Today the revolving restaurant is closed to the public, a white wedding. The queue we have experienced, the complicated ticket procedure, is a reminder of the former East Berlin. But the panorama of the city, the vision of angels tapped by Wim Wenders, allows us to align ourselves and to preview the road we intend to follow to the far west and the Olympic Stadium. Most impressive is Karl-Marx-Allee: blots of vegetation, a concrete alphabet of lovingly restored high-rise estates.
When we descend into Alexanderplatz, it’s not there. We’ve been translated into another east: Barking, Dagenham, Romford. A soulless piazza with ill-considered post-architectural interventions, a railway station and a choice of uninviting cafés. Bemused tourists carve solid pastries, glug ersatz coffee. Anna remarks on the absence of dogs and cats. We are in the wrong part of town, I tell her. Around here you have to feed on deep memory, the dogs have been eaten. Dining that evening with the editor of a Berlin magazine, I was told that dogs are plentiful in outlying areas. This was a city of foxes, he said, living in the cellars of abandoned Nazi buildings. Of wolves emerging from the surrounding woodland. Of stoats taking up residence in motor vehicles, gnawing the wires. And an army of ghosts too, the last hold-outs. Root-chewers in rags, with skulls for faces. French SS units who are never going home.
Intimations of the World Athletic Championships were on display in the window of a department store: bloodless albino figurines, pound-stretcher versions of Leni Riefenstahl’s Aryan champions, kitted out in the appropriate colours for their nations. Nederland. Australia. Korea. White as lard sculptures. Muscles toned on the exercise machines visible in the gym at the base of Fernsehturm. Reflected behind the models, in a waft of cloud, are the block-buildings of the square. A city on fire. My local informant said that the authorities were nervous in the run-up to the elections: there had been a number of troubling incidents, Muslims stabbed in parks. With serious German involvement in the high-tech aspects of the Afghan campaign, people remembered the Madrid bombings. Arrests had been made, incomers and native Germans, in a house in the country. ‘It’s everywhere now. There are no boundaries.’
The editor pointed out that the government of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, at the time of catastrophic economic collapse in the early 1930s, decreed savage cuts in social programmes. Teachers’ salaries and unemployment benefits were slashed. A conservative administration preached parsimony – for everything except themilitary. Money was found for new battleships. The alien within, the Jew, was demonized. Germany moved towards the grand project: world war. By way of a building blitz underwritten by the 1936 Olympic Games, symbol of a nation’s rebirth.
Unter den Linden sweeps us along, as it is intended to do, towards the Brandenburg Gate. A refreshing shower cools us. There is so much to absorb that we scarcely appear to be walking. We’re on an airport travelator, a moving pavement pulling us through sites of approved memory. Isherwood recalls an incident, shortly before he left Berlin, when ‘a group of self-important S.A. men’, chatting and laughing, blocked free passage down this avenue. Walkers were forced to detour through the gutter. The English writer, knowing that a pivotal period of his life is over, studies the reflections of the great civic buildings in the windows of fashionable shops. He stares ‘with a mournful fixity’, as if to impress these images on his mind, to carry them away. To reconstruct them as marketable fiction.
The Brandenburg Gate, living up to its reputation as the location where the Wall was finally breached, is a barrier of a different kind: street performers, spontaneous musical groups, a thrash of tourists. A person dressed as a storm trooper out of Star Wars stands in my way. The franchise is inescapable. A lumbering Berlin bear takes off its head, to beg a cigarette from a corpse-green vampire soldier. Who has been made up to look like an oxidized military statue. The smoking bear reminds me of a card from the film museum showing Brigitte Helm in Metropolis, in her pre-Star Wars robot outfit, being given a straw to suck a drink held by a woman in a white coat. While an assistant with a hairdryer deals with the sweat.
