Berlin in Pictures: Weimar City and the Loss of

Berlin in Pictures: Weimar City and
the Loss of Landscape
An Paenhuysen
The smokestack was in the 1920s a popular motif of the Neues Sehen (New
Vision) in Germany. In this turbulent decade of rapid modernization it was
regarded as the icon of modern engineering. The smokestack symbolized its
forward-looking progressive force and offered a variety of challenging visual
options. As a leitmotif it was explored in the most important photobooks,
which emerged as a new genre in mid-1920s Germany.1 László Moholy-Nagy’s
Malerei, Fotograe, Film (Painting, Photography, Film, 1925), Alfred RengerPatzsch’s Die Welt ist schön (The World Is Beautiful, 1929), Franz Roh and Jan
Tschichold’s Foto-Auge (Photo-Eye, 1929), and Werner Gräff’s Es kommt der
neue Fotograf (Here Comes the New Photographer, 1929)—every one of them
Many thanks to the Belgian American Educational Foundation and the Alexander von HumboldtStiftung for their nancial support of my research.
1. The photobook is here understood as a book without text that offers a story based on photographs only. On the photobook as genre, see Gerry Badger and Martin Parr, The Photobook: A
History, 2 vols. (London: Phaidon, 2004–6). On the development of the photographic essay and the
photobook in interwar Germany, see Ute Eskildsen, “Photography and the Neue Sachlichkeit Movement,” in Germany: The New Photography, 1927–1933, ed. David Mellor (London: Arts Council
of Great Britain, 1978), 101–12; and Jan Brüning, “Kurzer Überblick zur Technik der Pressefotograe in Deutschland von 1920 bis 1940,” in Fotograe und Bildpublizistik in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Diethart Kerbs and Walter Uka (Bönen: Kettler, 2004), 11–28. Most important for the study
of the Neues Sehen in Germany is the catalog Neues Sehen in Berlin: Fotogra e der Zwanziger
Jahre, ed. Christine Kühn (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2005).
New German Critique 109, Vol. 37, No. 1, Winter 2010
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2009-015 © 2010 by New German Critique, Inc.
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Berlin in Pictures
displayed the topos in various fashions: dramatically angled, in close-up,
dynamically abstract, in collage, montage, and solarization.
It was the power station smokestack that most stirred the imagination of
the Weimar photographer. Berlin had a rm reputation as the “electropolis”
par excellence.2 With the founding of the electric companies AEG and Siemens, and the erection of the rst power station, the city held a key position in
the modern network of electricity. The power station emphasized Berlin’s
modernity. For without electricity there would have been, of course, no modern metropolis, with its luminous advertising, light architecture, public transport, and trafc lights. The power station represented thus a transforming
force. That the Weimar photographer Sasha Stone decided to open his photobook Berlin in Bildern (Berlin in Pictures, 1929) with an image of the smokestacks of the Klingenberg power station was a clear statement in favor of the
modern city (g. 1). As a photographer of the Neues Sehen and a collaborator
on the modernist architecture journal Das neue Berlin (The New Berlin), Stone
took the celebration of the electropolis in stride. The belief reigned that the
technician paved the way for the future.3 Stone himself was a former engineer
who had worked during the 1910s in the brave new world of the United States.4
He was befriended by Alexander Archipenko, Walter Benjamin, Erwin Piscator, and Walter Ruttmann and was very much part of the leftist avant-garde
scene in Berlin.5 In his photobook the famous symbols of modern Weimar
Berlin—the radio mast known as the Funkturm, the trafc tower of Potsdamer
Platz, and Avus, the world’s rst autobahn—were captured.6
2. See Andreas Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006).
3. See, e.g., Werner Gräff, “Es kommt der neue Ingenieur,” G1, 1923, n.p.
4. For more information about Stone’s biography, see Diethart Kerbs and Peter Masswinkel,
“Sasha Stone: Randbemerkungen zum Lebensweg und Lebensende eines staatenlosen Fotografen,”
Fotogeschichte: Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotograe 10 (1990): 37–53. On his photography, see Eckhardt Köhn, ed., Sasha Stone: Fotograen, 1925–1939 (Berlin: Nischen, 1990).
5. In the beginning of the 1920s Archipenko gave Stone sculpture lessons and taught him the
constructivist principles. Together with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Naum Gabo, Hans Richter, Raoul
Hausmann, Ruttmann, and Benjamin, Stone participated in the magazine G-Material für elementare
Gestaltung. In 1924 he opened his studio on the Kurfürstendamm, and he soon made a reputation as
the photographer of the New Vision.
6. On those symbols of modern Weimar Berlin, see Gottfried Korff and Reinhard Rürup, eds.,
Berlin, Berlin: Die Ausstellung zur Geschichte der Stadt (Berlin: Nicolai, 1987); and Michael Bienert,
Die Zwanziger Jahre in Berlin: Ein Wegweiser durch die Stadt (Berlin: Berlin Story Verlag, 2006).
For a good introduction into the various places of modernity in general, see Alexa Geisthövel and
Hobbo Knoch, eds., Orte der Moderne: Erfahrungswelten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt
am Main: Campus, 2005).
Figure 1. “Großkraftwerk Klingenberg,” in Sasha Stone, Berlin in Bildern
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Berlin in Pictures
Yet the photobook’s suite did not explore a dynamic modern city pulsating with the invisible new energy. Electrical power was not depicted as the
energy of the future for the modern man and woman as it was, for instance,
two years later by Man Ray in his Electricité. Making use of photograms,
montages, and collages, the American Dadaist visualized the various applications of electricity in modern, dynamic life. Stone, on the contrary, depicted a
static city in an atmosphere of undisturbed peace and quietness. His visual
construction of Weimar Berlin did not evoke the image of the city as the paradigmatic place of modernity. It was not that Stone ignored the Weimar city’s
electried sites (he clearly did not), but his visual strategies deprived them of
their aggressive urbanism. I argue that in Berlin in Bildern a counterdiscourse
was developed against the dominating visual image of modern Berlin promoted in the daily press, in lms, and in advertising during the Weimar Republic. This was done to display the German capital as a “human” city in which
the urban dweller could feel at home. Berlin was depicted not as a fragmented
space of distraction but as a rooted city and an organic whole in which nature
and culture were harmoniously unied.
