Writing

Urban Temporalities and the Politics of Duration: the Marx Engels Forum in Berlin
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Amelia Weinreb for her continued assistance and editing of this thesis. Without her support over the past year, this project would never have been realized nor would it have received the critical attention it needed to develop. Much of her course on Urban Anthropology influenced and directed this thesis. It is also necessary to thank Barbara Hoidn and Wilfried Wang for their invitation to spend the fall and winter working and researching at their office in Berlin, Hoidn-Wang-Partner, and their continued contributions to my development as a scholar. Without their insight and guiding knowledge many of the subtle details behind the history of the MEF would be absent or overlooked. This thesis would also be radically different if it were not for the feedback received in Kathleen Stewart’s Affect seminar and the readings suggested throughout the semester. It was only too helpful to hear Stewart’s and other students’ responses to my writings. And lastly I must thank Christopher Harkey, whose continued readership, feedback and philosophical insight have enabled me to stitch these ideas together.

Introduction
The Marx-Engels-Forum (MEF) in Berlin, Germany is a public park whose historical development and contemporary political landscape reflect a politics of duration whereby inclusion or exclusion from the future and past are central concerns,. Located on the banks of the River Spree, Southeast of Schinkel’s former Lustgarten in front of the Altes Museum, the park is a somber green space that divides itself from the concrete grid through its interruption by a light belt of trees. The park retains a number of public sculptures, by Ludwig Engelhardt and others artists who assisted in the design of the park, that are a semiotic residue of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) and a reflection on contemporary planning practices. These sculptures convey a series of messages both from the former GDR and the contemporary governing body; first through their initial realization over a period of 40 years, and second, through their potential inclusion in Berlin’s future according to contemporary urban strategies. While the memories these sculptures evoke often reinvigorate an East German cultural nostalgia, the park itself is a worthwhile trajectory for scholarship as it is East German urbanism in a context where urban revitalization and the construction of nationalism is increasingly obscuring and blending such trajectories. The park’s history details this process as an unfolding of the state through the urban in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This thesis discusses the politics of duration by situating the MEF in a critical historical framework that examines the lived experiences in the park and its surrounding areas through ethnographic observations and historical analysis.

Berlin is a place of inconstancy, change and instability due to its continuing fusion, where these driving forces inform urbanism and impact the daily lives of city residents. This is not to ascribe to common visions of Berlin produced by scholars still immersed in Cold War rhetoric, nor is it to entirely dismiss these views, but instead it means to propagate reflections on what Berlin’s voids have led to. Berlin’s history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been grossly tumultuous, and it is after war, fission and fusion that the temporary has come to occupy a key role in the urbanism of Berlin. It is for this reason that my thesis explores how duration is a political project, where the inclusion or exclusion, from the near, immediate and far future, of material and semiotic trajectories is of central concern.

In examining urban duration, I rely on a series of observations of events within the MEF. Their composition weaves notions of temporality, or rhythms of experience, with those of duration by emphasizing the everyday occurrences in the park, such as stopping to take photos or resting for a moment on a park bench while looking at a map. Combining these firsthand accounts with historical strata, I apply a patina to my contemporary impressions, examining temporality and duration as a means to make sense of the park both as a physical place and an idea since 1948.

In approaching the MEF through a lens of temporality, my goal is to discern how contemporary cities have reorganized perceptual logics of experience such as time, vision, hearing and sociality. I argue that the MEF demonstrates specific experiences of Berlin that share inherently temporary qualities, emphasizing different modes of duration and temporality that encourage light sociality. I support this argument by the retelling of events I witnessed and participated in while also making significant historical currents resonate with these accounts. This practice is supported through the patina I apply, derived from historical analysis of the site and its relations to ideology and the state.

Methodology
This thesis combines historical study of the MEF from image archives, scholarly texts, German legislation, and interviews with observational studies that were produced from the months of August 2010 until January 2011. The historical analysis focuses on a variety of events that led to the conception, development and realization of the MEF. Within the historical framework, stress is placed upon the political, cultural and social events that contributed to the conception of the site along with the delayed process of realization. Through the historical analysis the observation and ethnographic detail is situated and enlisted for contemporary reflection that supports my analyses of temporality at the site. This scholarship follows a trajectory, for which Setha Low is renown, within Urban Studies that stresses analysis of cities and urban spaces through a layering of various disciplines and their encapsulation in ethnographic observations. (Low: 2000)

The ethnographic and observational research for this thesis took place during approximately six months in Berlin, from August 2010 until January 2011. Without prior habitation in the city, my initial ideas about Berlin were purely structured through scholarly articles and American interpretations of Berlin. My ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation took place weekly in irregular intervals. With the geographic location of the MEF, it was often the case that I would be passing through on bicycle while heading to other parts of downtown, or that I would stop for moments of rest while heading to exhibitions, conferences or discussions at nearby institutions. As the MEF is directly west of Berlin destinations like Alexanderplatz and the television tower, it is centrally located, and therefore my observations took a variety of forms due to its almost constant propinquity.

As my grasp of German is extremely basic, there were limited in-situ conversations and most of the personal narratives are related to my own workplace and social milieu. While in Berlin, I also worked at Hoidn-Wang-Partner of which one principal’s research and concentrations included the MEF. Through assisting with an exhibition and general conversation, I gained insight into Hoidn’s assessment of the MEF. This was extremely beneficial as it provided an in-depth background for reading this urban site that is exclusive to Berliners who possess an understanding of urban economics, land development, the politics of planning, governance and infrastructure. In addition to discussions about the site with those around me, I contacted various individuals and groups that had participated in events related to the Marx Engels Forum. Through interviewing individuals involved with the site through urban interventions ,like the installations of Raumlabor, I gained valuable insight into the recent past of the park and the environment disputes over the territory created.

My participant observations at the MEF most often excluded interactions with other visitors, though this was not always the case. The steady flow of individuals passing through the site contributed to my anonymity, so I did not develop continued relationships with any individuals at the site. As the MEF was under deconstruction while I was conducting my field observations, the regular usage patterns of the area were clearly altered, and this should be noted.

Finally, it is difficult to geographically separate observations at, from, or of the MEF from those of Berlin in general. Many of the ideas I propose in this thesis are a combination of ideas taken from the MEF and my general experiences of Berlin. As my movements throughout Berlin were often by bicycle or the underground and above-ground subway (the U/S-Bahns), there is an inseparable connection between these paths and the MEF. At times, my observations then focus on areas outside the geographic boundaries of the MEF, but are related through my experiences, ideas, or memories.

A Plaza’s Worth
The justification for this scholarship rests upon the site’s contemporary and historical significance in Berlin. Located in the historical city center, the park is situated in direct proximity to many of Berlin’s most notable sites, including the Berliner Dome (a prominent church), Alexanderplatz (a large public square and transit hub), the former Schlossplatz (castle grounds), the Altes Museum (a renown museum designed by Berlin’s famous architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel), and the recently reconstructed Nikolaiviertel (a historic district to the South of the MEF). It is of specific contemporary concern as the site is currently under construction while a new U-Bahn public transport (?) stop is being made, and the future of the park is yet unknown.

Throughout the twenty-first century, the site has delineated the relationship between state, ideology and urbanism. After a forty-year deferral, which began in 1948, the GDR constructed the park with significant changes to the initial plan, which had originally been envisioned as a palace of the republic, or grand castle for the people of the newly formed GDR, and a monument to Marx and Engels. Now that the GDR has been disassembled, Berliners are left with the question of what their historic city center should be and what it should mean. While Marx and Engels were necessary components of the state urbanism from 1948 until 1988, their inclusion or exclusion from the future of the city, and national identity, is a political process directly concerned with the duration of a subdued Soviet monumentality and ideology.

Studying the MEF tunnels through a heap of dreams, ideas, and images about the past century and what specific areas in a city might have meant or might come to mean. For Urban Studies, this scholarship on the MEF continues a tradition or anthropological fieldwork that describes an image of a place while providing critical reflections. This observational study then aims to expand the field of Urban Studies while remaining tied to feminist political goals of rethinking what temporality and duration might mean in the political realm, achieving an unseemly unity between disparate disciplines and methods of narrative that are so often separated from one another. It is my hope that the antagonisms within my own readings and descriptions of the MEF will portray certain complexities in urban life while contributing to what Urban Studies might come to be. This scholarship is a modest contribution to Urban Studies that integrates Elizabeth Grosz’s ideas about time and politics with lived experiences of the MEF and Berlin. (2005, 105-111)

Thinking the Past, Present and Future
The framework that situates this ethnography is embedded in the ideas of time, space and duration argued for by the feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz. Her reflections on time lend to a reading of the MEF in so much as they offer a new understanding of cities as temporally active sites both in material and semiotic understandings. The benefit of utilizing Grosz’s philosophy for this observational study is providing a fresh reading of what temporality might mean in cities today, and further, how temporality can be understood as a political tool in urban conditions. This concern with time and politics propels my analysis by lending a frame that politicizes duration through understanding it as a process of either exclusion or inclusion from futurity and the past. (Grosz: 2004, 195-7 The present contains multiple links to the past and to the future, through potentiality and the virtual. But experiences, accumulations and forces of the present do not always continue into the future nor are their retrieval from the past through acts like remembering or activating forgotten occurrences always an easy task. It is this process of either inclusion or exclusion, through duration, from what is to come or has been that is a valuable scholarly pursuit because it introduces a specific politics of the urban.

This analysis of temporality as a political condition also examines how cities themselves are temporally active sites. Utilizing Grosz’s ideas about duration between states, my scholarship analyzes not only the iterations of the material and semiotic sites that are and have been, and will be, the Marx Engels Forum, but also operates as a reflection on the individual’s experience of the city as a continuum of time states. The focus for this analysis of the phenomenological is taking the impression that urban conditions have specific temporal consequences that are related to basic material conditions such as area or territory, travel, habitation and entertainment to only specify a few of these qualities. My analysis of the phenomenological is framed as an ethnographic study to capture the lived experiences present specifically in the Marx Engels Forum, and more broadly, in Berlin. This is a paper about specific experiences of the city that are tied to daily processes of urban life such as taking mass transit, or gathering in crowds at crossing walks, passing by strangers, and catching only quick glimpses of areas you pass daily in Berlin.

