Читать книгу The First Days of Berlin - Ulrich Gutmair - Страница 9

A Category 1 smog alert is declared if the measuring stations register too much sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide, if those levels are sustained for three hours, and if there is a wind velocity of below 1.5 metres per second for twelve hours and an area of low pressure over the city. In such cases, residents of West Berlin are requested only to aerate their flats for a short time, not to go out walking for too long and to refrain from outdoor sport. It would probably be healthier for the inhabitants of the capital of the socialist German Democratic Republic, commonly known as East Germany, if the same guidelines were in force there. However, the thresholds are higher than in the West, which is why smog is entirely theoretical in the GDR. When a Category 1 smog alarm is declared on 1 February 1987, police patrols in West Berlin announce over 2,000 infringements of the driving ban before 11 o’clock that morning; the air in the east of the city is officially clean.

There are days when the smell of sulphur hangs in the streets, a reminder that West Berlin is surrounded by the dark continent of the Eastern Bloc, which strikes Westerners as an old, rusting, colourless industrial world populated with smoking chimneys and glum-faced proletarians operating gigantic machines. The GDR is the European country with the greatest sulphur dioxide emissions and the highest levels of particulate matter in the air. East German environmental activists complain that the chemical combine in Bitterfeld has no pollutant filter. The filters were allegedly removed from the chimneys by Soviet civil engineers after 1945 as reparations, and no new ones were ever installed. Since a pocket of air takes less than three hours on average to travel across the city, the majority of the dirt in Berlin’s air is assumed not to have been caused by emissions within the city itself. As long as the power stations and factories are still operating in Czechoslovakia, Bitterfeld and Leipzig, and while people on both sides of the Wall drive cars and coal is burnt in the tiled stoves of old houses, a yellow-brown haze hangs heavily in the wintry Berlin sky whenever a south-easterly wind blows and there is a temperature inversion. The odour is unforgettable.

The deposits of these sulphurous yellow days settle on the house facades and colour them a pale shade of brown. You can see it all over town, though in West Berlin it is concentrated in poorer districts with large migrant-worker communities. In the East, where the late-nineteenth-century buildings haven’t seen a lick of paint in fifty years, this brownish hue dominates the city centre. Despite being responsible for a lack of colour in the city, it coats your body with excess dirt. This brown suffuses your clothes after a day in the city; it turns your hands and your bathwater black. Spend the whole day outside or dance the night away in a cellar somewhere, and there’ll be a black crust to scratch out of the inside of your nose the next morning. Human nostrils and building plaster are the most common magnets for the dirt in Berlin’s air. At night it turns the sky orange; in homes it manifests itself as yellow ash, of which large quantities are produced from burning Rekord coal briquettes from Lusatia.

When the Wall was still there, you couldn’t see it most of the time from East Berlin. A complex system of barriers, spring guns, patrols and access passes prevented the ordinary citizens of the East German capital from even approaching the ‘Anti-Fascist Protective Barrier’. At night, the vacant lots and empty houses along the Wall were bathed in bright light on the eastern side. The other side of the Wall was painted in vivid colours, making it the world’s largest work of street art and masking the grim East beyond.

To get a good idea of what it was like in Berlin-Mitte when it was still a little-regarded corner of the East German capital, you should take a look at Hans Martin Sewcz’s photos. The photographer took some thirty black-and-white panorama photos of the streets of Mitte in May 1979. Everything is standing still; only the children are full of life, as children always are.

Two boys in shorts are advancing towards the camera. They are giving the photographer’s lens a look of defiance. One of them is wearing a striped T-shirt, the other has canvas shoes on but no socks. It must have been a warm and sunny spring. Behind them lies Auguststrasse, empty and quiet. The street is clean but has obviously been repaired, creating an asphalt patchwork from different historical periods. A few Wartburgs and Trabants are parked at the side of the road. No rubbish on the pavements, no billboards on the sides of the buildings, only a laundry plying its trade. The rubble of bombed-out houses in Mitte had long since been cleared away. Small parks were established or makeshift sheds erected on those sites. The people in the photo look out of place and yet completely at home, as if they don’t belong here and as if there is no life beyond these streets. Mitte is frozen in time, like the castle in Sleeping Beauty, and it stays that way until 1989, until the Politburo’s sleeping spell can no longer numb the people’s restiveness. When Hans Martin Sewcz photographed the streets of Mitte, East Berlin was still a romantic’s paradise. Now his pictures invite the viewer to contemplate what used to be, who lived here and what the loss of that isolation means.

