Berlin (eBook)

Psychogramme of a City

Karl Scheffler (Autor)

Florian Illies (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Suhrkamp Verlag
978-3-518-76824-2 (ISBN)

Infos

'Berlin is damned forever to become, and never to be.' Scheffler could not have anticipated that his dictum would prove prophetic. No other author has captured the city's fascinating and unique character as perfectly. From the golden twenties to the anarchic nineties and its status of world capital of hipsterdom at the beginning of the new millennium - the formerly divided city has become the symbol of a new urbanity, blessed with the privilege of never having to be, but forever to become.

Unlike London or Paris, the metropolis on the Spree lacked an organic principle of development. Berlin was nothing more than a colonial city, its sole purpose to conquer the East, its inhabitants a hodgepodge of materialistic individualists. No art or culture with which it might compete with the great cities of the world. Nothing but provincialism and culinary aberrations far and wide. Berlin: 'City of preserves, tinned vegetables and all-purpose dipping sauce.'

<p>Karl Scheffler (1869-1951) war Kunstkritiker und Publizist. 1906 legte er mit <em>Der Deutsche und seine Kunst. Eine notgedrungene Streitschrift</em> ein polemisches Pl&auml;doyer f&uuml;r den Impressionismus als Kunstform der Moderne vor. Ab 1907 war er Herausgeber der einflussreichen Zeitschrift Kunst und K&uuml;nstler, bis diese 1933 von den Nationalsozialisten verboten wurde.</p>

Textauszug

Foreword:

Destiny as Opportunity

On Karl Scheffler’s DNA analysis of Berlin

The last opportunity to cut Berlin adrift was lost in 1648. At the conclusion of the Thirty Years' War, when there were precisely 556 households remaining in one half of the city (Berlin) and 379 in the other (Kölln), there was apparently serious debate among the inhabitants about pulling up sticks and quitting. Unfortunately, they decided against.

Unfortunately? Yes, of course. If you read Karl Scheffler’s bilious love letter to Berlin from the year 1910, you will understand that Berlin will never find its way to itself because, just as in a Greek tragedy, the inability to do so is a condition of the city’s being. To remain in the realm of myth, if Berlin is the illegitimate offspring of a Greek god and a mortal, then the father is probably Dionysus while the mother works in an alien registration office somewhere in the West of the city. And if all that seems a little far-fetched to you now, then try reading this foreword a second time after finishing the book. Because anyone who has skimmed even two or three pages of Karl Scheffler’s analysis will see that the subtitle “Psychogramme of a City” is rather more than a journalist’s high-toned pretension. Scheffler was the first author to explain why there is no escaping Berlin’s destiny. That’s why in his last sentence he declares that Berlin is: “Damned always to become, and never to be.” At the end of 200 pages, that “damned” strikes home like a dagger, covering the arc from Greek mythology to Bahnhof-Zoo in seconds.

But even without the “damned”, Scheffler’s condemnation made a hit in the literary salons of Charlottenburg, Dahlem and Pankow – audible whenever a groan went up over a new building site in Berlin Mitte. With it, though, with the pitiless, indissoluble chain linking it to destiny, it acquires the depth that induced Scheffler to end his book with it, to set it at the conclusion of his anguished meditation. It is the distillation of 200 pages and two millennia. It makes a wonderful aphorism, eight words – and yet it only deploys its full force if you have read the preceding pages. Rarely is it given to the reader to witness an observer like Scheffler at work as in this book, just as rarely to follow a method through to its conclusion as when he draws his inferences from the balled-up history of the city, this metropolis that began as a settlement of German peasants and Wendish fishermen.

