The city of Heinrich Zille, Alfred Doeblin, Joseph Roth, and Marlene Dietrich—not to mention the decadent Weimar years, made famous in American popular culture by the musical, Cabaret, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s famous novel Good-bye to Berlin-- became that of Lou Reed, and David Bowie, Nina Hagen, among many chroniclers of its cultural world. For much of the breadth of the 20th century, Berlin has fascinated and appalled at the same time. As painting gave way to photography and the movies, during the 20th century the city of Ernst Ludwig Kirschner and George Grosz became the city of Hannah Hoech and Martin Munkasci. It was then and is now the subject par excellence for photography.
Always in flux, Berlin is as the journalist Karl Scheffler put it, a "city condemned to becoming and never to being."
Berlin, itself, is indeed a sort of façade both in name and deed. Even that well-beloved town symbol, the bear, has nothing to do with the original place that was built on the confluence of the rivers Spree and Havel. No. Berlin, built on a swamp, took its name from the old Slavic word, birl, or swamp. This could also help explain the loss of the billions of Euros in building projects, etc.: the money just sank into the water. And so, as one scrunches one’s way across the sandy, stony streets, one notices at first glance that the city is truly a complex of castles built on sand.
More so than with other places with a long and complicated history, Berlin’s buildings and street fronts have always tried to put specific faces on its architecture and the facades of its buildings.
The massivity of the Nazi –era architecture of Speer and Co.-- tarted up with neo-classical details: a wreath here, a frieze or eagle there—attempted to concretize and legitimate Hitler’s regime. The post-war reconstruction wrought by the occupying powers and subsequent East and West German governments compounded and refracted Berlin’s public face still further because the divided Berlin was always already confronting itself.
During the Cold War, the separation created by the Wall and the need to present to the other side the most attractive and strongest image each half reflected a true split personality in the buildings of the city. Two of the highest buildings, the Fernsehturm in the East and the Axel Springer Verlag skyscraper in the West, both not surprisingly media-centered buildings responsible for broadcasting in electronic and print media the political and commercial images of the opposing systems, could be seen, weather permitting, almost everywhere in the divided city. They were made explicitly to be seen by the other side. This double-vision gave Berlin the realized psychological schizophrenia that lives on in the façades of the city’s public spaces and the office windows and the storefronts.
It is a place that the American writer William Faulkner would see in the same words as he referred to the “God-haunted South” of the post- Civil War epoch of the United States where “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” Everywhere one turns one sees, is confronted with, is reminded of, the things that have gone on throughout its history. and, for example, through the observations of the famous “Stolpersteine” or “Stumbling Stones” of the artist-historian Gunter Demning whose brass coated paving stones memorialize those, including entire families, whom the Nazis forcibly deported and all too often exterminated, in the sidewalks in front of the houses where they lived. These inconspicuous memorials are part of modern Berlin and more than any of the more photogenic monuments in Berlin are reminders of those whose lives were lived in Berlin and whose lives were deliberately and systematically taken from them. These “Stolpersteine” have become to me a talisman of a history the Nazis tried to erase. They also become yet another facet of the many historical layers or façades of Berlin that continue to be present in this haunted, scarred, recovering city.
Here in this all round now, the pedestrian, flaneur, photographer, that thief of images, looks in at the world presented and finds himself caught by his very glance, betrayed by his fleeting reflection. The crime: imagining in the big city the world at once within and without, complete in a moment and caught in the tain of the mirrored glass as though on a sheet of film.
For a photographer Berlin is the perfect subject. The camera fixes change, if only for a moment, at 1/125 second. It reminds one, as Roland Barthes noted, of what has passed and of what is to pass. But as we shall later see in Jason Langer’s selected vignettes, there is something more going on than seemingly randomly chosen moments from the everyday.
Berlin, like all great cities, has been a magnet for seekers and searchers and people trying to make new lives. Not for nothing was the Hollywood of Europe, Babelsberg, the first and still largest European film studio, created in 1912. With its intense build up from the years 1870 through the early 1930s, Berlin became the cultural hub of Europe if not the world, especially during the post-WWI Weimar Era.
Two movies especially, Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin- Die Sinfonie der Grossstadt from 1927 and Menschen am Sonntag from 1930 by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, with a story by Billy Wilder, pay homage with great flair and honest charm to the lives of normal people living and loving in the Weimar years. These films, among the finest examples of cinema verité, celebrate the lust for life and feeling of endless possibility that the Berlin metropolis made famous. Sadly, this epoch was to be short-lived.
