Street Scenes: Brecht, Benjamin, and Berlin

By Nicolas Whybrow

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2005 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84150-114-7

Contents

Acknowledgements,
Photographs,
Introduction,
Preamble,
1. Terra Terror: the Unlikely Event,
Part 1,
2. Chaussee Strasse: the Last Place,
3. Chaussee Strasse: Brecht's Spectacles,
Part 2,
4. Oranienburger Strasse: the Space of Recurrence,
5. Grosse Hamburger Strasse: the Space of Disappearance,
6. Niederkirchner Strasse: Wall Wounds,
7. Potsdamer Platz: White Noise,
8. Strasse des 17 Juni: the Space of (Dis)unity,
9. Karl Liebknecht Strasse: the Space of Light,
Bibliography,
Index of Names,

CHAPTER 1

Terra Terror: the Unlikely Event

'You know why they put oxygen masks on planes?

So you can breathe.

[Shaking head] Oxygen gets you high. In a catastrophic emergency, you're taking giant panic breaths. Suddenly you become euphoric. You accept your fate. [Indicating drawings on safety procedure card] It's all right here. Emergency water landing. 600 miles an hour. Blank faces. Calm as Hindu cows.

That's an ... that's an interesting theory.'

(Fight Club)

[...] travel to forget they used to advise the neurasthenic, travelling lessens the suicidal tension in opposing a substitute for it; the little death of the departure, the gain acquired in the increase in rapidity of displacement was a disappearance into a holiday where there's no tomorrow, which amounts, for each, to a deferred rehearsal of his last day.

(Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance)

Dying to Go

I'll begin on the plane from London Heathrow to Berlin Tegel. Still on terra firma, just easing out of the blocks and taxiing towards take-off.

'In the event of the aircraft landing on water ...'.

Wait. Slip up or customer relations policy change? 'Unlikely event', surely. That is what they have always said in the past: unlikely. What is going on? The tables have turned and we have to bank on the event being likely or at least even odds? After all, there is a quite confounding argument to say that the outcome of all risk situations is ultimately two to one. It either happens or it does not, and it could do so at any time. So perhaps the airlines are finally coming clean. Or maybe we are talking evolution. The airlines have come to the conclusion that, as a species, we humans have become so conversant with the global discourse of air travel – so skywise – that we do not require that little linguistic prop anymore. It is now inscribed in our cultural genes, as it were. In fact, retaining it may in the meantime produce the reverse effect, namely to draw attention to rather than disguise the very real possibility of the plane crashing. Sophisticated beings that we are, we have developed an immunising capability against such rhetorical charms, which, let's face it, did have the tricky task of deflecting our thoughts from death by raising the possibility of its imminence. From the airlines' point of view, then, it is best to be matter of fact. Play it straight, deliver the instructions and hope the fearful thought keeps its distance.

And, as the cabin crew continues the performance of its emergency ritual, it strikes me how odd it all is, that tugging of toggles and tapping of top-up pipes. Deeply familiar, but strangely abstract. And somehow archaic, the vestige of a primeval era of travel by air. Like activating propeller blades by spinning them manually. It seems to stand in no relation to the advanced degree of sophistication represented by present-day aircraft technology. Will they still be doing that fifty years from now? Or will there be an assumption by then that safety procedure is generally known; that we do not require to be taught or reminded anymore of how to behave in the unlikely event? Well, perhaps. But I suspect the survival of this survival ritual is safeguarded by a purpose exceeding – or even superseding – the communication of a code of safe practice. That purpose might be the perfunctory playing out of an exercise designed to insure the airlines against liability in the event of litigation following an accident. Rumour has it after all that when things actually go wrong, the notion of procedure in any case goes out of the window (so to speak). Hence, being seen to be taking precautionary measures is the most important factor from the point of view of the post-crash determination of responsibility. On a less cynical note, I would suggest the ritual is chiefly about managing terror. Not in the (unlikely) event of it arising at some future point in the flight, but in the extremely likely event of it being present here and now.

