Heart Of Berlin Research Articles

PLANLAR, SINIRLAR VE ÜTOPYALAR ARASINDA BIR BOŞ ALAN: TEMPELHOFER FELD

This article is about the huge emptiness of the Tempelhof Field, which was an airport before. In the heart of Berlin, free from its historical past, it remains a dysfunctional, passive but an enormous area. In this article, the potential future of the Tempelhof Field, which is debated by both formal and informal actors, will be discussed in relation to Lefebvre's spatial triad regarding perceived, lived and conceived spaces in capitalist societies. The dialectic relations among these three make the field a product produced from above and below. In this study, the Tempelhof Field will be examined and read as an “empty signifier” through the concepts of use and exchange value of space and as well as the right to the city.

Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany

Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany

My Germany in 2017: a resilient country that is taking responsibility

My Germany in 2017: a resilient country that is taking responsibility

The Boys in the Boat: An Epic Journey to the Heart of Hitler's BerlinDanielJames Brown. London: Pan Books, 2013.

The Journal of American CultureVolume 39, Issue 1 p. 115-116 Book Review The Boys in the Boat: An Epic Journey to the Heart of Hitler's Berlin , Daniel James Brown. London: Pan Books, 2013. Laurence Raw, Laurence Raw Başkent UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Laurence Raw, Laurence Raw Başkent UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 07 March 2016 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12496Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume39, Issue1Special Issue Theme: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Influences on American Culture Guest Edited by Bruce E. Drushel and Joseph H. Hancock, IIMarch 2016Pages 115-116 RelatedInformation

Review: Neo-historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic, 1970–1990 by Florian Urban

Florian Urban. Neo-historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic, 1970–1990 . Farnham, England, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2009, x + 294 pp., 94 b/w illus., and 3 diagrams. $124.95, ISBN 9780754676164 For most of its existence, the German Democratic Republic was committed to mass-produced housing, pragmatic modernism, and socialist universalism. Having built a sea of prefab high-rises and slabs, during the 1970s the government turned to neohistorical architecture and the renovation of historical neighborhoods, especially in the capital, Berlin. In Neo-historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic, 1970–1990 , Florian Urban offers the first systematic exploration of this paradox.1 The explanation, he suggests, lies in a mixture of pragmatism, provisional decisions that were later amplified into lasting policy, and shifting cultural attitudes. The paradox might have been only apparent, as Urban argues that neohistoricism was not always antipodal to modernism. What Urban calls neohistorical architecture comprises refurbishment, reconstruction, and new structures. His examples are showcase projects located in the center of the city, all somehow exceptional: spaces aimed at tourism, or at representing the GDR to an international public, or located in areas famous for their vibrant alternative culture. The resulting buildings and neighborhoods do not necessarily abide by visual or material authenticity, but rather evoke a “historical character” or “feel” through the use of past architectural forms and the staging of history “in period shops and restaurants”(74). The most notorious example is the Nikolaiviertel, a patch of winding streets and old-looking buildings, which Urban calls a “prefab old town” in reference to the concrete plates used in a large portion of the reconstruction. The area was at the heart of medieval Berlin, but most of it lay in ruins in the postwar era—including the Nikolaikirche, one of Berlin’s oldest structures. The Nikolaiviertel’s central location and history made it attractive to the GDR government not only as a site for tourism, but also to boost claims to German national …

