Preserving the Wall’s Ambivalence – Language, Structure and History in Jürgen Böttcher’s Die Mauer

URSULA BÖSER
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh




ABSTRACT

The fall of the Berlin Wall was an event to which the media, and in particular
television, reacted with the instantaneous creation of an historical narrative of
victory and defeat. Jürgen Böttcher’s Die Mauer is the most widely circulated
exponent of a group of documentaries which gave a far more ambivalent account
of events, and refused to provide an authoritative narrative. Böttcher’s film makes
sparse use of language and focuses on the material aspects of the Wall as well
as on the physical responses which the structure elicits as it falls. These observations are contextualised by the projection of a montage of historical footage
about the Wall on to the structure itself. This highlights the multi-dimensional
nature of the Wall as an iconic space of official history and of private recollections. Overall, the open voice with which the film addresses its audience unsettles
ready historical constructions.


The fall of the Berlin Wall proved to be highly broadcastable. Television cameras
were an ubiquitous feature of the events of November 1989. Not only did the
cameras record these, they also influenced their dynamics and arguably even
accelerated the collapse of the GDR. Further to its immediate impact, media
reports about the fall of the Wall quickly consolidated into an historical narrative of victory and defeat. Eggo Müller notes on the portrayal of events in the
media: ‘It was the superior system of society that had won, the free social market economy, the free and work-minded, it was Germany, the world champion
that had been victorious.’ (Müller, 1992: 141). As the physical manifestation
of the ideological division of post-war Europe crumbled, the media delivered
instantaneous history. As, in the words of Vivian Sobchak, the primary agent
of ‘representational immediacy,’ television ‘collapsed the distance between
present, past and future that structured our previously conceived notion of the
temporal dimension of what we call history.’ (Sobchak, 1996: 5).
In palpable contrast, numerous documentary productions from East
German and West Berlin filmmakers conveyed a very different perspective
on the fall of the Wall. In these works ‘ambivalence seemed to be the certain
knowledge.’ (Müller, 1992: 152). Here, as Peter Zimmermann notes, documentary successfully fulfilled its traditional role of providing alternative perspectives on political events (cf. Zimmermann, 2001: 24).
Jürgen Böttcher’s  Die Mauer (1991) is the most widely screened of
‘Wende-Flicks’ that home in on the fall of the Wall as a paradigmatic moment.
The following provides an analysis of Böttcher’s representation of events
between the end of November 1989 and August 1990 in the vicinity of an
increasingly dismantled Wall. Central to this study will be an analysis of stylistic choices which create a textual effect that critics have variously summarized
as ‘ambivalent’ or ‘poetic.’ (Richter, 1994: 171). These terms denote an epistemological stance in Böttcher’s work, and they acknowledge the film’s refusal to
reduce the complexity of history to a linear narrative.
The release of  Die Mauer in 1991 was greeted with considerable public
accolade: both the prize of the International Federation of Film Critics and
the Felix, the European Prize for the year’s best documentary by the European
Film Academy, were awarded to it. Followed by the award of the Filmband in
Gold, the highest honour to be bestowed on a German filmmaker, these official tributes spelt Böttcher’s elevation into the pantheon of pan-German film
history’ (Wetzel, 2000).
Such tributes honoured a film-maker and painter whose work in
both artistic fields had received a very mixed reception in his native GDR.
Böttcher had started out as painter under the name Strawalde. Following his
expulsion from the Association of Fine Art in 1961, and having fallen prey to
the formalism debate, and to the accusation of ‘aestheticism’, he was barred
from exhibiting for another seventeen years. Turning to film, he completed his
studies at the Film Academy in Potsdam and was taken on as an employee
of the documentary studio of DEFA. In 1961 he made his first film Drei von
vielen, a portrayal of the life of two workers and a sculptor with a shared
passion for art. The official response to it would become a familiar one. In
the eyes of the censors, the bohemian informality with which the lives of the
three young people is portrayed, conveyed a distorted image of an advancing
socialist state. The film was forbidden and shelved.