With the coming of the Nazis in 1933 this cosmopolitan, multicultural mélange, most recently celebrated in the ongoing series Babylon Berlin, came crashing down, and with it, began the Second World War and the destruction of Jewish society in Europe.
Yet both Berlin itself and Jewish life in Berlin have, however, survived the atrocities of the Holocaust and the shattered ruins left in the wake of the bombings and tank battles that finally crushed the Nazi regime in 1945.
With the passing of time, of war and division and finally reunification, the city has changed immensely, but even as the layers of architecture have been built up, destroyed, and replaced, Berlin is still that “cesspool and paradise” it was a century ago.
Still, though, there are traces of the past and signs of an even more vibrant future everywhere on looks in this scarred metropolis.
I must confess that I am a history freak and one who is fascinated with big cities and how they have evolved, lurching from epoch to epoch, for better and for worse. Baltimore, New York, San Francisco, and Budapest have been stations on my path. I like cities the same way as many other people who come to them. They are places to find work, to find oneself, to participate in something bigger than oneself and to feel that one is a player on the grand stage of life’s great theatre of being.
For writers and artists, especially photographers, Berlin at the turn of the 21st century has something of the limitless sense of possibility of all great cities in their boom times, yet, unlike in almost all other cities, the past is always present. This makes for especially haunted experiences and for dreams both fantastic and nightmares most deep.
About that haunting feeling: for me as for Jason Langer, Berlin evokes the ghosts of the past even as it seems to be a portal to a lively and diverse future. The signs of Prussian greatness gave way both to the Nazi dictatorship enforced by the Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo and to the German Democratic Republic whose “real existing socialism” was maintained by the Ministry for State Security or Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit gave rise to another equally feared acronym, Stasi. Both regimes used similar methods of spying on their own citizens, and as one system was replaced after the end of the Second World War, some of the same buildings such as those in the northern suburbs of Hoehenschoenhausen and Sachsenhausen were used by Gestapo and Stasi alike to confine and torture those whom they considered “enemies of the state.”
Needless to say, both regimes perfected a parody of “German efficiency” in the most brutally bureaucratic form. Depicted in Langer’s evocative photographs is the House of the Wannsee Conference where in 1941 the Nazis planned the “Final Solution” to eliminate the Jewish populations under Nazi control especially in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The evil banality of deadly bureaucracy is also to be seen in his images from the Stasi archive with its extraordinary collection of files totaling some 111 kilometers of documents many of which are held in Berlin and represent the work of thousands of “informale Mitarbeiter””, short “IM’ or “unofficial collaborators, i.e., citizens who spied upon their fellow citizen and family members.
Even today, German bureaucracy and authority figures evoke an almost Kafka-esque fear in me even if the bad old days are long past. It manifests itself whenever I go to renew my papers or even pass through a demonstration…
And yet, Berlin for me as for Langer, and for countless others—by 2020 some 40% of Berliners were not born in Berlin and almost 25% of the nearly four million residents are non-German immigrants-- has been the place for self-exploration, for work, and for the sheer joy of meeting new people and experiencing new relationships.
It is a personal search for self and for the experiences that build the self and as such forms a sort of modern Bildungsroman told through images as Langer so ably demonstrates. Not for nothing does the above introductory excerpt from David Bowie’s epic song cycle, Station to Station, make sense for this essay because, like Langer as for myself, Bowie, after a series of intermediate stations of his own and the trying out and discarding personae, ended up in Berlin where he experienced one of the most artistically fruitful periods of his life that brought forth his “Berlin Trilogy” that consisted of the albums Low, Heroes, and Lodger.
For me as for Langer, the constant juxtapositions of history and emotions have enabled the creation of series of writings and photographs that doubly reflect our own experience of the discordant symphony that “Grossstadt Berlin” produces with every living breath and pace of foot or pedal of bike or tram ride for that matter. It is a self-contradicting history of reality, received memories, of fantasies and of aspirations—but then so is life.
Jason Langer’s fascinating portrait of Berlin is more of an inward portrait that expresses through eloquent black and white imagery that touches the symphonic notes and registers of the “Grossstadt” and those of his personal itinerary across it in his depictions of his own fears, fantasies, and experiences in the big city. It is a compiled emotional chronicle of several extended visits with his own inimitable personal relationships with friends and places both fantastic and all too real across spaces temporal and emotional as well as geographic.
Arranged as a journey departing from West to East, “towards the rising sun” as he has elsewhere described, his darkly ambiguous images reflect a period of his own search for enlightenment.
Bill Kouwenhoven, 2021