When it was made public, this competition merely fulfilled the function to keep up democratic appearances. How the Heinrich Heine-Allee was going to be redeveloped - to be turned into a tree-lined promenade - had already been decided behind closed doors. Any further discussion was pure decorum. Like it’s name was a belated recognition of the city’s most famous son, the Jewish poet and journalist Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) who died in exile in Paris, the Allee was going to be an atonement for past, unspoken sins. The Allee, constructed in 1809 on the demolished fortifications of the old town, had been called successively Boulevard Napoleon, Friedrich Strasse, Linden Allee, Alleestrasse, Hindenburgwall, before finally acquiring its current name in 1963. In the same Allee, a memorial for another prominent Jew, the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, destroyed by the Nazis in 1936, was only reconstructed in 2012. Anyhow, it was all about restoration - what the Germans call ‘Wiedergutmachung’ (mending). As Manfred Hermes wrote back then in the ‘Überblick’: “In this situation, every tree is good. By 1986 every tree has already become a political cipher. The equation of tree=nature=citizen-proximity=environmental protection has become a populist, all-purpose slogan, sure to attract the support of any electorate.”
It was a well-established historical pattern : a once-upon-a-time cherished promenade, blossom and shadow-scented, an openair catwalk for the incrowd and its bystanders, an impressionist showcase, is ravaged by two world wars (the trees often felled for firewood) only to receive, after all the slaughter, the final coup-de-grâce at the hands of the newest national obsession : the car (unchallenged to this day). Then, after decades of barbaric indifference, flowing by like a stinking polluted river, the authorities invariably come up with the same solution : to push the unpleasant aspects of modern comfort (mainly private transportation) underground, at least where civic representation and pretence are deemed de rigueur for the purpose of touristic and real estate development, and to return visually to a former state of innocence.
Under the influence of Kaspar Koenig’s seminar “Art and the Public”, a couple of Academy students, definitely a radical minority, all of them from the sculpture department overseen by Ulrich Rückriem except me, a defector from painting, awakened to a possible return of art into a social context, to leave behind “the to-and-fro murmurings of art-for-art’s sake” (Manfred Hermes) and to step into the polis. Hence our participation in the competition.
The fact that tree-planting had become a cover-up for the failure to confront the necessity of real change and our intuitive grasp of that complacency 40 years ago can tell you, astoundingly, that the Art Academy, already then in it’s death-throes, still possessed at the margins that priced mixture of social duty, playfulness, autonomy and undauntedness. In retrospect it was the last flicker of excitement about a potentiality to participate in the wider goings-on of a town, outside of the hermetic terror of the comme-il-faut studio and its catering to the patrician approval of the art system and its sponsors ; and before the wall came down, bringing in the wake of its demise the uncontestable rule of information technology.
In sculpture there is certainly a more acute relation to the material world, as opposed to the enshrined world of flat, personal expression to which painting had been reduced. Sculptors, not painters were requested to draw from the nude. Sculptors visited quarries and foundries ; they understood architecture and talked about our built enviroment. They knew about weight, mass, and engineering, and were invitingly physical. No wonder I defected. All of us (Andreas Siekmann and Susanne Troesser stand out) shared the view that the Academy was loosing its clout and that Düsseldorf had since long relinquished its vanguard position in urban planning, manifested so uncompromisingly in the city-center elevated highway, the Thyssen highrise (Helmut Hentrich, Hubert Petschnigg, 1957-1960), the Schauspielhaus (Bernhard Pfau, 1965-1969) and the bridges across the Rhine.
For the uninitiated it might be of interest that our commitment to the public sphere happened without any reference to the guru of ‘direct democracy’, Joseph Beuys, who had been forcibly removed from the premises by a police squadron only six years earlier. True to his proclamation that ‘everyone is an artist’, he had enacted the unthinkable : to open the doors of that venerable institution to anyone who had an interest to become his acolyte.
It remains one of the most telling German ironies that he, the sublime cultural export of ‘Wiedergutmachung’, a once active Nazi turned martyr, had not only dispensed with anything remotely resembling democracy in favour of unquestioning submission to his shamanistic leadership, but came to promote trees as well ! Not any tree of course, but the German oak ; and they must be a thousand, and they must be tethered to a thousand stelae of granite (also German).
My proposal consisted of a rectangular prismatic body of loam-coloured bricks, ca 35 meters high, a tower or a huge slab depending from which side you viewed it. No windows were to interrupt the surfaces of that monolith, except for an all-encircling band of glass on the top - where a disco was to be located ; a disco with a ravishing view. Inside balconies connected by stairs, think of giant fire escapes, could have served for multiple purposes ; and the western wall could have been transformed in summer into a movie screen for a temporary open-air cinema on Grabbe Platz, inbetween the old brutalist Kunstverein and the new (at the time) Kunstmuseum. Manfred Hermes put it like that : “Lukas Duwenhögger’s proposal rethinks the space in a way that is both architecturally the most responsive and the most consequential and advantageous. Its effect would be the creation of squares and a subtle gradation of massive volumes befitting an urban centre.
But to return to Heinrich Heine and to complete the drama ; it breaks your heart if you read a sentence like the following by that forever unblemished man : “ … if we [the Germans] complete what France has begun [the revolution] … the whole world will become German! Of this German mission and universal domination I often dream whenever I promenade under oaks … [then] all of the world will be German. This is my patriotism.” (Prologue to ‘Deutschland, Ein Wıntermärchen’, 17. September 1844) This seems at first so shocking and desperately incongruous that one just gasps for help. In case you seek it, precious help may come from Hannah Arendt’s “Rahel Varnhagen” and the first chapter of her “The Origins of Totalitarianism” , called “Antisemitism”. It is certainly not offered by Thomas Rosenlöcher who, in his much lauded epilogue to the book (2013) prefers to brush under the carpet the fundamental question of the fateful, self-deceiving desire for total assimilation of the European Jewry in the wake of the Enlightenment.
Considering the possibility that our rejection of trees might come across as a ‘brutalist’ authoritarian agenda, within our contemporary perspective where bio-politics reign supreme, it is worthwile to mention that far from taking all of the above into account - indeed being completely ignorant - we nevertheless unwittingly articulated a connection between German wished-for victimhood and trees as opposed to a German admission of guilt and the joy of building. It’s also worthwhile to mention that the officially approved and constructed solution has, until now, remained controversial and never garnered the sympathies of the city’s inhabitants. The same goes for the Commemorative Monument for the Homosexual Victims Under the Nazis in Berlin.
İstanbul 24.02.2022
