Reply to Campbell and Haussermann

Reply to Campbell and Häußermann PETER MARCUSE I welcome both Scott Campbell and Hartmut Häußermann’s comments on the issues raised in my discussion of events in Berlin. They provide further factual detail on the events involved and even further enlarge the issues that need to be confronted. Scott Campbell has captured the main points I wanted to make, and has enriched the discussion with an amplification of the history of the Holocaust monument controversy, especially bringing in the reaction of Helmut Kohl to the prize-winner of the first competition, the Berlin collective led by Christine Jackob-Marks’ giant tombstone with the names of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust on it. He makes a key point in passing: that ‘Germans will not identify with the Jewish victims in the same way that Washington tourists identify with the names of the dead American soldiers engraved in stone [on the Vietnam memorial]’. There is only a tiny Jewish community in Germany today; for most Germans, the tragedy of those who died in the Holocaust is (understandably, but critically) someone else’s tragedy. If the purpose of the memorial is to overcome the effect of this void, and help establish an empathy with and a sympathy for the Jews and the Jewish life wiped out by the Holocaust, then a Jewish museum is a better answer — and the new one in Berlin may be a big step in that direction. But if the purpose of the monument is to be to aid in the confrontation with the causes of the Holocaust, to deal with a period of German history dangerously in danger of being forgotten, then something more than the current proposals are needed. Indeed, what is needed is not a monument, but something else — I will return to this at the end. I only have two disagreements with Campbell’s discussion: as a minor point, I think he exaggerates the extent to which the Allies ever ‘decartellized’ German industry after the war;1 and his point about the difference between the Berlin of today and that of the fascist period is important, and an important gloss on my discussion, but I draw from it a different conclusion. He rightly points out that German power is today decentralized, that Berlin is not today ‘the high-profile center of aggressive nation-building’ — of a concentrated political and economic power. That power is spatially deconcentrated, however, does not mean that it is less concentrated. The issue is not ‘Berlin’ as an actor, or even as a place, but the structures of power and the social, economic and ideological relationships that are developing and already in place today, regardless of whether in Berlin, Bonn, Frankfurt or elsewhere. What is happening today in Berlin is — may be — representative of what is happening in Germany as a whole (and not only in Germany), but it is not itself what is questionable; it is the whole that is questionable. That ‘not only in Germany’ is one of the points that makes Hartmut Häußermann’s comments so interesting. His is an odd piece, for while the first part of it is indeed an interesting response to my article, the second part goes into a polemic against a position I 1 See, for instance, Joseph Borkin’s (1978) The crime and punishment of I.G. Farben, The Free Press, New York, among the extensive literature. ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 186 Events and debates never took, on issues not mentioned in my article, in a tone reminiscent of cold-war controversies hardly germane to analyses of current developments in Berlin and Germany. On the first set of issues, around the Holocaust memorial, we largely agree. Opinion in Germany is indeed divided on the memorial, but some are against it because it is too small, others because it is too much, or the wrong form, or in the wrong place, or shouldn’t be built at all. The bigger question I tried to raise was in effect whether the ‘deeply serious’ debate on the memorial might not be needed on more critical issues of national history and policy. Häußermann does not pick up, as Campbell does, on the deflection created by focusing a central debate on issues of symbolic built form. It would be interesting to revisit some of the deeper questions of philosophy involved — the ‘aestheticization of politics’ of which Walter Benjamin spoke in a different context, the impossibility of any art after Auschwitz of which Adorno wrote — but, while they are critical to the discussion, they go beyond the scope either of my or Hartmut Häußermann’s comments. On the facts of the Government Center, Potsdamer Platz and Friedrichstraße, there is also no disagreement, but we do come to different conclusions from the facts. We agree that security measures around the Parliament and the Chancellor’s office are ‘ludicrous’, and ‘show little trust in democratic processes’ (the Bannmeile established around the buildings is not a ‘neutral zone’, but literally translated a ‘banned mile’, a mile in which major forms of political activity are banned). But it is hardly reassuring to be told that ‘Germany has an obsession with security’ and that ‘this is nothing new’. Likewise we agree that Daimler-Benz had a ‘one-time cozy relationship with the fascist regime’ (that it might have some current responsibility for what it did then, as Volkswagen has recently been forced to admit, with current payments of compensation, if very limited, for what it did then, is not something Daimler acknowledges). Again, the defense that it ‘is neither more nor less democratic than any other major corporation intent on