Stone’s imagining of Berlin anticipated the increasing criticism of photography’s role in society in the last years of the Weimar Republic. With his
photobook he redened the New Vision’s claim on photography’s revolutionary potential. But Berlin in Bildern must also be seen in the political context
of late Weimar Berlin. An increasingly popular political Right declared the
city’s demise through a conservative, antimodernist critique that embraced
the return to a preindustrial rural society. Stone’s Berlin was an attempt to
mediate between the rural and the urban and to show that the two were not
incompatible. In its argumentation the book displayed aspects of reactionary
modernism. Its discourse revealed the tensions leftist intellectuals experienced in the late Weimar Republic. Modernism was dropped for a nostalgic
search for a home that could be found only in Germany’s natural landscape
and that was at odds with Germany’s modern society. Stone’s photobook of
1929 can be seen as conrmation that avant-garde tendencies were already
waning by the late 1920s. The Nazi seizure of power in 1933 with its distaste
for everything urban was no coup but part of a larger conservative trend that
was not restricted to the political Right.
Cityscapes
The opening image of the power station aimed to seize the viewer’s attention
with a potent symbol of the modern age. The new energy radically transformed
the outlook of the city in the 1920s: with its light architecture and neon adver-
An Paenhuysen
5
tising Berlin became known as “the new City of Light in Europe.”7 Not only
did electricity alter the city’s physiognomy, it also remade everyday urban
life. While in 1914 only 5 percent of Berlin households had electricity, this
had increased to 50 percent by the end of the 1920s. Electricity accelerated
the spread of information by telegraph, telephone, and radio. It also altered
the mobility of the urban dweller. On the electric-powered subway one could
cross the city in no time. The “Berliner Tempo” became quintessential to the
city’s self-representation.8 The demand for electricity was so huge that in 1926
Klingenberg, proudly promoted as the biggest and most modern power station
in Europe, was brought on line.9
To depict Klingenberg, Stone chose a low angle to accommodate the
upward thrust of its smokestacks, and its mass was played against the blank
space of the sky. A cloud of smoke erupting from factory chimneys was a favorite element in modernist photography, mostly featured in a full bursting and
amboyant way to underline the bustle of modernity. But this is not the case
in Stone’s depiction. The smoke of Klingenberg is diffuse and dissolves softly
into the air. One might say that despite all its grandeur, the power station is
not portrayed as a brute force shoving aside nature. Stone’s viewpoint of the
smokestacks is straightforward and slightly distanced, avoiding dizzying angles
and providing its object instead with a classical touch. Indeed, the three symmetrically depicted chimneys recall the Doric columns of a Greek temple.
Alluding to antiquity, the opening picture of the power station evokes not so
much a city of full motion as a static and timeless city.
When the viewer ips the page, this line of argument is emphasized
with a second picture of Klingenberg. Now the power station is cornered to
the frame’s left edge; instead of steel and concrete, the picture’s main vocabulary consists of water and air, the very opposite of what constitutes the city
(g. 2). Most dominant is the water that lls up half of the frame. This broad
7. Korff and Rürup, Berlin, Berlin, 460. On the introduction of electricity and its consequences,
see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Licht, Schein und Wahn: Auftritte der elektrischen Beleuchtung im
20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Ernst und Sohn, 1992). For more information on Berlin as the new City of
Light, see Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001), 92–141.
8. On the imagining of Berlin as the city of tempo in the newspaper’s feuilleton, see Michael
Bienert, Die eingebildete Metropole: Berlin im Feuilleton der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992); or, in lm, Karl Prumm, “‘Dynamik der Grossstadt’: Berlin-Bilder im Film der Zwanziger
Jahre,” in Berlin: Blicke auf die deutsche Metropole, ed. Gerhard Brunn and Jürgen Reulecke (Essen:
Hobbing, 1989), 105–23.
9. Hans Achim Grube and Christina Keseberg, eds., Power Stations in Berlin: The Electropolis
Heritage (Berlin: Bewag, 2003).
Figure 2. “Großkraftwerk Klingenberg” and “Schönlankerstraße Wohnbauten,” in Stone,
Berlin in Bildern
An Paenhuysen
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space of rippling water reinforces the feeling of timeless inertia. In the water
the reections of the smokestacks resemble those of trees. Harmony between
nature and technology is further underlined through a bridge connecting the
factory on the left with trees on the right. In short, Klingenberg is represented
as an organic part of a natural landscape.
This second picture is paired with an aerial photograph of Berlin.
Although the city now enters the frame, the landscape perspective is intact.
Stone did not take this aerial photograph, but it was included for a specic
purpose. Showing the outskirts of Berlin, the camera’s high vantage point
offers a panoramic view and envisages the city as an extended space that continues far beyond the eld of vision. Below, one can distinguish new houses of
modern urban development. The aerial view imparts a feeling of control on the
urban scenery down below, which would have been impossible from eye level.