As a means to locate specific practices that are tied to the politics of duration, I also integrate the ideas of Amin and Thrift that they propose as “light sociality” in contemporary cities. This focus on a specific type of social relation is meant to derive a concrete instance of political duration in the every day by examining how cities alter social relations not only through material conditions, like the brief glances we encounter on the subway, but also through semiotic instances of duration that are as apparent as billboards and the changing of stoplights. By developing the concept of light sociality within Grosz’s ideas about duration, the future, the present and the past, I argue that cities present unique temporal conditions that pervade dwellers’ experiences in ways unlike those outside urban conditions. This is due to material circumstances like transit, where rapidly traveling across a large territory is commonplace, or density, where swarms of individuals come together momentarily at crosswalks and other points of movement only to quickly disperse. My focus on the Marx Engels Forum is then a specific and concrete example of these unique temporal conditions in Berlin and the experiences that result therein.

Deterritorializing Strata, Notes on a Political Process
Piles of brick continue to grow daily but are kept away, with a fence, from the curious hands of tourists, children and dogs that find their way into the Marx Engels Forum. The fence holds no clues about what is occurring, the sign hinged on the fence is a generic contractor advertisement but a few posters scattered along the fencing of the southern edge of the park, emblazoned with the BVG logo, hint at something transit-related. Craters of earth expose the historic heart of Berlin, accompanied by the rough volumes of stones tossed atop one another, standing as witnesses to the former sites of the GDR’s monuments to Marx and Engels. Ludwig Engelhardt knitted Marx and Engels together from wireframe,
then added their flesh and bone through slab of clay after slab of clay only to finish by pouring them as bronze. Sibylle Bergemann, who just passed away in the Fall of 2010, documented Engelhardt in the 1980s when he created the sculpture of Marx and Engels. Her photos show images of both figures pinned throughout Engelhardt’s studio, his guides in crafting the two philosophers. Recorded in black and white, the initial forms are not much different from the piles of stone I see in the MEF, nearly shapeless pieces of earth put one atop the other, to later be placed in the center of historic Berlin.

By now Berlin has many hearts, and the districts that are scattered throughout the city lack any simple cohesion. It has been a rough hundred years for this city, and like anything else, the torrential storms that have left their scars on its surface have also maimed what was once a cohesive entity. These craters are nothing but scrapes after what this portion of the city has already witnessed, including the marches of Hitler, the destruction of World War II, and the parades of the GDR. The visitors that pass through realize something is changing, but there are no direct or obvious signs displaying why demolition or construction is occurring, or even if it is either or a combination of both. What was once here or what might come to be is completely unclear and for this reason the site becomes a temporally relevant political texture. For as Grosz argues, the movement of differentiation between the past and future is duration. And the processing that goes into this differentiation is a site of political relevance insomuch as it can come to influence this differentiating, division, bifurcation and dissociation. (2005: 110-1)

The television tower at Alexanderplatz rises above the forum and the tourists that have come to take pictures here find it absurd that they cannot take just the right photo to commemorate their trip to the big city by standing in the center: the fence prevents this. But they are resourceful and just as the groups of buses that line Spandauer Straße (where tour buses park) prevent direct circulation into the park, the fence also funnels visitors around the perimeter of the forum. It’s difficult to notice at first, but Marx and Engels are still here. They’ve just been slightly relocated from the center of the city–and the former showcase of East German identity–off to the Northwestern tip of the forum, still gazing East but now nearer Unter den Linden and slightly askew from their formerly central position in the city and state ideology.

This park (it might be difficult to even call it that) is going through a change. Like much of Berlin, the changes are a fairly recent development that is already being reconfigured themselves. The MEF has been here and recognized as a park since 1987, and it has seen the fall of a government, the stitching together of a city, and the production of a new German nationalism. It may not be noted as having witnessed all of this, and often this is because the park is almost forgotten. Its chestnut trees distinguish it from Nikolaiviertel in the South, the Spree in the West and Alexanderplatz to the East. The North reflects Berlin’s growing commercial success as a European capital with a new Radisson hotel, Fox headquarters and arcades to pass through while visiting the historic city center. I watch as children run through timed spouts of water in these arcades, waiting with their parents to be seated at the commercial restaurants that are tucked into the cavities of the block that combines hotel with news agency, with tourist shops and aquarium. The entire block to the North of this park is a consumer extravaganza, containing traditional Berlin souvenir items like crossing guard keychains and stuffed bears, upscale restaurants, an Einstein’s coffeeshop and an aquarium. The basement of the building is nothing like its glossy exterior that is coated in glass and reflects the lights of traffic as it flows. Rather, as I take the elevator into the underground with my boss to pick up a competition model of the city center, I’m introduced to the mechanics of the aquarium. As Barbara pieces together the Styrofoam television tower and bags the rest of downtown Berlin so we can carry it to the planning senate’s exhibition, one of the aquarium workers offers to show me Berlin’s last seahorse, whose lover has just died. The block contains too many things all at once, and this very quality of difference and density contrasts strongly against the patch of grass situated just South and whose main attractions are the leftovers of a failed dream, or maybe the end of a nightmare for some. The dream was Communism and the park is a direct embodiment and celebration of this, while at the same time the commemoration of a nightmare for others, its perpetuation in Berlin’s center signifies both and illustrates what Grosz deems the coexistence of the past and present. But according to Grosz duration includes not only this coexistence but implies the “continual elaboration of the new, the openness of things (including life) to what befalls them” (2005: 110) Within this framework the perpetual existence of the park then operates between the past and present as a variety of physical realizations and symbolic interpretations, continually open to what might become, or befall.

But it’s not only the Northern block that I notice when visiting the MEF, Museuminsel (Museum Island, a cultural center) also easily overshadows this park, and until fairly recently the prior Palace of the Republic functioned as a containing condition for the park, reinforcing its presence as absence by bordering it on its Western side, across the River Spree. But the park is not really a void so much and it is only an absence in its lack of built structure, besides the combined public toilet and convenience store on the Southeastern corner and the small tourist boat pavilion on the Western edge.

This park is one urban form of German Socialism, its history describes an all-too-familiar cultural fantasy of Cold War tensions whereby grand dreams become shriveled realizations and the hopes of a people are barely cobbled together. But the park contains more than just this, and the groups of cyclists that assemble among its ringed sidewalks and the tourists that pass through during their brief glimpses of Berlin might realize this. The Berliners that follow behind their dogs, who presumably used to urinate on Marx and Engels, might not envision the site as really being this depressing nor this important. Instead, these individuals might have barely formed an opinion, most of them never even stop here to look around. There is really no reason to do so currently as the park is undergoing construction and Marx, Engels and the other sculptures that used to stand guard in the center of the park have been huddled together inside another fence. Instead, the park is a site for individuals to pass through. The Berliner Dome is just to the Northwest, literally across the street. Nikolaiviertel is to the South and holds a variety of shops and cafés that celebrate and craft traditional German identity through cuckoo clocks, bears, dolls, and German handiwork. Taverns, traditional restaurants and historic buildings of Berlin’s founding, such as Nikolaikirche, Berlin’s oldest church, make the district and match the northern block in quality of difference and density.

The relocation of Marx and Engels is a recent occurrence that took place this past September in anticipation of the extension of the U-Bahn to the Berlin townhall. Now the park is disassembled while an underground stop is added on its Southeastern perimeter, encouraging the flow of individuals through the historic city center along the East/West axis. The construction lines the Southern edge of the park and pedestrians along Spandauer Straße find the pervasive orange cones blocking their jaywalk into the plaza surrounding the King Neptune fountain. During the warmer months of the year, this area surrounding Neptune and his maritime companions, and leading up to the television tower holds beds of red roses that filters the throngs of visitors as they move east or find an available bench. The benches that line the Northern and Southern edges of the plaza are filled in the warm months, a cacophony of languages suffocating the water trickling across Neptune’s companions and adding another cloud of speech over the already marked benches which are covered in graffiti tags.

As I walk past those sitting in the plaza, a general visitor is entirely too difficult to discern as the young and old blend together, tourist and resident remaining nearly imperceptible. The elderly rest and watch as walkers pass through with indistinct trajectories, though most likely somewhere in the historic downtown, and families take pictures next to King Neptune, trying to hold back their children from diving into the gargantuan fountain. Mostly they are successful as when I’ve passed through the plaza there have never been children directly in the water. Instead they tuck themselves into the laps of the figures surrounding Neptune or attempt to climb Neptune as their parents rush them to pose for a photo, the line of likeminded people building behind them and pressuring their candid moment’s appearance. As the tourists generally command the territory around the fountain and beds of roses, punks on their bicycles, skateboards and rollerblades command the stairwells leading into the television tower. Their hair lacks any specific order or style, they’re not the fashion victims of Hackescher Markt nor Prenzlauer Berg, and as I pass through, I notice their risky movements as they jet through the crowds of people, pushing to see how close they can get to one another or the pedestrians while weaving in and out of the crowds. The television tower itself propels into the sky and on clear days the very tip can be seen puncturing a cloud. But when the grey skies of Berlin gather in the Fall and Winter months, the television tower begins to disappear after ten or fifteen stories, becoming lost in the fog and mist, only revealing itself intermittently as a faint red glow pulses from the sky.

Unlike the Neptune plaza and Alexanderplatz to the East of the Marx Engels Forum, the park itself lacks any distinguishing characteristics at first sight. Previously, its companion, the Palace of the Republic, was situated along its Western edge, just across the River Spree. The water divided the continuity of what was initially a single urban plan, along with so many other unforeseen circumstances. For the Marx Engels Forum was previously meant to be the entire area that is now filled by Alexanderplatz to the void left by the palace’s recent destruction. In its current deconstruction the park only lives up to its recent history as its unsteady conceptualization, development and realization are repeated once again. But for visitors to the city center none of this is immediately apparent, and there is a fairly lacking sense of place. The physical makeup of the park consists of concentric paths placed around a brick center, the paths holding benches often left unoccupied. Sculptures of Marx and Engels once held the center position, surrounded by other works from the socialist era. The River Spree ebbs along the Western edge of the park, dividing it from Museuminsel while connecting it to the circulation of tour boats that make their way along the canals of the city. On the Southern edge of the park the street is populated with hazard signs, fences and construction equipment dividing up the crowds of visitors to Nikolaiviertel. The restaurants across from the Southern edge encourage groups to pass through the park as they make their way to the Altes museum or head along the canal to find the urban markets or to wait in queue for the Pergamon museum.

