Berlin: The Symphony Continues. Orchestrating Architectural, Social and Artistic Change in Germany's New Capital

Costabile-Heming, Carol Anne, Rachel J. Halverson, and Kristie A. Foell, eds. Berlin: The Symphony Continues. OrchestratingArchitectural, Social and Artistic Change in Germany's New Capital. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004. 328pp. $106.00 hardcover. Though six books and a steady stream of articles have appeared on Berlin in the past decade, a broad range of disciplinary perspectives on the city's transformations since 1989 could not be found in one place prior to this volume. Comprised of work in literary and studies, urban planning, art history, architecture, music, history and anthropology, Berlin: The Symphony Continues strives to capture the city's complexities with a vast array of scholarly voices. These diverse offerings, fifteen in all, are divided into three sections corresponding to Berlin's environment, its representation, and the way we experience it (2). These sections are porous insofar as many of the essays address each of these categories with varying emphasis. Each of the sections contains, for instance, analyses of contemporary films in the context of Berlin's physical environment, the history of the city, and earlier films. Thematic resonances can also be discovered that transcend the respective section, disciplinary perspective and cultural forms being analyzed. Six essays critique the trend toward transparency, expressed architecturally in glass structures such as the cupola in the renovated Reichstag, as a democratic metaphor in the Berlin Republic's public buildings. A similar number questions the use of Weimar-era images and cultural conventions, seeing in them problematic attempts to return to a period seemingly free of historical burdens and/or to brand an image that can compete with the images of Paris or London. This latter resonance-reading Berlin's tumultuous 1920s through the present's cultural production-is to be expected in light of the editors' declarations that their reference points derive from the images of Walter Ruttmann's 1927 film Berlin. Die Sinfonie 4er Groftstadt and Thomas Schadt's 2002 remake Berlin. Die Sinfonie einer Grosstadt (1-2). This filmic recycling makes the symphony metaphor seem apt for situating contemporary Berlin films historically as well as thinking about Berlin's specific forms of urban life in a multi-disciplinary manner. As the editors write, our anthology builds on the idea of a city symphony that these two filmmakers espouse, and thus seeks to analyze the myriad changes in the city as part of an unfinished composition (2). …