The Cultural Identities of European Cities PDF

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Contents Katia Pizzi and Godela Weiss-Sussex Introduction 1 Martin Liebscher Vienna: The Narcissistic Insult 7 Katia Pizzi Trieste: A Dissident Port 27 Nagihan Haliloğlu Istanbul Criteria: The Construction of a City Identity 43 Nevena Daković Imagining Belgrade: The Cultural / Cinematic Identity of ...

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Contents

Katia Pizzi and Godela Weiss-Sussex

Introduction

1

Martin Liebscher

Vienna: The Narcissistic Insult

7

Katia Pizzi

Trieste: A Dissident Port

27

Nagihan Haliloğlu

Istanbul Criteria: The Construction of a City Identity

43

Nevena Daković

Imagining Belgrade: The Cultural / Cinematic Identity of a City at the Fringes of Europe

61

Peter Burke

Myths of Venice

77

Iain Fenlon

Sounding the City: Music, Monteverdi and Mantuan City Identity

93

Adrian Rifkin

Bayreuth, World City? or: The Provincial Village as Global Denkmal …

109

vi

Stephen Brockmann

Nuremberg and Its Memories

125

Godela Weiss-Sussex

Berlin: Myth and Memorialization

145

Michael Sheringham

Paris – City of Names: Toponymic Trajectories and Mutable Identities

165

Paul Melo e Castro

Lisbon on Screen: Aspects of Portugal’s Capital in Portuguese Cinema

185

Guido Rings

Madrid: Neo-colonial Spacing in Contemporary Spanish Cinema?

205

Notes on Contributors

231

Index

235

Katia Pizzi and Godela Weiss-Sussex

Introduction

What is the cultural identity of a city? Looking at the current internet marketing of some of the cities explored in this volume, the answer seems straightforward: Paris is the ‘magic city’, the ‘temple of lovers’,1 whereas Vienna is – somewhat more rhetorically and conceptually interesting – ‘where hip meets Habsburg’.2 But a further trawl through marketing slogans reveals how difficult the marketable reduction of complex identities actually is: where marketeers cannot rely on ready-made clichés or do not have a particularly gifted slogan writer at their disposal, they tend to lose themselves in fanciful generalities (Trieste as city of ‘charm and mystery’)3 or resort to rather pedestrian, uninspiring factuality (‘festival- and university city’ Bayreuth).4 The essays in this volume go beyond the simplification of tourist brochure clichés and marketing slogans. Rather, our aim is to explore the extremely complex and multi-layered identities of European cities. This undertaking is based on the understanding that cities are simultaneously both real and imaginary places. Indeed, to quote James Donald, it is the interplay between imagined city and ‘real’ urban environment, the ‘traffic between urban fabric, representation and imagination [that] fuzzies up the epistemological and ontological distinctions and, in doing so, produces the city between, the imagined city where we actually live’.5 1 2 3 4 5

, accessed 15 February 2010. , accessed 15 February 2010. , accessed 15 February 2010. , accessed 15 February 2010. James Donald, Imagining the Modern City (London: Athlone, 1999), p. 10.

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Katia Pizzi and Godela Weiss-Sussex

‘The city between’ then is what we are trying to grasp. This is dependent on the distinctive heritage of a given city, on a network of historically transmitted cultural resources. The network consists just as much of the political history of the city as of its literature, film and music, of its myths, street names, architecture and even of the way it is represented by the media. Our knowledge of this ‘collective image bank’ or ‘archive’ of urban images,6 channels and mediates, whether we are conscious of it or not, our perception and experience of a city – and as such it is just as ‘real’ as the built environment in which we move. By delving into some of the major European cities’ ‘archives of images’ we set out to expose the ‘interpretive grids’7 through which we perceive them. Some of the principal questions in this undertaking are: what narratives are shaped out of these archives of cultural resources? By whom? What do they reveal? What do they cover up? What is the relationship between public image and personal experience? And how do different genres or media of cultural production interpret city identities? * This book arises from a lecture series of the same title, which was run jointly by the editors of this volume at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies at the University of London from October 2005 to May 2008. The selection of cities under scrutiny here reflects the remit of the Institute: of the twelve cities included, ten belong to the Germanic or Romance cultural sphere. But the two contributions on cities outside this sphere (Istanbul and Belgrade) provide some revealing parallels. One strand of self-identificatory rhetoric that runs through several of the cities’ discourses considered here is that of a nostalgic harking back to a grander past, often connected to a sense of dislocation or insecurity from which questioning of the city’s identity arises. This stance is revealed in Martin Liebscher’s essay on Vienna, Katia Pizzi’s on Trieste and Iain Fenlon’s on Mantua, but it is 6

