The End of an Event

Abstract

In Jürgen Böttcher’s 1990 documentary, The Wall, filmed in late fall and early winter immediately after the Berlin Wall was opened, we see how little its dismantling wants to become an event. The chisels tapping away at the Wall, even the bursts of pneumatic hammers, make an intermittent clatter. Instead of harmonizing, the metallic raps erupt and fade solipsistically. To be sure, the camera records tourists converging from all over the world to touch the Wall’s remains or to revel at the New Year’s celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate. But Böttcher’s lens documents something less sensational than the sensation produced out of the Wall’s demise by, for example, the concert of Beethoven’s Ninth conducted by Leonard Bernstein on December 25, 1989, or a roster of international rock stars performing Pink Floyd’s The Wall the following July. Why the quiet, nearly solemn tone? Is there not something willful in the choice to focus on the Wall as an object since the resistant material quality of a reinforced concrete barrier influences the film’s rhythm more than the galloping pace of the events that overtook east European socialism? Nowadays, it is taken for granted that events must come fast, furious, and fulsome in the programming rotation. In his anthology Der Trend zum Event Peter Kemper diagnoses an “event fad” at the outset of the new millennium, while Peter Schneider sees a “dictatorship of velocity” in the competition among media outlets to beat each other to the latest spectacle.¹