Fig. 3 Children in Auguststrasse, May 1979

The Berlin winter sky is also orange one evening as we turn off Oranienburger Strasse into Tacheles’ courtyard, where a Trabant is planted nose-first in the sand, a laconic memorial to a lifestyle that no longer exists. In the back wall of the house is an inconspicuous grey steel door, which opens around eleven or twelve at night. I’m not alone – nobody goes dancing on their own. Maybe there are two or three of us. We say hi to the bouncer and wink cagily at the woman on the till. She’s sitting off to the right, just inside the door, huddled in a thick jacket. In front of her is a small metal box. She looks like a secretary guarding a franking machine rather than the most exciting place in Berlin. We head downstairs and step into the passageway at the bottom. The ceilings are low, the walls unplastered and damp. It smells of cellar, of decades of silence, of cigarette smoke and the spilt beer of past parties. You’re confused the first time you reach this point. Which way? Straight down the tunnel into the pitch black? Or turn right, around the corner? This disorientation turns out to be a trick. There’s no dark tunnel ahead of us, just a mirror standing slanted in a lift shaft. It lures you into believing in a path that doesn’t exist. Then we hear the music. We turn right, around the corner, and we’re inside.

An offbeat is pumping away. The bass drum pounds stoically, imperiously, at 120 beats per minute. The syncopated sound of a cymbal, running ahead, cutting in early, draws our bodies forward. Individual sounds, fat, rich and sexy, carve out spaces for themselves between the beats. Slowly our ears grow accustomed to the music. It’s house, on vinyl imported from Chicago or New York. It’s better, simpler and more seductive than anything we’ve ever heard before. People come in, stand around for a while and say hi to each other. They chat, laugh, drink beer, and then sooner or later they start dancing. They don’t come here to sit around; the only seats are at the cocktail bar. Both the bar and the bar stools are mounted on springs. It’s a challenge to climb up and sit down. Your legs dangle in the air as if you were swaying on the branch of a tree. It isn’t very comfortable and it doesn’t make sense to sit down for very long. The club consists of a damp cellar, dim light, people, music and, most importantly, motion.

You can make out two rooms, separated from one another by a smaller space in the middle. A laser beam cuts across the club from left to right, like a sign from the future encountering the remains of a story that seems to be stuck in 1945 when the Berliners hunkered down in air-raid shelters, waiting for the Red Army to arrive. A heap of rubble is a reminder of how it may once have looked down here. Further back in the dark there’s a small bridge over a water-filled hole in the floor. People are dancing to a new track played by a DJ whose name we don’t know. Initially, there’s no DJ cult, no names you need to remember beyond the names of the places themselves. There are smells and smiles, gestures and conversations in places the music has enticed us to. There are people who move, dress, drink and smoke in their own style. They meet down here for a night in one another’s company.

The club is called Ständige Vertretung. It’s named after the Federal Republic of Germany’s permanent diplomatic representation in East Germany which was situated just around the corner from Tacheles, in Hannoversche Strasse, from 1974, but is no longer in use. On 2 October 1990 the plaque of the ‘Permanent Representation of the Federal Republic of Germany to the GDR’, to give it its full name, is unscrewed and removed. From that moment on, Ständige Vertretung ceases to be a place representing a state but a place where things happen that you can only experience live. Till Vanish has hauled a few old TVs down from the street into the cellar. He uses them to show the feedback you get when you film a screen with a video camera, then play the recording on a screen and record it all over again: a permanent short circuit that produces not pictures but lighting effects. Till Vanish has a cyberpunk peroxide-blond hairstyle you can spot from a mile away. Some Sundays he cuts people’s hair down here. He came from Weimar to Tacheles and lives next door.

