The Arab Spring Comes to Berlin

This Monday I dropped by Occupy Berlin (Asableas are now held daily at 5:00 p.m. on the lawn outside the Reichstag) and discovered a group of representatives from the Arab Spring - "young leaders" from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria invited to spend a week in Berlin by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Read my report on the session and on the current state of Berlin's Occupy on my blog Translationista. The only outward sign that this group of people speaking French on the Reichstag lawn was anything other than a pack of tourists was the bicycle parked beside them with this sign hanging from it. I thought the sign looked familiar; then I remembered where I'd seen it before: in a video featuring the "Asamblea Song," which I have now translated into English.

Occupy Berlin

I knew there was an Occupy Berlin even before I arrived here two days ago, because I'd seen Dina Rasor's column about it in Truthout and because I'd been greeted at Frankfurt Airport by a map of all the German "Occupies" published in the Oct. 27 issue of Die Zeit. There are lots of them, and Berlin is the biggest (followed by Frankfurt and Hamburg). Based on what I saw today, Occupy Berlin is well on its way to establishing itself as a serious Occupy movement.

Things started out slowly at the first event I attended, which had been announced for 1:00 p.m. on the western side of the Brandenburg Gate. I arrived to find only an older couple holding up a banner calling for a tax on net worth and a young man setting up cardboard signs. This turned out to be Roman Asriel, one of the main initiators of Occupy Berlin and the webmaster of one of the several currently active Occupy Berlin websites. (Other OB websites can be found here, here, here and here.) For a while the demonstration remained modest in size, with half the 50 or so participants forming a "meditation flash mob" while others went on talking around them. Since I spoke up to offer greetings from New York, I was asked to report on how things were looking there at the moment. Then the organizers explained Occupy Berlin to newcomers, announced several upcoming local events, and took questions from the crowd.

Around 2:00 p.m. things became much more lively. A large march of protesters dressed as billionaires and holding signs praising the virtues of greed and consumption arrived at the Brandenburg gate; they were initially stopped on the far side of it by a line of policemen but then (perhaps because the large masses of tourists out enjoying the late-October sunshine were being stopped by the blockade as well), allowed to pass through. They then began a (pre-arranged) shouting match with the original group of 99%ers that ended with a sort of summit: A man holding a wooden mock-up of the Pope (who complained loudly that the police had stopped him and punched a hole in the water bottle he had rigged up to allow his wooden pope to urinate) recited an excellent parody of the Lord's Prayer rewritten as an ode to profit. Then an Angela Merkel lookalike (sort of) gave a speech ("The future belongs to the rich," etc.) Then we all marched peaceably to the front of the Reichstag, where a General Assembly involving several hundred people took place; in Berlin, GAs are referred to by the Spanish word for "assembly," asamblea, in tribute to the demonstrations in Spain.

It was clear from this GA that Occupy Berlin is still in its early stages: The main business of the assembly, after the explanation of the standard OWS hand signals, was inviting people to stand up and say why they had come to the assembly. A number of the things you would expect to hear (about not feeling represented by one's elected officials, etc.) were said; a man from Greece explained why the proposed bailout of his country by the EU would not help anyone, including the Greeks; a small child stood up twice and performed cuteness; someone sang a protest song translated from the Portuguese; a woman from Mexico reported on successes in achieving certain rights for indigenous peoples in her country. Some of this was inspiring. Overall I'd say that some of the sort of organizing that gives a movement its identity has yet to occur in Berlin. But things are definitely moving along. A number of working groups have already been established. A kitchen set up beneath a tree ("Occupy Imbiss") was serving its first meal. There was even a catchy Occupy Berlin song, "Asamblea weltweit," performed to lead off the march.

