Fieldsite

Berlin is the ultimate postmodern space. It enjoys a shifting (until recently declining, now rapidly expanding), heterogeneous population, a discontinuous and ruptured history, old communists, young right-wing neo-Nazis, aging Red Army sympathizers – and, through the duration of this study, four foreign occupation armies “protecting” two opposed political and economic systems. I moved to Berlin in 1986 to study the relation of its dual political structure to everyday life. At that time little did I foresee the autumn revolution of 1989, when the desire for unity and continuity of the German Volk, for oneness, overwhelmed the diversity and duality of culture and politics, when Berlin's chameleon nature, its refusal, or inability, to fix its political, cultural, or economic organs, caught the world by surprise: the people of Leipzig and East Berlin spearheaded a peaceful revolution, presaging an about-face in the city's, and Germany's, identity, as well as the end of the Cold War era. Berlin's fluidity, its lack of final closure and essence, does not anomalize its place in history, however, but rather elevates it to an apotheosis of our time. More than perhaps any other city, it has periodized and shaped twentieth-century history in the West: 1914, 1939, 1989.