No matter how much we bemoan our short-lived digital storage systems when yet another error message of corrupted files appears during our search through cultural archives, it is evident that data loss is not just a teething problem of the computer age but one of its basic functional principles. In view of the deluge of news that in real time continuously inundates general consciousness and demands attention, the ability to forget and delete is indispensable. Without it, the system’s operating capacities would fail as a result of information overload. In the permanent emergency state of our present free market economy, the problem that is inherent to the idea of archives has intensified: only the past that is continually in use and is constantly reenacted survives.
Thus it seems that collective memory can hardly be moulded by anniversaries and other official events (Cologne – City of the Arts, 2007), during which the members of a community – freed from their daily routine – affirm the foundations of order in a ritualized form. Instead it is the continuous revision and up-dating of the communal myth that takes place on the market place of competing interests.
The present offers reasons enough for us to look beyond it for orientation. And it is the privilege of contemporary art, despite its involvement in the mechanisms of the market, to act as an agent of possible and impossible worlds (utopias) that have not yet been realized. Yet because the angel of history turns its back to the future even as it moves forward, it follows that art can draw its subject matter only from the cultural archive, enriching its heritage with new forms and new constellations.
The historical archive of Cologne, the largest collection preserved in a city archive in Germany, contains an impressive treasure. The grand history of Cologne, countless anecdotes and little stories recorded in 30 kilometres of documents, files, maps, pictures and manuscripts from more than 1,000 years of history are there to be discovered. Yet what bottled message from the 1,957 years since Cologne was elevated in 50 A.D. to the status of a city under Roman law – Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensis – will be passed on to future generations cannot be determined. It is possible, however to view remnants of this cultural heritage –astonishing stories of success that are still a part of life in Cologne – although they were once extinguished. The reconstruction began in 1957…
In 2007 Cologne is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Bundesgartenschau (German Federal Garden Show) in Rheinpark. The relevance that such a botanical event can have for contemporary art is illustrated in Kassel’s “documenta”, which in the accompanying programme of a similar federal garden show developed into one of the most important documentary platforms for contemporary art. In the field of music Cologne is on the way to playing a similar role with its MusikTriennale, which is taking place for the fifth time this year. Except for Frei Otto’s tent-like roof for the Tanzbrunnen (outdoor theater), which can be seen as the precursor of the famous roof for Munich’s Olympic Stadium, the artistic programme of the 1957 Federal Garden Show did not have any lasting effect. The sculpture park that was laid out at the time has suffered considerably due to what is now touted as “public interest”. The contemporary treasures displayed in the current sculpture park on Riehler Street, however, provide more than adequate compensation for what was lost.
Cologne’s Rheinpark has earned its historical-cultural importance primarily in its role as a witness of the permanent mutability of public space. The instability of public space is demonstrated not only in the temporary disappearance of Rheinpark when the Rhine is flooded but also as the object of changing concepts of city planning and the venue of their contradictions.
As a public green area, Rheinpark exemplifies the ideals of the garden city, which were developed as an alternative to workers’ confined living quarters – objectionable both in political and hygienic terms – that arose in the wake of industrialization. Not only from the perspective of today’s efforts to re-urbanize civic space does this form of appeasement seem controversial, as is clearly illustrated in the Werkbund exhibition of 1914 in Rheinpark: Walter Gropius set up – in the middle of a nearby recreational area for the working population – a model factory with a workshop and office building. That is not only an obvious reference to the changing function of public green areas but also an indication of the growing importance of reproductive areas as a resource for the expanding immaterial production we experience in our culture today.
The urbane models that led to the creation of Rheinpark have left their mark in its cultural topography as has the sudden appearance of conflict and friction. Thus the cultural impact connected with the Werkbund exhibition began to fade after its buildings were destroyed in the war. Nevertheless its traces can be made evident in various ways in Rheinpark. The great success of the Werkbund show influenced the planning of the media expo “Pressa” of 1928, which was the largest and most successful exhibition in German history. This led to the early expansion of the Cologne trade fair, which to this day is a valuable economic factor for the city: a group of TV channels, including the private broadcasting company RTL and the news station n-tv, have established their headquarters in the trade fair building with its listed brick façade and thus draw on the Pressa tradition. The connection that the Werkbund established between art and economy is also continued in its trade fair hall, and ART COLOGNE (a fair for contemporary and modern art) has advanced, at least momentarily, to the most important art market of the world. If we consider the entire city, the most important members of the design city Cologne can be seen as the successors of the Werkbund: the International School of Design, the International Furniture Fair, “Passagen” (a design fair) and in its present-day form the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (Museum of Applied Art), which was founded as early as 1888.
Established 100 years ago in the footsteps of the British Arts and Crafts movement, the Deutscher Werkbund, the intellectual forerunner, also in terms of its members, of the later Bauhaus school, brought together and united artists and industrialists who promoted the idea of good form and created – before the word existed – the professional profile of the designer. The result of its work, inevitably bound up with considerable ideological battles, was presented to a wide public for the first time in 1914 in a large-scale exhibition with numerous model buildings on the grounds of the present-day Rheinpark.
The glass house by Bruno Taut is the first building made of industrially produced glass building stones. The novel transparency of its façade reveals nothing however – it does not expose an otherwise concealed truth in the interior of the building. As work commissioned by the German glass industry, the transparency presents nothing more than the material itself – the glass. Thus on the eve of World War I the glass house was pointing the way twentieth-century art would move – an art form which, in view of its self-referential linguistic code, is characterized to a considerable degree by the predilection to focus on its own mediality.