A very different fate met Böttcher’s next film, Ofenbauer. This study of a
brigade of workers installing a new blast furnace in record time is the first
of a series of films in which he focuses on what is a central theme of his
manoeuvre: the human being in a working environment. Ofenbauer was awarded 
the Silberne Taube at the 1962 Leipzig Documentary Festival. Both recognition
and proscription subsequently shaped Böttcher’s work. When, in 1966, he was
given his first opportunity to make a feature film under the title Jahrgang ‘45, it
fell victim to the general retrenchment in the arts in the wake of the infamous
11th Plenum. Amongst a general condemnation of subversive, nihilistic and 
anarchist tendencies in cultural life, the characters in Böttcher’s study of the
first post-War generation were deemed to provide an unsuitable example of
GDR youth. Jahrgang 45 was to remain his only feature film. His subsequent
documentary oeuvre features films which he ranks as ‘Strafarbeiten’, or work
imposed as penance for inappropriate behaviour, whilst others have entered
the international canon of non-fiction filmmaking.
By the 70s Böttcher had become one of the foremost documentary filmmakers in the GDR, a seminal influence for other DEFA documentarists and
a frequent cultural export. In particular, retrospectives of his works in Paris
(1986) and Edinburgh (1988) brought him international attention.
The vagaries of this reception reflect not least the working conditions
of GDR documentarists. Documentaries were produced in the state-
controlled studios of DEFA which employed film-makers and technical
personnel on a full-time basis. A lack of artistic freedom came with an
environment which, in some respects, was conducive to documentary
filmmaking. As Richard Kilborn points out:
There were excellent training facilities and once they had made the
grade, GDR documentarists could rely on a degree of technical and
logistical support which was the envy of many film-makers in the West.
Not only were they able to film using 35mm, they also had the luxury of
not having to complete their projects at break neck speed.
(Kilborn, 1999: 267)
As television secured its position as the dominant medium in the 60s,
documentarists could also be ‘more artistic, more creative and also more
critical, since a partial information policy was now delivered by TV reporting.’
(Zimmermann, 2001: 14).
Within this system Böttcher achieved a degree of accommodation which
not least seems to have rested on his interest in and approach to documentary
filmmaking. As he states in an interview in 1967: ‘I do not make critical films,
polemical films. … That is not to say that I might not want to do so at some point
in the future. But this is how I find my central theme: I get to know people, I have
a yearning to get to know certain groups of people.’ (Hanisch and Liebmann,
1967: 22). These groups of people would predominantly be workers in a laundrette or a canteen or railway shunters. Such portrayals of members of the
working class were, in principle, compatible with the ideological imperatives of
the state of farmers and workers which the GDR cast itself as. Yet Böttcher’s work
remained recalcitrant to easy classification. As Hans-Jörg Rother sums it up:
What was irritating and exciting in Böttcher’s films and what some cultural functionaries just could not get their head around was apparently
that they did not really comply with official notions of ‘partiality’, or at
least they tried not to do so. Yet, they did not want to or were not able
to express an ‘oppositional point of view.’ To demonstrate interest in
the human being without using the individual as proof for the veracity
of an idea or a political program, is tantamount to an insistence on a
free subjectivity which is simply not envisaged within an authoritarian
system.
(Hans-Jörg Rother, 1996: 23)
Die Mauer weaves archival footage as well as observations and chance
encounters along the Berlin Wall into an episodic, meandering structure. The
film covers the period from the opening of the border in 1989, the reformation of
the GDR system of government and the developments which would precipitate
the dissolution of the GDR and its accession to the FRG, as laid down in the
Unification Treaty of August 1990. None of these changes or their reverberations
are a point of reference in the film. The announcement of the official opening
of the border at the Brandenburg Gate, the New Year celebrations of 1989/90
and the staging of the Pink Floyd rock opera The Wall, all provide intermittent
temporal anchorage.  However, as days pass into nights and the season
changes, inferences about the time elided between individual scenes remain
vague. Böttcher does not provide a framework of chronology. Instead, the
passage of time is expressed through the increasing perforation and permeability
of the Wall. The film’s exploration of this theme ends on a strip of earth which
runs across the asphalted surface where the Wall once stood. The change from
the individual efforts of the ‘wall peckers’, souvenir hunters of a more or less
commercial bent, to the intervention of heavy machinery whose work acquires
an air of public performance in the early portions of the film, but then ceases to
be spectacular, underscores this process.