These various cultural institutions that are scattered throughout the historic downtown of Berlin pull and push visitors through the Marx Engels Forum. I watch as a teenage boy and his girlfriend sit on a bench, scouring their map as they look about their surroundings the historical city center, their floating walk tethered for a moment as they gather their bearings. The park really captures these individuals and their visit to it lacks any direction or aim. Their looks as they gaze about the surrounding buildings and paths details an unwillingness to stay put, a desire to fall into the green void that exists as the absence of two palaces just West of this park. In the late summer, this desire subsides at times because at least the leaves remain and the sun makes people lazy, negating any real motivation to exit the area and instead prolonging a brief respite from the explorations and routines of the day. In the Winter this changes dramatically and the wiry branches of the trees scrape the mute clouds, their leaves in heaps smothering the grass as it struggles to poke through for the short hours of sun between mid-morning and the early afternoon. This park, the Winter Marx Engels Forum, only encourages passing through and holds no attraction for the swarms of huddled dinner guests or foreign nationals hopping between bars, museums and restaurants. Instead the groups of dinner party attendees scrape along, moving en masse and afraid to break from their winnowed caravan for fear the creeping cold will separate them. For the warmth in the winter months is a nearly unattainable fantasy in this park, its dim lampposts barely illuminating the area at night and the nearly absent diurnal sun providing only brief comforts. But outside and along the park there are individuals sitting in cafés and restaurants, or rummaging through crafts shops or rushing up the stairs of the Berliner Dome for a performance. The constancy of the park’s failing grasp on its visitors is slightly abutted at times though. It is when the uncommon interrupts the area that visitors do not so much flee the park as they do stroll.

On the weekends this is seen when street merchants line the bridge at the Northwestern corner of the park. Their tables hold GDR memorabilia such as Russian hats, pins and other political paraphernalia celebrating or commiserating the dissolution of the GDR and its transition into a new democracy. These street merchants stand behind their goods as the groups of tourists pass along on their way, they wear their own hats with dour expressions and visitors to their tables question the authenticity of the merchandise while trying on the look of a communist. As quickly as they’ve picked up a hat and posed for their companions they’re off again, abandoning the street merchants on the bridge to the unforgiving gusts that froth the banks of the Spree below. The brief encounter is followed by a succession of events that will take place for the visitors as they walk along Karl Liebknecht Straße. After their perusing of the communist memorabilia the pack of walkers will pass in front of the Berliner Dome, pausing to take a picture between the intermittent traffic, dancing amongst one another as photographer and subjects move back and forth, adjusting the perspective to frame just the right ratio of faces to architecture in the coming picture.

Moving West along the street they peer down upon the green void that now only holds a few boardwalks covering the site of the former Palace of the Republic. Then directly North of this is the famous Altes museum, designed by Karl Friedrich Shinkel, and itself an urban vision that has witnessed enormous events, such as its own garden’s destruction by the National Socialists for their Nazi assemblies, of the destruction of the Schlossplatz by the GDR and in a sadly ironic continuity with the National Socialists, their own military gatherings and displays of power. These sites attract the swarms of visitors to Berlin and its inhabitants alike, their history breaking into the contemporary as protesters march, musicians perform, artists beg for attention and Berliners pass by.

At times there is a musician who has set up his makeshift performance in the park, near the Spree. A saxophone case collecting coins passersby toss after their dinners or on their way home is his only stage and companion. But these performers know what they are doing, and they realize that an audience just might not be in their best interests. For in Berlin the musicians who look for change from passersby infrequently find a spot where an audience might or can accumulate. Rather these musicians choose places that people only pass through. Riding the U-Bahn in Berlin can be like attending a rapid music festival. Mexican and Turkish immigrants pop into cars either alone or in groups reaching six. They tote beaten instruments whose leather straps fray around their necks, their clothes disheveled matching their hair. As the announcement that the doors are closing begins, the music follows and solo performers rapidly manipulate the strings or prongs, or gadgets that emit noise while those in groups find harmony and race through a traditional Mexican or German song, some times choosing to cover popular American music also.

As the train car lurches forward to the next stop you can feel the musicians as they race to finish, their performance is hasty and mistakes result from their imbalance as the tracks jolt one way or another. I watch as a small boy, common among the Turkish groups, weaves between passengers, offering his frayed cup for any donations that might come his way. Infrequently a rider pulls out some coins and drops them, usually congratulating the performers and smiling brightly as the other riders of the train look into their books or raise the volume of their own music players. Before anyone realizes it, the next stop has arrived and the performers are already out the door and heading to the next car or jumping tracks to backtrack a predefined circuit. Their movements are planned and they know that if they are caught on the train without a ticket they’ll each receive a 40 Euro fine. Staying on the line for only one stop affords them less liability in this risk and their movements between cars and directions are a tactic to avoid the nearly imperceptible rail workers who randomly appear asking to verify train tickets. Like the scraggly bands of performers that strategically ride the above- and underground, the infrequent performers that inhabit the Marx Engels Forum know that such a place is one of temporary states and that this is the terrain in which they can gather donations from couples, individuals and groups just passing through. For without any audience these performers really have no clear past, and so the merits of their performance are unknown, as are the conditions that have led to their public reception.

When a musician does arrive in the Marx Engels Forum the envelope that encapsulates the park is broken by their noisy collections of songs, or some times only one song if you stay long enough to notice. For while the park lacks any distinct structures besides the combined public WC snack shop in the Southeastern corner, and the tourist boat pavilion, the sparse vegetation is able to insulate the inhabitants from those noises attempting to invade from the four sides surrounding the park. A broken or out-of-tune instrument then wails gently for those individuals walking along the Western path, moving North towards Karl Liebknecht Straße or South towards Nikolaiviertel. It is an occurrence similar to the musicians on the above and underground lines as the passersby only rarely deposit coins in the case and nearly never stick around long enough to listen to the set. But the atmosphere does change with the addition of the musician, their notes echoing through the empty park and infrequently finding a barrier in a group of tourists stopping to photograph the television tower. Unlike the performers on the transit lines, those visiting the park stay put, standing behind their instrument cases and quietly manipulating the toggles and keys until small bursts erupt. Their rhythm merges in and out with the pace of visitors as they stroll through the area, or provides a backdrop out of sync when the visitors stop to admire and question why Marx and Engels are just sitting in the corner of the park. The sculptures are at least two or three times life-size and the docile expressions of both political philosophers have led many to speculate the artist’s intentions. The sculptures that surround the bronze Marx and Engels are an assortment of stone carvings portraying the writhing bodies of the workers in the capitalist machine and thin abstract metal volumes with photos of presumably historical German events. The variety of sculptures that once stood centered in the park, spreading out from the focus on Marx and Engels are now huddled together, cramped into a corner of the park near the street vendors.

Some days the sculptures find company among art restorers, pushing against the sculptures with their brushes as they flake away at the debris of at least a decade. The current condition of the sculptures hides their history during the 1990s when the dissolution of the GDR and the Berlin Wall brought public protest against the philosopher’s ideas through spray paint and other tactics of expression. Now the sculptures have been returned to their initial condition, missing the ironic messages that once were sprawled across their bases, mocking the failure of the GDR and the ideas of a people with comments such as, “We’re not guilty” or “Next time everything will be better”. (Ladd 1997) During the restoration work, visitors’ curiosity was perked, and infrequently the delays the sculptures normally cause were prolonged to watch as the restorers worked. The once grey bodies writhing under the pains of capitalism gained a glow as the stone’s surface became lighter and lighter, revealing a cream surface. Now as their facelift has been completed, and the restorers’ work has been achieved, the sculptures lack the ability to provoke the curiosity of park visitors and their admiration has returned to brief stops as individuals and groups exit the park.

Like the sculptures, the park itself is undergoing a change, as it has been since its first conception until its realization. The disassembled pieces of the park are gathered in fences and nothing is clear about whether they will reassemble as they once stood, or if this process of putting the Marx Engels Forum back together will provide insight into a new outlook on Berlin reflected by planning guidance, market interests, and the beliefs of a people. To situate the changes the space is currently enduring is to wade through years of history, examining the perpetuation of a single site as both a material and semiotic entity comprised of real artifacts and ideological, cultural, and social mappings. Reflecting on the historical lineage of the park provides insight into how the distinct qualities of the Marx Engels Forum have been created through a tumultuous milieu that attests to duration and perpetuation as a form of politics.

The Latent Instability of a City Center
The Marx-Engels-Forum occupies a complex site that reflects both upon historical development and envisioned future changes. Its location in the historical city center of Berlin places it in immediate proximity to a number of cultural attractions and central components of urban life, such as public plazas, event spaces, mass transit, and circulation corridors. Within the Marx-Engels-Forum are a number of public sculptures, the residue of the former GDR. The texture created by this semiotic patina interacting with contemporary city life exposes contours of the everyday by tracing political pasts, presents, and futures.
The process of establishing a coherent system of development for the postwar Berlin with the unstable desires of the GDR proved to be difficult but is illustrated through both the conception and then realization of the Marx-Engels-Forum. Postwar Berlin was concerned both with the construction of new housing and the construction of a new modern socialist identity through the development of its city center. (Diedendorf 1983: 191-2) After the Second World War, a high percentage of Berlin– citizens of the city and the built environment itself–had been destroyed . This created a tense atmosphere for a newly founded democratic republic but contributed to a hybridization of public housing projects with monumental architecture to produce republic novelties.
When examining the history of urbanism in Berlin after the war, the GDR’S disciplined dedication to this monumental housing hybridization is apparent. There are, of course, dramatic changes in design and plan of these projects, but these alterations reflect larger political struggles related to national identity and are not so much related to the postponement of housing development. This project is characterized by a dramatic shift in style that illustrates the sobering of political tendencies, a symptom of the ebb and flow of political leaders in office. The Karl-Marx-Allee (a grand boulevard), formerly the Frankfurter Allee and then the Stalinallee, provides a legible history for understanding the changes within urban planning while also providing the basis for a situated understanding of the Marx-Engels-Forum.

Where will the workers live?
In the 1950s while under the leadership of Walter Ulbricht, an architectural and urban language was provided through the importation of Soviet Neoclassicism . The common heritage of this language was developed when the GDR sent a group of architects and urbanists to the Soviet Union to learn the current Socialist design methods. The result of this trip was the “Sixteen Principles for the Restructuring of Cities” published by the GDR and devoted to a type of anti-Modernism, refocusing on the city center and the place of the worker within the city. Both the program and language were essentially hegemonic tendencies placed upon the GDR as part of an integration with the USSR. The outcome of these new urbanist guidelines can be read through the semiotics of Karl-Marx-Allee.

