4100 Duisburg: “… tearing at the seams”
“A garbage can, occasionally, to me at least, can be beautiful.
That’s because you are seeing. Some people are able to see that –
and feel it. I lean toward the enchantment, the visual power of
the aesthetically rejected object.”[1]Walker Evans
Anyone who grew up in Duisburg during the fifties and sixties, as did the author of these observations, experienced a vibrant city with its own unique character: economically thriving and culturally ambitious. In 1960, thanks to its geographical location on the Rhine and Ruhr rivers, Duisburg ranked among the German municipalities with the highest pro-capita income. Viewed from the south along the border to Düsseldorf looking towards the northern edge of the city, which opens up towards the Lower Rhine region, the industrial plants of heavy industry lined the banks of the Rhine like pearls on a string. Even today, their names still evoke shades of Germany’s economic miracle following the Second World War and call to mind a culture of once private companies that emerged during the mid-19th century: Demag, Mannesmann, Kupferhütte, Krupp, Thyssen, and Stinnes. A family business, the König Brewery in Beeck, lent a special flavor to the city’s economic structure by producing a Pilsener beer with a bitter note that was widely known throughout Germany. Beer, the “bread” of the working man, was brewed in every city in the Ruhr region; König Pilsener, however, enjoyed a reputation of exclusivity. On many days the brewery’s unmistakable aroma wafted over the entire quarter. It was situated not far from the expansive Thyssenhütte mill, which extended all the way to Hamborn and exported its high-quality iron and steel products all over the globe. The harbor represented the city’s true lifeline: situated at its center around the confluence of the Ruhr and Rhine rivers, it reached far out into the urban topography, forming its core and giving it cohesion. “At no time and at no place was the Ruhr district ever beautiful,” was how historian Ulrich Herbert once characterized the region of his forebears.[2] This was also true of Duisburg. Once known as the “Montan City” (derived from Latin mons in reference to the city’s coal and steel industry), it was nevertheless an urban organism with its own unmistakable identity, and it stood out – or so it seems in retrospect – from among the monotone cities along the Ruhr and Emscher rivers. This was because the vitality that characterized its economic life was matched by an earnest cultural commitment. Like all cities in the Ruhr district, Duisburg was also governed for decades by the Social Democrat Party (SPD), which enjoyed an absolute majority. In those days, however, enlightenment, education, and culture were inviolable elements of the party’s self-image, with which they sought to lead the working class toward self-determination and self-responsibility in accordance with their founding principles. In Duisburg these aspirations were given credibility by two lord mayors in particular, August Seeling and Josef Krings, both of whom were in office for many years. They championed a cultural dimension of life that they considered unalienable. Together with Düsseldorf, Duisburg has long been home to the renowned theater community “Deutsche Oper am Rhein”; the city sponsored the internationally recognized Lehmbruck-Museum for sculpture, which was named after Wilhelm Lehm-
bruck, a native of Duisburg’s Meiderich quarter; and it was only natural that major international newspapers were available at the main library in the heart of the city. And then came the day when Lord Mayor Krings threatened his party with resignation in order to prevent a budget cut that would have affected the ballet. Duisburg, so it appears to this chronicler, was “special” in those days and did not consider itself part of the Ruhr district. Until the mid-seventies there was a signpost in the center of town that pointed in two directions: west towards “The Netherlands” and east towards “The Ruhr district.”
From today’s perspective, this image of an intact city has something of a fairy-tale quality. The industrial restructuring of the Ruhr district was implemented much too late, and the aftereffects have long been conspicuous in the “Montan City” and its crumbling infrastructure. Duisburg at present is a “poor house.” It is deep in debt. It cannot contain the costs of its actual expenditures, and it has a disproportionately high population of immigrants who are difficult to integrate. The historical background that led to this situation is briefly outlined in the following. An elite cartel comprised of business, unions, and regional politics closed its eyes for decades to the fact that the age of heavy industry had definitely come to an end in the Ruhr district. The underlying structural shift was ignored and countermeasures were not taken. An economic structure that had been irrecoverably lost for quite some time was propped up with large state subsidies. And the social fabric began to fray as well. “In consequence, this led to great social segregation, to an over-aging of the Ruhr district, to disproportionally high unemployment. It is also to blame for the fact that two-thirds of all adolescents under eighteen in Gladbeck or Herten grow up in poverty or in precarious circumstances and that seventy, eighty, or even one hundred percent of elementary school children there have a so-called “migration background.”[3]
The terrain that Laurenz Berges patiently explored in Duisburg over the past few years is comparable to the foregoing description of the Ruhr district’s deeply seated communal misery. He mainly kept to the quarters that were formerly sites of heavy industry and are now suffering the most from the effects of structural change. A general decline in the quality of urban life is obvious. These photographs never attempt to portray concrete examples of social maldevelopment, however. Berges is instead interested in how to make the things in the image speak in order to render understandable a dimension of experience: interiors, architectural details, fragments of nature, a person here and there. Berges’s mode of work is indirect. His photographs create a parallel reality that transcends details and seeks a holistic visual effect all the more emphatically.
