Small towns and villages concealed themselves from you while you were out looking for them, they hid underneath the covers, and only when you closed your eyes did they come out, letting the City, with everything to hide but nothing to lose, do all the showing off. Ride the U-Bahn to the end of the line; pass through as many Berlins as you can (future, past, present; yours, mine, theirs); try and find yourself, Berlin, another; and you might notice that glass is everywhere—what isn’t broken or smashed, could, in its beauty, be thought to stand for what was, that is, if Berlin didn’t have enough objects of significance already without
your having to invent new ones; tour the city by exploring the geography of Wings of Desire, experiencing the foreign by way of the familiar, visiting the locations where Wenders shot the film, getting lost in the Tiergarten, then cutting it in two, walking right down the middle, and you’ll stumble upon Berlin.
You spend the walk to the top of the Siegessäule, which was ridiculously placed in the center of a rotary by Hitler, looking at graffiti, the majority of which seems to have been written by Colombians. Meanwhile, Victory stands on high like a pirate without his parrot; Bruno Ganz, star of Wings of Desire, belongs on her shoulder like Victory belongs in Athena’s hand.
Appearing out of nowhere, Brandenburg Gate, door to nothing in particular, through which parades march for no reason, to which all roads, seemingly, lead—none of which go anywhere—appears in Faraway, So Close! rather than in its predecessor, Wings of Desire, because Wenders wasn’t allowed to film there until after die Wende, until after the Wall came down.
The Grand Hotel Esplanade, located at Bellevuestraße 1, adjacent to the Tiergarten, has been preserved under glass, and not only does walking casually by it fail to reveal a way in, but even the open doors contradict themselves, warning the passerby not to enter. Not that, without the voice of Nick Cave sounding from within, there’s anything to tempt him to.
There are no signs that Waldemarstraße was once a no-man’s land, no evidence of a Death Zone, and nothing resembling the sight of the scene where the picture turns from black and white to color. All there is to suggest the film is this angel, watching over Michaelskirche.
Lohmühlen Bridge, located, like Waldemarstraße, in Kreuzberg, my favorite part of Berlin, spans the river Spree, across which folks play ping-pong on outdoor tables made of cement. The bridge is recognizable if you’ve seen Wings of Desire; boats pass under it, cars over it, making the Wall conspicuous in its absence.
The weather seems to change depending upon which direction you approach Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church from; blue skies give way to gray, gray into rain, which clusters itself in pockets and comes down heavily on some but not at all on others, leaving behind a rainbow to accentuate the changing color of the light, which reflects off the church in golden browns as if for the city—happening below it—to admire and marvel at.
The arcades of Potsdamer Platz, which Europeans —unaware that the plaza is barely a naïve cookie-cutter abstraction of an American shopping center—inevitably compare to the malls of America, pale beside the three teal cranes that permanently set off the Berlin skyline, landmarking the square. Were the angel Homer to return to the place, however, were he to account for buildings arranged like models on an urban planner’s desk, he might repeat what he said in Wings of Desire, when the bombed out square still looked like an abandoned rail yard: “ich kann den Potsdamer Platz nicht finden”—I can’t find Potsdamer Platz—for the square, one great construction site, struggles to fulfill its responsibility to once again define a great city. If anything, it defines it through its struggles.
Architecturally, windows, designed with imagination, fountains, complemented here by gi-normous steel seesaws around the corner from where the U-Bahn lets off, cranes, and jackhammers characterize a new Berlin, linked in my mind by hagiolatry to the one of old, city of huge, ubiquitous, empty space; open air; absence; and blank facades that suggest cities to come, like the city itself reminds you of future versions of itself.