The construction and design of Karl-Marx-Allee was captive to at least two goals that included the production of a new modern socialist identity, and the provision of much needed housing. To create this new modern socialist identity, the planning and design guidelines of the “Sixteen Planning Principles…” were utilized. The effect was of a Neoclassic monumentality, reflecting the progress of the East Germans and their new Socialist republic while also breaking from traditional planning by integrating mixed uses throughout the street. This incorporation of housing is key as it pronounces the combination of nationalism with the really existing needs of the republic, providing a German socialist program. It was not only that the GDR planners and administration were creating a public building that would reflect the progress of the GDR and consecrate any claims of national identity, rather Karl-Marx-Allee is a testament of the GDR’s ability to combine nationalist projects with the needs of the republic.
 
The Marx-Engels-Allee operates in such a way that it defines a period of GDR planning through both its architectural language and designates the desires of a political network. The impact of this is a permanence, one that persists as a remainder of planning linked with inefficiency and totalitarian practice. Largely this persistence is entangled with the memories of Stalin. While the avenue was celebrated, and is still a formal aspect of central Berlin, there is no ability to divest the meaning associated with this simulation of Soviet Neoclassicism. Its inefficiencies are regularly found within the level of detail required by the language of Neoclassicism and materials usage in construction, two traits considered unacceptable for meeting the demands of a housing crisis. Hermann Henselmann, the architect who oversaw the project, would later become involved with a number of major designs for the rebuilding of central Berlin.

The decision to utilize Soviet Neoclassicism carried with it a series of charges against the international design community. As Paul Betts has noted, then GDR leader Walter Ulbricht openly opposed an international style of Modernism, providing that “The arrangement of socialist living quarters should harmonize the inhabitant’s material and cultural daily needs.” (Betts 103) For Ulbricht there was a continued reliance on a grand National past, a tradition that the GDR was the rightful heir of and must continue. Largely this resulted in a rejection of Modernism associated with the Bauhaus or industrialization of designed objects. Beauty was felt to be a trait of this imagined national inheritance and invariably it was chosen that an architectural language such as Classicism was essential for providing the cohesiveness of a new modern Socialist identity. “Furniture manufactured in the Bauhaus style does not correspond to the sensitivity to beauty among the new Germany’s progressive human beings.” (Betts 103)

The aesthetic of beauty relies on unstable terrains and so it should not be unexpected that a firm rejection of Modernism might only be fleeting. Instead there is a manifestation throughout the planning history of the GDR that serves as an aesthetic trace of beauty. Whether this is a beauty achieved through the replication of bourgeoisie conditions through Neoclassicism, such as Garnier’s Opera House in Paris, or a realization of Sant’Elia’s ever changing Futurist city, within this trace is located a propensity towards instability. Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the planning of central Berlin from the 1950s until the end of the GDR in the 1980s, within which the impression of the Marx-Engels-Forum first found a stable base.

Making Plans
In the 1950s the newly formed GDR entertained a series of plans for how the development of housing may occur in tandem with the production of a new urban center. One outcome, the Karl-Marx-Allee, represented a merger between the needs of the republic and the GDR’s quest to forge a new central Berlin . While the larger problem of meeting housing demand persisted for a number of decades, to implement any significant projects a city plan would need to be established. The process was tumultuous as confrontations between East and West Germany manifested themselves in the form of various design competitions . A significant amount of energy and political determination were expended on these competitions as each part of the split Germany informally and formally approached the topic of reunification through planning. As Ladd notes, “neither side every fully acknowledged the division of the city; the official view in East and West was that Berlin was one city and the other side was responsible for its unfortunate partition.” (Ladd 1997: 180)

The proliferation of city plans reflects the shifting desires of the GDR to represent itself in the built form. A major alteration occurred in the GDR’s program when Nikolai Kruschev replaced Stalin as leader of the USSR. The former Soviet Neoclassicism which both the GDR and the USSR had initially chosen as their de facto architectural language was negated by Kruschev , who ushered in an industrialized, modernist language. The former Soviet Neoclassicism was critiqued for its inefficiency to meet the demands of the nation, both in the USSR and the GDR with Kruschev calling for streamlined production of housing.
While the design competitions for the city of Berlin had produced a series of plans, the inability to implement aspects of these had been rooted in the lack of resources needed to produce monumental architecture. As Kruschev ushered in the modernist aesthetic by championing industrialized construction, the GDR established a series of principles that would define further development by defining a socialist city. Bruno Flierl (1985, 98) specifies these characteristics:

-to be the city where the controlling bodies for national politics, state and the economy are located;
-to be a city of science, research and teaching;
-to be a city of electrical engineering and electronics;
-to be a city of intellectual and cultural life
-to be a city of international traffic

To produce an urban context that would encapsulate these tendencies it was necessary at some point to condense a number of their functions. This is most apparent when the history of the Palace of the Republic is explicated. The Palace of the Republic was the outcome of a serious deferral stemming from the founding of the GDR. It is also intertwined with the production of the Marx-Engels-Forum, as they were originally to be the same urban project.
 
In the 1950s, when the GDR had first been created there was a decision to tear down the badly damaged royal palace situated in Berlin’s urban core. The new socialist government saw the royal palace as a symbol of Prussian militarism, and like the previous regime of the Third Reich, which had censored or destroyed many cultural artifacts, the newly founded government destroyed the royal palace to delineate a clear break from Prussian militarism. (Diedendorf 1993: 195) For the emerging republic this left a concrete void in the center of their new urban condition. Schinkel’s Lustgarten had previously shared the landscape with the royal palace but had since been paved over by the Nazis to provide grounds for public displays of military regimentation. With the royal palace destroyed the concrete void was increased, creating an urge to design a monument to Marx and Engels, the fathers of scientific socialism, that would serve as the symbolic center of German socialism while also providing a new palace to serve the functions of the state.

A major component of this production was creating a space where mass gatherings could occur. Not unlike the Nazis, the German socialists relied on mass gatherings to reiterate national ideology and create a nationalist sense of unity (Ladd: 1997, 56). When first envisioned the monument was to be a grand tower, a high-rise, in which the state would be housed while guarded by a monumental sculpture of Marx and Engels. The palace would then become an appendage of state administration intimately tied into the urban core. There would also be an expanse of space conserved for mass gatherings that were a common aspect of socialist lifestyle in the GDR. Schinkel’s Altes museum would remain but much of the previous context of the Museum Island had either been destroyed by war, the Nazis or the GDR. Ideally the situation created an opportunity to remove hindrances of the past in order to produce a socialist future; a pattern not unique to the GDR and continuing today.

The realization of this monument was the pursuit of many architects in competitions ranging throughout the 1950s and 1960s. While there was always a changing emphasis on the development of a new modern socialist nationalism and the priority of housing, it remained unclear what may become of the former palace square. A first draft was submitted in 1951, by the Berlin Planning Party, and under the lead of Edmund Collein. The plan was loyal to the central tower concept and also envisaged a series of high-rise blocks surrounding the monument. Following this submission, another proposal from 1953 envisioned the central tower in a narrow, gothic steeple style while also proposing significant changes to the urban tectonics by joining Marx-Engels-Platz, Alexanderplatz and Stalinallee by Karl Liebknecht Strasse, rather than by Rathausstrasse. (Flierl 1985: 115-6) With the restructuring of the urban streets there was now a clearer architectural context for future development, creating a unified visual and cultural language rather than a disparate sampling. Formerly great attention had been given to the scale of surrounding buildings when Schinkel designed the Lustgarten and Altes Museum on SpreeInsel, or Museum Island. For a contemporary observer this dedication to a homogeneity of scale emphasizes the GDR’s commitment to a national past and enactment of German tradition through a unified plan, or possibly a Gesamtkunstwerkt (total artwork).

Sensitivity to tradition was continued as a third plan, by a team under Gerhard Kosel in 1957, then followed taking cue from the traffic structure of
the second plan. The proposal to retain the modified traffic structure was retained, creating a cohesive urban context, but Kosel’s team surrounded the central tower structure by pond like recesses from the River Spree. The first three drafts submitted continued to build upon one another, improving the urban condition first through establishing a central landmark, or node, then following by creating a cohesive urban core of paths. Of the three plans, none were implemented, though their visions were continued and modified.
 
The GDR held a design competition in 1958-9 entitled, “International Design Competition for the Socialist Reconstruction of the City Centre of the Capital of the German Democratic Republic.” Many of the proposals submitted were within the framework established by the GDR authorities. They contained a central tower that would house the bureaucracy of the state while also exhibiting a monumental sculpture of Marx and Engels. Two designs specifically deviated from this plan, that of the Hermann Henselmann Collective and the design by the Naumov Team.

According to Flierl the Henselmann Collective envisioned, “replacing the planned high-rise office block by a television tower as Berlin’s dominating landmark and housing the offices of the People’s Chamber and the Council of Ministers in a relatively low building.” The deviation was unique in that it both ignored the request of a high-rise office block while seriously excluding any consideration for a monument to Marx and Engels. Rather the Henselmann Collective included a 320-meter radio tower signaling the transmission of socialism throughout the world. Similarly, the Naumov Team suggested a central building housing a large auditorium rather than a high-rise apartment block and then a 260-meter metal needle that would serve as Berlin’s landmark. Other variations existed within the designs but the greatest deviations were the lack of a central high-rise tower or a monument to Marx and Engels, for these reasons both proposals were rejected by the judges and Kosel’s plan from 1957 still exemplified most closely the desires of the GDR authorities.
In 1961, following the competition, the City Council decided on a reconstruction plan for the city center. The basic framework consisted of a central thoroughfare composed by Unter den Linden and the Berlin Forum around Marx-Engels-Platz up to Alexanderplatz with the Karl-Marx-Allee as a longitudinal axis while Frieidrichstrasse and the Spree Island served as transverse axes. Though the design competition had presented the judges with an array of possibilities for the monument to Marx and Engels, or the new palace, it remained unsure of a design and only decided that the palace would be built on the East bank of the River Spree. Eventually it was decided that the plan of the Herman Henselmann Collective would be partially pursued for development , though it violated the original design competition rules. This would not be until nearly a decade after the original competition when according to Ladd, “technological modernity had become the East’s accepted architectural language and a television tower based on Helsemann’s design was in fact built”. (Ladd: 2002)

Specters of deferral
Similar to the realization of the Henselmann Collective’s plan for the center of Berlin, the monument to Marx and Engels was deferred while also being deformed. It was not until the 1970s that a plan for the new socialist palace was finally developed under a team led by Heinz Graffunder. Radically unlike the proposals submitted to the original competition, Graffunder’s team designed a building clearly influenced by international modernism. The Palace of the Republic was composed of an elongated volume clad in bronze-stained glass and marble. There was a very clear deviation from the original intention of the GDR, when under the influence of Stalin, to design a high-rise tower decorated with a monumental sculpture of Marx and Engels. The reality of the project was a low volume consisting of mixed uses. The Palace of the Republic had been a complex for bureaucratic functions, such as the party headquarters, while also serving a series of social needs by providing space for birthday parties, weddings, cafes, bowling alleys and bars.