In Duisburg he found images of a void that is filled with a fundamental silence. A feeling of forlornness and disorientation seems to lie over the city, a condition known as bardo in Buddhism: that is to say, a transitional state between death and rebirth. This explains the unique intensity of the visual effect. Light and silence are its messengers. Soft daylight fills the rooms, inside and out, with an intangible volume. The matte appearance of the colors intensifies their effect because they are no longer a superficial manifestation, but corporeal instead. They almost seem to sink into the image surface. There is an unhurriedness of observation inherent in these pictures that communicates itself to the viewer. Life in its putative fleetingness is brought to a halt and attains fulfillment in ubiety.
Berges’s images describe a path leading inward. It is not just a matter of portraying the external phenomena that characterize an urban landscape; an existential dimension is at issue. What is our state of being in the world? Photographically capturing the recurring cycles of waning life (which, it should be pointed out, are regularly followed by new periods of economic and cultural prosperity) represents the main focus of his art. In his photographs, Duisburg’s scenery bespeaks the transience and melancholy that adhere to human existence. Their silence is only offset by the dimension of visual beauty that manifests itself in light and colors. This dimension alone implies a prospect of redemption.
With this perspective, Berges is arguably the only photographer of our time who follows in the footsteps of two giants of photography from the previous century, namely Eugène Atget (1857–1927) and Walker Evans (1903–1975). These two in particular dedicated themselves to portraying a culture grown old and things caught up in the process of decay. In Paris, Atget photographed buildings, some of which were built in the Middle Ages, had survived Baron Haussmann’s urban renewal campaign, and were due to be torn down in the foreseeable future. He also captured the parks and aristocratic residences in the vicinity of the French capital that were slowly falling into disrepair, thus bearing witness to the end of the former First Estate’s social importance. He was driven by a fascination with the characteristic beauty of things in decline, and it was his wish to preserve in photographs that which was already doomed to destruction for future generations.
Whereas Atget acted almost unconsciously, guided, it seems, only by his yearning for the refracted light of the past in order to find a reflection of himself therein,[4], we encounter in Evans a profoundly deliberate, intellectually sovereign artist who was always well-aware of the aesthetic dimension of his work. He too felt drawn to the old architecture on the plantations of the American South, both to the mansions as well as to the slave quarters, which they built themselves from self-fired bricks. He was equally fascinated by the 19th century wooden Victorian homes in the vicinity of Boston, which were designed and embellished by local carpenters. From 1930 on he dedicated one of his first larger works to them: an early testimony to his love of a unique vernacular style that was born from the work of local craftsmen. He viewed it as “classicism of the ordinary,” a style that was not at all aware of its own aesthetic dimension. In Evans’s opinion, it was superior to the traditional high art exhibited in museums because, in it, the life energy of ordinary Americans manifested itself directly – and it could also reveal itself in private living spaces, churches, shops, and on signs. When Evans photographed New York City’s Pennsylvania Station in 1963, the building was already empty and scheduled for demolition. He did so in order to memorialize the architecture and interior details because he was conscious of the value of a national historical edifice that was doomed to destruction and could never be rebuilt. His interest in such manifestations of history did not, as he put it, have anything to do with sentimental nostalgia. There was, instead, a culturo-historical dimension involved when something was in the process of exiting the stage of history. From the old and passing aspects in our culture of everyday life emerges a quite distinct spiritual impulse, a force that confronts the pointless motion of the perpetual “new.”[5]
Evans’s near rapturous love for the senectitude of things had its corrective in a strict formal consciousness, which he found in modernist literature, and in which he was quite well-read. The writings of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and E. E. Cummings counted among his guiding lights, but he always considered 19th century French literature, and especially Charles Baudelaire und Gustave Flaubert, as his benchmarks. With regard to Flaubert in particular, Evans determined that his own art had profited from the author’s “realism and naturalism” as well as from his “objectivity of treatment; the non-appearance of author.”[6]