Die Mauer, true to its title, displays a high degree of spatial unification.
The recurring setting is the most richly connoted space of Berlin’s division:
the Brandenburg Gate and its surrounding space, Potsdamer Place. The Gate
had been a major traffic hub prior to World War II. This, and its proximity
to buildings inhabited by the NSDAP nomenclatura made it the target of
repeated bombing, which only the Gate and the Reichstag survived. The
work of destruction was completed with the building of the Wall in 1961:
a wasteland of ruins was turned into an empty no-man’s land with the
multilayered structure of the Wall surrounding the Brandenburg Gate on both
sides, and skirting narrowly past the Reichstag. The spatial backdrop of these
iconic architectural structures links disparate shots.
In his discussion of stylistic conventions of non-fiction film Bill Nicholls
notes that the documentary film is freed from ‘some of the conventions relied
upon to establish an imaginary world’ in the fictional film. Whereas this relies
on devices like continuity editing to make us infer spatio-temporal continuity,
this inference in documentary film is based on our expectation, that we will
‘engage with films that engage with the world. … Things share relationships in
time and space not because of the editing but because of their actual historical
linkages.’ (Nicholls, 2001: 28). Böttcher’s film draws coherence from history
which is not projected as concept, narrative or chronology. It is the ‘dimension
of a collective symbol as something real’, (Korngiebel et al, 1992: 31) a material
and hard fact, which elicits highly visceral reactions that is central to Die Mauer.
In his filmic engagement with this physical manifestation of history, Böttcher
refrains from putting images and sounds into the service of an argument.
This is announced in the film’s pre-credit sequence. Here, the camera
pans from a digger in the midst of a landscape which carries scars of industrial
activity across scattered and discarded pieces of the Wall. Extensive and slow
frame mobility alternates with long-held shots. In a symmetrically designed
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sequence  of shot-sizes we increasingly move in on the detail of discarded
segments of the Wall and then draw back again. The sequence ends on a stretch
of Wall in a wide open setting.
The absence of any expository commentary foregrounds this sequence as a
cinematographic gesture of showing. The focus of this gesture is the sheer material
quality of the Wall that is so blatantly stripped of any function. Only the distant
murmur of an urban soundscape accompanies the pictures, and the off-screen
sound of an aeroplane reaches a crescendo with the cut to the film’s title.
This pre-credit sequence introduces a perceptual framework for the coming
film. Slow and extensive pans will be a recurring stylistic element of Die Mauer.
At times they will double up on themselves to show the same locality twice.
Long traveling-shots which display expanses of Wall, or home in on other
urban structures, and long-held shots, cue us to scan closely what is before us.
The rare forays into signature devices of vérité cinematography, as in the judder
of images as the camera advances to a person or occurrence, only highlight a
stylistic texture from which a sense of distanced observation emanates.
Böttcher’s short cameo appearance in the early portion of the film seems
to encapsulate this filmic stance: during a brief foray into the underground
world of Postdamer Platz a long shot features a large metal safe with its door
ajar. In the following medium long-shot, he briefly steps into the frame to
swing the door open so that the camera can examine its contents. However,
no revelations are proffered, only an aleatory pattern of rust that marks the
passage of time. This minimalist intervention in the pro-filmic world, coupled
with the overt reference to its stylistic processing to foster close observation,
well describes the filmic texture of Die Mauer.
