‘WE’blog

I was going to call this “Reflections on Berlin”, but after my ‘reflections’ began to stabilise into some kind of meaningful gestalt, I realised that I had something more specific to say.

Berlin is somehow the city of my fantasies. Ever since hearing the 1966 broadway cast recording of “Cabaret” as a child (that’s the one with Lotte Lenya – an authentic voice of Berlin, and Jill Haworth in the role eventually usurped – and in my view, spoiled – by Liza Minnelli) I have been fascinated by the idea of a city I never visited until last week. I must say that I had so many contradictory expectations that I expected nothing in particular – except that German would be spoken. I wasn’t wrong about that, at least.

Further food for my fantasies came from dozens of art history lectures, where especially the work of “Neue Sachlikeit” artists like George Grosz and Otto Dix presented a brutal and often darkly funny illustration of the years leading to the rise of the third Reich, and a grotesque wit which I also found in the songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. Anyone who says the Germans have no sense of humour has evidently never seen John Heartfield’s collages, watched a Brecht play, or even reflected on the nationality of Billy Wilder, director of the enormously succesful Hollywood comedies “The Seven Year Itch” and “Some Like it Hot”.

Through most of the cold war, Berlin was the most highly-charged setting for what Winston Churchill memorably called the “iron curtain” – which in that city had become a physical, rather than merely symbolic barrier between two monstrous ideologies involved in a ‘zero-sum’ game: There was never a ‘win-win’ option on the table. That should have been evidence in itself that both sides were somehow ‘wrong’.

I did get a large dose of modernist painting in Berlin, at Neue Nationalgalerie, where obscure works by famous surrealist and abstract expressionist painters, from the private collection of Herr and Frau Pietzsch spoke less of ideological certainty, and more of the role of chance and random factors. Life is messy and muddled, and any realistic ideology needs to accomodate one basic truth – that both the mathematical and physical universe tends inevitably towards ‘entropy’ (noisy disorder). Order is not something which comes by itself, rather it comes about because of restraints of one sort or another. The ‘free market’, for example, is neither truly free, nor fully under anyone’s control, so we might as well be honest about which restraints are in place.

A highlight of the trip for me, was the Pergamon museum, where I and a group of second semester international students got to see the Ishtar gate from Babylon. We had already discussed one of the lion reliefs from this extraordinary structure in a session on representational techniques in computer games. In particular I wanted to impress upon the students that allowing process to influence expression is no bad thing. It doesn’t matter if the ‘foliage’ in your game is represented by mostly square ’tiles’, even if real foliage has a different shape. These kinds of designs tell us something about process; something about pragmatism, and also – in as far as our imperfect illusions are good enough – that the quest for perfection is often overrated.

The ancient Greeks might have made their marble columns and friezes as beautiful and seamless as possible – going to great lengths to conceal joins, edges and supports – but some special information is carried by evidence of process. In the gates of Babylon, we are in no doubt that every single blue-glazed brick is made by hand, seperately, and presumably by many pairs of hands – evidence of the vast and organised human population of the walled city state, of which Babylon was the first example in history.

In the Jewish tradition, Babylon was a symbol of the folly of tyranny and pride, with its ‘unfinished’ tower, in reality a vast artificially-irrigated ‘rock garden’, hung with lush plants to please the wife of King Nebuchadnezzar II, who was homesick for her mountain homeland. (The hanging gardens of Babylon were one of the seven wonders of the ancient world). Berlin too has its tower – just as much a symbol of the folly of tyranny and pride. And indeed Berlin’s western part was for many years also a walled city, conceived to keep the decadent barbarians contained rather than excluded.

For all those that take a tour of Berlin’s Jewish museum, or leave the ruins of Berlin’s wall saying “never again!”, I invite you to make a quick investigation of the details of the ‘security barrier‘ being erected inside and across Palestine (by Jews – how ironic!), or indeed the wall being built on the border between India and Bangladesh.