7

Terms used by Franco Bianchini and James Donald respectively. Franco Bianchini, ‘Introduction’, in Godela Weiss-Sussex with Franco Bianchini, eds,Urban Mindscapes of Europe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 13–31 (p. 14); Donald, Imagining the Modern City, p. 7. Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 324.

Introduction

3

very powerfully present, too, in the discourses on city identity conducted in and about Istanbul that Nagihan Haliloğlu presents. Haliloğlu’s consideration of Istanbul also provides another point of comparison and connection with the cities of Germanic and Romance cultures. The cultural identities of Vienna and Trieste have been established in opposition to the Balkans, that is to the East, just as the cultural identity of modern Istanbul has been shaped in opposition to the oriental, Islamist Turkish hinterland. Nevena Daković’s exploration of Belgrade, another city placed at the centre of tension between East and West, provides further opportunity for comparison and exemplifies the position of European cities in the force field between Eastern and Western ideologies, religions and cultures. It thus helps to sharpen the sensitivity to oriental and anti-oriental discourses in the make-up of European city identities. The orientalizing gaze is considered, too, in Peter Burke’s grand tour exploration of the city of Venice through the pages of numerous authors, including Byron, Casanova, James, Proust and Ruskin. Burke highlights the pivotal role played by Venice in the European imagination by identifying the myths conjured up by this ‘paradise of cities’.8 If all of the aforementioned cities emphasize past cultural glory in close conjunction with a greater political significance in the past, Bayreuth is the prime example of a nucleus of cultural individuality whose radiance extends well beyond its political or geographical importance. The juxtaposition in this volume of Fenlon’s chapter on Mantua and Adrian Rifkin’s on Bayreuth shows how different the approaches to a city’s identity can be. Even though both focus on the impact of music on a city’s identity, one is a scrupulous exploration of musical history and its impact on, and instrumentalization for, the construction of a city (and a national) identity, whereas the other is a highly personal exploration of the associations provided by the experience of the city. Both are equally valid, opening the door to associations and partly unconscious influences on how a particular city is perceived – a process that is particularly apt in the case of a city such

8

Quoted from Ruskin’s diary, 1841, in John Julius Norwich, The Paradise of Cities: Nineteenth-Century Venice Seen through Foreign Eyes (London: Viking, 2003), p. 72.

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Katia Pizzi and Godela Weiss-Sussex

as Bayreuth, whose images and myths are more enduring and powerful than its physical manifestations. Bayreuth may also serve as an example of a city that, at a particular point of its history, was styled into the epitome of a national culture: through its association with Richard Wagner’s music, Bayreuth was fashioned into a shrine to Germanic culture. Similarly, as Stephen Brockmann shows, Nuremberg too held the place of imaginary German capital – and did so for a period of over 150 years. And then, there are the cities which, rather than being defined by – af firmative or negative – reference to particular historical or cultural epochs or images of the past, demand an accentuation of the f luidity, the constant re-invention and the palimpsestic quality of their identity. Such is the case of Berlin and Paris, as Godela Weiss-Sussex and Michael Sheringham explain in their respective contributions. With their emphasis on the protean nature of Berlin’s and Paris’s identities, these two chapters stress the important issue of any city’s heterogeneity and of the fragmented character of its citizens’ and visitors’ experience. Here, as indeed in all the essays in this volume, the need to resist any simplifying, unifying image in the attempt to capture a city’s cultural identity is underlined. The final section of the volume is devoted to two cities – Lisbon and Madrid – examined through the lens of cinema. Paul Melo e Castro’s contrastive analysis of two key cinematic trends in films about Lisbon pits the attempt to create an image of a city as an extended cohesive neighbourhood against that of metropolitan diversity. And introducing a post-colonial perspective, Guido Rings exposes the contradictions between the official image of Madrid in the marketing of the city for tourism and the perception of the city by some of its citizens, in particular its immigrants and outsiders. To guide the reader through the structure of this volume, it has been possible only to pick out a few of the interconnections between the individual contributions. The sequencing and grouping of essays as it is presented here allows the material to be understood in a coherent way, but it is by no means the only structure possible. On the contrary, the groupings of essays are meant to be porous and interactive. The reader will, no doubt, discover more connections between them than those we point out here. The comparison of mono-cultural versus multicultural cities, and the