People are dancing in the left-hand room. A French guy is at the decks, playing euphoric, minimalist music that’s hard to resist. From the edge of the dance floor it looks like a private party with rules unintelligible to anyone who’s only watching. Now it’s all about peeling yourself away from the wall, taking that one decisive step towards the dance floor that sets everything in motion. Until your movements have become automatic and you’re immersed in the music. Until you’ve overcome the embarrassment of letting yourself go, and the fear of looking weird. Until your mind is calm and focused, taking the occasional break, a few minutes’ time out at least.

Detlef Kuhlbrodt, who used to go clubbing in Mitte, describes this moment. ‘The first time I ever danced I was twelve. I’d imagined that dancing would kind of make me vanish into the here and now, but sadly that didn’t really happen very often. Instead, you just felt insecure. The effort to get it right just meant the effort contaminated your movements.’

But this music, more than any other, actually makes it easier for the dancer to slip softly into it, as into sleep. House is based on loops, simple repetitive bass lines over a straightforward beat. A few sounds, a few chords played on keyboards, often imitating the sound of a piano. If there’s any singing, it’s generally simple commands related to dancing or to the music itself. The loops spiral forwards in time, creating a feeling, as you dance, of being fully here, an overwhelming, powerful sense of presence and simultaneity. It’s the loop that moves the dancer. This produces the euphoric je ne sais quoi described in the ‘Can you feel it?’ of a famous house track, yet still unspoken, as if it were something you weren’t supposed to say aloud. And so at some stage we really do vanish into the now, transported by the beats, the elegance, the lush sounds of the music, beguiled by the motions of other people’s bodies, all this overspilling energy. Laughing faces, fleeting glances, attention, contact.

After we’ve been dancing for an hour, the sweat starts to drip on us and the others from the low ceiling where it has condensed and merged with the grimy deposits. Over the house beat, a woman’s voice shouts, ‘Come on!’ This isn’t just a memory; I can recreate it at any moment, because one of the few pieces of material evidence of my nights at Ständige Vertretung is a Scram record. It’s been standing on my shelf since I bought a copy after the DJ played the Empire Mix of ‘Come On’ one evening. I’d taken an unforgivable peek at the turntable: sometimes sheer exuberance makes you overstep the line. That can’t have been during Ständige Vertretung’s first winter, though, because ‘Come On’ was only released on the New York-based Strictly Rhythm house label in 1992.

I have precisely three objects that are laden with memories of Ständige Vertretung. That Scram record and two slips with ‘Entrance Card’ printed in bold typewritten letters on thin cardboard – free entrance tickets (you saved five marks) I clearly never used. I think the cashier must have slipped them to me when I left the club in the morning, but it might have been someone else.

I moved to West Berlin in October 1989 to study at the Freie Universität. Good timing, because the Wall came down only three weeks later. In the years that followed, I spent my days at university deep in the western half of the city, while at night I was out in the unlicensed, unregistered bars, the squats and clubs of Mitte.

Memories don’t work like a camera. The pictures our memory produces are hazy. They fuse with smells, sounds and faces, and in turn these are associated with conversations that might well have taken place in a completely different context. Brief moments from scattered nights over a number of years coalesce into a single memory. A riot of rapid sequences, like strobe-shattered shards that belong together but are impossible to compile into a story, however hard you may try. But I can tell when and how at least one of my first nights at Ständige Vertretung ended.

One morning, before sunrise, we staggered up the steep stairs out of the damp cellar and into the wintry orange light of Berlin. It was a Friday, 18 January 1991. The reason I’m so sure of the date is because that morning something about the big wall on the far side of the large stretch of wasteland behind Tacheles was different.

Right at the top of the wall below the roof, written in white lettering at least two metres high, was the word KRIEG. War. The previous evening when we went down into the Tacheles cellar – Thursday used to be house night – that graffiti hadn’t been there. In the early hours of the previous day, Operation Desert Storm had begun in Iraq. That same day Helmut Kohl was elected the first chancellor of a reunified Germany.