Preface: Phys. Status Solidi C 2/2012

AbstractThe present issue of physica status solidi contains papers presented at the 38th International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors (ISCS 2011). The symposium was held May 22–26, 2011 at the Maritim proArte Hotel in Berlin, Germany.Following the great success in Takamatsu, Japan, the “38th International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors (ISCS 2011)” was again held co‐located with the “23rd International Conference on Indium Phosphide and Related Materials (IPRM 2011)“ under the umbrella of the “Compound Semiconductor Week 2011”.The symposium is one in an annual series, which has in the past rotated between North America, Europe and Asia. The last three conferences were held in Takamatsu, Japan (2010), Santa Barbara, USA (2009) and Rust, Germany (2008). The history of the symposium goes back to 1966 when the first “International Symposium on GaAs and Related Compounds” took place in Reading, England.The scope of the meeting includes both science and technology and the entire spectrum of III–V and II–VI compound semiconductors as well as SiGe, SiC and carbon related materials. Eight program sub‐committees, covered crystal growth and deposition techniques, oxides and carbon related materials, micro‐ and nanotechnologies, simulation and characterization, light emitters and detectors, high frequency and high power electronics, novel device concepts as well as sensors and actuators.The Compound Semiconductor Week 2011 attracted more than 460 participants from all over the world. A total of 370 papers were presented, including 3 joint plenary talks. Over the course of ISCS 2011, a total of 17 invited papers, 102 oral contributions and 120 poster presentations were given.The conference was opened with a plenary session by the Nobel prize winner 2010, Andre Geim from Manchester University, highlighting the current research on “Graphene”. Following his excellent talk, Connie Chang‐Hasnain, University of California, Berkeley, presented her pioneering research work on “Nanolasers on Silicon for Chip‐Scale Optoelectronics”. In a very interesting plenary talk on the future of optoelectronic communication, Meint Smit, Eindhoven University presented his view on “A New Era for InP‐based Photonic Integration”.We would like to thank all of the participants of ISCS 2011 for contributing to the success of the meeting and hope that you enjoyed the lively discussions with your colleagues as well as the atmosphere in the very heart of Berlin. We acknowledge the excellent work of the program committee, under the chair of Nicolas Grandjean and thank the referees of the manuscripts for their work.Finally, we extend our thanks to the VDE Association for Electrical, Electronic and Information Technologies and to the organizing committees from the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics and the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications.The 39th International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors, chaired by Pallab Bhattacharya from the University of Michigan, will be held on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara from August 27–30, 2012.Freiburg, December 2011

Everything is What it is, and Not Another Thing: Knowledge and Freedom in Isaiah Berlin's Political Thought

Although Isaiah Berlin's critique of positive liberty has achieved canonical status, its place within his wider political philosophy remains obscure. However, the re-publication of one of his most important philosophical essays, From Hope and Fear Set Free, as part of a new edition of Four Essays on Liberty, simply entitled Liberty, has opened the door to a re-evaluation of Berlin's political project. At the heart of Berlin's argument, which gains its fullest expression in From Hope and Fear Set Free, stands his contention that positive liberty, in its incarnation as self-realisation, conflates liberty with knowledge, which leads to the distortion of our phenomenologically inescapable structure of experience. This transgression against the conceptual framework in terms of which we think, Berlin argues, played its desolate part in linking the ‘totalitarian temptation’ latent in liberty as self-realisation with the totalitarian politics of the mid-twentieth century.

POTSDAMER PLATZ - MYTEN OM MIDTEN

POTSDAMER PLATZThe city square has been the organising centre for urban development in the western world, but the history of Berlin can be told as a quest narrative, the search for such an organising centre. This article tells the story of Potsdamer Platz, which can be viewed as the centre of the Prussian (and later German) capital. In the age of the Baroque Potsdamer Platz was connected to one of the new geometrical squares (an Octogon), which emphasised the aristocratic order. In the age of Romanticism the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel used it in his efforts to reshape the city as a panoramic cityscape. In the Weimar Republic Potsdamer Platz gained a mythical status. It became the symbol of Berlin as a “world city”; and writers, painters and filmmakers excelled in artistic comments on this symbol. The Wall put an end to the glorious history of this “heart of Berlin”, but shortly after 1989 planners and politicians embarked on a project to make the city’s heart beat once again. In the age of Postmodernism, however, the city square has become a history of making exteriors into interiors, of replacing the physical space by mediated space, of “Disneyfication”; and as this article shows, this tendency also characterises the new and renewed Potsdamer Platz.

