A look at Germany and Europe these days reveals regions full of fractures. Seemingly long united regions are radically diverging. Supposedly clear civilizational agreements are being thrown overboard with verve. Life models and value systems are drifting apart everywhere. Of course, this is currently most radically evident in the refugee debates and their dregs, the attacks on asylum seekers and their shelters. Here, as […]
A look at Germany and Europe these days reveals regions full of fractures. Seemingly long united regions are radically diverging. Supposedly clear civilizational agreements are being thrown overboard with verve. Life models and value systems are drifting apart everywhere.
Of course, this is currently most radically evident in the refugee debates and their dregs, the attacks on asylum seekers and their accommodation. Here, as in the XYZ-egida demonstrations, we can see how poorly defined the foundations of our coexistence are. For the time being, we can forget about the idea of a civilizational unity that has been realized once and for all in Germany, but even more so in Europe as a whole. As bitter as this realization is. Where we thought there was unity, there are countless front lines – and new ones are constantly being constructed.
Against this backdrop, it seems rather prescient that the curator of the next Architecture Biennale, Alejandro Aravena, will be holding his 2016 discourse event under the title “Reporting from the Front”. Together with Biennale director Paolo Baratta, Aravena has now announced this in Venice. The curator is concerned with the “front lines of the built environment”. It can be assumed that the Chilean will initially look for these in emerging countries such as Chile, Brazil or India. But the events of recent days show that we don’t need to look that far to discover spatial frontlines. I have already referred to the refugee home as a structural statement of struggle (and increasingly contested territory). In a more fundamental sense, however, urban space as a whole is a zone of permanent, not always peaceful conflict. It is not for nothing that the term “no-go areas” is circulating.
With regard to the front lines that (still and repeatedly) divide Germany as a whole, it can be stated: These are, even if we didn’t want to admit it for a long time, more powerful than ever. Sigmar Gabriel is right when he speaks of spatially constituted areas of darkness, of “dark Germany”. However, this does not mean East Germany, and that was not Gabriel’s intention. What is clear is that there are micro-spaces in which any thought of culture, civilization and the aesthetics of life seem out of place. Right-wing extremist regulars’ tables, for example. Parties such as the NPD aim to expand them on a large scale. The regulars’ table thus becomes a spatial principle. And once the common neo-Nazi gets going with his programmes of nationalist cleansing of towns and villages, the end result is likely to be deculturalized banal spaces of collective mindlessness. Dark Germany as a perverse political goal.
This is also the specific tragedy of the refugee haters. The fact that they know exactly what they don’t want (namely all foreigners). But they don’t have a clue as to what should actually characterize the regions they want to “clean up”. Neither economically, politically, aesthetically – or even architecturally. In a globalized world, they would be spaces without identity. Therein lies the absurdity of the Pegidaists: they talk a lot about national identity, but their fear-driven hysteria is an expression of a lack of identity. The lack of one’s own gives birth to hatred of the foreign.
And that also has something to do with East and West Germany. Of course, it is too easy to say that the hatred of refugees is limited to the (no longer quite so) “new” federal states. It’s not, keyword Salzhemmendorf. But it does seem to occur more frequently than average in the east, as the journalist and refugee expert Olaf Sundermeyer recently reported on Maischberger. And I interpret this as the result of an identity crisis that is not originally East German, but is perhaps more pronounced there. Regional self-descriptions are becoming fragile in the wake of postmodern globalization – everywhere. And parts of the East do not have an identity that can counter this erosion process as robustly as, say, Upper Bavaria. (Which is not to say that the Bavarian folk soul is particularly close to me. But it is strong).
Perhaps this was not possible in any other way after the fall of communism. Where should the identity-forming “great stories” in Lyotard’s sense have come from in the face of a culture that was unanimously understood at the time as the result of a political aberration and was accordingly consistently unwound? The turnaround happened the way it did. But we should have the courage not to deny the possibility of more fragile identities in East German regions from the outset for reasons of political correctness.
This is not an original architectural consideration. Nor do I believe that the identity crisis I have described can be solved by architectural or urban planning means. But perhaps it helps to formulate it as a problem. And I could imagine that against this backdrop, for example, the architecture-related winner mentality with which East German flagship buildings such as the Palace of the Republic were flattened would appear in a more problematic light. Because this opened up further “front lines” that were not needed.