The viewer is given the chance to observe the city from a distance before getting closed in by it. At the right edge of the frame is a fragment of a wing. The
cropping of the image highlights the fact that the picture was taken from an
airplane.10
With the aerial photograph the emphasis shifted from the power station to another symbol of modernity. Both the power station and the airplane
were important transforming forces in modern life.11 But in Berlin in Bildern, once again, the technology was not linked with urban modernity. The
inclusion of aerial photography at several interludes throughout the photobook allowed the viewer to take a breath, gain distance from urban life down
below, and establish an overview.12 In other words, it gave the viewer of Berlin
10. On the history of aerial photography, see Beaumont Newhall, Airborne Camera: The World
from the Air and Outer Space (New York: Hastings House, 1969). Aerial photography, rst used
intensively during World War I, remained popular in the 1920s. On its use in city planning during the
1920s, see Anthony Vidler, “Photourbanism: Planning the City from Above and from Below,” in A
Companion to the City, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 35–45. In
interwar Germany, the airplane was believed to possess liberating capacities: achieving power in the
air was supposed to unite the nation and raise Germany’s position in the world, whereas other world
powers would be an obstruction on land and at sea. See, e.g., Ernst Jünger, ed., Luftfahrt ist not!
(Leipzig: Protektor des deutschen Luftfahrtverbandes, 1930), a photobook of pictures and articles on
diverse aspects of contemporary aviation. Jünger was a right-wing intellectual.
11. See Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).
12. Cf., e.g., the reections of Roland Barthes, looking down on Paris from the Eiffel Tower, or of
Michel de Certeau, looking down on New York from the World Trade Center. “The bird’s-eye view,”
Barthes writes, “permits us to transcend sensation and to see things in their structure. . . . To perceive
Paris from above is infallibly to imagine a history; from the top of the Tower, the mind nds itself
dreaming of the mutation of the landscape which it has before its eyes; through the astonishment
of space, it plunges into the mystery of time” (“The Eiffel Tower,” in Rethinking Architecture: A
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Berlin in Pictures
in Bildern the opportunity to keep in mind the eeting and irrecoverable rst
glance of a city in a landscape that Benjamin described in Einbahnstraße
(One-Way Street, 1928): “Once we begin to nd our way about a place, that
earliest picture we had of it can never be restored.”13 Berlin in Bildern did not
allow this earliest image to vanish from the viewer’s memory. Reection on
the bigger picture from an aerial perspective was forced on the viewer at regular intervals. The very rst photographs of Berlin in Bildern set the tone: both
the power station and the airplane put Berlin on the map of the modern world,
but neither power station nor airplane prevented the city from being rooted
in its specic natural landscape.
The disturbances and the tensions of urban life on the ground were,
so far, left out of the picture. Yet a subsequent cut to Alexanderplatz puts the
viewer right in the middle of metropolitan frenzy (g. 3). Together with Potsdamer Platz, “Alex” was at the heart of Berlin’s urban life, inspiring Alfred
Döblin’s famous 1929 city novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, in which the protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, kicked out of prison, tries to nd his way in the labyrinth of the modern city. Alexanderplatz was situated in the working-class
quarter. At the end of the 1920s the square was subject to redevelopment; a big
subway station of the same name was under construction. Berlin in Bildern
shows Alexanderplatz from a high-angle view.14 Trams, buses, and cars set the
hectic pace. City dwellers negotiate their way across the street. Indeed, this
bustling city meets our image of Weimar Berlin.
Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach [London: Routledge, 1997], 175–76). In The Practice of
Everyday Life Certeau wonders: “What is the source of this pleasure of ‘seeing the whole,’ of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts[?] To be lifted to the summit of the
World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp. . . . An Icarus ying above these waters,
he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far below. His elevation
transgures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by
which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a
solar Eye, looking down like a god” (quoted in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. Gary Bridge and
Sophie Watson [Oxford: Blackwell, 2002], 383).
13. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1979), 77.
14. See Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf (Berlin:
Fischer, 1929). On urban planning in Berlin during the 1920s, see Harald Bodenschatz, Platz frei für
das neue Berlin! Geschichte der Stadterneuerung seit 1871 (Berlin: Transit, 1987); Günther Schultz,
“Von der Mietkaserne zum Neuen Bauen: Wohnungspolitik und Stadtplanung in Berlin während
der Zwanziger Jahre,” in Im Banne der Metropolen: Berlin und London in den Zwanziger Jahren,
ed. Peter Alter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1993), 43–86; and Wolfgang Schäche, “‘Das
Neue Berlin’: Architektur und Städtebau,” in Weimar in Berlin: Porträt einer Epoche, ed. Manfred
Görtemaker (Berlin: be-bra, 2002), 62–67.
Figure 3. “Alexanderstraße” and “Blick aus einer Kneipe auf den Alexanderplatz,” in Stone,
Berlin in Bildern
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Berlin in Pictures
However, this “aerialized street photograph,”15 as one could call it, creates
a safe distance between the viewer and the urban commotion. It submerges the
dynamic hubbub down below, and the viewer preserves an overview of the city.
When Stone’s camera nally pulls down and shows Alexanderplatz at eye level,
it does this from inside a bar. Because of this inside framing, the urban space
seems closed off, protected, and safe, like a homely interior. Prominent is a
Rückengur, in this case a gure at the bar with his back to the viewer. In
nineteenth-century German Romantic landscape painting, the Rückengur had
been a popular topic: the halted traveler seen from behind enabled the viewer to
enter more fully into the landscape.16 In Stone’s photograph the Rückengur has
the same effect. It introduces the viewer not into a landscape but into a broader
space of time: together with the Rückengur the viewer gazes not into the future
(of, for instance, the subway construction works) but toward the old city. A
horse-drawn carriage articulates this focus on the past. It forms an anachronism
in a time of increasing motor trafc. The spread of Alexanderplatz, observed
from high above and down below, urged the viewer of Berlin in Bildern to see
that the modern urban scenery was still linked with a foundation that reached
far back into history. The depiction provided the viewer with a rare feeling of
security at one of the most central places of Weimar modernity.
