An afternoon in Prenzlauer Berg nourishes nostalgia, even for someone born too late into the 20th century to have witnessed the changes. There is a melancholic side to this scene of pleasant idleness. On a sunny day in fall, hundreds of people walk up and down Rykestraße like 19th century flaneurs. Today, Prenzlauer Berg is known as one of Berlin’s most thoroughly gentrified areas. Bearing curiosity, hostility or sheer boredom, the looks they cast from one side of the building to another create an invisible crisscrossing grid oa incident. Their lives cross in the stairway or the backyard. Konrad Wolf portrays Prenzlauer Berg as home to a heterogeneous blend of artists, old people, young couples and families. 2 They are contrasted by two alternative surroundings: the provincial small towns where Sunny and the entertainment ensemble stage their program to meager success, and the Plattenbau settlement into which Sunny’s friend Christine has just moved. Its 19th century apartment blocks, centered around bleak courtyards, provide the social structure in which Sunny’s life unfolds and against which she rebels. The neighborhood provides more than a mere background to the film. When Konrad Wolf made Solo Sunny in 1980, he chose Prenzlauer Berg as the setting for the story centered around a struggling singer in her late twenties. The Altbau is home to a heterogeneous blend of artists, young couples, old people, families He is not actually on the move, but rather unwilling or unable to arrive. Despite the temporary appearance of everything, it seems that Ralph has lived here for a while and is bound to the place by the sheer weight of his books. There is an impermanence to his arrangement, an instability rooted in the absence of clearly allotted spatial functions. In this apartment, life happens in the awkward nooks that remain unoccupied by stacks of reading material and haphazardly placed shelves. The absence of a dining table leaves the window sill as the most convenient place for a meal, spots on the wall mark the places where pictures used to hang, a painted heart on the door remains as a trace left by a previous tenant. His bed, simply a mattress placed on an old door, is barely large enough for one and crammed into a corner between stacks of books and a record player. Because his reading habit has long outgrown the space, he has been forced to give up, perhaps happily, more conventional uses of the space. Ralph’s place is a labyrinth filled to the rim with books. The similarity between Flora’s drawing and the situation outside inserts into the film a subtly ironic commentary: destruction endures even as its targets change – this time around, a housing block must make way for an uncertain future. Earlier in the film, a newspaper clipping pinned to the wall of Ralph’s kitchen points to another moment of destruction: the cartoon titled “Kugel, ein Schloß ruinierend” (“Wrecking Ball destroying a Palace”) by the Austrian artist Paul Flora, published in the Western German newspaper Die Zeit. 1 The blast enters the reality of the apartment only in the form of a light tremble that moves the scotch in an unopened bottle of ‘Teacher’s Whiskey’. She enters, apparently indifferent to the spectacle of the explosion, and puts a bag of groceries on the kitchen table: pickled cucumbers, a melon, canned sausages from the GDR’s largest meat production facility in Eberswalde. The cloud of rubble from a nearby detonation gathers momentum as Sunny arrives at her lover Ralph’s apartment, situated just across the S-Bahn tracks on Kopenhagener Straße in Prenzlauer Berg. What can take root here, where the traces of the past have been eradicated? Now there is a sky where once was stone, a gaping hole that points into an uncertain future. A growling noise hits the ear drums with a polite delay.
#KONRAD WOLF WINDOWS#
Walls, windows and roof seem to float weightlessly until the upper stories crumble, pick up speed, scatter into a grey cloud of rubble. A brief eternity of stasis follows, the illusion of intactness is maintained for the blink of an eye. The eventual ignition happens in the lower third of the structure, as if the ground was pulled away underneath the framework. Markings are made and cables attached, turning the house into a doomed body rippled with explosive arteries. The destruction of a building: more important than the brief moment of the blast are the hours leading up to the detonation.
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