Imagining West Berlin: Spatiality and History in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, 1987

Hannu Salmi University of Turku

Warum bin ich hier und warum nicht dort? Wann begann die Zeit und wo endet der Raum?

— Peter Handke

'Today, the endangered frontier of freedom runs through divided Berlin. We want it to remain a frontier of peace.' These famous words by President John F. Kennedy were spoken on 25 July 1961, at the time of the Berlin crisis, in his radio and television report for an American audience (Mur 2004: 7; Brager 2004: 68; Schwarz 2004: 188). At the end of World War II, Berlin had been a battleground, and soon after the war it became the scene of another kind of battle: the Cold War. Five weeks before Kennedy's speech, First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party and GDR State Council chairman Walter Ulbricht had stated that 'no one has the intention of erecting a wall!' (Gedmin 1992: 25). Two months later, however, the building of the Berliner Mauer had started. The year 1961 marked the drawing of a physical barrier between East and West; in the end, the 155km-long Wall enclosed the city of West Berlin, separating it completely from East Berlin – and from East Germany.

The emerging ideological gap of the Cold War was etched into the material world by the Wall, but it was to a large extent also a construct in the realm of the imagination. The divided city of Berlin was frequently used as a film location, beginning already in the late 1940s, but it can be argued that the most influential cinematic depiction of the city of the Wall was that directed at the very end of the Cold War era by Wim Wenders. This film was Der Himmel über Berlin (1987), known in English as Wings of Desire.

Wings of Desire can be interpreted as a film about the dividedness of Berlin, in which the Wall itself plays a crucial role. It is also of interest because Berlin changed radically once again after its filming; just a few years later, the Wall, which had had such a strong presence in Wings of Desire, was dismantled and torn down. Wim Wenders' cinematic homage to Berlin also serves as an access point to how borders and spatiality were imagined in Cold War Europe. It is noteworthy that the reception of the film was intertwined with political changes at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. It was filmed in Berlin in 1986 and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1987. The West German premiere was on 29 October 1987. In many European countries it was released in 1988, the same year in which Mikhail Gorbachev introduced the concept of 'glasnost' in the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall began to collapse on 9 November 1989. In Germany, Wings of Desire was re-released in July 1993 and was also circulated in the eastern parts of the reunited country.

In this chapter, I explore the ways in which Wings of Desire portrays the German metropolis and its topography: how it imagines the city space and draws maps of its own, and how this imagination relates to the notion(s) of history. In moving about in space, within the borders of West Berlin, the film describes the routes and sites of the city. My argument is that it refers to maps and itineraries that recalled pre-war – and pre-Wall – Berlin in the memories of its inhabitants. Here it is important to recognize that (deferring to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), maps are always superimposed upon one another: old maps are not replaced by new ones but are rather stratified over each other. In his Cartographic Cinema, Tom Conley has argued that cinema works like a map: both are forms of locational machinery. A film creates boundaries, transgresses borders, navigates in space, excludes some places by portraying others and shows places to identify with. The film, like a map, tells spectators where they are situated, directs their actions and shapes their understanding of where they are – and, simultaneously, who they are (Conley 2007: 1–22). It is important to see film not only as a narrative form of expression but also as a performative one. Films imagine and construct our visual – and aural – understanding of the environment. In this chapter, I analyse the transformations of Berlin city space on the screen from the perspective of one particular focal point offered by Wings of Desire. The following discussion emphasizes five aspects, all of which contribute to the ways in which the film intermingles spatiality and history: Berlin places and the idea of the 'angel of history', ruins and wasteland, maps and itineraries and, finally, the Wall. It is essential to note that Wenders' film did not merely reflect political changes: it participated in creating the dividedness of Berlin and in connecting the city's sites, maps and itineraries with memories of the past.

Cinema of place and angels of history

Wings of Desire is a film in which time and space are inextricably bound together. It can be characterized as an instance of cinema of place, and in that sense does not diverge from Wim Wenders' previous productions. Think, for example, of such films as Alice in den Städten/Alice in the Cities (1974), Paris, Texas (1984) or Tokyo-Ga (1985). Furthermore, one can argue that in Wenders' films the problem of spatiality is connected with the way the films...