As I have pointed out, the problem for airline companies is how to deal with the very tangible association of the service they provide with the idea of death: that which is unknown and unforeseeable, which you fear – literally and figuratively, the last thing you want to happen. There cannot be many modern, everyday phenomena that confront you with the possibility of death with quite the same immediacy as travelling by plane. There are, for instance, visits to hospital. But hospitals are designated 'death sites'. They are prepared for it. They have real procedures that are implemented when it occurs. We accept that mortality, however it is handled by medical discourse, is one of the features of hospital culture. It deals in it. Air travel does not, supposedly. Moreover, whereas a visit to a hospital may invoke the 'smell of death', it is not necessarily yours, though ultimately it is probably that of which you are thinking. Airlines are faced not only with having to invoke death's possibility – without mentioning it – but also with palliating the implication that if it takes place, it will be within the next few hours and it will affect you. They are caught, then, in the unenviable position, on the one hand, of causing you to contemplate the potential occurrence of death – a nasty one at that – whilst reassuring you, on the other, that the risk to which you have committed yourself was really worth taking. To enable the latter thought to gain ascendancy, the former needs to be displaced or, if you want to be Freudian, sublimated. Like the plane itself our attention is elevated to a higher channel, away from the earth and thoughts of interment. So, if we are in fact talking survival tactics in the cabin crew's performance, the element of survival is more accurately ascribed to the strategic redirection of terror than the passing on of 'handy tips' for certain unmentionable eventualities. The whole procedure might be called entertaining the unbearable idea of death, a performative action that marks the collapse of the terror of contemplation into the ritual of its diversion. In Freudian terms that can be said to correspond to the move towards language and away from the 'lived experience of the real', a process analogous to the well-known allegory of fort/da, which both Freud and Lacan viewed as the linguistic distancing or mastery of the drives. (For the latter that process of encodification implied, of course, the disappearance of the self.) Drawing on both Bauman (1992) and Baudrillard (1993), Adrian Heathfield's article 'Facing the Other: the Performance Encounter and Death' usefully sums up the notion of the social organization of cultural production as originating in a defensive reaction to the threat of mortality:

Modern societies are predicated on 'survival strategies' which frequently involve the temporary resolution of death's threat through objecthood: the fixing of that which eludes understanding and explanation into identifiable and knowable objects. Objecthood draws phenomena into the field of the rationally explicable and is a condition which implies containment through place, name and identity.

(1997)

Terra Nullius

We are airborne and rising. A member of the cabin crew places before me a flat, rectangular box. My squarish meal.

'What would you like to drink, sir?'

'Oh, er, got any white wine?'

'Bordeaux or Australian Chardonnay? Be with you in a moment, madam ...'

But this is precisely not a square meal. This is a mini-banquet of delicacies: smoked salmon for starters, then roast chicken and Russian salad, followed by tiramisu. And these are delectable angels, unconditionally indulging my every desire: pleasing to behold, silky in their movements, charming and obliging of manner. Burp and they would probably pretend to find it alluring. I may not be God – we'll be hearing from him later, I expect, delivering his report on the state of play 35,000 feet above Hanover or thereabouts – but I've certainly got some sort of minor fiefdom to my name. As the air gets thinner and the alcohol begins to cloud my brain, I'm not in heaven just yet, but it is giving me a pretty good foretaste.

But where am I in fact? 'In between', no-man's land (or air), nowhere? Well, it could be the occasion of my last supper. But that is a retrogressive thought. Death, or the fear of it, has long since been lulled out of my system. I am in full trance now, a state which began to work its spell at Heathrow, actually. A kind of sickly-sweet shopping and eating delirium. I realised, as I waited for the sugar to disappear into the depths of my third cappuccino, that the hive of activity all around me in the departure area, that constant stream of people parading past my observation post outside Prêt à Manger, was entirely without aim. It dawned on me when the same characters would reappear at intervals, still apparently on their way somewhere. And I recognised what was going on because I had been there myself, circulating endlessly, prowling the precinct, a trapped soul, thinking: there must be something interesting, something I haven't seen; there must be more. In some respects the activity suggests the aimless strolling of the flanêur. In fact, it's the antithesis because its possibilities are finite and predictable. You cannot get lost, only pointlessly ensnared.

The anthropologist Marc Augé refers to airports, or the locations of air travel generally, as instances of the non-places of supermodernity (Augé 1995). The latter is meant in the sense of a modernity that is 'over-determined, in the language of Freud or Lacan' (Augé in Read 2000: 8), containing an excess of information which no longer allows human beings to recognise themselves:

This overabundance of images has perverse consequences in so far as the more we get a chance to see everything, the less we can be sure we are still able to really look at them. The world becomes, one might say, abstractly familiar to us, so that, socially speaking, there are literally no more relations between the world and us, in so far as we are content with the images imparted to us, as is the case today for a lot of people.

