‘Right to the City’ Presentation in Berlin

I’m off to Berlin next week to give a presentation at the Regenbogenfabrik (former squat, now alternative social centre and housing project in Kreuzberg). It’s the 30th anniversary of the project and I’m very excited to be able to take part in the celebration. The winter and spring of 1981 marked something of a high point in the squatting scene that emerged in West Berlin in the late 1970s/early 1980s and the Regenbogenfabrik was first squatted on March 14, 1981. While the recent clearing of Liebig 14 has been seen by some as yet another body blow to the activist community in Berlin, I believe that it is still possible to forge other different spaces in the city. I will be speaking to the relationship between the history of squatting in West Berlin and a renewed ‘right to the city’. I’ve included the poster for the talk below for anyone who happens to be in Berlin. The poster should really read ‘auf die Stadt’ rather ‘an der Stadt’ though I suppose one could use the latter as well.

Iniva Talk: July 8, 2010

A couple of months ago I was asked to give a talk at Iniva in London as part of the Whose Map is it? exhibition. The exhibition focused on the way in which maps have come to inform contemporary artistic practice. I was asked to speak on research that I’ve been conducting on the historical geography of squatting in Berlin (I suppose one could argue that squatting promoted an alternative ‘cartography’ of the city). I spoke alongside Paul Goodwin who gave a fascinating talk on informal urbanisms in Lisbon (part of the Under Construction project).

For my sins, I’ve been youtubed:

And the rest of the talk:

‘Crooked’ Wanderings: Krumme Strasse Mk. 2

“Noisy, matter-of-fact Berlin, the city of work and the metropolis of business […] has more – not less – than some other cities of those places and moments when it bears witness to the dead.”

                                                                                                                                                     -Walter Benjamin (SW2: 613)

In my daily meanderings in Charlottenburg, I often find myself on Krumme Strasse (or ‘Crooked Street’). As I posted earlier, the street is largely remembered today as a key flashpoint for the new social movements which emerged in West Germany in the late 1960s. But it is also the ‘crooked street’ whose paved stones absorbed the footfalls of Walter Benjamin on his way to the municipal swimming pool for lessons he would soon come to dread. The pool was renovated in the 1970s and 1980s  (it was severely damaged during the Second World War) and is located right at the slight turn or kink that has given the street its name.

 

Municipal Swimming Pool on Krumme Strasse

 

 

For Benjamin, to find oneself on a ‘crooked street’ was to also take leave of the linear and hard-edged one-way street that he explored in an eponymous text of 1928. Benjamin famously commented in the Berlin Chronicle on his desire to find appropriate spatial form for the performance of his own autobiographical corpus. “For a long time,” he writes, “I have toyed with the idea of structuring my life- bios – graphically on a map” (SW: 596). Indeed, it is hard not to understand Krumme Strasse as a structuring device for the complex topographical (even perhaps topological) space through which Benjamin’s remembered self unfolds itself in both the Berlin Chronicle (1932) and the later and more stylised Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1932-1938).

Benjamin has always been one of my more faithful companions in Berlin. His books are never far from my side and have been sadly reduced to the status of so many dog-eared well-worn Baedekers especially as I, like Benjamin before me, try “to get hold of the images in which the experience of the big city is precipitated” (SW 3: 344, original emphasis). But to follow Benjamin down Krumme Strasse is to ultimately follow the lead of Vanessa Berry’s excellent posting on her blog. I leave you to check out her own words as a suitable retracing of Benjamin’s earlier wanderings.

 

Benjamin's "Crooked" Street

Geographies of Protest in Berlin

I’m currently in Berlin for much of the summer doing fieldwork for a new project on the history of the squatting scene in the city. I’m living in a flat on Bismarckstrasse in Charlottenburg about 100 metres from the Deutsche Oper. I’m also only two blocks from Krumme Strasse, the scene of one the defining events in the radicalization of the student movement in Germany in the late 1960s. I’m talking about the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg by a West Berlin police officer during demonstrations against the visit of the Shah on June 2, 1967. A sculpture by the Austrian artist Alfred Hrdlicka commemorating the event can be found in front of the Deutsche Oper while another signpost close to the spot where Ohnesorg was shot has been erected by the City of Berlin.

Historians have traditionally highlighted the significance of the shooting as the key turning point for a student movement that was forced to rethink its ability to generate workable notions of alterity, resistance and struggle. Shocking revelations regarding the shooting will undoubtedly prompt a thorough re-examination of the various protest cultures and counter-publics that emerged in its wake.

 

Ohnesorg Memorial

 

 

A recent discovery by archivists working in the Stasi files of the former GDR casts completely new light on the plainclothes police officer who shot Ohnesorg. As it now turns out, Ohnesorg was shot by someone who was in fact under the payroll of the Stasi. There is an excellent article in English on the Der Spiegel website which attempts to piece together the sequence of events leading up to the shooting of Ohnesorg. It also reflects on the implication that these new revelations may have for existing accounts of the 1968 generation. Whatever the case may be, trying to plot the various topographies of protest in West Germany from the late 1960s to the present will certainly require a revised geographical imagination.