Literature

In what has long been considered the world's first photograph, Nicéphore Niépce recorded the view from a back window of his house in the Burgundian village of Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, near Chalon, in the summer of 1826. It shows the outlines of a pigeon tower, a bakehouse with a chimney, the sloping roof of a barn, a pear tree and a patch of sky. However, despite its apparent realism and ordinary approach, there is something unsettling about the scene, an uncanny effect resulting from the long exposure time required to record the image on the asphalt-coated tin plate fixed to the back of a camera obscura. During the eight hours of Niépce's experiment, the sun moved from one side of the complex to the other, successively illuminating both sides of the courtyard and casting the respective shadows in a composition of morning and evening light. What we see is thus a visual record, almost surreal in effect, that could never exist in the "real", measurable world. The composition thus underlines a fundamental ambiguity of the photographer's art: its rootedness in a particular moment and situation that can never be repeated in an identical way. Even the image produced in an electronic millisecond is a unique event.

The distance between Niépce's courtyard and Stephan Kaluza's Berlin is shorter than one might expect at first glance. The French inventor succeeded in representing something that was not literally present but existed vividly in the visual document he originally called the "heliograph". Kaluza goes a step further in these acts of perceptual sleight of hand by documenting a legendary edifice that virtually ceased to exist on 9 November 1989: the Berlin Wall, which in the years between 1961 and 1980 had grown from a simple barbed wire fence to a complex double- walled site incorporating the infamous "No Man's Land" or "Death Strip". But even then the Wall was as much a phenomenon - an abstraction - as it was a deadly and painful reality. Hence even those photographs taken 30 or even 40 years ago represent no more than a kind of Platonic shadow of "the real". (Moreover, if we were to return to the locations of the remarkable contemporary photographs contained in this volume, all taken within the last year, we would find them subtly or dramatically changed, but always consistent with the conceptual premises - a kind of photographic relativity - that emerged incidentally from the work of Nicéphore Niépce).

The western face of the concrete Wall completed in 1982 became a kind of "canvas" on which artists from all over the world expressed themselves. Among them was Keith Haring, who in 1986 created a 100-metre mural of chained and linked figures in the colours of the German national flag. Almost immediately, a local artist began to paint over the bright, graffiti-like design, arguing that grey was the only suitable colour for the monolith. So, once again, we are dealing with "invisible" or faded images. Nor is the phenomenon as esoteric as it might seem at first glance. A popular nursery rhyme with the nonsensical title "Antigonish", written by the American poet and educator Hughs Mearns in 1899, suggests something archetypal here:

As I was going up the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
Oh, how I wish he’d go away!

In addressing what Heinz-Norbert Jocks calls "The Spirit of Absence", Stephan Kaluza takes on the paradoxical task of visualising the invisible; in doing so, he creates a seamless, fluid panorama that traces the former course of the Cold War's perverse monument to enmity through today's reunified Berlin. The result is a sober document that avoids both pathos and touristic excess, but is often illuminated by a quiet beauty, as if something of the suffering of confinement and the joy of liberation were distilled here. Actual remnants of the Wall are rarely to be found: a long section of the first, westernmost barrier near the former Gestapo headquarters, between Checkpoint Charlie and Potsdamer Platz; a longer section of the easternmost structure along the Oberbaumbrücke, nicknamed the 'East Side Gallery'; and a largely reconstructed installation north of Bernauerstr, that became a memorial in 1999. Otherwise, only occasional fragments of ramparts and watchtowers remain, scattered across 14 different sites, gradually giving way to souvenir hunters.

With slight exaggeration, one could claim that more pieces of the Wall can be found on e-Bay - with or without certificates of authentication - than in the German capital itself. (One is reminded of Mark Twain's comment that, had he bought all the pieces of the true cross and all the nails from the hands and feet of Christ that were offered to him on his trip to the Holy Land, he could have returned to the United States and built the biggest house on the Hudson). In the euphoria that followed the opening of the East German border on 9 November 1989, huge sections of the structure were simply razed to the ground. Some larger and more colourful fragments were traded by Limex, the East German company responsible for foreign trade. Some of these pieces found their way to the United States, where they can be found in more than 20 registered locations, including the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, and the façade of an office building in New York. A particularly interesting fragment, enhanced with graffiti, is installed in the men's restroom of the Main Street Station Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, where it supports four urinals and is topped by a commemorative plaque. However one judges the appropriateness of the locations, the Wall played a special role in the American imagination, not only as a symbol of the Cold War confrontation between East and West, but also as a beacon of tradition and urbanity.