As is evident in the pre-credit sequence, this is a film which foregoes
expository rhetoric and the verbal expression of narrative authority. Further
than that,  Die Mauer makes scant use of language overall. Long passages
feature only atmospheric sounds and silent observation. Where  Die Mauer
employs sustained speech it come from people whom Böttcher meets on his
perambulations along the Wall. In particular, he prompts exchanges with four
of the innumerable ‘wall peckers’ who scavenge the structure for keepsakes.
The first of these features three Japanese women. To his question about the
destination of their loot they state: ‘Japan’ and add: ‘This is our memory.’
The second encounter is with a Turkish youth. He blithely hacks away at the
Wall but his interest in selling bits of concrete seems quite undermined by his
carefree attitude and open-handedness when he tosses bits of the Wall over to
the East as ‘a present’. He departs with an anarchistic flourish as he volunteers
the information that he has brought his hammer ‘from school’. Yet another
boy stands on a ladder in front of a section of the Wall which has already been
stripped of its graffiti and paintings. As Böttcher asks about the price the youth
looks in puzzlement at what he holds: ‘Ten’, he feels impelled to improvise.
A little later on Böttcher comes across two more youngsters. The extended
exchange which ensues resembles a playful rehearsal of the tenets of a market
economy. In it, pieces of the Wall spark off issues such as commodification,
profit and competition.
Ostensibly, Böttcher’s selection of speakers does not elicit and enlist the
considered views of eyewitnesses in these exchanges. His interlocutors who
do not bear any preconceptions of history. Instead of presenting nuanced
argument through them, he frequently captures fragments of speech, such as
during the historic New Year celebrations of 1990 around the Brandenburg
Gate. In a sonic patchwork of utopias, screams and shouts are woven together


with the promise of ‘freedom for any colour’ from an American, ‘wishes of
happiness’ from a group of Italians and chants of ‘Gorbi, Gorbi’ from vodka
bottle-waving youths, and an evocation of the spirit of Woodstock.
Other encounters remain tellingly silent. A group of GDR Guards leads
Böttcher down into the most infamous ghost station of the post-war underground
system underneath Potsdamer Place. Here, trains from the West briefly traversed
Eastern territory under the watchful eye of the Guards, but never stopped. The
camera focuses on two soldiers in a long-held medium shot, but no words are hat the Wall will bring about a dialogue about culture and society, and that the 
GDR’s cultural heritage will be preserved. Faced with this nuanced assessment,
his focus seems more on filming somebody who is filmed as she speaks, rather
than what she actually says. In this brief scene the camera wanders between her
and the cameraman who films her. As he notes on his approach to the filming
of the encounters which are a seminal part of many of his films:
This oscillation, this tension between what is original about the spoken
word – with all the charm of the personal – and the awareness of the
narrator that he addresses a public, is something which I consider to
be one of the great possibilities of documentary film. And I think that
if this kind of thing succeeds it is at one and the same time about a
person’s state of consciousness.
(Quoted after Seidel, 1967: 126)
The woman’s implicit offer to speak to Böttcher’s film crew as well is not
taken up and they move off towards another point of interest. These scenes
contribute to a film in which diverse comments are not enlisted to make up
commentary by a dispersed agency. If a staple rhetorical move of non-fiction
film is to use images as ‘nominal depictions, they represent a class of entities,
and are made to function as a link in a controlled chain of meaning’ (Plantinga,
1997: 156), Böttcher’s presentation of the people he meets offers highly
individual and arresting takes on their interaction with the Wall. However
they illustrate diversity rather than coalesce into a coherent picture. Many
encounters remain silent as only the sound of hammering accompanies the
observation of the ‘wall peckers’ as they undergo their own specific emotional
trajectory, while the Wall itself puts up formidable resistance to their efforts.
The reflection of their state of consciousness seems mediated in this physical
response to its materiality.