Just as the 1950s vision for a grand tower to socialism was reinterpreted, so was the original monument to Marx and Engels. Finally realized in 1986, the Marx-Engels-Forum was placed behind the Palace of the Republic, East of the Spree River. Now two moderately larger than life-size bronze figures of Marx and Engels occupy a park with ribbon-like sidewalks and gentle plantings. The design of the park itself is fairly unremarkable and its discontinuity with the current urban meshwork has led to recent speculation about its future. It is unclear whether the sculptor Ludwig Engelhardt designed both the central sculpture of Marx and Engels, and the park itself, or whether the design was left to an unrecorded Socialist Unity Party (SED) collective. The Marx and Engels monument is surrounded by a series of sculptures by various artists, all centered on the theme of life under Socialism and the workers’ movement.
The forum occupies a complex space in time and culture. The correlation between a transitional phase in architectural languages between Neoclassicism and Modernism reduced emphasis on monumentality as can be seen both in the former Palace of the Republic and the artistic style of the Marx and Engels monument, including the design of the forum in its entirety. There exists a degree of restraint in the sculpture(s) within the Forum, they lack the grandiosity of the Ernst Thällmann monument and others emblematic of Socialist Realism . Unlike other monumental works of Socialist Realism, the artwork in the Marx-Engels-Forum persists as tangible cultural artifacts, almost uninspiring. Post-unification actions have largely left this forum untouched, unlike many other sites in Berlin that have been subject to erasure and repair in accordance with the current political system.

The forum therefore represents a serious deferral, an almost conservative approach to design. Against the radicalism of the variable housing projects that were meant to inspire and propagate a new modern socialist Germany, the forum can be contrasted by its lengthy propagation. Desired in the 1950s, it took nearly four decades to be realized by an artist collective led by Engelhardt. Shortly after the forum’s production the GDR toppled, and with it many of its urban projects and public art. But the forum continues to persist, as it did for nearly four decades in the imaginations of the GDR officials and citizens.
There may be a close link between the lacking volatility of the public artwork and the curious absence of any ideologically loaded structures on the site that has allowed the Marx-Engels-Forum to remain. As many Socialist Realist monuments have been destroyed since post-unification it is somewhat surprising that Marx and Engels have not followed a similar path. A twice than life-size figure of Marx sits while Engels stands, both men look absently towards the West and the now vacant lot where the former Palace of the Republic once stood. But there are no grand gestures given by either of the revolutionaries, they are not holding an axe and divider nor are their bodies being supported by crushed swastikas underneath their feet; they are only waiting and staring absently.

Witness to change
Until recently the Palace of the Republic stood to the West of the forum. In 2002 and 2003, the German Bundestag decided that the palace should be demolished with great outcry from both Germans and the international community.(Flierl: 2009, 10) With the palace’s recent demolition to provide space for the Humboldt Forum , the stability of the Marx-Engels-Forum has been reviewed by the Senatsverwaltung für Stadtentwicklung. According to a report issued by the Senate in April of 2002, the Marx-Engels-forum will stay intact, however changes to the design are envisioned to integrate it with the newly forming vision for the urban core (Bundestag 2000).
 
According to Beatrix Burtin of the Städtebau und Projekte in Berlin, dialogues have been initiated to address the signification of the forum in a campaign called “Rathausforum” just this year. (Burtin: 2009) By 2011, the current concept has the monuments of Marx, Engels and others moving underground. Then within two years a design competition will be initiated for the forum, attempting to integrate the space with the rest of the urban core through a mitigation of history ranging from the founding of Berlin in the 13th century until the present. Whether the Marx-Engels-Forum will dismiss the immediate demand of integration by the current government, is yet unclear. However, the Humboldt Forum will consist of a partially reconstructed royal palace by the Italian architect Franco Stella integrated with a type of modernism that could be said to reflect the former Palace of the Republic. This urban revitalization program will radically alter the urban context surrounding the Marx-Engels-Forum, once again. According to Thomas Flierl, “The Humboldt Forum was and is a great deal more than just a fortunate inspiration to legitimize the reconstruction of the Schloss.” (Flierl)

The Marx-Engels-Forum then persists as a relic of an increasingly erased era. Now demonstrating neither grandiose architecture nor monuments, the forum produces a disinterested quality through its ambiguity and lack of content. It neither urges nor satiates as it consists only of simple greenery and a few obdurate sculptures. Surrounded by changing street names, vanishing buildings and specters of the urban meshwork, it is a process of recovery for the core of Berlin. (Azaryahu: 1986, 581) It first enacted this position in the 1950s when it became a stitching point of meaning for the newly formed GDR. The proposal of a monument to Marx and Engels was meant to consolidate the emerging identity of East Germans while also contributing to a spatial definition of modern German socialism. While its realization took decades, its production altered the urban core of Berlin by adding new layers of meaning. With the demise of the GDR the Marx-Engels-Forum is now once again pushed into the abstract of planning, contributing to a new definition of German identity, once again, while redefining the spatial experience of Berlin’s city center and possibly a continuous deferral .

The Brevity of Reterritorializing
Benjamin Foerster Baldenius has scruffy medium-length hair, unkempt from only three hours of sleep due to a competition entry that made him work through the night and into the morning. He’s part of the urbanism firm Raumlabor (Spacelab) in Berlin, and his office takes up the entire top floor of an old brick building in Kreuzberg. The area is now popular and home to many bars and clubs, döner shops are dotted along Schlesische Straße, joined by vintage shops and so many other mixed collections for which Berlin is famous. Baldenius was enmeshed in the public protest that took place regarding the destruction of the Palace of the Republic, engaging installation art as a political tool of expression with his colleagues at Raumlabor. But his involvement with the Palace predates flooding its basement and installing a mountain inside, rather, it reaches back to his very arrival in the city.

Listening to him explain Berlin’s urbanism is like following a stranger in a crowd, his ideas straddle an unclear position, darting back and forth, between and disappearing only to show up again in a place unexpected. The unexpected is what makes his memories that much more enlivening. He moved to Berlin from Hamburg in 1989 just a short time before the fall of the Berlin wall, to study Architecture at the technical university. His memories about Berlin in the 1980s conjure images of dark alleys, grey skies and conspiratorial schemes with friends spying on friends for indistinct desires. As he discusses the city of the past he notes one could always tell what part of the city they were in by the color of the streetlamps and whether they cast a low yellow glow over the sidewalks and roads or if their white incandescence brightened the cobbled pathways, a geography of mood.

For Baldenius this was not the only distinction in the divided city and he recalls entering East Berlin at times with his father to visit the theater, showing traditional Brechtian work. His remarks about the division bring together strange visions of the city with the West being filled with a nightlife of experimental theater and clubs while the East suffered the traditional plays of Brecht and any alternative scene was hidden in the basement of a church whose location was nearly unknown. This image of the city only kept together for a short time though as soon after his arrival in Berlin, the wall collapsed and along with it the GDR followed suit in due time. And this is when Baldenius first noticed both the Marx Engels Forum and the Palace of the Republic. As a student at the technical university his campus was located at Ernst Reuter Platz in Charlottenburg, a Northwestern district of Berlin. Living in Prenzlauerberg in the East of Berlin gave him the opportunity to pass through central downtown each day on his way to university, and along his path he recalls the distinctly boring façade of the Palace of the Republic greeting him each day, as did the nearly empty park just East of it, the Marx Engels Forum. But he expresses his initial impressions of the area in a flippant manner, acknowledging he had no concerns for neither the building nor the park when he was a student, besides a disgust for the architecture of the palace. Instead his interests were in organizing together with faculty at the university to petition for student housing and more immediate concerns.

At the time his mother had also recently relocated to Berlin from Hamburg to work as the office manager for the Social Democratic Party as the GDR strained to avoid crumbling. One day she had returned from work with a collection of drawings that detailed the construction of the Palace of the Republic, assuming her son who was studying Architecture would be enlivened to receive documents so integral to the city’s form. To her surprise Baldenius could not be less interested in the building, even with its grand halls for the parliament and general public assembly. In recounting the story he remarks on how very little any of the area interested him, at the time all he could make of the Palace was a query as to “Why?” and the Marx Engels Forum barely elicited any emotion due to its barren and stark qualities. His mother not only brought him detailed construction drawings but also worked in both the Palace and another governmental building nearby, not once did Baldenius visit her or step foot into the building. It was not until some years later that the bronze and glass box elicited a response from him, after the opening of East Berlin began to resolve portions of the student housing crisis and his interests were freed somewhat. After his studies the Palace of the Republic went under renovation and was not finished until 2006, when all the asbestos had been removed. But along with the removal of the asbestos went the entire building’s fire prevention system, for the asbestos had coated these components, and without them in place, the building was deemed hazardous once again and unsuitable for occupation. Directly in the center of the city visitors were kept away from one of the most integral sites in the city’s recent and distant past.

This exclusion from the building began to enliven a curiosity in Baldenius, among others, and the public displays of opinion began to embroil the site in a heated discussion as the new Germany was continuing to form. Shortly before the building’s demolition announcement by the German government, the palace was masked by a life-size print of the former Prussian castle that had existed before its demolition by the GDR, after the Second World War. In his remarks, Baldenius describes his reaction to finding this fake monolith as he passed by as akin to the impression received from Christo and Jean-Claude’s wrapping of he Reichstag, in wonder but laughable nonetheless, perceived as a joke aside from all serious intentions. The tactic of the fake castle became an increasingly present event in the downtown according to Baldenius, and even today Schinkel’s former Baukademie stands semi-lifelike just west of the former palace, a skin hung on metal girders urging reconstruction. (Till: 1999, 269) These installations began to encourage public dialogue about the Palace of the Republic and it became an increasingly heated issue for discussion. Competitions continued to be held as attempts to resolve what could become of the city’s center and the palace remained empty and still as it sat in its parking lot across from the Marx Engels Forum.

