Tear Down This Wall.

Brendel, Maria Zimmermann

"TEAR DOWN THIS WALL" by Maria Zimmermann Brendel Allied Museum, Berlin GERMANY June 28 * December 31, 2007

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"Tear Down This Wall: Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate," at the Allied Museum in Berlin, marks the twentieth anniversary of President Reagan's historic appeal to Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the wall that divided Berlin and the world. Presenting multi-screen projections of film clips of the president's visit to West Berlin on June 12, 1987, as well as photographs, state presents, protest flyers, anti-Reagan art, and propaganda posters, the core of the show is a looped speech Reagan made in front of the Brandenburg Gate, standing with his back to the menacing, scarred concrete wall built by the communists back in 1961 to divide the city between an "oppressive" German Democratic Republic in the east and a "free" Federal Republic of Germany in the west.

Besides offering an extensive catalogue with contributions from both East and West insiders, "Tear Down This Wall" emblazons important historical markers as audiovisual diversion for the many visitors and school children that regularly come to be informed. (Founded in 1998, and jointly sponsored by Germany and its main postwar allies, the Allied Museum is located in a former U.S. military compound, with a permanent focus on Berlin's rise from the ashes after 1945.) The results are therefore predictably yet oddly skewed. It is why, for instance, contributor Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk can breathlessly announce that, "It is by no means a-historical to regard Ronald Reagan as one of the most important gravediggers of European Communism." Even so central a figure as former Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl admits that, "We Germans owe much to Reagan, for what he said on that day was the most important speech held on Berlin soil." Yet somehow this "fact" has hitherto failed to break ground, at least until now. For years, we learn, Reagan was a target of ridicule. When inaugurated as president, communist propagandists had a field day. He was either branded as a capitalist overlord ruling from the White House, or a farcical, second-rate actor in the service of a shadowy oligarchy. In a direct swipe at the international arms lobby, East German posters like Das Weisse Haus (1983) depict the U.S. seat of government as flanked by missiles. In another poster from 1984, Reagan is compared to an elephant in a china shop, trampling the fragile peace. Also included here are examples of USSR propaganda, such as Palm Branch, Washington-Style, bristling with ordnance, and Liberty on Crutches (both 1984), showing the statue crippled by weaponry and dollar signs.

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There were many artists, too, who opposed Reagan's foreign policies. Joseph Beuys produced a vinyl single in 1982, on which he sings about peace. Its unique cover design reads, Sonne statt Reagan (Sun Instead of Rain--Regen in German means "rain"), under which can be found his familiar signature. In 1983, Klaus Staeck (now president of Berlin's Akademie der Kunste) designed an anti-Reagan poster depicting a man in a suit, with a missile for a head. The Reagan show also includes a 1999 Yevgeny Kozlov painting of Gorbachev seated pensively on an armchair looking into the distance, now hanging in the gallery of honored citizens in Berlin's House of Representatives. Gorbachev has in fact fared much better in the race for historical acceptance, asserts renowned German feminist Eva Quistorp. To this day he is still revered in Germany as a hero, even by a younger generation, who can easily recognize him in a photograph, unlike Reagan. Gorbachev promised domestic reform, openness toward the West, and most of the nuclear arms reductions. Reagan welcomed the new Soviet leader and negotiated with him despite stiff opposition from conservatives back home, among them Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. But he did not remove the nuclear warheads stationed in Germany that Gorbachev wanted. Quistorp remembers that on the day in question, demonstrators had wanted to advance toward the Brandenburg Gate but were held back by the police. Thus for so many people, events on the ground drowned out Reagan's speech. "Somewhere between sirens and tear gas there was a television in a bar [in Kreuzberg from whose] flickering tube we could hear the words: 'Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate (...) tear down this wall.'" Nobody could have known that the Berlin wall and the Soviet Empire were soon to collapse-the wall on November 9, 1989, and the USSR, finally, in 1991.

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Not long after "Tear Down This Wall" opened, on October 3 in fact, Germany's national celebration of reunification, a documentary-style magazine ad started making the rounds of the Berlin newsstands. It features a large image of Gorbachev seated in the backseat of what looks like a vintage Volvo, the official East German state vehicle, riding along a stretch of the Berlin wall now preserved as an outdoor museum. The colors have been altered to give the image a drab or grimy look, matching the original appearance of the eastern side of the wall, even though in reality the high concrete slabs are as luridly tagged today as the western side. By some bizarre coincidence, it's as if we were glimpsing Gorbachev portentously revisiting that "grim symbol of power untamed, the fitting symbol of the regime that built it," as Reagan once described the wall. But Gorbachev has actually gone there to sell Louis Vuitton travel gear, and indeed sitting beside him is an expensive leather bag exposing a Russian theatrical playbill and various papers, referencing both work and play. And even if, as the caption below makes plain, he thereby acquits himself by way of supporting Green Cross International, there's an obvious bittersweet quality about this newfound cause. Below the image are the words, "Does one travel around the world to discover it or change it?" (In an English version published in Esquire, it says: "A journey brings us face to face with ourselves.") What we do notice is that Gorbachev's gaze is directed toward the wall ahead and not at past achievements in the mirror of historical or personal redemption.

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Not surprisingly, these echoes of Reagan and others in "Tear Down this Wall" warrant comparison with the Vuitton ad. The Allied exhibits inherently function as holy relics or Zeitfenster (windows on the times), all the while raising the bar of received wisdom and chronic political oversight. As with those reliquaries of old, the purpose of all such effusion is more to prop up the dwindling fortunes of present beliefs and practices than anything so noble as to revere or restore the past. But irrespective of whether German appreciation of Reagan's role in aiding the fall of communism needs restoring or elevating (which is hardly true in the U.S., where Gorbachev's role by contrast now seems largely forgotten), it is still pure hogwash to base this elevation solely on those sacred shrines of presidential history in Simi Valley and other state archives. At the very least, the aftermath of both leaders' agendas on German soil is fraught with layers of crossed or missed messages, of both a mundane and paranormal nature, just like their modern-day equivalents in German politics. Vuitton's shrewd take on Gorbachev, however, clearly presents itself as staged, as being beneath illusionism, and even if ultimately it's just a cynical attempt to milk the street creds of the last czar of Soviet communism, its sly suggestion of driving the baggage of history ever forward still evades beatification and the perfect circularity of invoking great men from the past as a cover for present misdeeds.