4 - Topographical Turns: Recasting Berlin in Christian Petzold’s Gespenster

Summary

This Essay Revisits the territory explored in the last chapter of my recent book, Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography. With this book I aimed to contribute to the topographical turn in cultural criticism and was concerned, in particular, to show how cultural topography is also linked to forms of urban tropography: figurative placements and turnings of urban space that determine its representation in high and popular cultural forms. The figurations — topoi and tropes — in question are partly found in the way in which urban space is cast in civic terms, especially in its representative forms: monuments, memorials, and symbolically invested places. But the book also pursued the claim that the placements and turns in question are fundamentally performative in character — constructed, invested, sustained, and sometimes subverted through turns in another sense — cultural acts. This cluster of assumptions, then, is bundled into the “topographical turns” of the title here.

In the chapter in question, I described post-unification films set in Berlin (following the cultural political “turn” of 1989–1990) as occupying an ambivalent position: caught between attachments to past scenarios and to turns in other, more contemporary directions. Across a range of films, I saw the performance of urban identity — on stage, on screen, or in the streets — as the key to that ambivalent condition. The films are suspended between constraint and relative autonomy in the practical, performative achievement of identity, community, and creativity in the city. In the present essay I further explore the transformative potential of such cinematic turns, and their limits, with particular reference to the spectral version of those turns in Christian Petzold’s Gespenster (Ghosts, 2005). Gespenster focuses on the vagabond figure of Nina, tracking her through spaces in central Berlin that are represented as off-center, an arena for more marginal experiences. In her intense but passing relationship with another girl, Toni, and the obsessive but transient pursuit of her by a French woman who believes her to be her long-lost daughter, Nina embodies the ghostliness of the film’s title.

In this essay I show that Petzold’s film uses fundamental questions of uncertainty in personal memory, and in the construction of identity that depends upon it, to contribute to the interrogation of national memory and collective identity.