The reasons why the Wall resonated so strongly in the American psyche are rooted in both history and mythology. Historically, Germans constituted the second largest group of immigrants to the new world, with six million arriving in the United States in the late 19th century alone. (Today, some 17 per cent of the population claims German ancestry, more than the English and Irish combined.) Not surprisingly, German names abounded in the deeds of incorporation of new townships. The most important was Berlin, but there were also Berlin Centre, Berlin Crossroads, Berlin Heights, Berlin Junction, Berlin Mills, Berlin Station and Berlinsville. (Even today, the state of Wisconsin has one Berlin and two townships called New Berlin). During World War I, anti-German sentiment led many cities to change their names, and on 2 June 1918, a New York Times headline demanded: "Strike Germany from the Map of the U.S.”. (The anonymous author recommended renaming "Berlin" and "Germany" as "Freedom" and "Victory"). Nevertheless, a dozen Berlins survived the purge. 

So did Americans' fondness for the once-and-future capital city, which for a long time was a symbol of civility, culture and tradition. More than political calculation or humanitarian zeal inspired the airlift that began in 1948, when the Soviets blocked access to the western sectors of the city by rail and road. With the support of their British ally, for 15 months US planes delivered 13 tons of food a day, along with coal, medicine and clothing. With the help of handmade miniature parachutes, chewing gum and chocolate bars donated by US schoolchildren also rained down on the besieged city. This spontaneous outpouring of sympathy for the former "enemy" in the immediate aftermath of the war must be borne in mind when assessing later instances of the American response to Berlin. When John F. Kennedy stepped onto a platform adjacent to the Wall in 1963, uttering the famous phrase "Ich bin ein Berliner" in his nasal, clipped Yankee accent, the simple phrase resonated around the world. Significantly, the American visitor was looking east, as Ronald Reagan would do in 1987 in a speech commemorating the city's 750th anniversary. In front of the Brandenburg Gate, the US president uttered the famous phrase: "Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”. 

The viewpoint of Stephan Kaluza's photos also constantly turns eastward, where views that were obscured and distorted for an entire generation open up. Suddenly, in this extraordinary sequence of photos - a kind of À la recherche du mur perdu - a depth of focus is revealed that underpins a vision at once physical and philosophical. Vistas and perspectives open up that were previously aggressively blocked by concrete slabs. To go through the present sequence of photos is to move along this imaginary line, where one is struck by the openness, the greenery of the city, its architectural diversity, and the frequent sense of neighborliness. At times, in fact, there is a suggestion of the many villages from which the city once grew, while here and there striped awnings and umbrellas give the scene a Mediterranean feel. At times elegant and at times ramshackle, imperial and sylvan, the panorama reveals the healing of a deep wound in the heart of the city. Here and there, in addition to the remnants of the Wall, there are leitmotifs 

reflecting its absence on billboards, fences and garden walls. It's a diversity best experienced by a fearless pedestrian, walking the line like Stephan Kaluza. Over the course of a yearly seasons, Stephan Kaluza walked a path that began to fade on the night of November 9, 1989, with his sights set on the East, a very different orientation from that of the millions of emigrants seeking the freedom and opportunities of the New World. 

"Westering," reaching out into the unknown world beyond the horizon, was a fundamental impulse of American civilization. For the great natural philosopher Henry David Thoreau, it was an impulse deeply rooted in the human psyche. In his essay "Walking," first published in 1862, the author praises the unspoiled, unfenced landscape through which he takes his daily strolls, while noting the early threats to this natural idyll and lamenting the day when “walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds.” More important, in the present context, is the geographic direction the solitary walker chooses. If he follows his instinct, the "needle" of his inner compass “always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side.” 

Nor does Thoreau see this faith in the future as limited only to the experience of the American frontier, for he firmly believes that “mankind progress from east to west. ... We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.” These attitudes, deeply ingrained in the American psyche, go a long way toward explaining why reactions to the Berlin Wall went far beyond the predictable (and often manipulated) reflexes of Cold War politics. Trapping an entire people behind a wall and thus nullifying their vision of the Western horizon was a direct attack on their spirit. In a poem entitled "Mending Wall," written in 1919, another great New England writer, Robert Frost, expressed the idea in even more universal terms. The poem opens almost laconically with the line “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall...”. Later, the narrator reflects,

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know 

Who I was walling in or walling out, 

And to whom I was like to give offense. 

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, 

That wants it down! ... 

If proof of Frost's aphorism were needed, it could be found in the historic events of November 9, 1989. 

David Galloway