Digging through the Heart of Reunified Berlin: Unbundling the Decision-Making Process for the Tiergarten-Tunnel Mega-Project

The Berlin Tiergarten tunnel project (VZB) consisted of a joint planning approval procedure for one road and several rail tunnels (inter-city, metro rail and city subway). The tunnels lead through the heart of re-unified Berlin, starting at the site of the new Central Railway Station, cutting underneath the River Spree and the new Federal government quarter, as well the Tiergarten Park and the new entertainment complexes at Potsdamer Platz. This paper traces the decision-making processes for this crucial post-Berlin Wall mega-project, and raises important questions regarding optimistic forecasts, cost overruns, the role of prestige in large infrastructure projects, and the limits of public review procedures. It provides particular insights into a complex case where multiple urban transport mega-projects were bundled together for joint approval and implementation.

Das Jacob-und- Wilhelm-Grimm- Zentrum der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

The whole construction of the Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum was based on a single concept. In an essayistic fashion, it is explored how its main ideas shaped the project and influenced the architecture of Humboldt-Universitat's new central library. Against this background the new building at the heart of Berlin is described and evaluated.

Memory and Mourning in Berlin: on Peter Eisenman's Holocaust-Mahnmal (2005)

In the heart of Berlin, on what was once the Ministergarten, now stands a memorial so gigantic and abstract that it demands not simply notice but also interpretation as metaphor, especially because it lacks signage (figure 1). Courting mystery by design, its title and purpose are presented and explained solely in cellar, off to a corner. The monument is neither arch nor column, wall or plaque, but a hilly yard of concrete stelae—all grayish in color and glossed to a shine. While severe and angular, this edifice suggests stands of grain, bowing under the forces of weather; waves crashing over dunes, or the bed of an ocean, rutted and jagged in shape as the glacier once created it; alternatively the topography of a city, a relic perhaps. Yet the work, by American-Jewish architect Peter Eisenman, based in New York City’s Flatiron District, was commissioned to commemorate genocide. It is the Denkmal fur die ermordeten Juden Europas, or Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, there to honor the Jews—between five and six million—who at the hands of Nazis and their allies, in Germany and elsewhere, suffered death in the ‘‘Holocaust’’ of 1933–1945. The artist, born in 1932 (educated at Cornell University and the University of Cambridge, U.K.), allows however that ‘‘people walk by and they do not know what it is.’’ A man of wry smiles and sundry hats, Eisenman does not mind such bafflement. He treasures ambiguity and contradiction in art,

Memory and History in Germany

If Canada is famously said to have more geography than history, Germany has more history than geography. What Canada really lacks, though, is not history but memory. Survey after survey shows how little Canadians know about the people and events that have shaped them. We do not teach our history and we do not celebrate our founders. It has made us a nation of amnesiacs, blissfully ignorant of our past, stumbling about in a poetic fog.The same cannot be said of Germany. Memory matters here. If Germany has too much history, which may well be true, it is trying to overcome it. This is particularly so in its public memory, a byword for presenting the past in monuments, memorials, and museums. Or, put differently, how society remembers, what it remembers, and who it remembers. Materially, we measure this in the exhibitions in museums, the signs on buildings, the statues in parks. All reflect a people's self-understanding.Germany is obsessive about its past. There may be no country that is more committed to writing its history in bricks and mortar. And there may be no city more committed than Berlin, its storied capital where so much of that history was made. It is a layered history, divided into periods going back generations. It begins with the monarch s of imperial Germany, represented in the royal palaces, gardens, and statutes of Potsdam and Charlottenburg, and the art and treasures of the five magnificent institutions of Museum Island, collections that are being restored and unified at great cost. Of interest here, though, is the last 90 years: the Weimar Republic (1918-33); national socialism (1933-45); the Cold War (1945-89); and reunification to the present. All are represented in Berlin in eclectic ways.This is especially true when it comes to marking the Holocaust. Nothing is more painful to Germans than the mechanized murder of the European Jews, and nothing is more fundamental to its public memory. While this genocide was a signal event for Germany and humanity, too, it does not necessarily ensure that it will be remembered that way - or even remembered at all - in the place it originated. Children do not always recognize the sins of their parents, let alone atone for them. Indeed, there are countries guilty of atrocities in the last century that have made little effort to address their past. They remain silent, ignoring or even denying it. Their museums do not address the big questions; if they do, they disparage or distort them. They have few memorials or monuments. This is generally true of Japan, Russia, and Austria, each of which sees itself as victim more than perpetrator.Not so Germany. If what the Germans did in the Second World War was unique in its size and horror, their commitment to remember it is unique in its depth and honesty. Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame? asks Avi Primor, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany. Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility. His incredulity is real. It has led essayist Wolf Jobst Siedler to suggest that if Germans were once world-class sinners, they are now worldclass penitents.How do the Germans remember? They make big statements, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which opened in 2005. It fills some eight acres in the heart of Berlin, in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, close by Unter den Linden, the city's historic boulevard. Its 2 711 square, dark-grey pillars of differing heights evoke the dense tombstones of Prague's ancient Jewish cemetery. While there is nothing identifiably Jewish about where the memorial sits, it is at the centre of things, not on the periphery. Nor is it small or understated. The Holocaust memorial is a stark expression of a nation's shame.More than a monument, it chronicles the Holocaust. Photographs, letters, and stories here illuminate history's darkest moment. This is reinforced a few blocks away in the Jewish Museum of Berlin. …