There are Occupy Berlin spinoffs as well. One of the announcements made today was that a second Berlin-based Occupy movement, Occupy Friedrichshain, is planning to hold a large demonstration at the Oberbaumbrücke and establish a new camp tomorrow (10/30). The neighborhood Friedrichshain is the Williamsburg of Berlin, so I'm not surprised to hear it now has its own Occupy, complete with website. This will be, as far as I know, the fourth attempt to start an Occupy camp in Berlin. Protesters at the inception of the movement on Oct. 15 - a demonstration that attracted huge numbers of Berliners - first attempted to establish a campsite in the shadow of the Reichstag, but were prevented by police, who in the end resorted to physical force to remove the tents being defended by dozens of peaceful protesters. A second camp was established on Oct. 28 on private land at Klosterstrasse 66 not far from Alexanderplatz; as I write this, it is still standing. Protesters today attempted to start a new camp at the Marx-Engels Forum beside Alexanderplatz itself, but were stopped by police. So far it appears that the same strategy working in New York (establish a camp on private property open to the public) seems to be most effective in Berlin as well.

Something I noticed today is that most of the older people I spoke to at the demonstration and assembly turned out to be East Germans, and all three of them let me know fairly soon in the conversation that they were from the East and emphasized that they had learned from experience how much can be achieved by taking peaceably to the streets. (Remember that the Berlin Wall was breached during one of a series of increasingly large protests that had been taking place weekly in Berlin and Leipzig for months.)

Another thing I noticed was that the Berlin police were both more aggressive and more restrained than the NYPD. On the one hand, members of the Polizei were right in our faces the entire time, often standing close enough to the demonstrators to be able to hear most of what was being said privately as well as via human mike; they also conducted aggressive bag searches, unapologetically profiling people (e.g. of the two women I spoke to who got searched, one had waist-long dreadlocks, and the other was Iranian). In the course of these bag searches, the police tried to force people to give up things like blankets (remember, an outdoor meditation session had been announced, so of course people had blankets). There was a great deal of discussion about this, and several of the gray-haired participants got vociferously involved, making it harder for the police to isolate and intimidate some of the younger people they were picking on. I believe they did succeed in taking a yoga mat away from one young man, but the woman with the dreads got to keep her blanket.

But apparently it is possible to talk back to the German police without getting arrested; this is very different than in New York. And in the video that shows the German police pushing their way through a crowd to take down a tent, they don't seem to be arresting the people who get in their way, they just push them firmly, but not violently, to one side - though two policemen do eventually get inappropriately violent with a pair of seated protesters near the end of the video. In short, even though the German police seemed more intimidating to me overall than the NYPD (because they kept getting right up in my business as I was simply standing on the sidewalk), I saw nothing even approaching NYPD-style transgressions like the casual use of pepper-spray, kicking and dragging handcuffed protesters or the nightstick beatings that were captured on video in NYC (not to mention the rubber bullets and tear gas employed last week in Oakland). I was also briefly part of a crowd that marched from the Brandenburg Gate back toward Alexanderplatz - walking right in the middle of the street Unter den Linden and blocking traffic there - without anyone getting arrested. I'd like to see that happen in New York.

Oh, and the demonstrators in pearls and neckties passed out handbills announcing that as of immediately a daily asamblea would be held at 5:00 p.m. in front of the Reichstag. Yep, sounds like a movement that's quickly picking up steam.

9/11 in Berlin

I think I've mentioned before that Berliners have a long tradition of loving America and Americans. Much of this love can be traced back to the Berlin airlift that began in June 1948 after Josef Stalin announced his intention to bring West Berlin under Soviet control and blocked off all land and water routes into the city, planning to starve the Berliners into submission. Two days later, a fleet of British and American supply planes under the command of American general Lucius D. Clay began flying in food and supplies to Tempelhof airport. The Luftbrücke (air bridge) was to continue for 15 months, and the Rosinenbomber (raisin bombers) have lived on in the public imagination.

This was the historical backdrop to John F. Kennedy's celebrated visit to Berlin, where he declared himself a Berliner on the steps of the Schöneberger Rathaus or Schöneberg town hall. Each borough of Berlin has its own Rathaus, and during the academic year 2001-2002 I spent a great deal of time in the Rathaus of the Schöneberg district where I was living; the amateur string orchestra I played in that year held its weekly rehearsals in one of the upstairs rooms.

