HANS HAACKE responded immediately in 1990 to the fall of the Berlin Wall and turned a watchtower into art.
In May 1990, Hans Haacke flew to Berlin. He had been invited with ten other artists to render visible the seams in the system that had been torn open with the fall of the Wall in a city that was not yet reunited. Like many others, during his weeks in Berlin Haacke cycled along the abandoned line of watchtowers and through the “killing zone”. And while the border equipment and installations were still being removed in Berlin, he concluded a contract with the East German National People’s Army and thus delayed the demolition of a watchtower in Kreuzberg. He then went about changing its appearance significantly, so from afar it now seemed an unusual structure: From September 1 through October 7, 1990, a gleaming neon-blue Mercedes star rotated on the tower, protected by mesh. The space beneath the tinted glass windows was emblazoned with two slogans: “Kunst bleibt Kunst” (“Art remains art”) and “Bereit sein ist alles” (“It’s all about being prepared”). What had once been the “killing zone” became an exhibition area for five weeks, and the watchtower morphed into an artwork entitled “Die Freiheit wird jetzt einfach gesponsert – aus der Portokasse” (“Freedom is now simply being sponsored – for peanuts”).
Haacke’s watchtower was part of the exhibition project “Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit Berlin 1990” (“The Finitude of Freedom Berlin 1990”). It was a large-scale cultural project of the political unification period in the heart of a no-man’s land when it came to legal certainty. It was the only exhibition project of this scale that East and West Germany jointly financed and realized in 1990. “Der Spiegel” magazine called it the “most important exhibition” of the year. The ambiguous title dreamed up by playwright Heiner Müller reflects the ambivalences of the day: “Endlich Freiheit” – freedom, at long last – implies joy, given the political upheaval; “finitude” at the same time reflects its limited timeline. The vacuum of 1990 became the space for art that sought more to cause uncertainty than to affirm things.
Symbols of East and West in Haacke’s “Watchtower” project
This is also the context in which we should read Haacke’s contribution. The tower symbolized the East, the star the West. The montage posed various questions: How can the different systems unite? Can individual elements be combined? Or will misunderstandings arise and likewise unintentional overlaps? The positioning of the star on top suggests the prophecy that the economic (control) system will replace the prior political one.
In the summer of 1990, Haacke’s “Watchtower” project highlighted the predominant position of the West and the capitalization of the East. In fact, he outfitted the tower with a symbol of consumerism precisely at the very moment the Wall itself became a consumer commodity. On June 20, 1990, Sotheby’s in Monte Carlo auctioned off 81 individual sections of the Wall for up to 30,000 Deutschmarks each, with the total proceedings coming to two million Deutschmarks.
The star specifically points to the activities of the Daimler-Benz corporation in Berlin in 1990: In the summer of that year, the company had acquired prime real estate on Potsdamer Platz for a tenth of the estimated value. This was a matter of public debate as early as 1990, and Haacke’s “Watchtower” locked into this debate, criticizing the company and the overhasty actions of the Berlin municipal government. Two years later, the corporation had to make a subsequent payment of 33.8 million euros, as the monopolies commission had declared that the purchase price broke the law. An ironic advertising column, therefore, for Daimler-Benz: This interpretation of the watchtower is supported by the slogans “Kunst bleibt Kunst” and “Bereit sein ist alles”, which drew on two of the corporation’s then ad slogans and brought to mind the East German boy-scout motto.
Finally, the star clearly alluded to another Berlin building: On the roof of the Europa Center at the top of Kurfürstendamm, a corresponding, if far larger, Mercedes star still rotates to this day. During the days of the divided city, it symbolically ensured West Berlin participated in West Germany’s flourishing economy.
I was not even two years old when Haacke’s Mercedes star rotated in Berlin, and I lived with my parents in drab Leipzig. Only later did I realize that in the year of my birth, 1989, with the fall of the Wall I was given the gift of freedom. “Wir sind das Volk” (“We are the people”) – this was the slogan chanted by the demonstrators marching along the Leipziger Ring in 1989, loudly demanding the renewal of East Germany. The shift to “Wir sind ein Volk” (“We are one people”) also symbolizes the change in mood in favor of German reunification.
Hans Haacke resorted to the slogan on being invited in 2003 to take part in a design competition for the square surrounding the Nikolaikirche in Leipzig, the starting point of the Monday protest marches: His proposal, which was not realized, was to project a handwritten slogan, “Wir (alle) sind das Volk” (“We (all) are the people”), in blue light onto the stairs leading up to the church entrance.
“We (all) are the people”
September 2016 saw me fly to New York to meet Hans Haacke and interview him. Born in 1936 in Cologne, he studied in Kassel, which was part of the “Zonenrandgebiet”, or zonal border, 30 kilometers from the border with East Germany. Since 1965 he has lived in the USA, but reads “Der Spiegel” magazine every week and remains in close contact with friends and colleagues. We met again in Athens for the opening of documenta 14 in spring 2017. For this show, he had returned to his idea for Leipzig: A banner and 10,000 posters were illegally glued to walls in Athens, on street corners and in public spaces. The poster boasted 12 lines of “We (all) are the people”, written black on white in various fonts and languages. In Kassel, the theme unsettled things, appearing on countless billboards and ad spaces.
The choice of languages reflected the respective percentage of migrants and displaced persons in Greece and in Germany, Haacke explained: “The banner reinforces our bond with all migrants and displaced persons who at present are exposed to virulent xenophobia, racism, and life-threatening religious conflicts in many countries in the world.” The rainbow that framed the block of text gave the statement an appealing touch and is reminiscent of the rainbow flag, which stands for the advent of the new, for peace, and for the acceptance of different, individual ways of life.
Since documenta 14, “Wir (alle) sind das Volk” has been seen on banners, posters, and postcards in Brussels, Ghent, New York, Bratislava, and Ramallah, not to mention in Leipzig, Zwickau, Halle, Dresden, Chemnitz, Stuttgart, Berlin, and Weimar. As part of the Hans Haacke retrospective at the SCHIRN, the decentral piece is now also present in Frankfurt’s urban space.
Where Haacke’s Mercedes star illuminated the no-man’s land killing zone back in 1990, in recent years a new residential district has arisen. The brochure advertising the new condominiums for sale highlights the site’s history: “The Luisenpark Berlin-Mitte quarter is prestigious, urban, and truly historical, since the Berlin Wall ran exactly along Stallschreiberstrasse, which borders the district.”
The banner reinforces our bond with all migrants and displaced persons who at present are exposed to virulent xenophobia, racism, and life-threatening religious conflicts in many countries in the world.