Alexanderplatz was considered the gate to the city’s eastern parts. East
and West Berlin met on Alexanderplatz. Also in this sense, Berlin in Bildern
depicted a mediation—a mediation between Zivilisation and Kultur, two keywords in the cultural debate of Weimar Germany. While Zivilisation stood for
the modern atomized society, urban rationality, and materialism of western
European countries that had their roots in the Enlightenment, Kultur was
interpreted as its eastern counterpart: a traditional, rural, preindustrial, and
holistic community, or Gemeinschaft.17 The mediation between the two was
stressed when the viewer turned the page and was confronted with an image of
a bridge and rippling water (g. 4). Introduced in the depiction of the power
station, these two elements show up regularly throughout the book, symbolizing the mediation between two opposite shores: nature and culture, landscape
and technology.18 In sum, Berlin in Bildern visualized a friendly relationship
between the rural and the urban.
15. Allan Sekula, “The Instrumental Image: Steichen at War,” Artforum, December 1975, 13, 30.
16. Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1990).
17. Ferdinand Tönnies had codied the differentiation in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Berlin: Curtius, 1887).
18. “The bridge,” Georg Simmel writes, “becomes an aesthetic value insofar as it accomplishes
the connection between what is separated not only in reality and in order to fulll practical goals,
Figure 4. “Roßstraßen-Brücke,” in Stone, Berlin in Bildern
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Memory Images
In 1920s Germany, antiurbanism was deeply rooted.19 The highly antagonized relationship between the rural and the urban, the old and the new, had
no parallel among other European countries. While in England and France
modernization was gradual, in Germany industrialization started later and
as a result modernization took place harshly, transforming society overnight.
The rapid industrialization caused demographic instability. In the 1870s twothirds of the German population lived in the countryside. By 1914 this situation was reversed. Berlin in particular, which became the capital of Germany
in 1871, was a migrant city. In the interwar period its huge population of four
million was a doubling of its two million inhabitants in 1910. The dislocation
of millions of people from the countryside caused disturbances. In the Weimar capital modernity and tradition were simultaneously active.20 Precisely
this tense situation, however, made Berlin into the most modern city of western Europe. As Marshall Berman put it: “To be modern is to nd ourselves
in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to
destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”21
Additionally, one could assert, as David C. Durst does in Weimar Modernism, that Berlin “in its very location and urban structure” embodied “the
vibrant contradictions of modern life.”22 Even today Berlin gives, according
to Durst, the impression of having a unique relationship to nature because of
the surrounding richly forested areas. And indeed, in the 1920s, factories
and peasant elds existed alongside each other. The Ford manufacturing
but in making it directly visible. The bridge gives to the eye the same support for connecting the
sides of the landscape as it does to the body for practical reality. . . . Yet the bridge reveals its difference from the work of art, in the fact that despite its synthesis transcending nature, in the end it
ts into the image of nature. For the eye it stands in a much closer and much less fortuitous relationship to the banks that it connects than does, say, a house to its earth foundation, which disappears
from sight beneath it” (“Bridge and Door,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach [London: Routledge, 1997], 67).
19. Andrew Lees, “Berlin and Modern Urbanity in German Discourse, 1845–1945,” Journal of
Urban History 17 (1991): 153–78.
20. In Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 212–28, Ernst Bloch stated
that Germany was characterized by a “non-simultaneous condition,” in which modern capitalism
was wed to a “pre-capitalist form of domination of Junker theocracy.”
21. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 6th ed.
(London: Verso, 1991), 15.
22. David C. Durst, Weimar Modernism: Philosophy, Politics, and Culture in Germany, 1918–1933
(Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004), xvi.
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13
plant was in the countryside outside Berlin. The Siemensstadt new town was
developed in the suburbs. And the newest experiments in modernist housing
could be found in the city’s outskirts, surrounded by undomesticated nature.
Berlin’s very structure thus enhanced the tensions between the rural and the
urban. Furthermore, in 1929, the year that Berlin in Bildern was published,
economic stabilization drew to an end and gave way to years of economic
hardship. Socioeconomic upheaval had occurred already in 1928.23 The crash
of October 1929 hit Germany particularly hard, as the economic crisis intensied the tension between rural and urban cultures.
Big-city life was supposed to entail the very opposite of what life in the
country had been. While rural society stood for tradition, stability, and continuity, the city represented the dislocation, the contingency, the relativity, and the
meaninglessness of traditional values. In the metropolis, technological, social,
and psychological change was felt most keenly. In Berlin Alexanderplatz Döblin described how Biberkopf was shell-shocked by the stimuli that metropolitan life imposed on him once he left prison. Walking across Alexanderplatz,
he was overwhelmed by bits and pieces of advertising slogans that could be
read from the buildings or on the trams. If vision had already been traumatized
by the Great War’s Materialschlacht,24 Berlin’s city streets seemed to provoke
an additional confrontation with the shocks of modernity. “There is no city in
the world so restless as Berlin,” it was written in 1929. “Everything moves. The
trafc lights change restlessly from red to gold and then to green. The lighted
advertisements ash with the dramatic iteration of coastal lighthouses. The
trams swing and jingle. The jaguar in the Zoo paces feverishly all night.”25
Photography was said to add to the city dweller’s disorientation. While in
the early 1920s photography was celebrated as the technology that opened up
a new world, criticism increased during the Weimar Republic’s nal years. A
culmination point in the history of the New Vision came in 1925, with MoholyNagy’s renowned Malerei, Fotograe, Film. The book’s thesis, that “photography was one of the most important factors in the dawn of a new life,” celebrated the camera’s expansion of visual eyesight: photography made one see
the world with entirely different eyes.26 Two years later, in 1927, the Weimar
23. Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1993), 120–27.
