The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (38 page)

T
HAT DOESN’T SOUND
much like the prophecies, does it? But one should always be careful with prophecies. Engels knew that the fulfillment of his dreams could only come after a destructive revolution, and so did Le Corbusier, whose radiant city would have obliterated the cities of his own time. The New Jerusalem, they knew, could only appear at the Apocalypse.

But they forgot that every future is followed by another—that their blueprints for everlasting utopia would, like all plans, be cast aside in the pursuit of others they could not possibly foresee. It’s something the residents of Hulme found out again and again over the course of a century, as vision after vision was visited on them: crucible of revolution, modernist showcase, anarchist free-for-all, chemical paradise. Each of these is remembered with simultaneous nostalgia and horror by the people who were there.

“No future, no future,” the Sex Pistols sang in one of their biggest hits. But it was the Futurists who put it best.

The oldest of us is thirty: so we have at least a decade for finishing our work. When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to happen!

They will come against us, our successors, will come from far away, from every quarter, dancing to the winged cadence of their first songs, flexing the hooked claws of predators, sniffing doglike at the academy doors the strong odor of our decaying minds, which will have already been promised to the literary catacombs.

But we won’t be there . . . At last they’ll find us—one winter’s night—in open country, beneath a sad roof drummed by a monotonous rain. They’ll see us crouched beside our trembling aeroplanes in the act of warming our hands at the poor little blaze that our books of today will give out when they take fire from the flight of our images.

They’ll storm around us, panting with scorn and
anguish, and all of them, exasperated by our proud daring, will hurtle to kill us, driven by a hatred the more implacable the more their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us.

Injustice, strong and sane, will break out radiantly in their eyes.

Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.

The Futurists. It sounds like a band from Manchester, doesn’t it?

In Which History Comes to an End

H
ISTORY FOR
S
ALE
A young boy sells pieces of the Berlin Wall, Potsdam Square,
Berlin, 10 March 1990
.

The Parthenon is dissolving into the atmosphere, but preparations have been made for the conclusion of its story. Bernard Tschumi’s new museum at the foot of the Acropolis contains an empty space the same size as the temple, ready to receive its remains should it ever become necessary to transfer them indoors. This museum already houses all of the sculptures of the Parthenon that remain in Greece, and other plinths in it await the return of the marbles held in London and elsewhere. Once the temple has disappeared from its original location, its history will terminate in this mausoleum.

The prophets of modernism tried to push the future toward a definitive end, seeking a utopian solution to all human strivings. Marx and Engels, for their part, posited history as a dialectic: a battle of ideas in the process of progressive resolution, century by century, iteration by iteration.
The Architect’s Dream
is the very image of such a process, in which building follows building in a sequence of improvements, from the pharaoh’s authoritarian tomb to the cathedral made by the willing hands of inspired craftsmen. Once the final revolution had been enacted and the human condition perfected, history itself would come to an end. Then the architect could rest on his column and gaze upon a world made complete, in which nothing need ever change again.

History did come to an end of sorts, but not quite as the Marxists or the modernists had planned. The fall of the Berlin Wall on 10 November 1989 concluded what the historian Eric Hobsbawm calls “the little twentieth century,” which began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, ran through the horrors of the
trenches, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima, through Nuremberg and the Prague Spring, and finished in Berlin. The events of that night represent
the end of history
, a term invented by the political economist Francis Fukuyama. Democratic capitalism defeated autocratic communism, bringing the last great ideological conflict to a close once and for all.

But unlike the Hulme Crescents, the Berlin Wall, whose spectacular destruction marked Fukuyama’s “end of history,” was not obliterated. Indeed, as hated as it had been, the Wall soon took on something of the preciousness of the marble of the Parthenon, which dissolves and crumbles even as it is gathered. The strange afterlife of the Berlin Wall is the history of the end of history.