It was terrible being so far from home the day of 9/11. A friend in Berlin had heard on the 3:00 p.m. radio news (9:00 a.m. EST) that a terrible accident had taken place in New York and had called me right away, so I was watching live on CNN as the second plane struck the South Tower, and then as the South and then the North towers collapsed. The television image of the South tower vanishing in a plume of dust is the most horrifying thing I have ever seen; I can only imagine the terror of those who witnessed it in person. Hours later, when I was finally able to tear myself away from the television and venture out into the street, I found the city of Berlin in mourning. People in the subway looked as if they'd had a death in the family, and many were wearing little American flags on their clothing. Where did all those little stickpins come from? A day or two later there were new stickpins, showing the American and German flags intertwined. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder declared Germany's "unconditional solidarity" with the United States. And when I showed up to orchestra rehearsal two days later, I found the steps of the Rathaus Schöneberg completely blanketed with flowers: hundreds and hundreds of small individual bouquets left by individual Berliners who wanted to express their feelings of sympathy and solidarity. The American embassy was ringed with flowers too.

Three days later, a massive demonstration was held at the Brandenburg Gate, which had been draped with an enormous black banner reading "Wir trauern [we mourn] - our deepest sympathy." Two hundred thousand Berliners showed up for it. The point of the demonstration was to emphasize German solidarity with the United States and pay tribute to a long friendship between nations, but I noticed a new tenor in the placards I saw a number of Berliners holding up. People were starting to remember that America was a major military power and worrying about what a reprisal for the attacks might look like. Might it look like a new world war? German President Johannes Rau officially called on the United States to practice "Besonnenheit," a word that goes back to Herder and Kant and can be translated as "sober-minded reflection." German hearts were bleeding for America - both in the government and on the street - but no one wanted to see the United States go to war. And while initially there was support for U.S. military operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq two years later on obviously flimsy grounds cost the United States much of the love and respect it had enjoyed in Europe, even in Berlin.

Ten years after the tragedy, military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, so it is hard to imagine the day when Berliners thinking of America will once more think first of the airlift and only after of these wars. I hope that day will come.

Threepenny Opera Travels from Berlin to NYC

Ever since seeing (and reviewing) Robert Wilson's wonderful production of Bertolt Brecht's classic The Threepenny Opera in Berlin back in 2008, I've been waiting for it to travel to New York, and finally it's on its way. The Brooklyn Academy of Music has just announced its Fall 2011 lineup, and the Dreigroschenoper will be on the program between Oct. 4 and Oct. 8, performed by the original cast from the Berliner Ensemble (one of Berlin's very best theaters, founded by Brecht himself) with English surtitles. If you're based in New York, don't miss this one! Season tickets are on sale now, and tix for individual shows can be purchased at the end of the summer. For more information, see the BAM website.

Maria Braun Gets Married All Over Again

The Schaubühne's Thomas Ostermeier is no slouch when it comes to restaging plays that have been famously staged over and over again (Hamlet, for instance), but what happens when he sets himself the task of staging a work whose author turned it into one of the most iconic monuments of post-war German cinema? Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun is a stunning piece of filmmaking, and the script (also by Fassbinder) is powerful in its own right, telling the story of the eponymous "self-made woman" who rises from wartime squalor to post-war industrial fortune using only her good looks and above all her canny intelligence. Fassbinder's film is pretty much untrumpable. So Ostermeier, in setting himself the task of translating the script to the stage, turned radically away from the film—he says he didn't even look at it when he was planning his own production—to produce a performance that both works on its own terms and puts Fassbinder's story in the context of post-war and contemporary German theater.

To describe Ostermeier's strategy in a nutshell: He cranks up the volume on the Brechtian slant already present in Fassbinder's play. Forget realism. This production uses only five actors (four men and the glorious Brigitte Hobmeier) to fill the play's 25 roles, which means, among other things, men playing various female roles while wearing wigs and speaking in masculine voices; they aren't so much disguised as women as displaying markers of feminine identity. One wig even serves double-duty (one actor wears it as nature intended, the other back-to-front, and they sometimes hand it off mid-scene). Ostermeier makes heavy use of gestural techniques, e.g. having the character of the doctor (whose costume is a woman's coat, too small for him, worn with the front open to the back) stand repeatedly in a characteristic semaphore shrug of helplessness—after all, it's his job to issue women certificates of health so they can engage in prostitution and then return to him for treatment once they've contracted STDs or gotten knocked up. Ostermeier handles his props epic-theater-style as well: All those big mismatched 1950s padded armchairs that turn the stage into a sort of big waiting room (the play is set in the Waiting Room of History) get shoved into many different configurations, signifying an apartment, then a train, a car, a restaurant. And a character driving a car pantomimes not only the steering and shifting but also the windshield wipers.