It was not until another urbanist group, named Urban Catalyst, formed a working coalition with two theater groups, that any recognizable activity took place within the Palace. The cooperation between Urban Catalyst and the theater groups took the form of grant-writing and resource establishment that led to the opening of the Palace for three months for public use. Baldenius recalls being contacted by Urban Catalyst to submit proposals for installations or events within the palace and at this point his interest had been raised due to the complexity of the situation and the political climate surrounding what to do with the palace. Under the banner of “Volkspalast”, or People’s Palace, Raumlabor’s proposals for two installations were implemented. Utilizing the site as a very clear message board, Baldenius recalls their first installation was meant to use the building in a rude way while at the same time achieving something amazing with the building. For Raumlabor this meant flooding the building with water for an installation entitled “FassadenRepublik.” The installation was participatory in a variety of ways, as it was meant to create a lagoon city constructed through façades designed by the public. The entire palace then became a lagoon filled with façades in response to the continually appearing, historically reconstructed buildings that were facing the palace in an attempt to restore the historical dimensions of the downtown site. By inviting the public to submit designs, Raumlabor then destabilized the ideological stranglehold of those private donors whose attempts to reform the city into its past image had littered the downtown of Berlin. Through “FassadenRepublik” Raumlabor brought the voices of urban publics to the center of a debate about city planning, even if for only a moment of recognition.

With the opening of the palace for public entry the controversy surrounding suggestions for its demolition became continually heated and the events taking place within the building continued to gain in importance as a tool of protest and input on the future of the city. Ideas about the city center in contemporary debate have tended to drift towards a rebuilding of the historic district, but as Baldenius mentions, which historic district is valid for today and from which point in history should Berlin choose to withdraw its future form? Baldenius makes it clear that the urge to tear down the Palace of the Republic and rebuild the original Prussian castle makes sense from an urban planning perspective, especially as the Lustgarten by Schinkel which was formerly destroyed by the Nazis has been quasi-rebuilt in a continuing movement towards historicizing the city center in an image taken from somewhere in the mid-19th to early 20th centuries. But for what reasons would a democracy vote to rebuild the symbol, image and footprint of a monarchical government?

To address this question, Raumlabor created a second installation in the palace entitled “Der Berg” that took the form of a mountain inside, outside and on the façade of the palace. Built from a glowing geometry the installation probed how the center of a city might garner meaning and who controls the development, implementation and editing of this meaning. Further, the intention of the installation was to address how a populace makes an area a home and in what ways the areas in which one lives reflects the ideas of a people. Baldenius describes the work as a response to the artificial façades that continue to occupy the site, even after the fairly recent demolition of the Palace of the Republic.

Events like “Der Berg” installation took place continuously throughout the brief three-month period in which the palace was opened to the public for temporary use. The visitors to the palace across from the Marx Engels Forum were taking part in a movement to reclaim the center of the city and to open this volatile space for a discussion outside governmental bodies and instead housed in the very area of dispute. Like so many individuals that preceded them, visitors to the palace walked atop the same ground as those gathering for the parades of the National Socialists and more recently the gatherings of the East Berliners during the existence of the GDR. While these previous individuals gathered in this area for support of the state, those going into the Palace of the Republic were gathering in opposition to the state and in support of the palace’s perpetuation, not only as a material site but as an idea of Berlin, as that rumored underground culture that thrives not completely unlike the undiscoverable alternative scene of the GDR, hidden in the basements of churches in unknown neighborhoods.

Weihnachtsmarkt
As the first snow has fallen in Berlin for the Winter, the Marx Engels Forum is oppressed by a plane hiding its recent scars. The padded layer has taken residency over the entire area and is slowly being molded by the visitors who pass through the concentric paths as they move between Museum Island, Nikolaiviertel and Alexandarplatz. But there is a strange contrast that has grown in tandem with the snow. The gentle pulses of the glowing red television tower now compete with the streaming colors of the ferris wheel that has risen near King Neptune’s plaza. Barely reaching half the height of the television tower, a ferris wheel has accumulated across the street from the Eastern edge of the park and its lights dance back and forth while the passengers, enclosed in little carts, receive a view of Berlin only available once yearly. The season of wet leaves and intermittent warmth in Berlin has ended, and with Fall’s passing, Winter’s arrival signals the assemblies of groups packed between insincere alpine cottages selling traditional crafts, modern gifts and various comestibles like candied nuts, fried cabbage and assorted sweets. Gluhwein is advertised throughout the Christmas Market and a stand advertising its Dresden roots prepare cauliflower whose aroma distinctly mixes with the assorted candies marketed only a few cottages down.

Passing through the market is like visiting Disney, its fantastically real production conveying an enjoyment best achieved through consumerism as experience. The rides that are dotted throughout the market spin children around on reindeers and other mythical creatures while the children shake bells beckoning the speed to increase. Strollers and the elderly push throughout the area, heading to alpine cottages for an assortment of goods and treats. The air is festive when crowds gather but moving through the marketplace during an off-time one finds the alpine cottages filled with vague expressions of workers as they adjust their traditional costumes or chef’s hats, awaiting the next rush of shoppers and noting the remaining time until they escape the Christmas village. The collection is a true contrast against the plaza’s usual use in Autumn where visitors and residents sit on benches admiring Neptune and his maritime friends. The lights of the television tower and those of the Ferris wheel react to one another, one slowly pulsing now and again while the hectic colors of the Ferris wheel wash the surrounding area in a Technicolor bath

Sitting in the Marx Engels Forum one can watch as the crowds that usually move along the Western edge of the park, are met by those visitors who are either rushing to or escaping from the parade of lights and crafts. Their faces express contentment from the market but slowly wane into a shiver as the wind comes across the River Spree, and into the park, to greet them. Like so many others, they turn around with their cameras to capture the blinking television tower and the its new Ferris wheel companion, whose rotations blend together the lights in their photographs and add to their memory of the city as busy place. The dinner groups abandoning their meals in Nikolaiviertel mesh with the families and tourists who are seeking the warmth of the market, its bright lights advertising a respite from the tundra like park of snow, benches and barren trees. No one is sitting in the park during the day, and especially during the night, it is abandoned. This changes occasionally and informal groups join those individuals rushing around the rings of sidewalk, or making new paths through the trampled grass, in their momentary glimpse of the park.

It’s late evening in the winter before snow has come, but the benches of the Marx Engels Forum are freezing. Slight flurries beset Berlin and their remains are scattered along the benches besides graffiti and the few remaining leaves who have survived their departure from the branches above. The Berliner Rathaus? quietly bellows as it reaches eight and its sound permeates the park for a brief moment. As the hands reach around to catch the next minute the approaching silence is scuffled by the interfering noises of boots scraping across the sidewalk. The lone individuals that are always passing through the park slightly drag their feet while they check their cellphone’s reception, muttering in mixtures of German, English and French. Before they have finished their calls they are out of the park and crossing into Museum Island or heading into the arcades just North of the park. Those that do not exit the park immediately, appear to have pulled out their phones not to ring home or find out what bar at which to meet , but instead, are crouching and contorting along the Western edge of the park while they try to capture the entire television tower in their camera’s viewfinder. A brief flash, they look down and their faces become aglow with their cell’s display. Mostly it takes visitors a few images before they really capture what they want. After looking at their cell display they realize the tower’s tip is cropped in the frame and they move further towards the River Spree, enlarging their perspective and capturing one of Berlin’s namesakes.

The process becomes more complicated at times, both when larger groups begin to pose for pictures and also when the steady streams of park visitors pass through, interrupting the image capture and forcing photographers to pace their photos in time with the breaks in crowds. A rhythm develops and one can watch as a slight queue begins building when one group wants the spot of another to capture the perfect image. These interactions are common and sometimes visitors are so carefree as to just snap off a photo while passing through, without even worrying about what is being captured. In the past when Marx and Engels were able to be approached at a closer distance and even interacted with, these sculptures were a favorite for photo opportunities, and searching through social photo media like Flickr documents the quintessential image, sitting in Marx’s lap with a television tower soaring into the grey, or sometimes blue, sky. But behind the fence with the other sculptures Marx and Engels are kept away from visitors, and Flickr will document this portion of the park’s history through a collection of images lacking any playful poses with Marx and Engels.

At times, it is not only tourists and dinner guests, or families, that pass through the park, but at irregular intervals the demographic becomes skewed. Some nights, while walking around the park, one notices one or two teenage men sitting with their bicycles resting against a park bench. As you pass by they barely notice and seem preoccupied as they gaze into the evening lights along Museum Island. Others pass by and still no movement, maybe they smoke a cigarette or turn to each other for a brief moment, one stands and paces slightly, but is completely unclear how the park attracted these individuals, and their persisting presence signals the onset of something just out of reach. In the 1990s, it was rumored that the park was often populated by such a crowd as these two, younger and somewhat rougher looking, their messages spread across Marx and Engels in spray paint and the other sculptures serving as just as clear of a message board as the two philosophers. Since the 1990s, and the changes in the city, this crowd has largely left the park, but at times it resurfaces, or at least a faint trace of it does so when groups of younger visitors meet up or wait friends.

A glimpse of red filters through the tree trunks and fence in the park, the glow dividing into a few lights whose rhythms become out of sync and detail the split of their initial impression as one object. With the approach of the lights the two men sitting on the benches rise up to greet their friends, the two have now become five. Increasingly, they become more audible, their German indistinguishable from across the park but their movements made clear by the trailing red lights that shift back and forth as they change positions. Curiously they remain at the bench, standing next to their fixed gears and conversing amongst one another. The group then grows again in size as a few more cyclists enter the park from Karl Liebknecht Straße. The group remains smaller at only six or seven people, for a moment it has a hint of a critical mass ride like in American cities judging by the rolled jeans and cyclist paraphernalia that adorns the visitors. The lights continue to blink intermittently and then one breaks away from the group. It is dark enough to faintly discern a body propelling around the rings of the park but one can easily watch the glow of the red light as it traces the perimeter of the park. Rushing by, the cyclist leans in towards the center so as not to lose balance, his solitary race continuing past his starting point until he has lapped the park at least three times.

