8/13/03: Pre-construction meeting. Put up the construction sign, printed from a design based on concept sketches and paintings and incorporating the WK8P2 project logo. 10 a.m.: Took down a nonworking five-armed streetlight (12 m tall) from Frenzelstraße in the older part of Hoyerswerda. 5 p.m.: Installed and reconnected the streetlight on an already existing green space in front of the condemned building on Merzdorfer Straße. Wed. 8/13–Thu. 8/14/03: Built a 1:10-scale model of a typical WK8 apartment out of MDF, having previously inspected and measured some standard WK8 apartments. Thu. 8/14/03: Construction fence delivered and put up, site secured. Worked on the apartments off Entrance 17, second and third floors. Set up a construction office on the second floor of the former day-care center on Buchwalder Straße, across from the condemned building at Merzdorfer Straße 14-18. Furnishings: twelve desks and twelve chairs. Hung up preliminary construction sign designs in the office and put up a bulletin board for demolition drawings to be created during the demolition process. Started filling it with “before” drawings of the condemned slab (drawn earlier in Berlin) and a painting of a detail: Smurf stickers on a door being used as a barrier. Made rubbings in Merzdorfer Straße 14, in the stairway and two apartments (second floor left and fifth floor left), and put them up in the office. Thu. 8/14–Fri. 8/15/03, 10:50 p.m.–6:50 a.m.: Made minidisc recordings of the sounds inside Merzdorfer Straße 14, fifth floor left. First stage of reproduction: Saved the original noises recorded by the microphone, plus the noises produced by the microphone and minidisc recorder (cable, jacks, ADC) during recording, as lossy-compressed digital audio signals on six minidiscs. Fri. 8/15/03: Temporary current connected. Installed the 1:10 apartment model as a unifying element of the construction office furnishings. Set up a computer running the HÄUSER/hoyerswerda animation on a table in the office. Installed drill cores and pavement chunks used in rutting tests (asphalt surface wear testing) in the office, as well as six planning models of Hoyerswerda Neustadt dating from the 1950s through the 1990s (on loan from the Schlossmuseum): Kühnichter Heide, WK8, City Center, WK2, City Center and Cube Houses. Installed a computer game with steering wheel on a table in the office: driving through a collage of Hoyerswerda’s current state and its demolition. Set up the video presentation WK8P2ABBAU / nasse wiesen und steppen (PAL VHS, sound, 12:49:34, thirteen scenes, brief commentary and interviews with prominent figures in 1960s modernist urban development on the relationship between architecture and landscape) in the office. Installed a metal nameplate (“Herr Strieder/Next Desk Please”) in the office. Fri. 8/15–Sat. 9/27/03: Daily ads in the Lausitzer Rundschau newspaper showing a photo of the condemned building (always taken from the same vantage point, a sixth-story apartment diagonally opposite). Fri. 8/15–Fri. 8/29/03: “Before” paintings depicting the condemned building from two different perspectives. Mon. 8/18/03: Start of scheduled demolition: hazardous materials removed from attic crawlspace; building disconnected from city utilities (power, water, sewer, storm water, gas, heat), telecom and cable; gutting of Building 14 begun (plumbing flushed, gas lines, mains dismantled).

Demolition of a Type P2 slab building in Wohnkomplex 8 (Residential Complex 8), Hoyerswerda Neustadt. A camera mounted on the bucket of the excavator films the demolition, moving with the bucket. The bucket swings and gouges. In the film, the rubble seems to defy gravity as it falls out of the frame. The image dissolves in the dust of demolition; the projection goes white. A second camera, mounted in the cab, films the operator’s face as the building is torn down. This is the counterview to the first camera. The operator’s face reveals his intense concentration, each tiny move standing in contrast to the sweeping movements of the demolition. Video projection on two opposing screens.

Deconstruction of a Type P2 slab building in Wohnkomplex 8 (Residential Complex 8), Hoyerswerda Neustadt. A camera mounted on the bucket of the excavator films the demolition, moving with the bucket. The bucket swings and gouges. In the film, the rubble seems to defy gravity as it falls out of the frame. The image dissolves in the dust of demolition; the projection goes white. A second camera, mounted in the cab, films the operator’s face as the building is torn down. This is the counterview to the first camera. The operator’s face reveals his intense concentration, each tiny move standing in contrast to the sweeping movements of the demolition. Video projection on two opposing screens.