24. Bernd Hüppauf, “Experiences of Modern Warfare and the Crisis of Representation,” New
German Critique, no. 59 (1993): 41–63.
25. Harold Nicholson, “The Charm of Berlin (1929),” quoted in Ward, Weimar Surfaces, 120.
26. László Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, trans. Janet Seligman, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 45.
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Berlin in Pictures
critic Siegfried Kracauer, together with Benjamin one of the most inuential
theoretical writers on photographic images in the interwar period, expressed
his skepticism about this overcondence. However much photography could
be considered an excellent tool of memory, capturing transient experiences
and storing them up against the future, Kracauer made a different argument
in his essay on photography. He opposed photography to what he called “memory images.” While the memory image selected and essentialized the signicant aspects of a person, place, or event, photography appeared to him “as a
jumble that consists partly of garbage”: “The blizzard of photography betrays
an indifference toward what things mean.”27 The photographic production
thus devastated the memory image:
Never before has an age been so informed about itself, if being informed
means having an image of objects that resembles them in a photographic
sense. . . . In reality, however, the weekly photographic ration does not at
all mean to refer to these objects or ur-images. If it were offering itself as
an aid to memory, then memory would have to make the selection. But the
ood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory. The assault of this mass
of images is so powerful that it threatens to destroy the potentially existing
awareness of crucial traits. In the illustrated magazines people see the very
world that the illustrated magazines prevent them from perceiving. . . .
Never before has a period known so little about itself.28
As Miriam Hansen has pointed out, however, precisely the very negativity of
photography, its role corroding the memory image, enclosed photography’s
radical emancipatory potential. By the end of his 1927 essay Kracauer contributed liberating functions to the photographic archive. In reecting reality in its disorder, photography could assist consciousness in pointing out the
provisionality of all given, presumably natural, arrangement. As a medium of
alienation or estrangement, photography was both expression and enactment
of the modern experience: “The turn to photography is the ‘go-for-broke’ game
of history.” Kracauer perceived modernity as an accelerating process of the
world going to pieces and photography as the medium of a self-destructing
modernity at the vanishing point of history.29
27. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 51, 58.
28. Quoted in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” in
Photography and Painting in the Work of Gerhard Richter: Four Essays on Atlas, by Benjamin H. D.
Buchloh et al., 2nd ed. (Barcelona: Libres de recerca, 2000), 22.
29. Miriam Bratu Hansen, introduction to Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption
of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), vii–liv.
An Paenhuysen
15
Stone’s Berlin in Bildern, however, seems more an attempt to escape
from such problems. One can doubt if Berlin in Bildern as a whole could be
called a work of the New Vision. An image by Stone that Gräff included in Es
kommt der neue Fotograf was used to exemplify the classical straight-angled
perspective of a street, to which Gräff did not object except that it was “boring.” Certainly, other photographs by Stone published in Berlin in Bildern
did match Gräff’s hunger for new, challenging perspectives. Yet the so-called
boring pictures have the upper hand in Stone’s photobook: the classical,
straightforward viewpoint prevailed. Stone’s photographs are still images in
every sense. The camera was kept static, avoiding zooms and dizzying angles,
recording a striking emptiness that recalls early-twentieth-century photography, which reduced the most vibrant boulevard to a lifeless, motionless, empty
scene. Stone also reduced the overload of information of Weimar street life
to a still panorama. Many of his photographs give the impression of long exposure times, and snapshots are rare.
The layout of Berlin in Bildern does not seem inspired by the New Vision
either. The map of Berlin was used to connect the images. From Alexanderplatz onward, the viewer was guided through the city from East to West. The
walk across town gave him or her the occasion to explore Berlin in its various
historical layers. The city’s medieval part, Krögel, was followed by a visit to
the new port Westhafen, a walk past Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum,
and views of late-nineteenth-century Wilhelminian architecture at Unter den
Linden. Friedrichstraße, Potsdamer Platz, Brandenburger Tor, the Reichstag,
Tiergarten, Kurfürstendamm, Schloss Charlottenburg, Funkturm, Stößensee,
and nally Potsdam followed, all according to the geographic logic. Organized
by the map, the sequencing did not deliver “bits” of a modern city, mimicking
the shocks of modernity. Rather than a series of points, Berlin in Bildern followed a line. As a result, the viewer experienced the city not as a fragmented
space and action but as a whole. By exercising the viewer’s eye, and this was
Stone’s particular adaptation of the New Vision, not a new angle of perspective
but a lost coherency and harmony could be discovered.
The rhythm of the walk through town was slow, as an antidote to a world
that imposed speed. In Stone’s Berlin there was plenty of time to rest, to contemplate. The photographs urged the viewers to think about an extended time
rather than just the instant of the exposure. They were taken to moments within
a journey when the wanderer paused and beheld. That is partly the result of
the smooth sequencing and of the static viewpoint. But the choice of subject
also has an important impact. The represented city, layered with time, triggered memory and slowed the pace. Walks in Tiergarten park or Charlottenburg were, moreover, preferred to a stroll along the Kurfürstendamm. This
16
Berlin in Pictures
preference for quiet places is emphasized throughout the book. Even the busiest places appear to be photographed during siesta on a tranquil Sunday afternoon. Instead of constant motion and ux, peace and quiet rule.