“Wild”life
It’s as the park becomes ensnared in a web of lights that I watch the Berlin town hall topple together as a mountain of red bricks, vibrations leaving its tip and sending away cobbled clouds of convulsing birds. These are the very same clouds that, at times, can be found traveling across the grass, their glazed eyes tracking any edible movements and sending them into jerky dances similar to their fits in the air, beaks snapping open and closed with steady wings propelling them about. I watch the airborne cloud sway to and fro above me, its dimensions shifting continuously as it turns from flat and deep to thin and textured. Every so often, the shifts occur as the cloud begins to break apart, a rupture tearing away at the texture and depth. The sky seems black as the clouds sway about but when I watch a fissure rip apart the seams, leaks slip through and just like when the cloud is scattering across the ground, its partial masking reveals something further.

The car lights that slide along the edges of the park trace it, their imprint on my retinas tearing a basket around me as their paths differentiate and integrate along the precise asphalt geometry. The fractured pace encouraged by the stoplights is interrupted at times when I watch cyclists rush past, their tail lights out of sync with the usual traffic and fraying the grid, or as camera flashes from the top of the Berliner dome distort the basket by tugging it North and raising its rim. While the clouds either disintegrate into the air or crowd along the ground in jittering packs, its movements are reflected in the leaves and branches as they gently shift, their retort to pressures of the wind. My breath is starting to show now as it’s November, and the common fantasies of Berlin hold true with the nights being the days and mostly lacking any clarity in vision due to the constantly grey-purple light. The cloud begins to rest, its parts dropping on the park like a rickety machine falling apart under the stresses of production. Barely noticeable, a rustle in the leaves surrounding my bike and below the bench where I’m sitting, distracts me as part of the cloud lands on me, its chalky white glob smearing across my jacket and just barely sounding louder than the thin planes below me as the tiny footsteps crack them slightly.

My breaths have become more labored now and as my chest heaves in and out to lessen the sharp of the cold in my throat, I notice the distinct flavor of the air, its crispness denoting the chill of the River Spree tainted with the aroma of the fallen leaves and a descending frost. Riding through the park on my bike the surfaces of the leaves wobble my trajectory as the wet mix with the dry, cracking noises being suffocated by a perspiring embrace. As I wait on the bench with the park to catch the breaking clouds, little noises erupt below me, signaling a reason for the agitated leaves shifting angrily. Barely noticeable, something flits back and forth beneath the leaves next to my bike tire and the bench, a gentle crackling following the violent shakes and displacements. The patches of cover echo the clouds that broke apart, their own discontinuities exposing a layer below and it is between these fissures that I first catch a glimpse of the fieldmouse valiantly darting in a meter’s dimension. As I wait on the bench, my book in my lap, it skips between me and my bike, rushing from the base of the bike, hidden under a leaf, to right beside my foot, whiskers flaying like whips, and eyes barely big enough to reflect light appearing behind storm-tossed shutters.

The fieldmouse continues its rummaging in the fractured coverage of the leaves and like the people who filter the garbage canisters of the park with their hands and eyes so deftly trained for valuable cans and bottles, the fieldmouse frenzies around me for anything of mouse-value. Its search is lengthy and so focused that my movements do not disrupt its treasure hunt nor scare it away. Instead, its scampering remains uninterested in my page-turning or subtle shifts on the bench as it meticulously combs the area, the potential treasures of the leaves needing thorough articulation and dedicated uncovering. Not unlike the mouse, those that pass through the park to collect valuable trash are thorough and constant in their searching. As they pause by the trashcans at the base of all the lampposts in the park, they quickly discern the contents of the crowded orange bins and clasp whatever they deem of worth. While the human scavengers’ movements are quick, they seek no cover as the fieldmouse does, and instead rush to quicken their findings rather than to hide their actions.
I’ve turned countless pages before I notice the absence of the fieldmouse, its search apparently finished or relocated to another area. But as I scour the ground, trying not to turn abruptly, on my jacket I noticed another part of the park dropped upon me. Its thin legs brush against as my jacket as its tiny body leaps forward, web trailing behind it and securing its descent from my shoulder. When I notice the spider it has already begun to drop along my body, becoming frozen in air as its legs leave my jacket and the wind tosses it along its string; for a moment it hangs without motion, its legs spread wide and gently while they collapse upon each other only to split apart moments later. When the wind ends its harassment, the spider passes onto my bookbag and begins rummaging about its contents, disappearing and reappearing as the tips of its legs trace the bag’s zipper, the spider sliding into the seam and out again.

Interruptions
The gaggle of older women brace themselves against the thuds of the amps, their beat sending shocks through the bodies trailing behind them. As they pass along Unter den Linden, I watch as their heads whip to and fro, their stretched ears waving wildly as the elderly ladies stand back in utter amazement. The beats vary, and with their variations iterations of jerks prolong the moments passing before me. Each truck holds about six speakers the size of my own body, a dj manipulates toggles in the back of the truck and in response, the speakers’ eruptions trigger violent fits from those trailing behind. The procession is unending, as far as I can see there are masses of individuals streaming along and violently shaking their heads in direct enjoyment. But the elderly women and myself stand still on the corner, in disbelief and confusion. I can feel the draw of the procession tug at me and recommend my joining, but I cannot break myself away from the street corner. As we watch water bottles are flung in our direction along with the noisy ballistics, ricocheting from the smooth glass behind us, and amplifying until our hearing begs deferral.

As we wait, there are gaps that are created by the pausing of the vehicles. And in enough time that it takes me to realize I could make a break for it, I could pass across the street or fall into the potpourri of bodies, it is already too late and I remain on the corner as a spectator. But now my observances are timed and in sync with these breaks, I anticipate their coming while watching as the parade participants slam their heads against the air, seemingly destroying an unseen barrier with their unrelenting jerks of protest aimed at myself and the others watching them drift along. Like the Spree they move through the center of the city, their breaks in movement reminiscent of the frothing currents passing along the banks of Berlin. And like the tourists in the boat that cruise along the city protected from the ebbs and flows that circulate and wrap themselves in Berlin, the old ladies and I drift.

Aggregating Compositions
“This virtual time itself determines a time of differenciation, or rather rhythms or different times of actualization which correspond to the relations and singularities of the structure and, for their part, measure the passage from virtual to actual.”
(Deleuze, 2004: 262)

“The text we read may be in real space, but insofar as it is comprehensible to us, it also exists in a state of virtuality. We did not have to wait for the computer screen or the cinematic projector to enter virtual space. We live in its shadow more or less continually…”
(Grosz, 2005: 105)

“Overall, we face a powerful mix of simple, sensory, problematic, and massive affects, given some structure in time by simple, complex, and hypercomplex refrains in varying processes of composition and decomposition.”
(Bertelsen & Murphie, 149)

I would like to propose that a productive mode for understanding the Marx Engels Forum could rely on approaching this park as a type of composition, a composition that produces a multiplicity of virtualities, when lived. This is not to refer to the park as a type of text but rather, to encourage an understanding of the urban as an experiential decoding of material and semiotic components, continually in flux but entering stable rhythms that produce specific atmospheres, such as I have recounted throughout this ethnographic study.

At focus here is also the notion of the virtual in this process of living and composing, for I would like to present the park as a type of open composition. It’s every day materiality constantly undergoing rhythmic changes whether they be through seasonal shifts in climate and use patterns, or in reworking the physical qualities of the site through construction. It is also useful to work with this notion of the open composition as it relates to the semiotic and the unstable meanings that become associated with the various symbols in the park, and of the park itself as a symbol. The park can then be thought of in the most abstract terms as a structure of corresponding relations that are themselves in rhythmical production and constantly altering the singular composition of the park through its multiplicities of becoming.

At the forefront of this conceptualization of the park is the notion of the virtual as explained by Grosz in lineage with Deleuze and Bergson. For the virtual is not a type of technologically enabled alter-state, as Grosz mentions when distinguishing computer enabled and cinema inspired notions of this modality. Rather the virtual is here thought of as a type of abstract modality in which a system of potentialities is stored, every potential type of combination or composition of some set of parts, that which is real but not actual, that which might become through actualization. Grosz remarks that this notion of the virtual has been conceptualized since the time of Plato in the form of Ideas and simulacra. Important in understanding the virtual is that this modality of becoming is in all senses real, it is the state of all potentialities of any entity that is real but not yet actualized. For the actual is a limiting process whereby all those potentialities of the virtual are indexed with the inception of only one of the multiplicity; in short, the virtual is the state of Ideas and immanence through which existence is produced. (Deleuze, 2004: 263)

The actualization of the virtual takes place in the present through the lived experience of duration. It is duration that then becomes a specifically politically relevant tool for analyzing the lived experiences of the city and specifically in this study, the Marx Engels Forum. Grosz writes that:

“Duration is the movement of divergence or differentiation between what was and what will be, a movement from one mode of virtuality (the past) to another (the future). Duration infects not only all of life, which carries the past along with the present; it also affects the universe as a whole.” (Grosz, 2005: 110)

In the Marx Engels Forum duration exists in various degrees and my argument within this paper is that the kind of duration specifically impacts the actualization of the potentialities within the virtual past and future, encouraging a politics of duration that examines differences in kind between durations. In the every day this translates to a recognition that the type of time spent in places specifically impacts the atmosphere of these territories due to specific modes of composition that are processed through the interrelating of the plethora of components that create a composition. My concern in examining this park is to expose how our durations in urban places figure directly into the compositional experience of those sites. The politics of duration is an abstract politics that is meant to enliven the every day by making aware the impact of time in lived experience. Actualization as enabled through type of duration is a specific kind of politics that relies on duration as the central concern for how potentialities might be actualized—the duration of a stroll through the park versus that of passing through on segue delineates a specific actualization of the composition that is the Marx Engels Forum and therefore delimits the virtual in a distinct manner related to potentialities actualized relative to the type of duration encountering the virtual. The politics of duration then relate to what Madalina Diaconu has described as an “atmosphere”, where the affective resonance of a composition exudes a certain something, due to the relational composition of the parts and their local and global affective capabilities. Diaconu writes:

“the ‘place’ is not at all the geometrical-physical space known from the natural sciences, but a qualitative, quasi-energetic and affective field of forces. Further, atmosphere is something one enters by accident or sinks purposely in; the condition for feeling an atmosphere is a rather passive Sicheinlassen, as Heidegger described in Gelassenheit.”
(Diaconu, 2010: 136)

Diaconu’s account of atmospheres presents a passive human subject that I find problematic in my own analysis of the Marx Engels Forum and directly in relation to any type of durational politics. This is for the very reason that my understanding of duration as a human quality is paramount to establishing a type of political duration, whereby the quality of experience in a specific composition suggests a specific form for that composition which is certainly in some respects dependent on the protracted or elongated experience of the actant. This is not to argue that an “atmosphere” is assembled through specifically human forces only, but rather the mode of this atmosphere’s relating to an actant is completely tied up in the kind of duration of experience, as this duration factors into the actualization of the potentialities of the virtual.