All the Brechtian gestures in Ostermeier's staging come together at a key juncture in Maria Braun's trajectory: the moment when she has just sealed her first triumphant business deal after her boss has failed and then—in a perhaps even more significant victory—won over her former adversary, the firm's cautious accountant Senkenberg. Both coups bear witness to Maria's extraordinary psychological astuteness; she intuits not only what people want but how to give it to them, or more specifically: how to herself embody their desires. She is, in her own words, "the Mata Hari of the economic miracle." And at this moment in the play it is clear that she is destined for a successful career. Ostermeier marks the moment with a projected slide-show montage of commercially produced objects of desire accompanied by a loud cacophonous din, but not before offering us a brilliant bit of theatrical intertextuality: He has two actors approach the microphones at the front of the stage to accompany Maria's triumphant celebration with a chorus of loud panting. For those familiar with the Berlin theater scene, this is an obvious citation of the opening gambit in Heiner Müller's iconic 1995 staging of Bertolt Brecht's play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui for the Berliner Ensemble. By equating Maria Braun's story with Arturo Ui's, Ostermeier provides a cynically subversive reading of Fassbinder's play that both Brecht and Fassbinder would have heartily approved of: Maria Braun's riding the waves of capitalism to wealth and power in the aftermath of war is just like Arturo Ui's (i.e. Adolf Hitler's) rise to power in the wake of economic crisis. After all, Fassbinder named her "Braun," the official color of the Nazi party—as Maria herself points out when she remarks apropos of her new lover, an African-American GI: "Better black than brown." Better indeed.

Overall, Ostermeier's Maria Braun is less striking and stunning than, say, the Hamlet he staged several years ago. He recycles from that play various techniques that have meanwhile become familiar to us from other stages as well: using video cameras on stage to project the faces of actors on parts of the set, even using their clothing as screens to project snippets of film. In this case, the use of film on stage is counterproductive because it just reminds us of Fassbinder's own (richer) images. Given the heartbreaking explosiveness of Fassbinder's final scene, it is perhaps unfair to carp that Ostermeier's staging of the play ends less with a bang than with a whimper. But where Fassbinder used to powerful effect the hysterically ecstatic voice of a radio announcer proclaiming Germany's victory in the 1954 World Cup, Ostermeier instead emphasizes a different pair of radio addresses, both by post-war Chancellor Konrad Adenauer—in the first, Adenauer declares himself vehemently opposed to the constitution of any sort of German army, and in the second, several years later, he announces his intention to create a new army for a new Germany. As Ostermeier sees it, commerce and militarization are two sides of a single coin. The career of his Maria Braun is merely a continuation of the war by other means.

Photos © Arno Declair and Sara Krulwich

Dance Theater in Berlin: Sasha Waltz

Sasha Waltz is one of the best-known choreographers in Germany (along with the late Pina Bausch, who was based in Wuppertal). Waltz founded her company Sasha Waltz & Guests in 1993, together with her professional and life partner Jochen Sandig, and ever since has played an instrumental role in bringing dance into the mainstream of Berlin cultural life, which among other things means moving it from the margins of the off-off to the institutions that have long been supporting Berlin’s astonishingly diverse theater offerings. In 1996 Waltz cofounded the Sophiensaele in Mitte, Berlin’s gallery district, to create a forum for dance and experimental theater projects, and in 1999 accepted the position of co-artistic director (along with Sandig, Thomas Ostermeier and Jens Hillje) of the most important theater in the western part of Berlin, the Schaubühne am Lehninger Platz on the Kurfürstendamm. Although Waltz’s position at the Schaubühne officially ended in 2004, she remains affiliated with the theater, which continues to feature a significant number of dance performances and collaborations between choreographers and theater directors.