Introduction

5

tension between the nationally representative and the local in the understanding of city identity are just two of the further themes emerging from the volume. Hand in hand with the attempt to provide different thematic angles and a variety of approaches to the investigation of city identity goes our aim to emphasize the importance of diverse cultural fragments in the puzzle of city identities. The essays in this volume explore the issues highlighted above with attention to cultural forms as various as music, architecture, literature, journalism, philosophy, television, film, myths, city planning and the naming of streets. To ensure the volume’s accessibility to a wide readership, contributors have provided English translations of quotations from foreign-language texts. Where no translator is explicitly referenced, these translations are the contributors’ own. * Our thanks go to the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies for hosting the lecture series upon which this volume is based; to the series editor Helen Chambers, who has followed the progress of the volume with much attention and patience; to the colleagues who contributed their essays; and to all those who attended the lectures and helped with their comments and discussions to shape the arguments presented here. We should like to close the introduction with a word of caution from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities: Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts. However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it. Outside, the land stretches, empty, to the horizon; the sky opens, with speeding clouds.9

Katia Pizzi and Godela Weiss-Sussex London, July 2010

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Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. by William Weaver (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986), p. 14.

MARTIN LIEBSCHER

Vienna: The Narcissistic Insult

‘It is a huge presumption to try to describe cities.’1 This assertion by Joseph Roth can be found in one of his pieces of reportage on a journey through Galicia, published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1924. He goes on to explain: Cities have many faces, many moods, a thousand directions, colourful destinations, dark secrets, joyful secrets. Cities hide a lot and reveal a lot, each one is a unit, each one a plurality, each one has more time than a reporter, a human being, a group, a nation. Cities outlive the peoples to which they owe their existence, and the languages, in which their builders communicated with each other. Birth, life and death of a city depend on many laws, which do not follow any pattern, which do not accept any rule. Those are exceptional laws.

Recognizing the complexity of any city identity and the audacity of the attempt to describe it, I shall focus in this essay on two aspects of Vienna’s identity: the city as the reflection of its inhabitants’ characteristics and as an organic structure in its own right. The latter is often revealed by the use a metaphors from the field of organic vocabulary such as Roth’s ‘birth, life and death of a city’ above. Once the city is established as a living entity, it can be scrutinized by the same criteria as any other organism. Even the first approach seems to be problematic in the case of Vienna as a huge discrepancy between the city and its inhabitants is to be found at its core. This gap becomes most obvious in the architecture of the city,

1

This and the following quotation is taken from Joseph Roth, ‘Lemberg. Die Stadt’, in J. Roth, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Klaus Westermann and Fritz Hackert, 6 vols (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1989–1991), II, p. 285.

