Dialogue of
Cultures......
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Kreuzberg:
Where tradition meets the modern
Kreuzberg has absolutely nothing to do with the Holy Cross. There is a place of pilgrimage in the Rhone called Kreuzberg, where the pilgrims do indeed climb a sacred mountain. But there are no hills in Berlin, and where changes do actually occur in the lay of the land they have, for the most part, been buried under asphalt in this big city. The big city is a different creature altogether. In Berlin, the ground of the city has been so often ploughed up for one reason or another that any connection to not-so-long-ago times - when this entire place was just a collection of little villages - has been thoroughly interrupted. But the cityscape created by human hands, which does not seem to be stop in any direction until suddenly, after many kilometres, you find yourself in a pine forest, has frothed out involuntarily into a number of areas, as in a process of fermentation, with or without the will of planners and designers. Kreuzberg is one of those areas, life is lived here apparently independently of what goes on in the rest of the city. As far as the word itself goes, Kreuzberg has something abrupt to it, something bare, perhaps even a little colonial: it sounds more invented than natural. But any decent name fetishist could also see more in Kreuzberg: it is a place where, indeed, lots of things intersect, where irreconcilable trends live side by side for a time, precisely because the crossroads implicit in the name forces such things to slow down and stay around for a little while.
Kreuzberg is one of the oldest of the new city areas which developed during the time of the imperial "Greater Berlin." Anyone who strolls through Kreuzberg with the eye of an art historian, able to imagine how the place looked when just a plan on parchment, will undoubtedly speak of its beauty. Kreuzberg's streets were built in a very good architectural period. Under the great influence of Schinkel, Prussian Classicism produced buildings which, in their simplicity, exude a great degree of dignity. The houses lining the streets in Kreuzberg boast tall, thin windows, fine cornices and balustrades which are reveries of copperplate engraving. The rows of houses seem slightly overdone as the juxtaposition of increasingly diminutive doors retreats into the distance in much the same way as a painter's use of a horizontal line to pinpoint his perspective lends depth to his work. When the light is right on a quiet public holiday, a visitor to Kreuzberg may well feel the magical experience of being lost amongst the splendid photographs in a life-sized architectural coffee-table book. Those who know Kreuzberg will perhaps shake their heads at such refined verbiage. The area was once a notorious slum. It was the desiderata of the major immigrations of Turkish workers and their families. It was here that the Turks formed their own community, bringing with them their own way of life to this neighbourhood of classical architecture, in much the same way their forefathers had brought an eastern touch to Greek Constantinople, making it Istanbul. And the Turkish immigrants with their traditional way of life managed to preserve what industrial and bureaucratic post-war German society had lost: family life in a number of generations all living together, hundreds of corner shops, a sense of community. Germans in Kreuzberg stand in stark contrast to the Turkish population. The latter live according to old tradition in larger groups, joined by religion and origin, while the former represent the individualization of unrootedness, that chaff of western civilization, a minority rebelling against any sense of communal life. An agrarian culture anchored in the Middle Ages meets youth culture's post-urban disintegration. Veiled great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers, and daughters live next door to women who see any and all forms of tradition as brutal oppression. In Kreuzberg, there are plenty of misunderstandings, maintained by both groups, while the unstable ground itself brings a certain form of sustained harmony.
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