Laura Bowie

What would it have been like to live in the island of West Berlin during the 1960s? What impact did the experience of the post-war context have on the global student movement in the city? By reconstructing the cultural atmosphere of the time and considering the site of West Berlin not only as a city, but also as a home, this book seeks to understand how the world was viewed by the protesting students, how the urban space they were living in influenced their political viewpoint, and how the cultural outputs of the generation created a uniquely symbiotic relationship with the world. This book paints a picture of the transfer of ideas between a variety of intellectual and cultural sources by combining theories that influenced the students’ perception of the world with the events centred around the key year of 1968. The intention is to come to an understanding of how the experience of living in West Berlin combined with architecture, and the arts more generally, to form the critique of urban planning and, by extension, society as a whole.
[https://www.peterlang.com/document/1154452]

West Berlin, a city emblematic of a fractured post-war society, provided the basis for the volatile student protests of 1968 where the youth sought to reclaim the city from its prescribed path. This article identifies the film camera as a probing tool of urban exploration during the 1960s through the films of Irena Vrkljan (1930-). As an outsider in the city, Vrkljan built on the work of many intellectuals in Berlin compelled by their urban experience to explore the connection between city and dweller. In contrast to the image of the 1960s as a period of upheaval, Vrkljan’s films offer a historically conscious, and lyrical approach to the city that discover alternative pasts and potential futures. Armed with a 16mm camera and the writings of Kracauer and Simmel, an alternative West Berlin is uncovered where, in the words of Vrkljan, “it is possible to penetrate the fabric of the city”.

This article discusses the work of 1960s Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell. Specifically in relation to the city of West Berlin in the form of the work Berlin: 100 Events. The paper analyses the relationship between art and city space and how the streets and places of the post-war city became contested and deeply symbolic. The 1960s saw a fundamental shift in how the new generation understood the world around them and the art of Vostell played a part in that development. Both the city and the younger generation were seeking a new identity and a new relationship to the world. The city spaces of West Berlin provided a catalyst for this recalibration.

This paper will explore the dynamic interface between politics, urban planning, architecture and culture, during the 1968 student protests in walled West Berlin. As a city that lost its function as a capital and its place at the forefront of global politics, the marginalised city, surrounded by the communist East, became place where new ideas about Germany’s identity were trialled and contested. In 1968, students held an exhibition that condemned current construction activities as being anti-social and reflective of greater issues within German society. In brief, the students condemned the zoning of the city, the denial of the past, the displacement of tenants into satellite settlements, and the destruction of nineteenth century tenements. The students campaign caused the remote Märkisches Viertel estate to become a ‘symbolic battleground for a struggle over the values of the modern city’. Thus the reflective connection between society at large and the urban environment was forged. This paper will bring into focus the dynamic and symbiotic relationship between protest and urban space, and demonstrate how the heated issues inherent in West Berlin at the time were both played out and mapped onto the marginalised spaces of the walled city.

This paper explores the current popularity of memory studies in academia, by looking specifically at the basis of the methodology by illustrating key theorists such as Maurice Halbwachs and his theory of collective memory and Pierre Nora’s Sites of Memory. These theories are then applied specifically to the portrayal of the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) in art, film and literature. The left-wing terrorism of the RAF developed out of the West German student protest movement of 1968 and holds a controversial place in the cultural and political memory of Germany today. In a 1971 survey by the Allensbach Institute, 5 per cent of the West German population said that they would harbour a member of the RAF overnight, which goes some way in illustrating the popularity of the movement. After the trial and (contested) suicide of the core members of the gang, this period holds a particular significance in the memory of the Left in Germany. At the time, as well as in recent decades, many films and novels have been created in order to contextualise the events and to ratify the conflict between supporting the ideology of the group, whilst condoning their terrorist methods. Gerhard Richter painted and exhibited October 18, 1977 in 1988-89, which questioned the portrayal of the RAF in the media as well as the issues of nostalgia, memory and cultural manipulation of historical events. This paper discusses the theories of memory and their manifestation in works of art as well as evaluating the use of a methodology of memory for critical analyse of particular events in history.

The domination of twentieth century history by World War Two and its aftermath are still heavily analysed and debated today. Despite this vast amount of research, little has been written about the emotional effects and the subjective experience of the Germans during and postwar. Every aspect of peoples’ lives was effected, thus creating a wealth of memory which can be used to analyse the emotional consequences of the war on the individual and on society. This piece of work looks at three main elements of postwar reaction and memory. 1.) The war’s impact on gender relations and the family unit 2.) Ideological warfare, the return of soldiers, and the idea of victimhood 3.) The destruction of towns and cities and the subsequent impact on concepts of history and nationhood.