Berges’s photographic art, which is said to owe its first impulse to an encounter with a book by Evans,[7], also has such a literary quality: its visual vernacular balances on the thin borderline between contentual reference and poetic silence. It does not really lend itself to description via verbal discourse. When contemplating the photographs taken in Duisburg and their author, we are for this reason reminded of a literary precursor who roamed the streets of Paris daily, roughly a century ago, and experienced the urban decay around him as a reflection of his own inner reality: Malte Laurids Brigge. His observations, penned by Rainer
Maria Rilke, rank among the key texts of early 20th century literature in which the experience of a far-reaching crisis of culture and the individual finds expression. What defines this text is an emphasis on visual perception, which characterizes its approach to reality in general. Not the slightest detail escapes this gaze; it makes the world speak, in a comprehensive sense. It is a mode of perception best known to us from the visual arts as well as photography. It is no coincidence that Rilke delved deeply into the art of Rodin and Cézanne prior to writing Malte Laurids Brigge. What he learned there, he named “objective narration”: an objectivity in which the observed becomes form, without a superabundance of emotional arabesques. To conclude, let us listen to this voice and its observations: “Will people believe there are houses like this? […] Houses? But, to be exact, they were houses that were no longer there. Houses that had been demolished, top to bottom. […] You could see inside them. On the different floors you could see walls with the paper still sticking to them, and here and there signs of where floors or ceilings had been fixed. Adjoining the inside walls and running the whole width of the house was a dirty-white expanse of wall across which crawled in unutterably disgusting, wormsmooth, bowel-like form the open rust-flecked groove for the toilet pipe. […] The dogged life that had been lived in these rooms refused to be obliterated. It was still there; it clung to the nails that were left, it lingered on the remaining strip of floorboarding, it was huddled up under the little that was left of a corner section. […] And from these surfaces that had been blue, green and yellow and were now framed by broken runs of demolished partition wall, arose the air from these lives, this tenacious, shiftless, fuggy air that no wind had yet dispersed. […] It’s the fact that I recognized it that makes it horrible. I recognize everything here; it passes into me without further ado; it finds a home in me.”[8] Indeed, this text could also be viewed as a forerunner of Laurenz Berges’s encounter with the city of Duisburg. His patient meandering through the streets, observing, seeking, discovering, returning, the setting of the camera, comparing and selecting the images: all these things attest to the confluence of a city and art. Duisburg may be a poor and, in many places, ramshackle city, yet Laurenz Berges’s view of it gives it a home in the realm of art. Not every city can make that claim.
[1] Walker Evans, Walker Evans at Work, New York: Harper & Row, 1982, p. 220.
[2] Ulrich Herbert, “Schön war es nirgends und nie,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21 December 2018, p. 13.
[3] Ulrich Herbert, ibid.
[4] Evans viewed Atget as one of the founders of modern photography, and his own aesthetics owed much to him. It is noteworthy how, mutatis mutandis, Evans’s characterization of Atget’s art reads like a description of Laurenz Berges’s photography. “It is possible to read into his photographs so many things he may never have formulated to himself. […] His general note is lyrical understanding of the street, trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry which is not ‘the poetry of the street’ or ‘the poetry of Paris,’ but the projection of Atget’s person.” Walker Evans, “The Reappearance of Photography,” in Hound & Horn, #5 (October–December 1931), quoted by Jeff Rosenheim with Alexis Schwarzenbach (eds.), Unclassified. A Walker Evans Anthology, Zurich/Berlin/New York: Scalo, 2000, p. 81.
[5] “I’ve certainly suffered when philistines look at certain works of mine having to do with the past, and remark, ‘Oh, how nostalgic.’ I hate that word. To be nostalgic is to be sentimental. To be interested in what you see that is passing out of history, even if it’s a trolley car you’ve found, that’s not an act of nostalgia. You could read Proust as nostalgia, but that’s not what Proust had in mind at all.” Leslie Katz, “Interview with Walker Evans,” in Art in America, March–April 1971, Vol. 59, No. 2, p. 87.
[6] “I know now that Flaubert’s esthetic is absolutely mine. Flaubert’s method I think I incorporated unconsciously, but anyway used it in two ways: his realism and naturalism both, and his objectivity of treatment; the non-appearance of author, the non-subjectivity.” Leslie Katz, ibid., p. 84.
[7] “When Laurenz Berges discovered a copy of First and Last by Walker Evans at a bookstore in his hometown of Cloppenburg in 1985, he bought it with his birthday money. It was his first book of photographs, and it still means a great deal to him today.” Thomas Weski, “Indirekte Erzählung,” in Laurenz Berges. Frühauf Danach, Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2011, p. 89.
[8] Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” translated from the German by William Needham, web.