On the north side of the avenue, Gary Cooper, that dignified American icon, marching out of High Noon, advertises Solidarity. ‘Yup.’ The sheriff triumphs before he turns in his badge. Exiled Hollywood leftists like Carl Foreman, High Noon’s scriptwriter, warp Western mythology. And are warped, right here, in their own turn. Coop stands tall at a frontier that is no longer a frontier. Pedestrians, and even well-behaved cyclists, are forbidden to pass through the Gate. We have to turn left, divert into the Tiergarten. Which makes us feel very much at home. The outwash of a grand project, as experienced in London, is confirmed by the closure of paths, security barriers across public highways, locked stations.
Tour guides try to nudge us into the group headed towards the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe: Peter Eisenman’s ‘maze of reflections’, a garden of sharp grey blocks. But we are caught in a crocodile of elderly, poncho-wearing cyclists who obediently push their bicycles into the permitted entrance to the park.
The Berlin editor told me that when he cycles through the Tiergarten on Sundays he encounters ‘Beckett characters’, vagrants with bundles, humorous malcontents. He might, I thought, have encountered the after-image of Beckett himself; not the world-famous, lightning-struck playwright, back to oversee another austere production in the Schiller-Theater, but a young unknown wanderer, philosopher of solitude. A myopic Dubliner edging close against the paintings in the museum of loneliness. He spoke, in his German diaries, of being ‘done in the eye’.
At the dawn of his career, in 1936, Beckett embarked on a voyage, hoping to visit relatives in Germany, to inspect galleries and make contact with painters. ‘What will Germany be?’ he wrote. ‘Six months walking around.’ Alone in his cabin, he read L.-F. Céline’s Death on the Instalment Plan. The perfect choice for an unknown city: delirium and derangement to set against stasis and elective exhaustion. Trapped within a Berlin that was not yet an island, Beckett tramped for hours in the Tiergarten. You can still feel the pattern of his stride in the sandy paths. And the invocation of Céline as the ultimate outcast, pariah and poet: a man with enough shrapnel in his head to act as a devil’s compass, leading him onwards into the storm. In North (1960), on the run from retribution in Paris, the crazed doctor delivers a cumulative itinerary of disasters, from spa town to Berlin bunker to Prussian estate; betrayed and betraying, undecided as to whether he’d rather face the Russians, the last Nazis, or justice at home.
Strasse des 17 Juni, when we are allowed to rejoin it, has aspects of the Mall, Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace. And aspects of Phoenix Park in Dublin. Memorials glimpsed through a curtain of well-tended greenery. Wars in stone or bronze. Victory columns. I am impressed by the park workers, the neat fashion in which they arrange their tools, the way they labour to sweep paths, trim trees and water plants. When I pause to photograph a lime-green caravan with the logo of a whetted cleaver and the word CARNIVORE, two cyclists pass close enough for me to feel their slipstream. ‘Kinski. Klaus Kinski!’ one of them shouts.
A bowl of soup for lunch, on the pavement at Bismarckstrasse, is a welcome change of temperature. For one thing, the English of the man preparing the soup is on a par with our German. The police sirens Anna was missing are back in force, louder than Hackney. I’m not sure of the status of the Comfort Hotel across the street, but the local demographic takes a distinct lurch towards Fassbinder. Two attractive, long-haired Thai women wait, in conversation, at the U-Bahn station. A West African lady in dramatic lace tights and vivid jewellery sways through the café, down the street, and back again. Modelling boredom. There are bookshops in this area, film stores, grocery operations on a modest scale. You can try Prana yoga or patronize LSD, an outfit retailing sex videos.
After inspecting the window of a gallery displaying watercolours of the Olympic Stadium surrounded by a pack of small bears with upraised arms, I come, unexpectedly, on the confirmation that we are still following the right route. A plaque publishes the news that Al
fred Döblin, novelist, playwright, essayist, lived and practised as a psychiatrist in this house from 1930 to 1933. He left Germany for Switzerland, ‘one day ahead of a Nazi arrest warrant’, before settling in Paris. It was at Döblin’s house in Hollywood that Fritz Lang met Brecht, before they worked together on Hangmen Also Die! Depicted on a DDR stamp, with his monkish spectacles and prominent nose, Döblin looks not unlike the founder of Fianna Fáil, Irish prime minister and president, Eamon De Valera. Döblin: Dublin. Doubling. The author of Berlin Alexanderplatz denied, at the period when he composed his masterwork, any familiarity with that other Homeric European wanderer, Mr James Joyce.