The absentness of people in the urban scenes of Berlin in Bildern is
remarkable: desolate night pictures of the Reichstag and the Kurfürstendamm,
a deserted palace, the idyllic shadow play of a tree in an alley, Krögel without its
proletarians, and Wannsee without its bathers. The legendary Avus offers a
deserted view, while the Funkturm is abandoned as well. When people do show
up, they are gathered as a community around a street merchant or a ower
seller, sweeping leaves together, clustered around children playing in a sandbox,
or leaving work. Stone’s amor vacui contrasted with the horror vacui that Kracauer observed in modern man: a metaphysical suffering the modern individual
experienced in the “empty space of existence,” in a life devoid of a higher meaning in God, tradition, or community.30 Stone’s photography suggested that a
unity and wholeness was still available in modern contemporary life. “Rather
than establishing boundaries around a principal body, landscape’s task,” Joseph
Leo Koerner writes in his study of Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic landscape painting, was “to establish continuities between bodies, to harness the
manifold into a unied whole.”31 The working method of nineteenth-century
Romantic landscape painters might also have been Stone’s. In his poignant
depiction of Bülow-Platz, where in the 1920s a new subway station was built,
people sit together on a bench around a tree (g. 5). It might have been an idyllic
village scene if not for the urban environment. On the left a U sign indicates the
subway, balanced on the far right by a glimpse of a horse-drawn carriage.
Forces of Nature
Stone’s photographic approach to the city had parallels with the ideas of modernist architecture as promoted in Das neue Berlin. As mentioned before,
Stone was a collaborator on the journal, and Adolf Behne, one of its editors,
was a well-known promoter of modernist architecture who wrote the introduction to Berlin in Bildern and helped edit the photobook.32 An additional indication of the commitment of Berlin in Bildern to modernist architecture was its
30. Kracauer, Mass Ornament, 129.
31. Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 97.
32. A short but nuanced description of Behne’s critical thinking can be found in Alan Colquhoun,
“Kunst und Selbstkritik in der deutschen Moderne,” in Moderne Architektur in Deutschland, 1900
bis 1950: Expressionismus und Neue Sachlichkeit, ed. Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani and Romana
Schneider (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1992), 251–69.
An Paenhuysen
17
Figure 5. “Bülow-Platz,” in Stone, Berlin in Bildern
dedication to Martin Wagner, one of the most inuential proponents of new
architecture in the 1920s, who coedited Das neue Berlin. In charge of Berlin’s
urban planning policy from 1926 until 1933, Wagner envisaged the German
capital as a metropolis of world signicance and favored demolishing older
parts of the city to create space for the new.33
As Anthony Vidler remarks, modernist architects of the 1920s wanted to
forget the old city in favor of a tabula rasa that restored the city to a natural
state: “The dispersed institutions of the new society would be scattered like
pavilions in a landscape garden.”34 In this utopia, empty spaces were preferred
to crowded ones. Transparency and spatial luxury were key.35 In Das neue
Berlin as well the main concern was not only how to transform Berlin into a
worldly metropolis: equally important was the question of how to preserve or
33. Ludovica Scarpa, Martin Wagner und Berlin: Architektur und Städtebau in der Weimarer
Republik (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1986).
34. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992), 179.
35. Steven Jacobs, “Amor Vacui: Photography and the Image of the Empty City,” History of
Photography 30, no. 2 (2006): 111–12.
18
Berlin in Pictures
restore its specic character or natural condition. Bruno Taut, for instance,
expressed those concerns in an article titled “Via London–Paris–New York–
New Berlin.” Typical of Berlin was, in his opinion, its rural appearance. Even
in its neon-lighted urban center, the city still possessed small-town features.
But especially in the outskirts, city and land intermingled happily. According
to Taut, Berlin’s unique mission was “to accelerate the transformation process toward a new mankind, that is, the inltration of the urban with the rural
and also the reverse, the cancellation of the contradiction between farmer and
urbanite, and the synthesis as an outcome.”36
The similarities with what Jeffrey Herf has called reactionary modernism are obvious. Although not inspired by a fervent nationalism, the urbanism
propagated by Das neue Berlin embraced not only new technology but also a
romantic, holistic idea of German society.37 Also in the photography of Berlin
in Bildern, technology was transferred from the realm of Western Zivilisation
into an organic Gemeinschaft. But unlike Das neue Berlin, Berlin in Bildern is
reconciled to the urban modernism of the existing city. One might discern in
this reconciliation a growing uncertainty at the end of the 1920s with the outcome of the modernist utopia. In fact, a closer look at Berlin in Bildern reveals
that its discourse goes off message. At certain points, the equilibrium between
nature and culture gets out of balance, and the division between Gesellschaft
(society) and Gemeinschaft is reestablished. Precisely at those moments, modernism is dropped altogether for a conservative tendency.
Again, the initial images of Berlin in Bildern are revealing. In this
respect, a comparison with the opening shots of Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City), which premiered in
September 1927, is telling.38 As in Stone’s photobook, Berlin plays the leading
role in Ruttmann’s lm. Both works also start by leaving the city itself out of
the picture. The rst shots of Die Sinfonie der Großstadt show only rippling
water. Subsequently, this unidentied water surface is superimposed by an
abstract pattern mimicking rippling water. With a sudden cut this hypnotizing
scenery is broken off by a train cutting in, heading toward the city. Technology
takes over and nature is subdued. In the rst shots of rippling water, Anton
36. Bruno Taut, “Via London–Paris–New York–Neu-Berlin,” Das neue Berlin, 1929, no. 2,
28–30. My translation.
37. See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar
and the Third Reich, 7th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
38. Stone designed the advertising for Ruttmann’s lm (Kühn, Neues Sehen in Berlin, 144).
An Paenhuysen
19
Kaes sees an association with “birth, fertility and the fountain of life,” symbolizing the primordial state of purity.39 In Berlin in Bildern, the opening shots
reverse the sequencing of Die Sinfonie der Großstadt. First, the power station
is shown in all its magnitude. Flipping the page, rippling water reaches, guratively speaking, to its ankles. It was a rst clue for the viewer of Berlin in Bildern that technology was not on the winning side in what would follow.
