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Riding the City TrainsUwe Johnson's Berlin
Johnson leads us into the Berlin from the 1950s to the middle
1970s. This is the time of the Cold War, the transition to the post
-Stalinist era in the East and the time of economic prosperity and
political upheaval in the West. Johnson lived for 15 years in Berlin
and knew both East and West intimately. Before he moved to West
Berlin, he worked as freelance editor for East Berlin publishers.
One day in Spring of 1959, he took a city-train Johnson's pathways will guide us through the city itself. In his
Berlin (or Berlins), one travels by public means of transportation:
the city-trains (S-Bahn) and the subways (U-Bahn). A journey through Johnson's Berlin is a journey through time as
well as through space. The stations are points in time with significant
meaning for the city/two cities and for the Germany they represent.
These are moments in time marked by acts of resistance (1945, 1953,
1956, 1961 and 1968 for example). These moments are connected to
places that are everywhere in town - sites of history, memory, culture,
politics, and utopia, which were important for Johnson, himself.
If the city of Berlin represents the center, the metropolis as well
as fragmentation we must then crisscross Greater Berlin, moving
between the centers and the margins. We will experience the city
by riding the city trains, which were operated, even in the West,
by the East German Reichsbahn for nearly the entire period of the
separation. These surface-trains will take us from the Soviet War
Memorial site in Treptow to the Ku-Damm, thereby passing Alexanderplatz,
Friedrichstraße and the Bahnhof Zoo. The U-Bahn changes our
experience of the whole, and we will feel Berlin's fragmentation
as we will pop up from the underground to see places like the Brecht-Haus
in the Chaussee-Straße, the former Stalin-Allee and the sites
were student radicals fought for change in 1968. My interest in these Berlin pathways lies in combining a reading of contemporary Berlin and the current discourse on memory and postwar German identity in the Berlin Republic with the work of a particular author for whom this city, its politics and its space represent very personally German failures and hopes across the twentieth century. Johnson has written extensively about the cities Berlin and the every day life of the Berliners. The journey's route will be inspired by Johnson's literary texts (the novels Zwei Ansichten and Jahrestage and the short story Eine Kneipe geht verloren) as well as his Berlin essays on city-trains, TV broadcasting and separation (Berliner Sachen and the Der 5. Kanal). I am also curious to work on presenting this pathways in a multi media project. In order to record Johnson's Berlin I would need to travel there and also research Berlin material (unpublished correspondences and notes concerning his participation in an organization that helped East Berliners to flee to the West after the Berlin wall was built) in the Uwe-Johnson-Archive in Frankfurt/Main.
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No
one author has more deeply and intricately inscribed the map of
Berlin into our minds in the last fifty years than Uwe Johnson.
Berlin, a crossroads of East and West, is the place that most unifies
German memories while yet also most dividing them. Johnson's Berlin
has many faces. Groß-Berlin (Greater Berlin), as he liked
to call it, was at once center of the surrounding provinces, to
which all trainlines and streets led, and the metropolis and urban
meeting place cultures, ideologies and people. At the same time
it was borderland, a place at the margins, and, to some, an outpost
of the West, while to others it was the proud capital of the smaller
Germany, the City. 
(S-Bahn)
to move his living quarters from East to West Berlin. Later on he
always refused to call this particular train ride a flight, maintaining
that he did not flee but only moved to a different part of town.
The two Berlins became an obsession of Johnson's, who understood
them as the epitome of 20th century German history.
Thereby
one constantly crosses borders and moves from one world to the other,
or from one time to another, often without knowing exactly where
the border is. We will try to find out what the concept of border
entails in a divided and unified city. What actually happened when
one took the train from Alexanderplatz to Zoologischer Garten in
the late 1950s? Was it simply travel from one point to another?
Did one go from one city to another? Did one cross any significant
distance? Did one cross a border? Was one leaving a country, a world,
in order to arrive in another? How did one experience the distance,
the difference, the border? How does one actually experience history?
What happened when on traveled 40 years earlier, in the 1920s? And
what happens when one travels to the same places more the 40 years
later, in 2001?
