I can’t let today’s news about the Kunsthaus Tacheles in Berlin go unremarked. A center for art and culture since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has apparently ordered vacated, with occupants carried out by force. Ironically, it’s really about a story about art and the absence of a legal framework, a building in the hottest part of the hottest city in Europe that no one seemed to own.
Tacheles stands (for now) on Oranienburger Straße, near the (now rebuilt) synagogue in what was Berlin’s Jewish quarter. Since its construction around 1909 it has been, variously, a department store, the Haus der Technik of the AEG conglomerate, a Nazi prison for French soldiers, a movie theater, and a trade union hall.
Damaged in the war and slated for demolition numerous times in the late DDR period, a brief confusion over who owned it led to its occupation in 1990 (post-Wall but pre-unification) by the Künstlerinitative Tacheles, the Artists’ Tacheles (“straight talk” in Yiddish) Initiative. Two decades before Occupy Wall Street, the building became an impromptu center for art, culture and music in the euphoric years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s hard to remember now, but equally hard to overstate the sense of possibility in Berlin then, drawing on the perceived glories of the Weimar ear, triumphs over Nazism and Communism, and new European culture.
I spent a fair amount of time there while living in Berlin in 1996, and during visits since. Tacheles was a place to be, to be seen, and marvel at the power of imaginations unbound after unspeakable repression. It was provacative, fun, and lacked a rear wall of any kind (the original vaults were exposed). It was also a place that for at least ten years (arguments will abound over whether it had been a tourist trap recently) defied the idea that art has to belong to anyone.
I will miss it and knowing that it is there.