The frequent forgoing of the potential of verbal structuration either
through commentary or the enlisting of individuals’ comments implies an
avoidance of ‘high-level propositions.’ As Carl Plantinga notes: ‘Film images
alone may imply or suggest propositions, but cannot assert them with
the directness of verbal language. Film without words can communicate
conceptual information, but cannot match the efficiency, intricacy, directness,
nuance and complexity or argument that words allow.’ (Plantinga, 1997: 73)
A gradual eschewal of the use of language as commentary marks Jürgen
Böttcher’s work. In his own account, this is not least a reaction to the working
conditions of censorship. It was on this that the attention of censors in search
of ideological clarity would focus. As he states: ‘As soon as explanations were
required, the censors and the authorities intervened. You always had to dress
things up verbally. You always had to regulate things – and it was absolutely
 PMPreserving the Wall’s Ambivalence
horrible.’ (quoted after Kilborn, 1999: 276 ). Böttcher’s use of language is the 
most palpable expression of the ‘open voice’ which addresses the viewers in
his films. By contrast to its ‘formal ‘counterpart, it, as Plantinga notes:
shows, provokes and explores. It may also imply propositions about the
projected world, but these implications differ from the explicit, highlevel assertions of the formal voice. The open voice is always implicitly
rhetorical, but it does not take the overt rhetorical positions of the formal voice. This epistemological position, basically an unwillingness to
claim full knowledge on its part, results in representational strategies
markedly different than those of the formal voice. One sees a meandering, often unpredictable structure rather than the conventional patterns
of its formal counterpart. The open voice implies an attitude different
from that of the formal voice; it is hesitant to make broad claims about
its subject, and provides neither neat contextualizations nor a strong
sense of closure. It is content to observe or to explore. It lets the viewer
draw her own conclusions.
(Plantinga, 1997: 116)
In Die Mauer this openness of voice is flaunted by contrast to a twelve minute
sequence in which Böttcher gives full rein to a recurring theme in the film:
the recording of the events around the Wall for the world’s media. The camera is part of a hurried advance of spectators towards the onset of officially
sanctioned demolition. As segments are lifted, they light up with the reflection of flashlights from a frenzy of recording. International journalists hunt for
images – even the omnipresent Border Guards have a role to play in the circulation of news as they turn into messengers for TV stations. Finally, a CNN
reporter, Richard Blythe Stone, is shown as Böttcher’s crew records him. From
his position amidst the columns of the Brandenburg Gate, he comments:
No parades will be passing through these arches for a long time to
come and the Wall over there will remain a blot on West Berlin’s landscape. But the Gate going nowhere, now goes somewhere and all of
East Germany knows where it goes. Richard Blythe Stone, CNN, at the
Brandenburg Gate.
The language of this commentary conveys authoritative knowledge of the past
and the future, and its claim to authority is further warranted by the speaker’s
location and his delivery. Being there in the thick of it underwrites his insights
which are delivered and validated by the professional sonority of a routine
and rehearsed delivery. This voice speaks from a position of self-assured
knowledge, it ‘explains; it teaches and directs. It maintains a hierarchical relationship with the viewer, such that the viewer is taught by a discursive presence that assumes a position of knowledge.’ (Plantinga, 1997: 115). Böttcher’s representation of the scene undermines this authority by means of repetition. Stone records four takes of the same statement, and all four are shown. As 
once more he reiterates the words for the camera and the microphone, we are
cued to reflect on the readily assumed knowledge that informs them, on their
implications, and on the packaging of history for a TV format.
One of the implied claims to knowledge in this episode concerns the historical connotations with which the Brandenburg Gate is invested. Forty minutes into the film, this topic is taken up in the first of three inserts of archival footage. With an overall duration of approximately fourteen minutes, this 
material presents historical events which took place around the Gate. Insert
one shows the construction of the Wall, the military build-up as Russian tanks
advance through Potsdamer Platz, and a series of escapes as the border is
increasingly fortified. Military parades, which are metonymic for the cataclysmic events that shaped German history in the 20th century, feature in insert 
two. First, Emperor Wilhelm II and his military train pass through the Gate.