A late-afternoon sun casts the shadows of the five Olympic rings, like manacles, on to the clean flags of the Osttor approach to the stadium. The rings are strung on a wire between twin brick pillars, topped with searchlights. Access to the stadium is strictly forbidden. Tours are suspended for the duration of the World Games.
Our approach was oblique, through a wooded area that reminded me of the Highgate district of London. Detached properties, houses, villas, chalets, cohabiting in a bucolic retreat. Flat-roofed modernist experiments, obedient to Bauhaus principles, rubbed along, in perfect harmony, with pastiched Tyrolean mountain huts and interesting constructions in pink tin. Statues in gardens. Art-machines glimpsed through picture windows. An enviable zone with none of the bristling surveillance systems, private security in cruising cars, that would be encountered in leafy Surrey or the Epping Forest footballer fringe. No wrought-iron gates with black lions.
In the Cold War spy fiction by which Berlin was sold to the British, Olympiastadion had another role: it was where the spooks hung out, a centre for covert intelligence. Spooks like parks. The former identity of this place, imprinted through newsreels of marches and triumphs, was the Reichssportfeld. Renaming a perimeter road Jesse-Owens-Allee doesn’t exorcize the way in which the film of 1936 was cut, to give the impression that Hitler refused to shake the hand of the triumphant black athlete. Agonies of conflicted opinion were endured as Berlin’s grand avenues were named and renamed, in the effort to achieve a balance between political correctness and respect for the past. We should never forget that among the last Jews held in the Schulstrasse transit camp, a former hospital in the northern suburbs, were a group of those whose racial inheritance was ‘forgiven’ while they helped to organize the Olympic Games.
Fascist bureaucrats dissolve into the facilitators of the new Germany, establishing connections with property developers and city councillors. Spy fiction made much of this. ‘Why don’t you get in touch with Olympia Stadion?’ says a character in Len Deighton’s Berlin Game. Alec Guinness, who crafted an owl-like serenity, combined with taking off his spectacles in extreme slow motion, into an illusion of Zen omniscience, revived his career by embodying the spy’s spy: George Smiley. The fat man in the tight cardigan. Bowler hat and rolled umbrella. Chelsea house and flighty wife. Appearing in tactfully filmed versions of the John le Carré novels, Guinness helped sell the notion of television as superior travelogue: Paris, Hamburg, Berne. Metaphysical doubt was expressed through infinitely extended sequences where he decanted himself from a car.
In an earlier pass at this territory, Sir Alec had a cameo in The Quiller Memorandum, which was scripted by Harold Pinter. He shows off the Olympic Stadium to a young American played by George Segal. ‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ he says, before explaining that the new generation of Nazis are harder to recognize, they don’t wear uniforms. ‘The scene, brief and played deadpan,’ wrote Christopher Hilton, ‘contained something unavailable anywhere else, a sense of proximity to what had been.’ Nobody does deadpan, that almost imperceptible tightening of the lips, the flutter of the eyelashes, better than Guinness.
Security is courteous. The operatives are not the desperate, edge-of-legality, non-persons who endure long hours of tedium, loudly visible in fluorescent tabards and hard hats, around the blue fences of Stratford and Hackney. They are polite but firm; linguists, diplomats of refusal. I produce a card. They are respectful of cards, even though the magazine means nothing to them. The name on the card is followed by one of those impressive German pile-ups: Redaktionsleitung. I’m invited to walk around to the Accreditation Centre.
The Olympic Park is one day away from the opening of the World Games and there is no hysteria. The perimeter reeks, hotly, moistly, of large animals. ‘A zoo?’ Anna asks. ‘Horses,’ I reply. Remembering the popular racecourse. The past, like it or not, is something you can still smell.