C&EN in Europe

I FIRST VISITED BERLIN in the summer of 1991 to cover an international AIDS conference for C&EN. The Berlin Wall had fallen only a year-and-a-half earlier, and the city, especially the former eastern sector, was in a frenzy of development. I visited Berlin for the second time just a few weeks ago on my way to Milan to attend CPhI. What a difference 18 years makes! Signs of the division of the city have been almost obliterated. The city’s center of gravity seems to have shifted back to Unter den Linden, the grand boulevard that was the traditional heart of Berlin until it was walled off as part of East Berlin. Running off of Unter den Linden, Wilhelmstrasse and Friedrichstrasse are chic shopping avenues that rival the Kurfurstendamm in the western part of the city. The area around the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament building, has been transformed since Berlin became the reunified nation’s capital. To the ...

Tanks at Checkpoint Charlie: Lucius Clay and the Berlin Crisis, 1961–62

The stand-off of Soviet and American tanks in the heart of Berlin in October 1961 constituted the most dangerous moment of the Cold War in Europe. It has been attributed to unnecessarily confrontational policies of General Lucius D. Clay, who served as President Kennedy's Special Representative in Berlin. This article assesses how the crisis evolved from the Berlin Wall to the tank confrontation. It centres on the role of General Clay, his communication with Washington, and his activities in Berlin. This is a study of the process by which US government policy was translated into diplomatic and military action. The article concludes that the resulting combination of force and diplomacy is crucial to understanding the crisis management of John F. Kennedy.

Ambient Power: Berlin's Potsdamer Platz and the Seductive Logic of Public Spaces

In privatised public spaces where people mill around and cross over one another's paths in largely unforeseen ways, one could be forgiven for thinking that power is largely about guards and gates or that it is present through surveillance techniques. This paper puts forward a rather different view of power in public spaces that highlights its unmarked presence. It argues that closure in some of the more recent privatised public spaces is achieved in decidedly modest ways through a logic of seduction. Using the example of a privatised public space at the heart of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz redevelopment, it is suggested that the layout and design of the complex represent a seductive presence that effectively closes down options, enticing visitors to circulate and interact in ways that they might not otherwise have chosen. The suggestive practices, experiences and spaces are laid out for temptation in such a way that closure is achieved by degree, through inclusion rather than exclusion. Power in this instance works through the ambient qualities of the space, where the experience of it is itself the expression of power.

