The Streets Echoed with Chants: The Urban Experience of Post-War West Berlin by Laura Bowie (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Streets Echoed with Chants: The Urban Experience of Post-War West Berlin by Laura Bowie Paul Steege Bowie, Laura–The Streets Echoed with Chants: The Urban Experience of Post-War West Berlin. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022. 300 p. In September 1968, West Berlin’s biannual Bauwochen (building weeks) celebrated the opening of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s modernist Neue Nationalgalerie and gave visitors an opportunity to tour “the most beautiful post-war … locations” in the city (p. 14). Skeptical opponents organized a kind of “anti-Bauwochen” whose most notable achievement was an exhibition that sought to “diagnose” the problems in West Berlin’s postwar (re)construction. Laura Bowie’s new book focuses on the organizers of this exhibition, the members of Aktion 507. This collection of [End Page 195] architecture students and assistants at West Berlin’s Technical University “mapped intellectual sources onto aspects of the lived experiences of city-dwellers to support their analysis” (p. 166), and those connections shaped the form and content of their work. Taking its name from the seminar room (number 507) of Professor Oswald Mathias Ungers, Aktion 507 offers a compelling means to reframe a transnational student movement within the “micro-politics of everyday spaces of West Berlin” (p. 22). Bowie explicitly locates Aktion 507’s Diagnose exhibition within a “timeline of global events” (pp. xxiii–xxiv) that runs from June 2, 1967—when West Berlin police shot and killed the student Benno Ohnesorg during a protest against the visit of the Shah of Iran—to October 31, 1968—when US President Lyndon Johnson announced an end to the bombardment of North Vietnam. Located in an unfinished building designed by Hans Scharoun to house the Technical University’s Urban Development Institute, the exhibition ran from September 8–20, 1968. Its published manifesto (rather more than a catalogue), as well as visual and personal documentation of the event anchor Bowie’s analysis, and she weaves in these materials throughout the book. Its 77 figures, published in a mix of colour and black and white, richly complement the text. Bracketed by an introduction and a “post-mortem” (Chapter 10), the nine remaining chapters are divided into three sections: “The Present,” “The Past,” and “The Future.” Part I wrestles with the “present” reconstruction of West Berlin, the evolving efforts to cope with post-Second World War destruction and the implications of urban planning policies that demolished housing stock in the city centre and constructed new high-rise housing in the city’s outskirts. The chapters of Part II take on the multilayered theoretical engagement with Germany’s Nazi past and the ways that past remained a (neglected) part of Berlin’s urban cityscape. The final three chapters tackle the ways that student protest tied together critiques of West Berlin’s housing conditions, the trajectory of the discipline of architecture, and Nazism’s authoritarian residue in order to articulate specific revolutionary visions for the city’s future. Hinrich Baller, one member of Aktion 507, retrospectively described this effort to translate theory into praxis as a kind of “visionary pragmatism” (p. 265). Central to Aktion 507’s 1968 diagnosis of the social and material contexts that underlay the lived experience of West Berlin was the Märkisches Viertel (MV) housing development, constructed in the northernmost reaches of West Berlin beginning in 1963. Initial plans drew on international modernist inspirations, such as those that had shaped the city’s International Building Exhibition in 1957, and imagined apartment towers surrounded by ample green spaces, schools, daycare, and other community facilities. Planners turned to a variety of architects, and their variable designs for individual apartments as well as the use of colour to differentiate the buildings aimed to offer an alternative to the “grey Alltag [everyday]” (p. 71) of Berlin’s postwar environment. When interviewed by members of Aktion 507, however, MV residents denounced the development as a “grey hell” (p. 74) for which the addition of external colour changed nothing. In an effort to cope with growing housing demand, the scale of the development expanded dramatically in the midst of construction. Buildings that O. M. Ungers had planned for three to [End Page 196] six stories...