The upsetting understanding Scheffler has arrived at from his intense engagement with Berlin is this: that Berlin was always a colonial city, a city of immigrants, repeatedly becoming an object of desire, for Huguenots and draft dodgers, for Silesian weavers and Swabian start-up merchants. When Mark Twain in 1891 enthusiastically commented on the occasion of his first visit to the city (then just 650 years old) how “new” this city was, “the newest city I have ever seen”, even though he was coming from the U.S., where one city after another was being founded – that goes to show how powerful its image is. The news ticker is of course a Berlin invention. Nowhere is there a stronger obsession with the now; the “regime of real time” (David Gugerli) that has governed temporality since 2000 found its crystallization point in Berlin. Scheffler tells you how this cult of the new came to be established in Berlin. What he understood in 1910 holds true more than a century, two world wars and four German constitutions later. They used to come in horse-drawn coaches, now they come by easyJet – the promise still holds true. It’s the hidden engine of this mindlessly propulsive city. Only in Berlin are the questions “Are you still living there then?” or “Are you still at that job?” asked with that tone of surprised contempt. The status quo here is always dodgy, and essentially only exists to be overturned. When galleries of contemporary art threaten to run out of ideas, they open “new spaces” in Berlin, as though that was any sort of substantive answer. Readers of Scheffler’s book will understand why Berlin is the city of “projects”, “development spaces” (of which the “five-year plan” is only the East Berlin variant), why this city is so proud of being a “laboratory”, why visions flourish here the way whole economies do in other places. There is hardly any productive work done here, but all the more gym workouts, working on and out of relationships, working up of the past. The only thing to boom in Berlin is the IT sector, because that’s the one space where imagination is a criterion and not some bourgie annual turnover numbers. And of course there’s no better place to make films than here, where the name of the project is projection. So besotted is the city with possibilities and so uninterested in realities that even the bakers are called “Brot & Mehr” and the 24-hour kiosks “Internet & Mehr”. Whatever it is, it’s never enough. Or if you like: “to be continued, beyond the horizon” (Udo Lindenberg).

Karl Scheffler dubs the people who come to Berlin “pioneers”, and you can tell not much has changed when the city’s marketing department greets newcomers at the city limits with a sassy “Be Berlin”. In German that means: dream on. If New York is the city that never sleeps, Berlin is the city that never wakes up.

Hipness is the manna that this city & more pours out to all and sundry like the 100 Deutschmarks of “welcome money” of yore. Over the centuries, Berlin was the destination for Huguenots and freethinkers, religious liberals and Jews, because this is where they were guaranteed “freedom of conscience”. That’s the secret core even today, even if such freedom is no longer confined to matters of religion. And that too is something Karl Scheffler sensed in his psychogramme of Berlin: “Religious rationalism in the coolly Protestant Berlin asked after the whys and wherefores for so long till the priest saw himself obliged to make his replies semi-philosophical” [p. 23]. In the meantime the other half has gone secular as well, and so Berlin’s answers to the question “Why?” are half philosophy, half mixology. The answer is: just because. Or, as Scheffler puts it: “Hegel’s doctrine that everything that exists is reasonable can be parsed as a sort of Prussian self-diagnosis or affirmation” [p. 27]. But then mere existing never counted for much in this city, where people’s preferred abode is the day after tomorrow. The old nickname “Athens-on-the-Spree” is not a joke, but a deliberate attempt to deceive.

Berlin, the heart’s desire of the pioneers, is most itself, most the colonial city, when it is permitted to be promising. Because when it comes to delivering, Berlin always fails. If we had all read our Scheffler earlier, then we could have spared ourselves the waiting for that “Berlin novel” that was expected any time after 1989, or we would have known in advance that the odds were stacked against a timely opening of the new airport.

Another one of Scheffler’s lessons is that one mustn’t hope that traditions will be respected in Berlin. The only tradition that is maintained is that of having no traditions. The fact that this book was lost from sight for so long is the best proof. Berlin – Psychogramme of a City is such a clever book not least because its author thought through it all himself, from beginning to end. Probably no one gave so much of himself to Berlin as this man, who crisscrossed the city, followed its axes and despaired because they lost themselves in the void, traced its rivers and was in despair all over again, because the city has no interest in its waterways and “the inhabitants don’t show any tenderness for their river, as they do in Paris and Vienna, and Hamburg and Frankfurt am Main” (wonderful observation) [p. 34]. Obsessed as the city is by speed, it reserves such tender feeling as it has for its traffic flows, the S-Bahn lines, the proliferating trams – and the noisy six-lane avenues on whose soft shoulders one sets out wooden tables and, after ...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.8.2021
• Übersetzer: Michael Hofmann
• Vorwort: Florian Illies
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
• Schlagworte: Berlin • Berlin Capital • Berlin English language • Berlin History • City Berlin • Deutschland • Discover Berlin • Germany • Mitteleuropa • Nordostdeutschland • ST 5158 • ST5158 • suhrkamp taschenbuch 5158
• ISBN-10: 3-518-76824-7 / 3518768247
• ISBN-13: 978-3-518-76824-2 / 9783518768242