A camera mounted on the bucket of the excavator films the demolition, moving with the bucket. A second camera, mounted in the cab, films the operator’s face as the building is torn down.

Monochrome City is shown at at the Goethe Institut Budapest.

I started coming down with a fever in the airplane; I have no memory of Schönefeld Airport. My arm was sore from a tetanus shot. The next day it was so swollen that I couldn’t get my fencing jacket on. So the match was off. I stayed in my hotel on the Alex and wrapped myself in all the blankets. I lay there in a daze, half-asleep. It was winter, the sun having somehow never risen at all, the sky silver-gray and empty as it always is in Berlin. I closed the curtains and tried to sleep in that tiny cell. On the wall above my head, faint but recognizable, there appeared the image of the building across the street. It was a detail of the gridded facade, severely distorted. Dust motes danced in the clear ray of light that fell through the slit between the curtains.
These memories surfaced from the camera obscura of the past, brought back by Heike’s exhibition. I haven’t thought of them in thirty years. I think it was 1976, and nothing interested me less than the image on the wall. The others were at the match. I wanted to get better. The light played over the blanket. I let the slit and the picture fade away. Back then, I had no idea what a camera obscura was, or that the building across the street was called the Haus des Lehrers.
We often traveled to East Germany to compete. Strange and funny things happened to us, and some not so funny, as in the great Hungarian poet István Örkény’s mini-novella “Ahasuerus”: “Two Jews are walking down the street. The first Jew asks the second a question. The second Jew answers him. The two Jews continue walking. The first Jew, who in the meantime has thought of another question, asks it. The second Jew answers him. Sometimes this amuses them. Sometimes it does not. And so the two Jews continue walking. They also continue talking. Life, as you can see, is not always a bowl of cherries.”
The processing of the past—a horrible expression, but that’s what it’s called, “processing”—presents similar opportunities. Satire strikes me less and less as the best form of processing, and I find the opposite extreme, nostalgia, to be equally inappropriate. A mixture of personal dismay and a grim objectivity might do. That’s what Heike Klussmann is experimenting with. In her studio on the top floor of the former Haus des Lehrers on the Alexanderplatz, she has set up her camera obscura and taken pictures of the surrounding panorama. The images of the monochrome city, the interior of the building, and the exterior elements exhibit an eerie similarity, a structural equivalence, so to speak. But the shabby rooms (good for nothing now but studio spaces), the gutted neon fixtures, the plasterboard ceilings and lunar landscape outside, the unmistakable shapes of (ex-) socialist modernist architecture, are not just a historical memento mori, but also a memorial to the former East Berlin, capital of East Germany. Not a monument to an institutionalized communal memory, of course, but a personal element in the process of the self-analyzing relationship that connects today’s Berliners to the recent past.
Erecting a personal memorial is, in fact, the only alternative when the neophytic zeal for the destruction of the past—to avoid the trouble and the consequences of processing, and to spare oneself the self-analysis—seeks to obliterate a chapter of history. This zeal extends to the built environment, and soon the ensemble that was the Alex of the seventies will fall victim to it as well.
From the window, Heike’s camera obscura scanned the city slowly and patiently, capturing the panorama at last in black and white after multiple attempts. The camera obscura produces a negative image, which she has not turned into a positive. She was right not to, as that makes it clear what she thinks about Berlin and the past: She took her time, allowing personal memories to reinfuse monochrome history with color.
I too was searching for the personal in the monochrome city in Heike’s pictures, for that certain silver-gray I’d once seen from my hotel window. Of the horizon I saw not a trace: The sky covered Berlin like a dark cloud.

Gábor Andrási
Budapest, 2000

Superconversion, demolition of WK8P2, a Federal Cultural Foundation project about the deconstruction of modernity, Hoyerswerda Neustadt

www.bundeskulturstiftung.com/superumbau