The month could be encapsulated in the activities of the last day. 31.01.2023.
We visited, for the first time, the Humboldt Forum, the name given to what largely inhabits the lavish construction that goes by the name of the Schloss. Schloss translates as palace but there’s another German word Palast. And in the GDR it was the Palast der Republik (palace of the republic, the German Democratic Republic that is) that stood on this selfsame site.
So on this one piece of land buildings have appeared, then disappeared – only to reappear again. In a chronology it would look something like this:
1443 – 1918 Stadtschloss: Palace lived in by monarchs
1918 – The monarchy abdicate at end of WW1 and after 400 years of residence,
1918 – 1945 – Stadtschloss building used for state functions/museum
1945 – Stadtschloss bombed and largely destroyed
1950 – Stadtschloss completely demolished by GDR government.
1950 – 1973 – Marx-Engels Platz established, parade ground.
1973 – The building of the Palast der Republik begins
1990 – After the end of the GDR, Palast der Republik gutted to remove asbestos then the shell is used as an alternative, experimental arts venue.
2006 – Complete demolition of Palast der Republik starts.
2008 – 2013 – Grassed area called Schlossplatz.
2013 – building of new/old Schloss begins.
2022 – new/old Schloss completed, no monarchy resident but a strong lobbyist behind the construction is from a royal lineage…
The old Schloss was first rendered redundant just after the end of the First World War when the whole of Germany became a republic, the Weimar Republic. The old monarchy was ousted for good and there was an incipient revolution, then a kind of civil war resulting in a shaky social democracy with enormous social and political tumult, with forces on the monarchical right, the militaristic right, the revolutionary communist and social reformist all striving to change it. The times then were filled with street clashes and fervent meetings in all kinds of public spaces. The Schloss was just another old building. Then less than 30 years later, it and other grand buildings in central Berlin were completely or partly destroyed by aerial bombardment and/or shelling towards the end of WW2. The remains of the Schloss were then torn down in 1950 and the Palast der Republik erected. After reunification in 1990, the Palast was itself rendered defunct, was vacated but its shell lived on as alternative art space and there was a determined effort to see this transformation as an ongoing project in the heart of the city. Again there were disagreements and ultimately the Palast was oblierated and when I first arrived in Berlin in 2011, there was just a big grass space. One day, we visited the Dom (Berlin’s protestant cathedral) situated directly opposite this site and I saw from the viewpoint of the cupola, a large heart (etched in dew?) on the lush green expanse.
A few years later, they began building what is there now, a fake but extraordinary accurate replica of the old Schloss, mostly housing the Humboldt Forum
So there’s no monarch in the new/old palace now but there are artifacts from across the previously colonised globe when monarchies and empires (of the original kind) abounded. As always with visits to museums like this, I feel awe and gratitude that these artifacts have survived and are being offered to me to gaze and wonder at, but I also feel disquieted, wondering how they were dislodged from their original contexts and by whom.
As we only had time for a cursory visit, we chose to go up to a top floor exhibition of art and artifacts from Asia. On the way, we came across items on display that alluded to the pre-existing Palast. One was a large wall relief in bronze, depicting a crowd of human figures, all naked, walking forward towards us. The implied message of this was moving. Here we are, with nothing but our hopes and aspirations, together, no one excluded (there were young, old, male, female figures) open to a future we want to make in unity and solidarity. A plaque told us that the relief had been cut into several pieces on removal from the Palast, perhaps this was only a fraction of the size of the original.
The other item we saw on our way up was a small TV monitor, of the sort originally used for CCTV. It was, we were told by the accompanying text, one that had been employed in the Palast. Next to it, in a vitrine, was an example of an old camera, the sort of which had captured what was showing on the screen of the monitor. It seemed that not only footage but commentary had been kept from, allegedly, the Stasi team who had been directing the cameras and stating the objectives of who or what should be tracked. The grainy black and white footage showed a man waiting on the steps of the then Palast. The commentators seemed keen to observe where he was looking and who he was waiting for. When a couple joined him, more was said about his relative short height and then about the imperative of recording the licence plate of the car some of them got into. Rather than this being shocking and alien to our eyes, this display only served to emphasise to us, the proliferation of such surveillance in our current contexts. We had only to look around for a second to see a camera embedded in the ceiling behind and above our heads.
We got to the Asian art floor and due to pressure of time only really managed to view some of the Buddhist items. One was a rendition of a figure called Akshobya who is said to embody a wisdom which transforms hatred into insight. Most often depicted as deep blue in colour, here the figure was made out of clear crystal, suggesting someone there and not there, caught in the process of appearing and disappearing. Beautiful.
Appearing and disappearing, like the Schloss, like the Palast, like us in the building, like the cameras and the footage, like the day and the month.
Afterwards, we went to a peace rally, somewhat hastily organised by part of Die Linke, the left party, after the agreement to allow German tanks to be sent to Ukraine. We noticed on the way, that the flagpoles on top of the Altes Museum, which faces the Schloss across the Lustgarten, were flying German flags at half-mast. These flagpoles had, until recently, been flying Ukrainian flags. We were uncertain why the flags were at half-mast. At the rally there were more flags, not the national kind thankfully but ones with white doves and the odd one for the party organising it. We arrived just in time to hear the co-leader Janine Wissler speaking out against escalatory measures which mainly go to massively increase the profits of arms manufacturers such as Rheinmetall. The rally took place on Rosa Luxemburg Platz, named after a woman who certainly knew about opposing war and militarism. The Volksbühne building formed the backdrop.
The rally was short and afterwards we visited the soon to disappear peace camp situated behind the Dom. The camp wasn’t connected to the demo but was rather a independent venture. They had already managed 3 months but had been ordered to leave because they weren’t making enough noise they’d been told by the authorities, either literally through a megaphone or digitally via a podcast. The prominent positioning of placards with explanatory text, alternate white and planet earth logo bearing flags weren’t offering a loud enough message it was apparently felt. One of the peace activists told us that they could have had a lot more people there too, had they tolerated the drinking of alcohol. So actions for peace are appearing and disappearing in Berlin.
Later still we went back south, to Kreuzberg and watched the film The Triangle of Sadness, full of structures disappearing and appearing again.
On the way 