playing a significant role in the globalization process’ is not very reassuring. And on Friedrichstraße, the fact that its investors want it to compete as a ‘domain of luxury and glamour’, is (Häußermann says ‘can be viewed as’, but I take it he agrees) ‘cynical in a city with a high unemployment rate and increasing poverty’. He calls that view ‘politically correct’ (a snide undertone?) and ‘justified’. The defense is that ‘political correctness’ and justice are not the ‘criteria by which the development of a capitalist city is [to be] judged’. Rather, it is ‘the market that decides utilization’, and the developments are no different from those ‘in Singapore, Manhattan or the London Docklands’. Again, not a very reassuring defense; in all cases, of course, the state played a major role in utilization decisions, and the key question is whether it played that role appropriately — ‘correctly’ — and what criteria indeed should be applied to its actions. I certainly agree with Häußermann that the question needs to be addressed not only to Germany. Then, curiously enough, Häußermann goes on to discuss unification and to launch an attack on positions of mine regarding the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) that nowhere appear in my article. He seems to take my favorable comparison of the East German Palace of the Republic with the new German government center as the equivalent of a defense of East German totalitarianism against parliamentary democracy. But he is turning the point I was trying to make on its head. My argument was precisely that symbolism was overcoming reality in the treatment of the East German building: that, symbol though it was of SED rule, its physical structure was indeed (as I think Häußermann admits) more open and public than the new government center would be. Would I prefer as a government building one whose structure is open, transparent and which houses cultural and recreational facilities as well as government spaces to one that is fortified, excluding normal public ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999 Debate 187 uses, and surrounded by a Bannmeile? Yes. Would I prefer a totalitarian regime to a democratic one? No, of course not.2 Häußermann concludes with some comments, extraneous to anything I wrote, comparing West Germany’s political legitimacy and anti-fascist credentials to those of East Germany. His comments seem to me to reflect the continuing division between many in the West and many in the East that has indeed survived unification. The kind of black and white picture that results (often on both sides) is represented by the only substantive point Häußermann makes on which I want to comment here (because it seems to hark back to the Holocaust issue): the idea that West Germany always ‘defended the Jewish people’s right of existence in Israel’, while the GDR was ‘invariably on the side of the aggressors against Israel’. It is admittedly a side issue, but one does have the sense that, even for German liberals (in the US sense of the term), the history of the Holocaust still prevents a fair view of the present conflicts in Israel and Palestine — sympathy for Palestinians in the Near East can hardly be equated with being ‘on the side of the aggressors against Israel’. As to the big issue underlying Häußermann’s discussion, it is hardly reassuring to be told, in defense of West Germany’s political culture today, that ‘the West offers less grounds for distrust than . . . East Germany’. There are problems today with the political culture of Germany, as there are with the political culture of the United States, the UK, France and most other countries: it would be hard to say which speaks more loudly about the state of effective democracy — the Clinton/Lewinsky/Starr affair, or the large number of votes Helmut Kohl got (even if not a plurality), or the resurgence of the National Front in France. The underlying problem, as I see it, is that, in the words of Häußermann, ‘. . . the means of political influence by private capital in Germany may have changed since unification. Not because of unification, but because of the growing dominance of neoliberal ideologies in a country that has to struggle for its position in a global economy’. That is indeed the problem. The best memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, the best indication that Germany has recognized and overcome the shameful parts of its past, would be for it to adopt policies that reflect not the values of a neoliberal ideology, but those of a humane and social polity. That is a task that confronts not only Germany but most countries around the globe today. Debates about the symbolic forms of monuments or buildings must ultimately, if they are to be meaningful, come to examine that task. Peter Marcuse ([email protected]), Division of Urban Planning, School of Architecture and Planning, Columbia University, Avery Hall, New York, NY 10027, USA. 2 I must say I think the comment ‘that the political entity under discussion [the GDR] was a state whose secret service terrorized its population and granted its citizens neither free elections nor equal rights is evidently of little consequence to Marcuse’s political/aesthetic judgment’ is an ad hominem attack that transcends the bounds of normal debate in a journal such as this. I am quite prepared to defend the morality of my judgments, but, unless provoked further, would prefer to ignore the comment and focus on the substantive issues in the text. ß Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1999