With its tendency to incorporate technological developments, the production of culture emphasizes performance-oriented qualities. This is also true for the most important project of the Werkbund exhibition, Henry van de Velde’s theatre. This building was a step forward that pushed Jugendstil, which continued to predominate the art scene in 1914, towards the humanistically motivated functionalism that was later found in the Bauhaus school. Van de Velde’s concept – to eliminate the clear separation of stage and audience – could not find a more favorable execution than in the Cologne theatre. In terms of political, religious and cultural theatricality, this city is, at best, only comparable to Venice, as everyone is transformed into an actor on the extensive stage of its public space. Thus we see Roman Saturnalia, Christian processions, cavalcades of Prussian military, Carnival parades and the Cologne marathon passing by in grand style along various routes throughout the city. It is not without reason that Cologne is considered the official address of the German theatre discourse – with the headquarters of the German Stage Association and the unique collection of theatre studies on Schloss Wahn (“delusion castle”), a true vanity of vanities. In the theatre-conscious city of Cologne the performance of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung in just two days is accepted as a unique opportunity by an audience whose young successors enjoy Germany’s only Children’s Opera.
After World War II the functional understatement in Van de Velde’s theatre became fashionable once again. After bombing destroyed much of the city during the war, the new opera house, the first municipal stage to be rebuilt, was opened in 1957 – another 50-year anniversary. Wilhelm Riphahn’s democratic architecture shuns the heroic overtones of an overpowering stage as well as pretentious pomp in the boxes and with an inviting gesture integrates the building into its urbane surroundings. With its simple elegance the opera house is only today beginning to be recognized as one of the most important architectural monuments of the German post-war period. This is not surprising, however, if we bear in mind that more than five decades are often required to evaluate architecture adequately in terms of its conceptual qualities and form. No doubt those who experienced the war had difficulties in not letting their judgment be swayed by ambivalent feelings that prevailed in the 1950s regarding the war’s aftermath.
Apart from the opera and the neighbouring theatre in which Peter Zadek had his debut as director and where today outstanding directors such as Robert Carson present their work, Riphahn was also responsible for the buildings on nearby Hahnen Street, which during post-war reconstruction was the only attempt to create an urban ensemble with a unified appearance that was actually completed. One of these buildings is Die Brücke (“the bridge”). It contains 20 studios for young artists who are supported with scholarships provided by the Imhoff Foundation. In addition Filmclub 813 is located on the premises. Today, however, the Riphahn building primarily houses the headquarters of the Kölnischer Kunstverein (Cologne Art Association), an institution rich in tradition, whose previous premises were torn down in 2003.
A new cultural centre planned for the Neumarkt required the demolition of the Josef-Haubrich Forum together with the forum of the Volkshochschule (“adult education centre”) and the Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, which in the 1960s was the heart of the Cologne art scene and will continue to be its emotional focal point. The construction of the new building, which will unite the future Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum and the extension of the Schnütgen-Museum under one roof, could not be started immediately after the demolition work because of unexpected deficits in the city’s budget. Since the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia has agreed to reserve funds for this purpose until the city’s financing is once again secured, the realization of the project is guaranteed. Until then there will be a gaping excavation hole on the site, which has achieved notoriety under the name of Kölner Loch (“Cologne hole”). In connection with the demolition an initiative of Cologne artists and art friends was formed (Das Loch e.V.), which after protesting the demolition of the Kunsthalle is now pursuing the idea of a “European Kunsthalle”.
That its name draws on two linguistic regions indicates how the director of the European Kunsthalle, Nicolaus Schafhausen, wants to position the institution in its urbane surroundings, namely, as a hybrid between a stabile exhibition venue and a dynamic centre for mercurial discourse; to be more exact – for a discourse about the changing locational references in art and the art industry. It may be coquette for an art institution to proclaim for itself those characteristics that are desired of the works to be exhibited – the charm of formal ambiguity, the power of meaning in form and the pleasure of dealing with the institutional context in a critical manner. The term Europe already seems to indicate a clear orientation, and one can hardly avoid assuming that behind the choice of the word there is not so much a desire for dealing with theoretical questions as for receiving public funds from Brussels. Nevertheless the creative concept has rightly received considerable attention and worldwide interest on the part of the art industry with its – typical for Cologne – conflicting interests and theories in connection with forced-voluntary nomadism. Once again this provides proof of Cologne’s resilient nature.
But the city can and must prove itself above all in connection with the worst genocide in history. This is being done in exemplary fashion, for example, by the NS Documentation Centre in EL-DE-Haus. Furthermore, the city also has the unique opportunity and privilege to restore Jewish culture and the history of Jews in Germany to its rightful place in Cologne’s cultural archives after the systematic persecution under National Socialism. And there is every reason to assume that the city will carry out this task diligently, including, in the near future, the construction of the House of Jewish Culture on the town hall square, a museum that will offer specialists and the general public access to the unique and rich testimony of nearly 1,700 years of Jewish history. The first Jews in history to establish a community north of the Alps did so in 321, in Cologne. Although Jews were expelled “forever” in 1424 and the first community to re-settle was not until Napoleonic times, underneath the city as part of ancient and medieval Cologne, the largest archaeological site in Europe today, there is an entire ensemble with a Mikwe, the Jewish cult bath, parts of a synagogue, as well as residential and commercial buildings. On the paving-stones of the town hall square, markings indicate the extent of the site. So that the Jewish heritage in Cologne is more than mere markings, the town hall square must now be made available for the construction of the House of Jewish Culture. This would also mean that the institution financing the project will be able to turn Cologne into a centre for both researchers and tourists interested in the cultural history of Jews in Germany. Let us hope that the new building will also house the Germania Judaica, which after the war has become –thanks also to the commitment of Heinrich Böll, the Cologne Nobel prize laureate – the library with the most important collection of documents on Jewish history in the Rhineland.