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MARTIN LIEBSCHER

epitomized by the ostentatious imperial buildings of the Ringstraße.2 They were built in the neo-classicist style during the second half of the nineteenth century at a time when neo-classicism had long since passed its peak. The great art historian, cultural philosopher and citizen of Vienna, Friedrich Heer, has interpreted their construction as the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’s last great attempt at self-preservation: The Ringstraße was also this – an attempt on a great scale by the Old Empire, the ‘Erzhaus’ of Austria, to maintain its standing in an impressive manner for the last time, in a Europe whose demolition so many men in North and South, in East and West, were awaiting: after Königgrätz in 1866, after 1871, after the foundation of the new German Empire. The plans to combine the Hofburg, the museums opposite and the public space as far as the Burgtheater into one complex, into a ‘Kaiser-Forum’ – plans that seem almost monstrous to us today –, are completely understandable under the aspect of a last act of self-preservation through monumental building. They resemble the early plans for Schönbrunn, which was supposed to become a super-Versailles, a super-Rome, never to be overtaken by its upcoming rivals, not to mention Belgrade, Beograd, the white city, or the small town of Berlin.3

The Viennese of today live within these glamorous imperial surroundings which, interestingly enough, were even at the time of their construction nothing more than a mere façade. That is why Adolf Loos once referred to Vienna as a Potemkin town. Vienna’s inherent dislocation between ‘Schein’ and ‘Sein’, appearance and being, had made its mark on this city even before the time of Arthur Schnitzler. In what follows I propose to focus on a certain aspect of this discrepancy that seems crucial to the understanding of modern Vienna and the

2

3

See Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), pp. 24–115; Rüdiger Görner, ‘Ringstraße oder Square. Junges Wien und Dandyismus’, in Thomas Eicher, ed., Grenzüberschreitungen um 1900 (Oberhausen: Athena, 2002), pp. 95–109; Ernst Hanisch, ‘Die Wiener Ringstraße. Zwei Pole, zwei Muster der österreichischen Kultur’, in Memoria Austriae II. Bauten, Orte, Regionen (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik/Oldenbourg, 2005), pp. 75–104. Friedrich Heer, Dunkle Mutter Wien. Mein Wien. Ein Essay (Vienna: Herder, 1978), p. 19.

Vienna: The Narcissistic Insult

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relationship between the city and its inhabitants, namely Vienna’s ambivalent attitude to its past. I am particularly interested in Vienna’s past as the former political and cultural centre of the German-speaking world and its slow decline into virtually complete international irrelevance with the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Today, the Viennese live among the witnesses of a long forgotten past but have no direct relationship to it. Among the historical breaks which have cut the Viennese off from a direct connection to the Habsburg past are: the First Republic, the fascist corporative state, the ‘Anschluss’ in 1938, the Second World War, the Second Republic, and so on. There have been so many caesuras that it is almost impossible for the Viennese to draw a straight genealogical line back to the days of the Empire and therefore to reconnect to Vienna’s past. Instead, the imperial past is nostalgically glorified or else degraded to a mere marketing asset for the tourist industry. But let us have a look at Vienna before the First World War. To do so, we first need to choose a point of view which disregards the cultural achievements of that time: this is a sober demographic approach to the phenomenon of Vienna. The statistics show that in the second half of the nineteenth century the city experienced an exceptional increase in population. The reasons for this were the incorporation of suburban villages on the one hand and high immigration from all parts and regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the other. Since 1869 there have been censuses on a regular basis: in 1880 Vienna had around 726,000 inhabitants, in 1890 – having incorporated the surrounding villages – 1,365,000, and by 1910 it had grown to the biggest population in its entire history, 2,083,630. Vienna was then amongst the largest cities of the world. In comparison, the other major cities in Europe at this time were London (7.25 million), Paris (2.85 million) and Berlin (2.07 million). Since then Vienna’s population has been declining. In 2006 only 1,661,206 people lived in the city.4 The size of a city is undoubtedly a major factor in determining its international reputation in terms of its economic wealth, political power, academic and scientific merits and especially its cultural achievements. In

4

See Statistik Austria at .

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the case of Vienna immigrants from all over the Austro-Hungarian Empire contributed to its reputation in all these areas. Amongst them the largest groups were Jews from Galicia, Czechs, Hungarians, Croats, Bosnians and Italians. Of course, if we take into consideration that 52 per cent of the working population used to work in heavy industry, we can assume that most of the immigrants enhanced Vienna’s economic wealth more than its cultural significance. The Jewish population of Vienna has played a highly important role within the rise of Vienna into the metropolis of 1900. In 1784 the city counted 230 Jewish inhabitants and b...