Yesterday's City of Tomorrow

Your industrious Euro Like Me reporter has been working on a film script (!) The movie is about a housing complex called Interbau, which was built in Berlin in 1957. The architects were pretty much the hot-shit superstars of concrete-and-glass at the time: Gropius, Aalvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer, and several others who perhaps should have been famous. In doing the work, I've come across a remarkable document: it's a booklet that was published at the time the buildings were opened for occupation, and it lays out the manifesto of what these builders were trying to achieve for the residents. It's by turns eerie, ridiculous and poignant, and it says a good deal about the European (leftie) intellectual head in the fifties. Some of it sounds totally five minutes ago, other parts sound like they were beamed in from Planet WonderWorld.
Anyway, the booklet is organized into a series of numbered Precepts (like, er, biblical verses). Here's a few of them, interspersed with some pictures I took of Interbau while I was there in January.....


"24 The family used to be a unit of several generations, living, working and spending their leisure time together. Today the large family has been reduced to a small one by the splitting of the old from the younger working generation.
25 Even this small family flies apart today towards its various places of work and interests. The members of the family drift apart."


"6 But none of us would voluntarily go on living in tenements, and each desires healthier dwellings in natural surroundings for his children.
7 All long to relax in the forests, wander among fields, bathe in clear lakes and rivers, and enjoy activity in little gardens."


" 17 Superficial and senseless distractions are on the increase as recreational activities.
18 The celebrity and the star are becoming universally accepted, delusive models.
19 Amidst this transformation the circle of politically and economically responsible persons has not yet achieved the character of a new elite, a genuine governing class.
20 There has arisen the type of professional official whose specialized capacity for thought does not move beyond the scope of devoluted duties.
21 Creative spirits, almost unknown to the masses, have their being in seclusion. But the value of their achievements has not yet been restored to general effectiveness."



" 4 In the city of tomorrow the people will live in urban residential areas with a free view and linked with their neighbors. At the same time each has the opportunity to lead his personal life."

(all quotes from The City of Tomorrow, Interbau GMBH/International Building Exhibition, Berlin 1957 booklet #1)

Ich bin kein Berliner

So there I was, in Berlin for the first time, getting all creeped out by history.

I left one of the shopping streets in Mitte--once an east berlin blight zone, now a hip! artists! district with lots of coffee and Asian food!--and within a few steps, I came upon an old wrought-iron fence, surrounding what looked like a hospital. I don't know if it was the iron or the sooty look of it, but I suddenly thought, "They had a pretty shitty century."

My weekend was like that, and also like my first date with my (Austrian) wife: I kept thinking, "Don't bring up the Nazis, don't bring up the Nazis!" and then of course I brought them up right away. Guess all that horrible shit is still very present, in the air in Berlin, and also in the mind of any arriving rookie.

After living in cozy old Vienna for the last year and a half, Berlin felt much more like a real, big, straight-up City. Like New York, it's ugly-beautiful. The weather was everyday awful--gray and rainy and spiteful--so maybe Berlin is actually ugly-ugly, and I just didn't notice.

On the last day, I checked my bag at the new glass Haupbahnhof. It's a vast pomo palace, more of a shopping mall than a train station. After leaving my stuff there, I wandered around the city for the last time, ate some greasy Turkish food and took fotos.

By the time I got back to the station, the wind had kicked up and the sky was making blue-black threats at everyone down here on Earth. Police were blocking the entrance to the Haupbahnhof: they'd already evacuated it and now I had to give one of them my claim check so he could get my bag for me! Several days before, a wicked storm had knocked a huge steel beam loose from the roof of the place, and now they were afraid it was gonna happen again--so they just shut it down. So much for modern architecture.....

Despite the mobs of fellow travelers made manic by the weather, I made it to my plane easy.

When I got back to Vienna, it looked so cute and calm.....