Jordan, Structures of Memory.
46.
Ernest Hemingway , A Farewell to Arms (New York : Scribner, 2003), 185.
47.
Konrad H. Jarausch , "Living with Broken Memories: Some Narratological Comments," in The Divided Past: Rewriting Post-war German History , ed. Christoph Klessmann ( New York: Berg, 2001), 188-89.
48.
Philipp Oswalt , Berlin, Stadt Ohne Form: Strategien einer anderen Architektur (Munich: Prestel, 2000), 56.