I fear that we will see many more of these ghastly constructions, especially as the climate and food crises develop; In addition, many of the minorities persecuted by the nazis and communists are also persecuted today. The latest news about the treatment of the Romany people - or even homosexuals - in eastern Europe show that some variant of totalitarianism is alive and well, and ready to emerge as soon as the right man appears.

All of this is strong evidence that the sickness called ‘dualism’ still holds sway, and ‘them and us’ remains a powerfully persuasive propaganda strategy, regardless of the ideologies involved. Aren’t we wiser than this?

So what was most significantly ‘reflected in Berlin’ for a 39 year-old Englander? What evidence of process caught his attention? Like any big city, it bears the evidence of its past in the present. On our first morning – a guided bus tour of the city, ably voiced by the highly-qualified and surprisingly charming Jens Møller – we learned that the trams are a relic of East Berlin, whereas the buses were from the time of West Berlin.

I have lived in London for four years. It’s in no way the best organised European capital, but still, the public transport infrastructure hangs together in some kind of logical way, even after privatisation.

In Berlin, I learned that trams are marked on the map as M in a circle, whereas the buses are marked as M in a square. M is short for metro (obviously), which in itself is also an abbreviation for that old Greek favorite “metropolis”. On top of that we have U-bahn (which Danes and Frenchmen would call the ‘Metro’) and good old fashioned city railways (which Danes and Germans call ‘S’, perhaps short for suburban, but not literally under the city, except sometimes). In the interests of simplicity, I will ignore taxis and pedestrian wanderings. Are you with me so far?

Most public transport maps in Berlin show some, but not all of the public transport networks. Those that purport to show all seem to favour one or two of those networks in full colour, with the ‘less favoured’ networks represented in very pale grey. Each ‘complete’ map chooses a different colour scheme. At any station, whether it be U-bahn, tram, S-train or bus, there is no indication given of compass directions. (I always thought North, South, East and West were kind of international, even if the words were different), so if you can find yourself on the platform of the right transport line, you have still a 50/50 chance of climbing aboard a vehicle travelling in the right direction.

Finally we have the issue of ‘public works’ – i.e. some of the lines not operating as they appear on the map, and require extra changes to exotic alternative vehicles – usually some kind of bus – because some-or-other building is being torn down or built up, or some stretch of railway is being renovated. All of the most acutely important information about these anomalies is presented in German only, in this most international of cities. Quite simply, getting about town can be harder than solving Rubik’s cube, because unlike the cube, you rarely have all the state variables in your hands at the same time.

Special mention should be made of the automated ticket machines, which appear to have been designed by engineers (oh dear) who were satisfied that it was at least mathematically possible to order all kinds of tickets to any destination, provided that the human operator adopted the correct attitude. Usability? We’ve heard of it.

I thought the Copenhagen Metro ticket machines were bad, telling you to re-insert your card to be re-read after previously asking you to take it out, but these machines from Berlin were a baroque triumph of dehumanizing cybernetics. Every group ticket was just twenty clicks away. The finger stabs the touch-screen while the trains come and go. You are one with the machine. There is even a language button, which sometimes, but not always, leads to a ‘language chooser’ screen. It sometimes works, but always resets itself to German without delay after each ticket purchase. Oh, were there more non-German speakers in your group? Sorry.

Don’t get me wrong. Unlike most of my fellow countrymen, I think the German language is extremely beautiful, but there is this issue with tourists not being able to understand it, and still wanting to find their way about the big cities. Are there not some clever information designers in Berlin that could help out? I don’t just mean providing a cheap compass with every tourist map (although that would be a huge help!), but rather that every station or bus stop should indicate which direction the trains, trams or buses would be travelling in, and where one might change to another network. There is a need to indicate not just an end station, but a compass direction. I did see a little icon indicating ‘clockwise’ and ‘anticlockwise’ on one of the ring networks, which was a good start. And what about having some kind of standard map color scheme. How hard can it be?

All in all, I saw only a tiny fraction of the city, which should perhaps best be experienced indoors. Therefore, the only way to experience Berlin properly is to keep coming back or even (gasp) to live there. I hope to do at least one of these in future.