(10–11)

Augé's notion of the 'abstractly familiar' recalls Freud's musings on das Unheimliche. Translated correctly, but nevertheless incompletely as (the) 'uncanny', the German unheimlich(keit) also has literal connotations of being 'unhomely' or even, as Paul Auster's alter ego muses in The Invention of Solitude, the state of 'not belonging to the home' (1988: 148). More commonly, it refers to that which arouses a sense of fear, insecurity or foreboding. Running these various senses together leads you to equate the experience of terror with the notion of not being home(ly), or of being in the realm of the unfamiliar: 'what is "uncanny" is frightening precisely because it is not known' (Freud 1990: 341). There is a link here too with Heathfield's summary of objecthood as that which 'draws phenomena into the field of the rationally explicable' (1997). A secure condition of Heimlichkeit or 'home(li)ness' is restored through a network of familiar or knowable objects. However, Freud's actual thesis is based on the curious way in which heimlich ('homely', 'familiar', 'native') 'is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich' (1990: 347). This is premised on the fact that heimlich also means 'secret' – ergo: the home, or its objects, as the protector of secrets – which is in fact its dominant sense in common usage. A 'warm and secure' phenomenon harbours something 'ugly and threatening'. (Neil Leach gives an illuminating example of the dialectic in operation: 'within the heimlich of the homeland there lurks the unheimlich of nationalism' [1999: 159].) Hence, for Freud, 'it may be true that the uncanny is something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfils this condition' (1990: 308). As such, the 'uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it' (363).

Augé concludes that 'in the world of supermodernity people are always, and never at home' (1995: 109). Non-places not only produce a form of suspended identity (or temporary non-identity), they also – or therefore – preclude significant interaction with the subject's environment. Like white noise, they effect a 'blanding out', a state of alienation in which you cannot properly sense. Hence, the non-places of travel can be said to promote an experience that is forgettable, in which no significant trace is left either in or by you although, paradoxically, it is a location to which you may return repeatedly. The 'abstractly familiar' emerges, then, as the effective antithesis to the 'secretly familiar' action of the uncanny inasmuch as the latter implies an acute sensing or 'coming home' of something previously witnessed, something that had absented itself. Augé's non-places evoke a return which produces an absenting.

Paradoxically, the traveller 'accedes to his anonymity only when he has given proof of his identity', according to Augé, a process which produces 'solitude and similitude':

Alone, but one of many, the user of a non-place is in contractual relations with it (or with the powers that govern it). He is reminded, when necessary, that the contract exists. One element in this is the way the non-place is to be used [...] The contract always relates to the individual identity of the contracting party. To get into the departure lounge of an airport, a ticket – always inscribed with the passenger's name – must first be presented at the airport desk; proof that the contract has been respected comes at the immigration desk, with simultaneous presentation of the boarding pass and an identity document [...] and checks are made at departure time to ensure that these will be properly fulfilled.

(1995: 101–3)

The English version of the French non-lieu (non-place) does not, as the translator of Augé's book points out, capture an important juridical application of the expression, namely 'no case to answer' or 'no grounds for prosecution'. In other words, it is 'a recognition that the accused is innocent [Tr.]'. As Augé himself states: 'In a way, the user of the non-place is always required to prove his innocence' (102) or, one might add to underline the paradox: to attest to his or her anonymity, to confirm their disappearance or absence. As Shusterman points out, the latter's 'etymology (ab + esse: 'away from being') reveals its link to the ancient philosophical puzzle of non-being, the paradoxical nature of 'things' that don't exist or simply fail to be 'here and now' (that is, present)' (2000: 99).

Terra Incognita

My mind drifts back fifteen years to the mid-1980s when I lived and worked in West Berlin for a year, frequently undertaking trips by train or car on the designated transit routes to and from West Germany. Every time it was an adventure both terrifying and exhilarating because you never knew what the East German frontier guards had in store for you. Procedures were rigorous but absurdly so, for in truth they were superfluous. You weren't permitted to turn off the motorways – not that many would have wanted to, save out of curiosity – and the trains did not stop till they got to the border at the other end. If the guards could find a way of pulling you up for some flaw in your behaviour or ID so as to fleece you of western currency, they would. It happened to me once when leaving the city. I was not in possession of my West Berlin resident's pass, something I wasn't even required to carry with me by the western authorities. What possible relevance could it have had to the German Democratic Republic on whose territory I was not intending, literally, to set foot?

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