Waltz's signature production, Körper (Bodies), which premiered at the Schaubühne in 2000 and was reprised there this August, was her breakthrough work; in it, she developed a strategy of not just using the bodies of her dancers to show us a dance but making bodies (and corporality itself) the subject of the work. This was the first piece of hers to travel extensively internationally. It established her as one of the leading voices in German choreography.

Sasha Waltz & Guests combines a fixed company (typically consisting of 25 members) with a large number of guest dancers from all over the world who join the troupe for particular productions. In Berlin they perform most frequently at the Schaubühne and at Radialsystem V, a relatively new arts performance space near Ostbahnhof. The group’s international composition becomes apparent whenever Waltz has her dancers open their mouths and add voice to motion, as happens for example in her “dance theater” work Gezeiten—the title means “tides” but also suggests “times”—which premiered at the Schaubühne in 2005. Gezeiten is a beautiful study of singularity and community in troubled times.

The production is divided into two parts: a relatively peaceful first half in which the dancers appear in small groups for an extended series of pas de deux, pas de trois and pas de quatre; they swirl about and through each other’s bodies, sharing body weight to launch one another aloft and supporting each other in unexpected configurations. Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites alternate with minimalist music composed by Jonathan Bepler. Waltz is concerned with presence defined simultaneously as physical and spiritual, and the tableau of dancers hurling themselves repeatedly onto each other’s bodies seems to be making as much a psychological as an aesthetic statement. She offers allegories of community as well, with dancers walking (in silence) in perfect lines, like human caterpillars, or running to sit upon each other’s knees to build large body sculptures. They twirl red chairs around like giant semaphore signals. She even has all her dancers line up against the back wall, moving their bodies up and down to sketch out graphs of ascending and descending lines. As a culmination of this strategy of using human bodies as building material, she wraps dancers in cloth singly or in pairs to create enormous cocoons that move in ways it seems impossible to attribute to human bodies.

The second half of Gezeiten takes a much darker turn, literally so: it begins with a fade to black and a truly frightening cacophonous din sustained for an unnervingly long time, it sounds as though the theater building itself is collapsing. And soon the dancers are seen running around in what appears to be a sort of war or catastrophe situation. We see a pantomime of ostracism, as one dancer is expelled from the group and then harassed, and soon panic grips the stage as a graveyard of precariously balanced brick crosses topples and smoke pours in through doors in the stage set, floorboards detach and commence an unnerving clattering that underlies the action that follows. Shouts in many languages fill the air as the dancers use their voices as well as their bodies to beat back the chaos they themselves are producing. Waltz’s vision here is theatrical, and yet her attention to the vocabulary of repeated motion is sustained even during the production’s most “dramatic” sequences. Again and again she fills the stage with dancers artfully staggering as though the floor were shifting beneath them—shifting differently for each of them, it seems, for they are both together and alone in their distress.

Waltz’s newest piece, Continu, combining motifs from several recent productions and featuring the orchestral work Arcana by Edgar Varèse, will premiere next week at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.




(Körper picture © Bernd Uhlig; Gezeiten pictures courtesy of LG Arts Center; Continu pictures © Sebastian Bolesch.)

Berlin 1989-2009

So much has changed in Berlin over the past two decades, and so much remains the same. For those who have known the city for many years, its history seems to be written into it like a palimpsest, with its new buildings, streets and stories layered on top of older ones rather than replacing them. This is a view of the city as experienced from the point of view of the East, which is how I first got to know it. My love affair with the city began two years after the Berlin Wall fell—though “fell” is not the right verb to express what happened that night in November 1989. The Wall was not toppled, it was permeated from East to West (having always been permeable in the opposite direction). Those first years of what people called either “unification” or “reunification” depending on their political sensibilities were marked by a sort of bleak euphoria in East Berlin. Euphoria because of the sudden lifting of restrictions, the limitations on what you might be allowed to study, buy or read, or where you might be allowed to travel. Bleak because all of this was tempered by new economic realities. East German bank accounts were cut in half in the conversion to the West German deutschmark. In the cataclysmic transition of East German society from socialism to capitalism, more than half the people who had jobs lost them, and it soon became clear that economic survival would be predicated on the ability to function in the West German system. Since virtually all the GDR’s industry had been state-owned, the collapse of the government meant massive shut-downs of factories, laboratories and businesses. Many teachers were declared unfit to practice their profession because of what now looked like an ideological slant in their training, and many recent university graduates found themselves having to return to school for additional studies before their degrees could be recognized. Some adapted and thrived, others struggled.