Images of the torchlight NSDAP procession which marked the party’s rise to
power in 1933, follow. Finally, Mussolini and Hitler are chauffeured through
the Gate amidst another military extravaganza, as Josef Goebbels looks on.
Following a short intermission of empty frames which are projected on to the
Wall, the area around the Gate has been laid to waste, a woman wanders
through the scene of destruction as Soviet soldiers hoist their flag next to the
Quadriga which crowns the Gate. A semblance of order is restored as the
insert ends with two Russian soldiers whose angular gestures appear to direct
almost non-existing traffic though the Brandenburg Gate.
Another military parade starts off the last of the archival sequences:
GDR regiments march along the Wall near the Reichstag under the gaze of
Erich Honecker and members of the GDR establishment. In festive mood,
they raise their glasses in the next shot. A repeat shot of the first of the four
military parades takes us back to the start of this condensed historical account
in Wilhelminian times. After some frames of the blank Wall we witness
the initial opening of the inter-German border in Bornholmer Strasse on
9th November 1989. 
Böttcher stages an overt re-enactment of the material within the narrative
time and the diegesis of the film. The first insert starts with a shot of the
projector which throws these images on to remaining parts of the Wall for an
assembled audience. All three inserts introduce their material with quotation
marks in the shape of empty frames which precede the footage. No access to
the past is offered here, only to an account of the past which has become part
of the cultural memory stored in the archive from which it is now recalled.
As prior interpretation of history, this archival material bears the inscription
of an original authorship. As Paul Arthur states with regard to the ‘organizing
voice’ inherent in films which take recourse to archival footage, this
is decentered or split between an enunciative trace in the original
footage-encompassing both stylistic features and material residues of
production such as film stock, speed of shooting, and aspect ratio – and
an agency of knowledge manifest in the overall text through editing, the
application of sound, titles, and so on.
(Arthur, 1988: 3)
The clear field of vision on the military parades as the recurring theme in
the above inserts denotes the privileged position of whosoever recorded
them. The function of these images as the enactment of power for posterity
by a succession of regimes is therefore inscribed in them. Böttcher also uses
repetition to draw attention to the authorship that is intrinsic to this material.
Insert one features a repeat shot of three young people who flee through the
barbed wire. As they walk towards the waiting camera one of them hides her
face. At the end of insert number two, a man walks through the ruined streets
with a flag over his shoulder. As he passes, his gaze remains firmly fixed on
the camera, as he breaks into laughter and addresses the presence behind it.
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This shot is then halted, replayed and continued. In these images the gaze,
either directed at or averted from the camera, travels over time and space.
Both scenes are marked by their direct and affective interaction, first with the
person behind the camera and now us. Both point to the unseen agency that
captured them, and raise questions about their provenance and what they
once told of, and have to say to us now.
Böttcher’s deployment of archival material explores the events which
constitute the Brandenburg Gate as a  lieu de memoire. Projecting images of
these events on to its surface turns it quite literally into a site in which ‘memory crystallizes and secretes itself.’ (Nora, 1989: 7). Material of military parades
under Willhelm II and Hitler is spliced together in seamless and rhetorically
charged transition. The theme and imagery is taken up in shots of marching
GDR soldiers. In Böttcher’s assembly, the Brandenburg Gate becomes the
focus of a fateful recurrence of military ambition that is displayed in a series of
parades. However, the concluding repetition of a shot from the Wilhelminian
parade which started off insert one, leaves this construction poised precariously between closure and endless reiteration. Images of marching GDR soldiers, which follow after a hiatus of frames of the Wall’s surface, reiterate
the symptom of a continuing historical pathology of militarism; they also
beg the question of the GDR’s place in the narrative of German history. The
contrast between the iconography of these images and the final sequence of the
opening of the border in Bornholmer Strasse is striking: the throng of human
beings which is released to flood across the border under the bewildered gaze of
a Border Guard, holds the potential for a very different kind of history.