Berlin in Bildern is full of the element of water. The river Spree is a favorite topic, and so are lakes and fountains. Rain pours down regularly in Stone’s
Berlin, and even dry spaces like the subway glisten. At any moment a heavy
rainfall can wash away the ower sellers on Potsdamer Platz (g. 6). As it is,
their silhouettes in the puddles on the street are undistinguishable from the
shadows of pine trees in a lake. In the nal image of Berlin in Bildern, displayed on its own, water is, once again, brought to the fore. The reference to
the opening image cannot be ignored: a neoclassical “temple” with columns is
depicted in the middle of the greenery (g. 7). However, this Charlottenhof near
Potsdam does not resemble a nicely civilized park, although it probably was.
While Klingenberg’s smokestacks triumph on the rst page, the columns of the
closing image are enclosed on all sides by wild enveloping nature taking back,
so it seems, its rights. Trees and water frame the columns of Zivilisation.40
But nature’s dominance extended beyond the element of water. In the
visualization of Potsdamer Platz, for instance, the forests in and around Berlin
are closing in on the square (g. 6). Potsdamer Platz was one of the city’s main
arteries. The rst trafc signal tower in Europe was erected at the center of
its intersections in 1925.41 Together with Alexanderplatz, Potsdamer Platz
epitomized urban modernity, and thus it was not without reason that Adolf
Hitler, in his hatred for the modern city, would order the destruction of the
square.42 Stone’s depiction of Potsdamer Platz shows similarities with the
39. Anton Kaes, “Leaving Home: Film, Migration, and the Urban Experience,” New German
Critique, no. 74 (1998): 180.
40. See also Michael Jennings’s essay on Foto-Auge, Roh and Tschichold’s 1929 photobook,
normally seen as a dedication to the New Vision: “Agriculture, Industry, and the Birth of the PhotoEssay in the Late Weimar Republic,” October, no. 93 (2000): 23–56. Jennings notices that a pervasive guration of water characterized the images of Foto-Auge. Weimar society appeared threatened
with a watery extinction: “Nature’s revolt against the technological ends in its erasure of all culture”
(45). Foto-Auge had thus an apocalyptic undertone, and disbelief in technology reigned. Dystopia
instead of utopia was visualized.
41. This trafc signal tower of the 1920s has been reconstructed in the new Potsdamer Platz.
42. Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 103.
Figure 6. “Potsdamer Platz” and “Blumenfrauen am Potsdamer Platz,” in Stone, Berlin in
Bildern
An Paenhuysen
21
Figure 7. “Charlottenhof bei Potsdam,” in Stone, Berlin in Bildern
pictorial portrayal of Brandenburger Tor by the German expressionist artist
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in 1929. In Kirchner’s painting the luxuriant forest in
and around Berlin appears, as Durst notices in Weimar Modernism, to have
joined forces with Tiergarten park to take hold of the triumphal arch.43 Its
passing cars and pedestrians are drawn back into the bowels of nature. The
same impression is evoked by Stone’s depiction of Potsdamer Platz. The picture is cropped in such a way that the square’s impressive buildings are totally
disregarded (and the people in the foreground of the “original” photograph are
cropped away). In no other depiction of Potsdamer Platz in the Weimar period
did the square ever appear so “green.”
While no Weimar photographer seemed to pass Potsdamer Platz without taking a snapshot of the renowned entertainment palace Haus Vaterland, it
43. Durst, Weimar Modernism, xix, xx. On Kirchner and his depiction of Berlin, see Charles
Haxthausen, “A New Beauty: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Images of Berlin,” in Berlin: Culture and
Metropolis, ed. Charles Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1990), 58–94.
22
Berlin in Pictures
was simply ignored in Berlin in Bildern. What did feature in the photograph
of Potsdamer Platz was, strangely enough, Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s small
Doric temple, built in the 1820s as a gatehouse, and denitely an anachronistic element of this key junction of the modern city. The trafc signal tower
hardly peeks out above the trees, which mark the frame for the viewer. Intersecting in the picture’s four corners, they impart the strong feeling that it will
take only a second before the square is overgrown with greenery. Nature’s
revolt is closing the curtains on the modern city. The inclusion, once again, of
Doric columns appears to give the message that Zivilisation needs to be nipped
in the bud.
The supremacy of nature’s elemental forces played a role in several writings of leftist artists and intellectuals in the last years of the Weimar Republic. In Bertolt Brecht’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Rise and Fall
of the City of Mahagonny, 1927), a typhoon threatened to destroy a ctional
city, built on sand in a California desert, that clearly referred to Berlin, the
most American of European cities.44 As long as money was provided, one was
allowed to do anything in Mahagonny: drink, gamble, watch a prize ght, have
sex. An approaching typhoon would, however, bring an end to this hedonistic,
capitalist lifestyle. Mahagonny seemed doomed: the panicked citizens reacted
with distress, but the typhoon bypassed the city. The confusion nature could
evoke in the city was also registered by Benjamin in Einbahnstraße (for whose
cover Stone designed a photomontage). The relation between city and land had
changed, Benjamin noticed, in a troubling way. In the traditional city the distinction between center and periphery was clear-cut: the city walls both held
back and revealed nature. The metropolis, on the contrary, was, Benjamin
wrote, “breached at all points by the invading countryside. Not by the landscape, but by what in untrammeled nature is the most bitter: ploughed land,
highways, night sky that the veil of vibrant redness no longer conceals.”45
Similar thoughts were expressed by the Marxist intellectual Ernst Bloch
in his essay “Berlin, as Viewed from the Landscape” of 1932. He attributed to
Berlin a unique relation to undomesticated nature. For Bloch, “the natural
factor” did not disappear in modern Berlin but remained “nearby in the form
of one’s own body and in every raw material . . . in the vast potting soil around
the plant of humanity, in the sustaining, surrounding structure of the earth.”