It soon became clear that the financially as well as politically dominant West Germany would determine which aspects of “Eastness” would remain and which would be erased. In the early 1990s, one often saw the graffiti “BRD + DDR = BRD”: the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany, a.k.a. West Germany) + the GDR (German Democratic Republic, a.k.a. East Germany) = FRG. The value of the DDR, the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, was being calculated as zero. In response, a backlash of nostalgia (or “Ostalgie”—from “Ost”=East) arose in the entire Eastern part of the country, particularly in East Berlin where the border was generally just a neighborhood or two away. This wasn’t nostalgia for those parts of life that the tourists now swarming into the city were charmed by. Where tourists saw street after street of gray façades with their plaster crumbling away to expose the brick and were reminded of streets in black-and-white movies, locals saw neglect and discomfort: it was difficult to keep buildings with damaged walls warm during long, cold Berlin winters. No, the nostalgia was for a way of life that had developed over a period of forty years and, the political unfreedoms notwithstanding, had involved things like the availability of a job of some sort for virtually every citizen, readily accessible childcare and healthcare, and a spirit of camaraderie and innovation in everyday life that derived from the shortage of certain resources. A limited range of clothing was available for purchase, and so women made their own. Many people could not get telephones, so friends dropped by to visit each other often to keep up to date on what was going on in others’ lives. I don’t think anyone who lived in the East would seriously have wished for a return to that system at any point after 1989, but many chafed against the apparent assumption that everything about life in the East had been shabby, substandard or misguided. For many, the glass had been half full.

It is difficult, walking through the streets of New Berlin, not to be constantly reminded of aspects of the city that were effaced bit by bit as the West gradually took hold in the East. It wasn’t so long ago that when you got out of the subway at Potsdamer Platz you found yourself in an enormous field of scrubby grass and biting wind with no buildings anywhere except for the ruins of an old hotel and the knowledge that Hitler’s final bunker had been under that grass somewhere. Now Potsdamer Platz is an architectural playground. Even more recently, the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic) was torn down after years of debate —an eyesore of Eastern Bloc architecture with a bronze-colored glass façade planted right smack in the middle of all the fancy Schinkel buildings up and down Unter den Linden, state buildings signifying money and power. The Palast der Republik was hideous, but it embodied an important part of Berlin’s history, and its demolition was regrettable.

Other elisions are far more modest. I cannot walk down Torstrasse in Mitte without remembering when it used to be called Wilhelm Pieck-Strasse after the first president of the GDR and those strange transitional months in 1994 when the street was marked by a pair of signs: one with Pieck’s name struck through with a red diagonal line, and one bearing the street’s old new name, Torstrasse, meaning “Gate Street”—presumably because in centuries past this street had led to one of the old city gates. The same holds true of Clara Zetkin-Strasse, which used to run between the back of the Humboldt-Universität and the Reichstag. Zetkin, a friend of Rosa Luxemburg’s, represented the German Communist Party in parliament for thirteen years during the Weimar Republic. Now the street is again called Dorotheenstrasse, the one remaining monument to Clara Zetkin the shop “Copy Clara” where you can have your xeroxing needs attended to.

The Berlin Wall has now vanished in most spots, replaced by a double row of bricks set into the ground to mark the line it carved into this city’s skin. It's as if it was simply displaced from above the ground to below. The demarcation persists in memory, while the Wall itself is now buried beneath the massive weight of all the new stories written into the space where it once stood.