Berlin, Berlin—Jason Langer’s Ode to the Grossstadt (excerpt)

With the coming of the Nazis in 1933 Berlin’s cosmopolitan, multicultural mélange, most recently celebrated in the ongoing series Babylon Berlin, came crashing down, and with it, began the Second World War and the destruction of Jewish society in Europe.

Yet both Berlin itself and Jewish life in Berlin have, however, survived the atrocities of the Holocaust and the shattered ruins left in the wake of the bombings and tank battles that finally crushed the Nazi regime in 1945.

With the passing of time, of war and division and finally reunification, the city has changed immensely, but even as the layers of architecture have been built up, destroyed, and replaced, Berlin is still that “cesspool and paradise” it was a century ago.

Still, though, there are traces of the past and signs of an even more vibrant future everywhere on looks in this scarred metropolis.

I must confess that I am a history freak and one who is fascinated with big cities and how they have evolved, lurching from epoch to epoch, for better and for worse. Baltimore, New York, San Francisco, and Budapest have been stations on my path. I like cities the same way as many other people who come to them. They are places to find work, to find oneself, to participate in something bigger than oneself and to feel that one is a player on the grand stage of life’s great theatre of being.

For writers and artists, especially photographers, Berlin at the turn of the 21st century has something of the limitless sense of possibility of all great cities in their boom times, yet, unlike in almost all other cities, the past is always present. This makes for especially haunted experiences and for dreams both fantastic and nightmares most deep.

About that haunting feeling: for me as for Jason Langer, Berlin evokes the ghosts of the past even as it seems to be a portal to a lively and diverse future. The signs of Prussian greatness gave way both to the Nazi dictatorship enforced by the Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo and to the German Democratic Republic whose “real existing socialism” was maintained by the Ministry for State Security or Ministerium fuer Staatssicherheit gave rise to another equally feared acronym, Stasi. Both regimes used similar methods of spying on their own citizens, and as one system was replaced after the end of the Second World War, some of the same buildings such as those in the northern suburbs of Hoehenschoenhausen and Sachsenhausen were used by Gestapo and Stasi alike to confine and torture those whom they considered “enemies of the state.”

Needless to say, both regimes perfected a parody of “German efficiency” in the most brutally bureaucratic form. Depicted in Langer’s evocative photographs is the House of the Wannsee Conference where in 1941 the Nazis planned the “Final Solution” to eliminate the Jewish populations under Nazi control especially in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The evil banality of deadly bureaucracy is also to be seen in his images from the Stasi archive with its extraordinary collection of files totaling some 111 kilometers of documents many of which are held in Berlin and represent the work of thousands of “informale Mitarbeiter””, short “IM’ or “unofficial collaborators, i.e., citizens who spied upon their fellow citizen and family members.

Even today, German bureaucracy and authority figures evoke an almost Kafka-esque fear in me even if the bad old days are long past. It manifests itself whenever I go to renew my papers or even pass through a demonstration…

And yet, Berlin for me as for Langer, and for countless others—by 2020 some 40% of Berliners were not born in Berlin and almost 25% of the nearly four million residents are non-German immigrants-- has been the place for self-exploration, for work, and for the sheer joy of meeting new people and experiencing new relationships.

It is a personal search for self and for the experiences that build the self and as such forms a sort of modern Bildungsroman told through images as Langer so ably demonstrates. Not for nothing does the above introductory excerpt from David Bowie’s epic song cycle, Station to Station, make sense for this essay because, like Langer as for myself, Bowie, after a series of intermediate stations of his own and the trying out and discarding personae, ended up in Berlin where he experienced one of the most artistically fruitful periods of his life that brought forth his “Berlin Trilogy” that consisted of the albums Low, Heroes, and Lodger.

For me as for Langer, the constant juxtapositions of history and emotions have enabled the creation of series of writings and photographs that doubly reflect our own experience of the discordant symphony that “Grossstadt Berlin” produces with every living breath and pace of foot or pedal of bike or tram ride for that matter. It is a self-contradicting history of reality, received memories, of fantasies and of aspirations—but then so is life.

Jason Langer’s fascinating portrait of Berlin is more of an inward portrait that expresses through eloquent black and white imagery that touches the symphonic notes and registers of the “Grossstadt” and those of his personal itinerary across it in his depictions of his own fears, fantasies, and experiences in the big city. It is a compiled emotional chronicle of several extended visits with his own inimitable personal relationships with friends and places both fantastic and all too real across spaces temporal and emotional as well as geographic.

Arranged as a journey departing from West to East, “towards the rising sun” as he has elsewhere described, his darkly ambiguous images reflect a period of his own search for enlightenment.

Bill Kouwenhoven, 2021