O
NCE UPON A TIME
, an obscure woman stood on an obscure street in an obscure corner of Berlin. In front of her, section after section of concrete slab stretched away in a space devoid of buildings and people.

The woman, who had hennaed hair, a broad face, a long black coat, and a cigarette in her mouth, stood on the cobbles looking to the West. She was scanning the concrete wall in front of her. Suddenly her eyes lit up, and she smiled. She waved at whatever, or whoever, she saw; then she glanced to the left and to the right, and her face fell. She turned on her heel with her head down and walked away, back East.

Ute had never seen the Antifascist Protection Rampart before. Although she lived only a few hundred yards away, her journey to it had been dangerous and had involved months of preparation. She was not meant to be there. She had no idea what was behind the Antifascist Protection Rampart—other than fascists, she supposed, if that was what it was meant to be protecting them from. Ute had a map of Berlin in which, beyond the rampart, there was only terra incognita. The rampart was the western horizon of the world, and on winter evenings whatever was behind it cast a baleful light into the sky, as if even the sunsets had been organized on the cheap by the border guards. No one walked up to, touched, or crossed over the Antifascist Protection Rampart. At least, no one did any of those things and ever came back to tell the tale.

O
NE BRIGHT SUNDAY
morning in 1961, a young officer of the German Democratic Republic put on a pair of walking boots. He packed his map, a bucket of white paint, and a paintbrush and headed toward the center of Berlin. Hagen Koch’s path began at the junction of Friedrichstrasse and Zimmerstrasse, and a crowd soon gathered there to watch him. He took out his can of white paint and the
paintbrush, dipped the brush into the can of paint, and began a line on the cobbles.

Hagen Koch was drawing a new meridian, a new equator, a new edge of the world, at which one ideological, political, economic, social, historical system came to an end and another began. The line he had painted was the line of the Berlin Wall.

The government of the German Democratic Republic issued a pamphlet that attempted to answer questions about the Wall for those who might happen to be curious.

Did the wall fall out of the sky?

No. It was the result of developments of many years’ standing in

West Germany and West Berlin.

Did the wall have to come?

Yes and no . . . The wall had to come because they (the West) were bringing about the danger of a conflict. Those who do not want to hear, must feel.

What did the wall prevent?

We no longer wanted to stand by passively and see how doctors, engineers, and skilled workers were induced by refined methods unworthy of the dignity of man to give up their secure existence in the GDR and work in West Germany or West Berlin . . . But we prevented something much more important with the wall: West Berlin’s becoming the starting point for a military conflict. The measures we introduced on 13 August in conjunction with the Warsaw Treaty states have cooled off a number of hotheads in Bonn and West Berlin. For the first time in German history the match which was to set fire to another war was extinguished before it had fulfilled its purpose.

Was peace really threatened?

It (the protective wall of the GDR) served the cause of world peace since it halted the advance of the German neo-Hitlerites toward the east.

Who is walled in?

According to the exceedingly intelligent explanations of the West Berlin Senate we have walled ourselves in and are living in a concentration
camp . . . Does something not occur to you? West Berlin mayor Brandt wails that half of the GDR, including the workers in the enterprise militia groups, is armed. What do you think of a concentration camp whose inmates have weapons in their hands?

Who breaks off human contacts?

Of course, it is bitter for many Berliners not to be able to visit each other at present. But it would be more bitter if a new war were to separate them for ever.

Does the wall threaten anyone?

Bonn propaganda describes the wall as a “monstrous evidence of the aggressiveness of world communism.” Have you ever considered it to be a sign of aggressiveness when someone builds a fence around his property?

Who is aggravating the situation?

The wall? It stands there quite calmly.

Is the wall a gymnastic apparatus?

The wall is the state frontier of the German Democratic Republic. The state frontier of a sovereign state must be respected. That is so the world over. He who does not treat it with respect cannot complain if he comes to harm.

So that was why the line had been drawn. It protected the Socialist Workers’ Paradise of the German Democratic Republic from the rest of the world.