Conclusion
My study of the Marx Engels Forum advocates an understanding of duration as an essentially political process in the composing of urban experiences. This thesis recounts a series of events collected through ethnographic observations that detail my particular experiences at the Marx Engels Forum and surrounding areas of Berlin. These experiences are by no means meant to be universal nor am I arguing that there is a meta-experiential framework for urban dwellers and visitors. Rather, this text has commented on how the confluence of factors in urban environments can couple with a multiplicity of durations to form specific experiences, always varying and unstable, only entering into specific rhythms through certain refrains, or repeated practices. This thesis has been a study of processes, the processes by which urban living differentiates itself in accordance with the multiplicity of time. Through detailing my observations at the Marx Engels Forum, and throughout Berlin, I have attempted to delineate specific kinds of duration and their involvement in what I have called “open compositions.” Examining the city in such a manner certainly leaves many questions unanswered and I think the least developed in this thesis has been the role of historical time and the politics of making new the past, through actualizing those historical potentialities that were evaded.
Throughout this thesis the various sections have developed notions of temporality and its role in affecting experience as a form of composition. In “Deterritorializing Strata, Notes on a Political Process” I developed the question of historical time most centrally, situating the creation of the Marx Engels Forum in some of its social, cultural and political conditions. I focused within this section on the trajectories followed by those agents involved in the conception, elongation and realization of the park; emphasizing the ties between changing modes of governance and ideological apparatuses for urbanism.
The sections following “Deterritorializing Strata” linked to these initial ideas of political, social and cultural factors to develop a history of the MEF that described how the various conditions of a nation give rise to specific urban forms. “The Latent Instability of a City Center”, “Where will the Workers Live?”, “Making Plans”, “Spectres of Deferral” and “Witness to Change” all were components in this questioning of the past and its connections to the future. Specifically, my writing addresses how specific historical virtuals were actualized by those agents concomitant with the production of the park as a means to bring awareness to what is excluded from the future through the actions of politicians, architects, urban dwellers and others agents.

Within “The Brevity of Reterritorialization” my interview with Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius developed a contemporary reflection on those processes of politicization I had constructed in the previous sections. As Foerster-Baldenius was present and involved with the most recent protests to preserve the Palace of the Republic, his methods of political involvement and the tactics of protest used were explicitly relevant to notions of temporality in the urban. Within this section of my thesis, issues of the historical virtual were less explicit and the development was instead focused on contemporary political engagements with urbanism and the utility of temporality in these very engagements.

“Weinachsmarkt” moved away from my concerns with history and functioned specifically as a contemporary narrative of the park. While its exclusion of historical considerations marks its deviation from the previous writing, it was in this section that notions of temporal rhythms were first developed. My focus on crowds moving, urban signs such as various lights, and the construction of experience detailed stepping into and out of some “thing.” The narrative in this section explicitly focused on detailed description to identify the components producing this “thing” that is the Weinnachsmarkt.

“Wild”life functioned to include those non-human actors implicit in the production of certain experiences of the park. By including a focus on animal life within the park this section proposed that an understanding of the city within a temporal register is not restricted to the humans who use it. Rather this section includes specific attention those non-human components of the park in composing the temporal rhythms with which this thesis was primarily concerned. My descriptions of swarms and individual insects or animals brought attention to the specific patterns of being that each actor suggested. Without the inclusion of these animals and insects, any account of the park would miss entirely vital components in the compositions that become the park.

Following my descriptions of animal and insect life in the park the section “Interruptions” was a brief account of entering into some”thing” in the city and how temporal rhythms factor into the composition of such a “thing.” My narrative focused explicitly on being situated at a threshold and the force exhibited between becoming or remaining. This account explicated the multiplicities of time in the every day, a constant concern throughout this thesis. In describing the Fuck Parade I not only brought to attention the force of temporality in the urban, but also the politics of duration by describing brief protest and its immediate implications. As brief protests were key in developing my thoughts about temporality in Berlin, this section acted to culminate my observations into a concrete example of the historical, political, social and cultural forces of temporality.

In the completion of this thesis, one question still remains that I find vital in understanding the forces of cities today. My writing about the historical virtual was cursory and I still find it necessary to question how we actualize those past virtualities that were excluded from the future or becoming. In studying the MEF, this question has only become continually more relevant as the un-actualized potentials of the past act as a reservoir of political potential in the present to. I would then further develop this question to ask what relevance the virtual past holds for us in current political processes? This question just may help to establish the potential of the “open composition”, which is what I have called the MEF, for the reason that continued instability and stability is a difficult notion with which to toy. Why do things come together in the manner they do, and why do they break apart? I suggest that the study of these unactualized historical potentials will lead to possible answers to these questions, and further, new political tools.

Endnotes
1. According to Paul Betts the most reliable figures estimate that through the 1950s 52 percent of houses had only one to two rooms. Central heating was present in less than three percent of homes and only 30 percent of residences had a toilet, with only 22 percent containing a bath. (2008: 96)

2. The Stalinist understanding of international modernism was deeply reactionary and situated in a rejection of perceived “formalism” and “cosmopolitanism.” An uncanny similarity exists between both the GDR and the Third Reich in their negation of modernism as each relied upon a reactionary rhetoric as a tool of nation building.

3. Largely the significance of this project is a spatial definition of German Socialism. The Karl-Marx-Allee can be read as a mid-century realization of what the future was to be like.

4. The politics of these design competitions are reflected in West German claims to Berlin in its entirety. The competition “Berlin, the capital” of 1957-8 is a prime example. (Flierl 93)

5. Gradually modernism became an accepted language after Kruschev denounced “ostentatious monumentality” in December 1954, as he succeeded Stalin. (Ladd, 222)

6. It is also important to note that the design by the Henselmann collective was not constructed on Spreeinsel, rather it was pushed North into what is now recognized as Alexanderplatz. While the radio tower has become representative of Berlin’s urban core, the outcome was highly divorced from the original desires of the 1950s and should not be mistaken as the originally envisioned socialist palace.

7. It is common to associate grandiose sculpture with Socialist Realism as it was generally a hallmark characteristic. The Soviet sculptor Nikolai Tomsky produced a 63 foot tall statue of Lenin in the Berlin neighborhood of Leninplatz until it was destroyed in 1991. Alongside this public artwork the Ernst Thällman monument may also be considered indicative of this style, reaching 43 feet into the air. (Ladd 202) The colossal qualities of these sculptures earn them their status as monuments and function to reiterate citizen interpellation through becoming landmarks in an urban context. This may be the reason the fate of such sculptures brings an early demise.

8. The Humbolt Forum is to be a cultural center in the core of Berlin. After the demise of the GDR and the destruction of the Palace of the Republic, continuous suggestions were made to rebuild the former royal palace. The Humboldt Forum is to be a response to these and will incorporate the Dahlem museums, parts of the State Museum in Berlin and the Humboldt University. (Flierl: 2009)

9. In 1950 Aufbaugesetz was a reconstruction act making all land public and available for development. (Flierl 39) The land that is now the Marx-Engels-Forum had previously been privately owned, but with Aufbaugesetz and the confiscation of property from Jews by the Nazis, it was filtered into the control of the state. As reparations are being made to the victims/families of the Holocaust, the stability of plans by the German government for this area may be deemed contestable.

Bibliography

Azaryahu, Maox, “Street Names and Political Identity: The Case of East Berlin”, Journal of Contemporary History, 21:4 (1986: Oct.) p. 581

Bertelsen, Lone, and Andrew Murphy. “An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain.” The Affect Theory Reader. Ed. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth. Durham N.C.: Duke UP, 2010. Print.

Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Bau und Stadtenwicklung, Urban Development and Urban Policy in Germany. An Overview (Senatsverlwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, 2000) p. 47-52.
—Bau und Stadtenwicklung, Schloss Berlin/Humboldt-Forum,Realisierungswettbewerb 2008, Senatsverlwaltung für Stadtentwicklung (2008).

Burtin, Beatrix. “Information about Marx-Engels-Forum in Berlin.” Message to Tyler Collins. 19 November 2009. E-mail.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004. Print.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 2004. Print.

Diaconu, Madalina. “Patina-Atmosphere-Aroma; Towards an Aesthetics of Fine Differences.” Handbook of Phenomenlogical Aesthetics 59 (2010): 131-48. Print.

Diedendorf, Jeffry M. In the Wake of War, The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War Two (New York; Oxford University Press, 1993).

Flierl, Bruno. “A Study of the Capital of the German Democratic Republic.” Habitat International, Vol 9/No 3,4 (1985), p. 91-126.
—”On the Significance – Historically and Within its City Surroundings – of the Area Mitte Spreeinsel in Berlin.” (Humboldt Forum Berlin, Das Projekt – The Project)

Flierl, Thomas and Parzinger, Hermann. Humboldt Forum Berlin, Das Projekt, The Project. (Germany; Theater der Zeit, 2009).

Grosz, Elizabeth A. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke UP, 2005. Print
-The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Print.

Ladd, Brian, “East Berlin Political Monuments in the Late German Democratic Republic: Finding a Place for Marx and Engels,” Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 37/No. 1 (Jan, 2002), pp. 91-104.

—The Ghosts of Berlin, Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. (Chicago; The University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Low, Setha M. On the Plaza: the Politics of Public Space and Culture. Austin: University of Texas, 2000. Print.

¬ Pence, Katherine, and Paul Betts. Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2008. Print.

Stangl, Paul A. “East Berlin, 1945-1961 : Ideology, Politics, Identity, and the Urban Landscape.” Diss. The University of Texas at Austin, 2001. Print.

Senatsverlwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, “Amtsblatt”, Senatsverlwaltung für Inneres (August 1999).

Senatsverlwaltung für Stadtentwicklung, “Internationale Experenkommission, Historiche Mitte Berlin”, Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Baund Wohnungswesen. (April 2002)

Till, Karen. “Staging the past: landscape designs, cultural identity” Ecumene 6 (3) (1999), pp.251-283.