It snowed heavily for a few days in the winter of 1990–1, making Alexanderplatz virtually impassable. The snow appeared to have got the better of East Berlin city council. The old order had collapsed, and the new one wasn’t yet fully in place. A year had passed between the Wall falling and reunification. East Berlin was caught up in a turbulent transitional phase marked by constant demonstrations, art happenings and parties. A situation similar to what nineteenth-century utopians christened ‘anarchy’ had taken hold during the interregnum between systems; an order that appeared to function virtually without leaders. Berlin was no longer the capital of the German Empire, even though every other street corner in Mitte suggested it might have been until very recently. Berlin was no longer the capital of the GDR, and not yet the new capital of a reunified Germany. A deal for Berlin to become the capital was far from done. Quite a few people in West Germany would have much preferred the seat of government to be Bonn rather than decrepit, dirty, poor Berlin in the eastern zone, which to their minds was halfway to Siberia.

Anyone arriving for the first time in reunified Berlin from the old West Germany encountered young East Germans in the process of learning about life in a world that had changed out of all recognition. There were East Berliners coming home from Schöneberg and Kreuzberg after a brief exile. There were people who went off travelling for a long time or moved to West Germany. And then there were those who joined forces with West Berliners and new arrivals from elsewhere after the fall of the Wall to create fashion, music and art, become DJs, design flyers and set up publishing houses and galleries, organize raves, open bars and clubs, sometimes for a matter of weeks and generally with no licence to serve alcohol. The clubs were the nerve centres of the new culture of ‘Metropolis Mitte’, as a flyer for the Eimer, a squat in Rosenthaler Strasse, called it.

Nick Kapica and Tim Richter were keen to identify what made a good club night.

‘What makes people tick? How do you get people to dance, really dance, all night long? Unlike the clubs we’d been to before, people came to us to enjoy the night. They respected the DJs as performers’, Nick says. This Londoner with reddish-blond hair has Polish roots. He packed his bags when the Wall fell. The sight of all those people dancing on the Wall and the general euphoria on TV convinced him to take a look around Berlin for a year. Like so many of those who moved to Berlin-Mitte in 1990, Nick ended up in Tacheles. That was where he met the Australian Tim Richter while Café Zapata was being set up on the ground floor. One night, the two of them were hanging out, sipping their beers and wondering where they could go for a dance. They’d been to a few clubs in West Berlin, to Kreuzberg, Charlottenburg and Schöneberg, but there was something missing. A club with an idea behind it, a club that appealed to a specific audience. To their minds a club night was an event that needed curating.

Nick wanted to put into practice in Berlin what he had learned at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication. There, they’d taught him about the Ulm School of Design’s concept, based on the principles of the Bauhaus movement and the rigorous lines of Swiss modernism.

‘We knew exactly what kind of public we wanted. We knew how it should feel. We knew what kind of music we’d play and we could already visualize the atmosphere inside our club’, he says. ‘The only thing we hadn’t figured out was where to do all of this.’

Some time later, the two men knew they’d discovered the perfect place for their club when they spotted a trapdoor in the floor of Café Zapata. They shovelled out huge quantities of soot and dirt from the hole beneath it and eventually came across a flight of stairs and a walled-up door.

‘It was a total mess. We structured the interior to reflect what it was like when we found it – two rooms separated by a smaller middle room. We knocked down some walls and built a bar to create a dynamic space. We didn’t do any advertising in the normal sense, but every freak in Berlin came to our opening night. They became our regulars, and the line outside the door was enough to tell any future guest whether they were “in” or not’, Nick Kapica says.

Initially, Ständige Vertretung only opened on Thursdays and Sundays. Those who chose to go out partying on Thursday and Sunday night, knowing full well they would have to go to work the next morning, paid for the pleasure with headaches, tiredness and below-par performance. Partying is about letting yourself go, feeling free and being unrestrained with your time. It’s a good bet that most of those sipping beers and cocktails, smoking joints or snorting speed at Ständige Vertretung on a Thursday night had no regular occupation.

Nick and Tim’s club was intended to be exclusive and unusual and yet open to everyone, so they chose not to apply a door policy defining who was allowed in and who wasn’t. They pretended there was one, though, to create a bit of suspense.