During the late 1960s, Berlin’s cityscape became synonymous with the changing mood of the protesting younger generation; they read their desire for change and the issues and potentialities of the city and society as embedded in the construction, destruction and voids within urban space. The Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin (German Film and Television Academy Berlin or dffb) was founded in West Berlin in 1966 and became a nexus for debates about the city, society, and the individual. Serbian-born author and film-maker Irena Vrkljan (1930-2020) was one of four women who was in the inaugural class and she created films that explored the forgotten spaces of West Berlin as a means through which she could work through the changing spaces of the city as reflective of her own experience and the experience of a generation. Haus (Dedication to a House) (1966), Berlin unverkäuflich (Berlin Not for Sale) (1967), and Berlin (1969) all explored the value of subjectivity in the cityscape as a means through which lost (hi)stories can be uncovered, captured, and used to inform future trajectories. Helga Reidemeister, by contrast, was a social worker who became a student at the DFFB in 1973 and used films such as Der gekaufte Traum (The Purchased Dream) (1977) and Von wegen 'Schicksal' (Is this ‘fate’?) (1979) to give agency and a voice to the women tenants of the new modernist satellite settlements. Both Reidemeister and Vrkljan used the city of West Berlin to explore the nature of contemporary society by painting “authentic” portraits of a city exposing the wounds of the post-war world. With governments in east and west dogmatically focused on the future, the experience of living within the island city caused these filmmakers and their generation to view the city’s voids as spaces of potentiality intrinsically linked to the past. Perpetually pulled between the past and future, into those gaps this generation filled with creative autonomy - spaces where potential futures were actively practised. This paper will explore the medium of the city, through film, as a site through which the identity of a generation was explored, understood and contested.

This paper will explore the urban dynamism of 1960’s West-Berlin; specifically, the tensions between urban planning decisions, protesting students, and the reality of life for the inhabitants of the walled city. At the city’s Technische-Universität, architecture students formed the protest group Aktion 507 and curated an exhibition, “Diagnosis of Building in West-Berlin” with an accompanying catalogue. The students defined their intent as follows: ‘we were elucidators, who believed in the power of technical and scientific progress […] We were for direct democracy’ (Krau, 1983). Architecture, as the nexus of social, economic, political, and cultural concerns, became a focal point through which the concerns of the wider student movement were given physical form. The desire to make the personal political was activated in the critique of the modernist high-rises; by focusing on the experience of the resident within the Märkisches Viertel satellite settlement, Aktion 507 sought to negate a repressive and hierarchical society, dominated by the self-interests of those in positions of power. The “direct action” initiated in the satellite settlement shapes the focus, with the intention of responding to the question of how subversive practices were used to negate the negative experiences and associations of these high-rise developments. Aktion 507’s desire to return a sense of agency to the city dweller, through a critique of changes in the post-war urban spaces, will form the centre of the analysis. The question then becomes how the lessons of the sixties can instruct a reconsideration of the potential futures of the vertical.

This paper will explore the dynamic interface between politics, urban planning, architecture and culture, during the 1968 protests in West-Berlin. At the Technische-Universität, architecture students formed the protest group Aktion 507 and curated an exhibition, “Diagnosis on Building in West-Berlin” with an accompanying catalogue and manifesto. The “Diagnosis” intended to display a critical analysis of construction activities as reflective of greater issues within German society. The students defined their intent as follows: ‘we were elucidators, who believed in the power of technical and scientific progress […] We were for direct democracy’. Aktion 507 demanded a well-informed critique that would lead to concrete changes within the city. Architecture, as the nexus of social, economic, political, and cultural concerns, became a focal point through which the concerns of the wider student movement were given physical form. However, the Diagnosis presented little in the way of a solution; as the name suggests, this was about presenting and identifying the issues, a call to engage the critical consciousness before a solution was proposed. This paper will therefore consider the actions that Aktion 507 initiated within the city as indicative of activities which could engage the city’s residents and instigate change within Berlin, and by extension, within society at large.

In 1968, a group of architecture students at West Berlin’s Technical University formed Aktion 507 in order to critique post-war planning policies within the city. Following modernist principles, post-war policy makers began separating the city by function, with residential developments relocated to the suburbs. The general belief was that nineteenth century tenements were responsible for the ‘undemocratic spirit in the city’ and not suitable for the new ‘democratic’ Germany. Thus, the action taken was to demolish tenements and replace them with prefabricated satellite housing developments. In reaction, Aktion 507 curated an exhibition, ‘Diagnosis on Building in West Berlin’, focusing on the ‘critical analysis of current construction activities’. The exhibition centred on the Märkisches Viertel, a development containing 17,000 apartments, jutting the Berlin Wall to the north of the city. Aktion 507 argued that architects, speculators, the senate, and construction companies exerted a ‘totalitarian rule over the city’. I intend to argue that the ideology of the student movement in Berlin was in a symbiotic relationship with the post-war cityscape whereby readings of urban planners, Marxists, sociologists and others were translated through the lens of Berlin’s unique character and position in the post-war world. For example, Marcuse’s theory on the repressive mechanisms of society held special significance in a post-fascist era where former National Socialists still held positions of power, and where left-wing intellectuals flocked due to exemption from military service. Likewise, the Märkisches Viertel, with its ‘intolerable defects in social infrastructure’, highlighted the wider social implications of relocating inhabitants from the inner city under the guise of social housing. This paper documents the use of architecture as a vessel through which political, cultural and social conflicts were argued and contested which, through involvement with residents, Aktion 507 irreversibly changed West Berlin, both as a physical and political space.

