As I hinted I was going to, I spent late April and early May in Berlin. Normally what I would be writing about here are the excellent concerts I attended—and don’t worry, I will get to them in a later post. But for now I want to focus on something much more unexpected: a rather amazing show I happened to find at Berlin’s Museum of Photography.
I actually try to avoid this museum as much as possible, because it is affiliated with the Helmut Newton Foundation, and I really can’t stand his work. But this time there was a special show I wanted to see, so on the last day of April, I wended my way up the first couple of floors, ignoring the blown-up Newton photos of breasty, naked females, and entered the top-floor gallery devoted exclusively to the work of Michael Wesely.
Wesely, who was born in Munich in 1963, has lived in Berlin since 2000. To judge by the photographs on display here—not only the most recent ones in the main exhibit called Doubleday, but the earlier examples of his time-lapse or archival work—he is particularly interested in the effects of time on our perceptions. How can we detect the still-living human element within archaic urban landscapes? How can we mark the passage of a few hours or even longer when people are assembled in public spaces? And how, most importantly, can we see both the past and present at once?
The astonishing photos that compose the project Doubleday: Berlin from 1860 to the Present Day are an attempt to answer that last question through what I hesitate to call technical means. It’s true that a great deal of technique had to go into making these entrancing, large-scale photographs, which combine Berlin as it used to look with the Berlin that surrounds us now. (“Now,” for Michael Wesely, is 2023: that is the second date on every caption in the show.) But to achieve the superimpositions in a way that does full justice to both present and past, he has had to make innumerable aesthetic and psychological decisions. Should the archival photos be left in their old sepia or black-and-white while the modern ones are in color? Yes, was his answer to that, though in some cases he has allowed a wash of color, usually blue, to unite the two eras. Which should dominate, the old or the new? His solution here was counterintuitive, for he has mainly allowed the old photos to come forward strongly, while the new images fade to ghostlike wisps in the background. How far back in time should he go for each location? This must have depended partly on what was available in the archives. But the archives he drew from were huge, so his choice, for instance, to show the Gendarmenmarkt in 1945 and 2023—partly turned to rubble by the war, but even more torn up by the recent renovation of the plaza—was clearly meant to draw a link between the two kinds of ruins. He gives us several samples of Potsdamer Platz, from several different angles and from multiple years, in some cases emphasizing just the current traffic in relation to the postwar desolation, and in other places capturing the ugly too-high buildings that stand like pale sentinels around that once-open war-torn spot.
Many of these scenes portray places I had just passed in the surrounding neighborhood: the Gedächtniskirche in 1946 and now, its “broken” shape and structure still nearly identical; the Kurfürstendamm at present and in 1962, with hordes of pedestrians from both eras milling along the sidewalks; the Budapester Strasse entrance to the Zoo in 1949, dwarfed by the high-rise building that stands behind it today and the modern cars that whizz by on the street. If you have walked around Berlin a lot, you can’t help but recognize many of the locations, and for the ones you don’t, Weseley has provided helpful captions and dates.
One of my favorite photos in the whole show is an elegant frontal image of the old Lehrter Bahnhof, taken in 1885, with a shadowy ultra-modern building (the Cube, it’s called) looming quietly behind and over it. I get a similar chill from the 1885 view of the simple and dignified old Marienkirche, with horses and carts standing in front of it and a stark white-and-silver TV tower seemingly growing out of its back. The Reichstag, too, is beautiful both as a dome-less ruin in 1945 and with a sliver of the current glass cupola peering over its head. These photos look nothing like the standard notion of a double-exposure, the kind an amateur might produce by mistake. On the contrary, each melded pair forms a single coherent image, an almost painterly view of a particular section of the city at two specific moments in time.
Given my own historical interests (I’ve recently been researching late-Weimar Berlin), I am struck by two images that draw on 1929 and 1931 for their earlier shots. The first is taken on Französische Strasse, where very little—including the Bridge of Sighs extending over the quiet street—has changed since 1929; only a faint background of bluish-tinted modern buildings and an even fainter image of a modern-day white car interrupt the old look. In the 1931 photo, taken from the Rote Rathaus and looking in the direction of Alexanderplatz, most of the blue-and-sepia image looks old; only the white column of the TV tower, dominating the right side of the picture like something that has landed from outer space, assures us that time has indeed marched on. The pedestrians in both of these pictures are all from the original era: the men (they are all men) wear clothes that, while not utterly Victorian, do not quite look like ours, and they stand next to vehicles—an open-topped car, some old-style double-decker buses—that have long since been retired. These people are just going about their normal lives, it seems, and only a few snatches of modern-day color and the faint glimpses of some as-yet-unbuilt buildings suggest that the world as they knew it is about to come to an end.
Wesely clearly knows his city and its history through and through; he can actually visualize its past when he looks at its present. Many of my Berlin friends have reported similar experiences themselves—a kind of palimpsest, in which the city as they used to know it is overlaid by the one before their eyes. But no one else, to my knowledge, has made that sense of doubleness, of constantly teetering on the brink between present and past, as viscerally accessible as Wesely has. Even his remarkable achievement, though, will someday be swallowed up by history itself. That is the thing about “now,” especially in an ever-changing city like Berlin: it is always temporary. Eventually Wesely’s 2023 will become part of the city’s past, just as my or your 2024 or 2025 or 2026 will. All of our visions of this city are always teetering, always momentary, because the only permanent thing about Berlin—as its 1929 inhabitant Joseph Roth was astute enough to observe—is its constant mutability.