44. When the opera premiered in Leipzig in 1930 with music by Kurt Weill, the Nazis instigated a public uproar.
45. Benjamin, One-Way Street, 78.
An Paenhuysen
23
The forested areas in and around Berlin imposed limitations on the city and
communicated something “extrasocial” to the city and its dwellers.46
Heimat
In a sense, Berlin in Bildern was a reactionary project that inspired a nostalgic longing for a preindustrial, agricultural utopia essentially at odds with
the modern world of early-twentieth-century Europe. Although Berlin in Bildern was the work of the new medium of photography and its style frequently
could be attributed to the New Vision, it did not visualize a future-oriented
and modern society. The effect the photography of Berlin in Bildern could
entail for its contemporaries in those nal years of the Weimar Republic can,
in conclusion, be illustrated with another photobook, titled Deutschland,
Deutschland über Alles (Germany, Germany above All ) and also published
in 1929. Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles was a “picture book” in which
texts of Kurt Tucholsky were combined with images of different photographers. The “montage” was put together by John Hearteld. At the time of publication, Tucholsky had left Berlin for Paris, and his relationship with Germany was, at the very least, a troubled one. Deutschland, Deutschland über
Alles was not his rst encounter with photography. In the 1920s he had already
published several critical essays on the medium. But it was the rst time he
used photography as an instrument in his critical writings.47
Tucholsky and Hearteld’s photobook was controversial. Although initiated by Willi Münzenberg, a leading propagandist of the Communist Party
of Germany and the editor of the weekly Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, it also
gained popularity on the political right because of its vicious attacks on the
Weimar Republic. But it must have been just as pleasing to the Right that the
photobook’s underlying discourse put the modern Weimar city and its politics
in clear opposition to the German rural landscape. The critique, both visual
and textual, touched on different facets of the Weimar city. The city failed to
represent itself and to communicate its power visually, so it was argued. It was
still characterized by the remnants of the previous regime, which showed that
46. Ernst Bloch, “Berlin, as Viewed from the Landscape,” in Literary Essays, trans. Andrew
Joron et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 365.
47. On Tucholsky and his essays on photography, see Hans J. Becker, Mit geballter Faust: Kurt
Tucholskys “Deutschland, Deutschland ueber alles” (Bonn: Bouvier, 1978); Anton Kaes, “Tucholsky und die Deutschen: Anmerkungen zu ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,’” Text und Kritik,
no. 29 (1985): 12–23; and An Paenhuysen, “Kurt Tucholsky, John Hearteld, and Deutschland,
Deutschland über Alles,” History of Photography 33 (2009): 39–54.
24
Berlin in Pictures
the old power was left intact. Not only buildings as such but also door signs or
ornaments pointed that out. Stucco was plastered on Kurfürstendamm shop
facades while their interiors were left untouched; another example, according
to Tucholsky, of the “as if” pretense of the Weimar Republic.
In short, the contemporary city evoked disgust and an air of demise.
Only at one point was Tucholsky able to reconcile himself to the city, and that
was when he contemplated a photograph by Stone that was also published
in Berlin in Bildern. It was a subterranean image of the subway, which, like the
power station and the airplane, symbolized Berlin’s modernization in the
1920s (g. 8). Different aspects of the picture might have inspired Tucholsky in
his contemplation. There was the underground’s darkness, which Benjamin
attributed to “the invading countryside.” There was the reection of neon light,
which according to an article in Das neue Berlin hindered people’s orientation
in space.48 And there was a glistening lm of water that appeared to cover the
platform. In any case, studying this picture, Tucholsky saw the city disappear
and a lost landscape resurface:
It doesn’t look like this at all—only the photographer ever sees it
like this.
It does look like this. It doesn’t.
You don’t see the subway station if the train has just pulled in, if you’re
in a hurry, if you’re riding with a pretty woman. You only see it when you’re
bored and forced to wait for the next train. Then the tired eye stares, halfconscious, at the advertisements—Chlorodol—the car in the social register—
scrub your feet with Abrador—you see everything and nothing.
You see the subway, and perhaps the whole huge city, the way the
photographer saw it, only once.
When you suddenly sense what it is you live inside. A landscape.
There can be a special moment when you experience the city like a forest,
like mountains, like the sea. You’ll see the subway lights reected in the
bright tiles and for a moment feel something almost romantic—you can smell
subway, and feel the big city in your veins. Then the black tunnel becomes
a strange tube inhabited by giants, and the stone walls and the hundred rolling cars that you hear only faintly, all seem to press down on you: you know
you’re in a cellar. But the feeling passes very quickly. And you’re standing
at Kloster Street Station again, carefully feeling for your ticket. You hope
you haven’t already lost it.49
48. Hans H. Reinsch, “Psychologie der Lichtreklame,” Das neue Berlin, 1929, no. 9, 154.
49. John Hearteld and Kurt Tucholsky, Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles: A Picture Book,
trans. Anne Halley (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), 109.
An Paenhuysen
25
Figure 8. “Untergrundbahnhof Inselbrücke,” in Stone, Berlin in Bildern
The symbiosis between city and landscape was brief. Only in the last chapter,
titled “Heimat,” did Tucholsky show a Germany he approved of, and that was
the rural Germany:
Now at least we want to say Yes. Yes, to the landscape and to the land,
Germany. . . . If you can hear the music of the mountains and feel the
rhythm of a landscape—No, it’s enough, really, just to feel that you’ve come
home—that this is your country, your mountain, your lake, even though
you do not own a single foot of ground. This is a feeling separate from all
politics, and it is out of this feeling that we love this land.50
But the loss of landscape was in the modern world inevitable. When, at its ending, Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles displayed an image of a train speeding toward the viewer, he or she could only react with fear, terror, and panic.
50. Ibid., 220–21.