Bridges to the Past: The Bridges of Berlin

The double-decker sightseeing boats cruising up and down the River Spree through central Berlin leave an indelible impression that every visitor takes away from the German capital. The Spree does not occupy so prominent a place in the world's cultural imagination as do the Tiber, the Seine, or the Thames. Yet Berlin's history is tied even more closely to its river than are those of Rome, Paris, and London. The city's watery origin is suggested by its very name, whose Slavic root bri designates a wet place. (Berlin means something like dike or dam; the popular derivation of the name from Bar, the German word for bear, the city icon, is a later folk etymology.) Neighboring Colin, which joined with Berlin in the early thirteenth century to form the walled fortress-town that constitutes the heart of modern Berlin, takes its name from the Wend-Slavic word collen for a hill rising out of a swamp. From their Stone Age settlements through centuries of strife between Germanic and Slavic tribes down

Screening Modern Berlin: Lola Runs to the Beat of a New Urban Symphony

Berlin 1998 – ten years after the fall of the infamous concrete wall that once ran through the heart of Berlin, dividing the city and Germany into two separate geopolitical entities for forty years: this newly reconstructed national-cultural site is the locale for Tom Tykwer's film Lola rennt. With over two million viewers in 1998, it turned out to be one of the most successful German film productions in recent years. It was no doubt the fireworks of film techniques and the energetic speed of the action driven by the hip techno sound track (written by Tykwer himself) that made this relatively short film a sensational success not only in Germany, but also on the international market. While its extrinsic proximity to MTV videos explains its popularity with the so-called Generation X with its predilection for speed and visual over-stimulation, Lola rennt presents on closer view a serious contemplation of socio-cultural issues concerning today's Berlin. As a film taking place in Berlin, Lola rennt is at the same time a film about Berlin, indebted to a long tradition of classic Berlin city films from Metropolis Berlin by Fritz Lang (1926) to Der Himmel uber Berlin by Wim Wenders (1987). In this line of Berlin city films, Lola rennt shows an affinity to one in pa rticular, namely Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Die Sinfonie einer Grosstadt, released in 1927. Since reviews of Tykwer's film have not noted the obvious analogies between the two films (Chappell; Rudolph; Whalen; Yakowar), this a rticle will explore these analogies and highlight the significance of Lola rennt as a filmic recreation of Berlin's urban space and its social and cultural texture at the end of the twentieth century. argument put forward here is that Ruttmann's Berlin: Die Sinfonie einer Grosstadt functions as a subtext in Lola rennt, turning Tykwer's film into a pastiche of its illustrious forerunner of 1927. Both films emphatically express – at opposite ends of the twentieth century – those changes in the human perceptive apparatus that Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, regarded as indicators as well as initiators of socio-historical change. Seen in this context, Lola rennt might be considered a postmodern sequel to the modernist Berlin: Die

Application of steel fibre concrete for underwater concrete slabs

In the heart of Berlin, the area of the Potsdamer Platz is being developed into a new multi-functional town centre. As most of the buildings reach far below the ground-water level, the construction of deep building pits becomes necessary. Due to special underground conditions and environmental protection requirements, sealing injection layers cannot be carried out for the deeper parts of these building pits. The remaining solution is to erect an underwater concrete slab, back-anchored by tension piles. These building pits are of a very irregular shape with extremely high water pressure on the concrete slab. In order to increase the overall safety of this construction, steel fibre concrete instead of plain concrete was used for these slabs, thus leading to a robust and ductile construction. This paper gives a short description of the building method, the tests carried out concerning the load carrying and deformation behaviour of such a slab and the additional tests undertaken on the building site to solve remaining questions about the underwater concreting technology of steel fibre concrete.

De l'usage politique d'un symbole. Autour d'une controverse à Berlin

Siegrief Heimann, On the Political Uses of a Symbol : Concerning a Controversy in Berlin ; The concept of political symbol and the uses made of it can help in understanding how the Neue Wache on the Unter den Linden in the heart of Berlin has become the central memorial of the German Federal Republic which, with a pieta by Kathe Kollwitz increased in size 64 times over and with the inscription To the victims of war and dictatorship on its base, forms an indissociable whole. Placing this complex within the context of the history of monuments to war dead and of the political cults created around them elucidates how the symbol effects the reconciliation between executioners and victims in an attempt to strengthen German national identity.