‘We were both graphic designers and that’s how we approached the project’, Nick says. He dreamed up slogans and themes that became the monikers of individual club nights – for example, Delirium, Swamp, Post House, Corruption and many more. You got your wrist stamped at the turnstile that marked the transition from outside rules to house rules. The day after, sometimes for a little longer, that stamp would be your only reminder of ever having been there, of having taken part in the night-time ritual. Because Ständige Vertretung operated a strict photography ban.

‘Banning photos but filming people having their hair cut at night and screening it live in the club was a way of teasing out questions of secrecy and privacy. The toilets were unisex at first. No cubicles. After a while, the only feature that remained was the one-way mirror you could look out through onto the dance floor. It was all about accentuating the moment and the situation we all found ourselves in together.’

The photography ban was emphatically enforced. Breach it and your camera could end up in pieces on the floor, or at least the film torn out and exposed.

‘Loads of crazy things happened in that club. The only ones who can talk about them were people who were there, and every one of them will have their own version. There are hardly any photos to back up their stories. Those people possess something special in a day and age when every event is immediately posted online. We didn’t really care about being photographed, but we did want to create a special atmosphere, a sense of mystery’, Nick Kapica says. ‘There had to be something only people who were there could remember.’

Of the photos taken in Berlin-Mitte after the fall of the Wall most are of the streets, very few of the clubs and bars. Even when it wasn’t expressly forbidden, as at Ständige Vertretung and many other clubs, it was decidedly uncool to take photos. It wasn’t permitted because it is impossible to observe and take part at the same time. Walk around a club with a camera and you’re like a tourist filming your own encounters. Anyone who slides a lens between themselves and the world doesn’t trust their own experience. They forego the here and now in the attempt to capture a transient sensation and are immediately a nuisance to everyone else. People who abandon themselves to the DJ, the music, the beat, are revelling in the loss of control and don’t appreciate being photographed in that state.

‘If someone came in to take some exotic photos, we’d tell them to stop’, Christoph Keller recalls. He worked the bar at the Friseur and has documented urban space in film and photographs. ‘We were conscious of it being something special. We wanted to avoid any commodification of the situation. It was something we created lovingly and quite deliberately to counter that type of exploitation. It was a space for tasting freedom where there was this form of temporary protection. That was also why people put so much energy into it, without really being paid for their efforts. Friends were allowed to take photos, but we didn’t like anyone doing it too openly. It would’ve destroyed the foundations of everything we’d built up. Some people tried to bring in video cameras, preferably with a lamp on top, but we kicked them out. It breeds alienation and ruins the atmosphere. Everyone was clear that we couldn’t let it happen.’

Due to many people’s aversion or simple indifference to documenting what was happening, the Berlin of those years immediately after the fall of the Wall has vanished almost without a trace. Most of the places where the old Berlin was still palpable and the new Berlin in its infancy are no longer there. There comes a point when so many tiny changes to the fabric of the city have accumulated that the essential details of the past are lost and can’t be stitched back together again. The real-estate market and urban planning decisions altered the buildings, the streets and the empty plots of Mitte beyond recognition.

A lively art scene and an unbridled and all-embracing party culture emerged in Mitte in the years after the Wende – the ‘turning point’ around the fall of the Wall and reunification. Yet the city where this all happened now seems to have disappeared. Berlin has clothed itself in the myth of a young, tearaway city, while the substance of this profitable reputation has been gently hollowed out. Those anarchic years have become a selling point in the global competition for tourists, investors and businesses. New buildings have been erected on the vacant plots. The city centre has long since ceased to be the preserve of the squatters, ravers and artists who revived it after the fall of the Wall. The clubs have moved elsewhere, and most are now purveyors of professional entertainment. The early nineties seem like a dream you can only vaguely remember the next morning while the soundscape still echoes in your ear. The sound of the Wende encompasses not only breakbeat, house and techno but pneumatic drills and rubble chutes, the compressed scales of modems turning data into notes, nightingales singing at the best time for going out and the sound of a lark in the morning, as well as conversations on the edge of the dance floor, at gallery previews and in bars.