In 1968, the personal became the political and thus every aspect of life became a means of political expression; this was particularly true in the arts. At West Berlin’s Technische Universität, a group of architecture students formed Aktion 507 and curated an exhibition, ‘Diagnosis on Building in West Berlin’, intended to display a ‘critical analysis of current construction activities’. The movement had a strong literary culture associated with it, with the accompanying two hundred page manifesto declaring the students condemnation of society with contemporary scholars and theorists used to articulate and strengthen their criticism. Significantly, due to the censorship and interruption of the war, key texts such as those of Walter Benjamin were not published until the 1950s and thus added to the raw nature of the protest. Students also set up various newspapers, most notably Berliner Extra Blatt and Agit 883, who saw their work as a ‘practical contribution to a counter-public sphere’. This then developed into the political action of ‘Book Theft’, which became ‘the national sport of the Left’ where activists would ‘expropriate’ volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital from a ‘bourgeois’ bookshop. These books were then handed out at demonstrations to then be discussed at subsequent teach-ins. This not only highlights the importance of literature to the movement but also the combination of intellectual engagement with physical action. The theories found in the literature and philosophy the students read were then mapped onto the urban environment of West Berlin. This paper intends to analyse the relationship between theory and protest, between book and action in order to ascertain how the political literature of the day was used as a means to articulate issues and comprehend the politically charged atmosphere of walled West Berlin, but also how the book became a means of protest in itself.

This paper focuses on one small element of my larger PhD thesis – that of
the application of colour to modernist housing estates in the 1960s. The Märkisches
Viertel District in West Berlin (1962-1974) is the focus of the paper which became a
highly contested development and suffered condemnation for its alienation of
citizens, lack of social provisions and the poor quality of the architecture. Architects
and planners employed an Op Art artist to create an overall colour concept for the
area which they thought would bring joy, personality, orientation and humanity to
the large development in the vein of the Bauhaus tradition. Protesting students saw
the ‘arbitrary’ application of colour as indicative of an urban planning mentality
which had no knowledge or care for the needs of residents. The tenants stated that
the colour changed nothing of the real social deprivation and issues inherent in the
development. This paper intends to expand on these claims and show how colour
became a contested issue in a highly politicised urban environment.

‘Germany is full of ghosts’, and Berlin in particular is a city constructed by layers of history and memory.  As the city that shows most deeply the scars of the twentieth century, Berlin has struggled to re-create an architectural identity post-1945. The recently started replica-rebuilding of the Palace (raised to the ground by the Soviets in 1950) is just one example of the unusual approaches the city has taken. Concepts of authenticity and purpose are questioned in creating a palace for a country without a monarch. The opening of the Berlin Wall Memorial, with its reconstructed death zone also shows an attitude to the past that is caught somewhere between museum and Disneyland architecture; local residents are confronted once again with overlooking the Wall. At a time when West Berlin was removed from maps of East Germany, there were mass clearances of nineteenth century tenement blocks in favour of sixties satellite housing estates that made a complete break with history. In the late 1960s, history was once again promoted, partially in extremes – for example, in the reconstruction of the medieval town centre at Nikolaiviertel. The discord between urban planners and local residents is exemplified in Berlin. The city’s urban landscape is layered with multiple histories and memories and the debate regarding how to deal with this past is constant. This paper intends to investigate some of the approaches to urban space, which have focused on one element of Berlin’s past, in order to construct a particular urban narrative.

The intention of my paper is to address the often disregarded interplay between architecture and political protest. Previous scholarship relating to student activism and Berlin has focused on the escalation of violence into the 1970s. In 1968 however, architecture students from the Technische Universität Berlin formed a group called Kampagne 507 which reacted to city planners’ modernist ideology of enclosed residential areas. The students often held sit-ins in condemned Mietskasernen (tenement blocks) to protest against the destruction of Berlin’s heritage and to demand a re-planning of Berlin’s divided city centre. The occupation of particular buildings to demonstrate the conflict between State and civilian was central to the protest movement. One of the main motivating factors for protest in West Berlin was a reaction to the hierarchical nature of government and of universities as many of the officials retained their positions of power after the fall of the National Socialist regime. The ‘68 generation was the first who were able to take advantage of free university places, which lead to an increasingly diverse and politically aware student population. This provides fertile ground for demonstrating both in physical and spatial terms the use of space as a site for political discourse and conflict between individual and institution.