The Accreditation Centre has its own, very human, stink. The armpit of the operation. Straggling queues of men, and a few women, in search of laminated badges. The aspect that disturbs the clerks about my request is that I have no interest in attending the Games. I’m happy to blink at the miracle of Usain Bolt and his tele-scopic limbs on television, for 9.58 seconds, before getting on with my life. All I ask is to be allowed to witness the interior of the stadium. With a business card from an unknown, but potentially prestigious magazine, my request must be treated seriously. A higher official is summoned. It takes him a moment to adjust to the fact that an intellectual, with the title Redaktionsleitung, doesn’t actually speak German.
‘Herr … Doktor … I’m afraid it’s impossible.’ He bows. He shakes my hand. ‘A question of security. Police and so forth. At any other time, you understand … ’
The solution is to take a lift to the summit of the Bell Tower, Glockenturm am Olympiastadion. It’s too heavy a set at the end of the day: the massive steps, the dungeon-like grilles, the shadow patterns on the cobbles. The British demolished the Bell Tower and the Langemarck Hall in 1947, one year before the austerity Olympics were staged in London. What we were entering, to take our places in the queue for the lift, was yet another tactful facsimile. Werner March, purged, de-Nazified, reconstructed the whole package, between 1960 and 1963, with the expertise of one of Fritz Lang’s architects of illusion. The Bell Tower, remade, was a real fake with a psychic displacement equal to that of the fatal towers in Henry Hathaway’s Niagara (those maddening saccharine chimes) and Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The Langemarck Hall with its black death-cult shields, its ritual pillars, was difficult to absorb. A difficulty further emphasized by loops of sinister newsreel footage playing in the empty crypt below.
At the summit, having climbed past the original 1936 bell, we gazed down at the stadium, and the city beyond it. The blameless swathe of the Maifeld couldn’t be purged of its former purpose, the strutting uniformed figures who had ridden in their open cars along the route we walked. I pointed out the Fernsehturm, the TV tower, on the distant horizon. It is a rare achievement to find an expedition so graphically mapped. ‘Only he who cannot forget has no free mind,’ said the exiled architect Erich Mendelsohn.
The Olympic Park extended into hills covered with dense woodland, red roofs, white blocks, the domes of astronomical observatories. Smoke slanted from the chimneys of an energy plant on the banks of the Havel. We were back with the vision obscured by the wing of the descending aeroplane at Tegel, but now some of the shapes in the spread of the landscape have acquired meaning. After the Olympic showpiece in 1936, this park leant itself to demonstrations, to military exercises. The stadium was a convenient space for rounding up those who fell foul of the state. In these woods, boy soldiers in the final insanity of the Third Reich were executed for desertion or cowardice.
Spandau, at the north-west edge of the park, is where Hitler’s architect of ruins, Albert Speer, paced the prison yard for so many years. This dark-side apologist, who managed to smuggle out 20,000 scribbled sheets of warped testimony, is another proof that the critic Lotte Eisner was right when she said, ‘Lang anticipated everything.’ Words pouring from a caged superman, half-lunatic, half-sage: this is an accurate transcription of Das Testament des Dr Mabuse, a film made by Fritz Lang in 1933. And then suppressed by the Nazis. Rudolf Klein-Rogge plays a criminal mastermind, incarcerated in an asylum, controlling the city by telepathy, hypnotism and t
he production of endless pages of deranged script – which the authorities and their tame experts struggle to interpret.
At a time when the Situationists were honing their provocations in Paris, Speer had already embarked on the ultimate psychogeographical exercise. As with my disorientation in the Sony Center, in attempting to describe a straight line, Hitler’s confidant marched in circles, following the shape of the noose he had so narrowly avoided. Round and round and round. He was flown to Spandau Prison in July 1947 and he remained there until October 1966: walking, walking, walking. He made meticulous calculations, he measured his stride and mapped the distance achieved on his self-inflicted treadmill against real-world geography.
His first excursion carried him from Spandau to Heidelberg. Every hamlet along the way was visualized. He saw more clearly than Werner Herzog on his trudge towards the Rhine. Clenched within the confines of his skull, the Munich film-maker barely notices the details of the external world: ‘The tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path.’ Herzog wonders if static figures in the frosted window of a café beside the road are corpses. Speer is omnipotent, he catalogues everything. He is the invisible spectre waiting to cross the autobahn.
Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project Page 37