An array of stylistic devices are enlisted for Böttcher’s appropriation of the
archival footage. All inserts are projected in slow motion and, notwithstanding
its date of origin, all footage is mute. Only the contiguous space of the projection intrudes through the off-screen sound of hammering, drilling or just fragments of speech or noise. At times, images are combined with non-synchronous
sound. The hollow reverberation with which the sound is invested gives these
sequences the auditory patina of fading recollections. Throughout, the texture
of the Wall interacts with the projected black and white imagery and thereby
impedes its legibility to varying degrees. Levels of time reverberate against each
other in these superimpositions of imagery and sound-image constellations.
This is perhaps most strikingly evident in insert number three. Shots of
marching feet and the beating of drums as soldiers parade past the GDR
leaders are accompanied by an off-screen chorus of ‘wall-pecking’ as the
future intrudes into the past, and as their power base is audibly chiselled
away. This entire sequence is framed by and interpolated with shots of
drilling machines which break up the Wall with inexorable and robot-like
movements. The Brandenburg Gate in the background is by now covered
in scaffolding for renovation. This reference to the future comes into sharp
focus as the inscription  Krupp is centrally displayed on one of the drill
heads. In a strikingly rhetorical move this shot invokes questions about the
continuity between a fascist past, a capitalist present and its investment in
a German future.
As Catherine Russel notes, the ‘intertextuality’ of archival film practice ‘is
always also an allegory of history, a montage of memory traces by which the filmmaker engages with the past through recall, retrieval and recycling.’ (Russell,
1992: 238). Böttcher’s recourse to archival material contains one particularly
conspicuous engagement with the concept of history: the beginning of the first
insert shows the first stages of building the Wall. Shots of onlookers reacting
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with anger or disbelief interpolate this lacunary account. After some empty
frames a condensed version is shown in which sections of the original image
cover the entire screen. This is made up of an assembly of significant gestures:
the unrolling of barbed wire, a man’s look of disbelief from behind it, an angry
gesture towards the emerging construction, the clasping of a gun and the drilling
of holes into the ground which the concrete segments will be anchored in. This
overtly condensed version amounts to a collection of ephemeral moments of a
lived history rather than the grand narrative that springs from it, and as we see
it in the repeated displays of military might.
The juxtaposition of official history, and history as it is lived and
recollected, runs through  Die Mauer. Most visibly, as the Wall succumbs,
the efforts of the ‘wall peckers’ with their hammers contrast with the heavy
machines which perform acts of officially sanctioned demolition. One
omnipresent trace of individual interaction with the Wall is the palimpsest
of graffiti which covers it. These traces of popular memory do not afford easy
legibility. Fragmentation, decay and their layered application obfuscates their
meaning. They engage us with the echo of a personal and communicative
gesture, the content and context of which is uncertain. On a structure which
has become paradigmatic for the big narratives of a world order, these
are private appropriations and instances in which a multiplicity of ‘small’
histories overwrites ‘big’ history.
In her discussion of the remembrance of traumatic historical spaces
Aleida Assmann contrasts the ‘symbolic constructions of meaning through
museums and monuments’ with a ‘memory of space’. This is heterogeneous
and cannot be divested of its complexity. ‘The different emotions which
are anchored within this space, constitute its complexity.’ (Assmann, 2006:
225). The ‘open voice’ which Böttcher constructs in Die Mauer through his
focus on the traces of history ‘not only as mere symbolic pieces in a chain
of signification but for their qualities as icons and indices with relevatory
potential’ (Plantinga, 1997: 118), preserves the complexity of its subject
matter and of the historical process as it is taking shape.
REFERENCES
Arthur, P. (1997), ‘On the Virtues and Limitations of Collage’, Documentary
Box, 11, pp. 1–7.
Assmann, A. (2006),  Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur
und Geschichtspolitik, München: C.H.Beck.
Böttcher, J. (1990), ‘Strawalde-Sprechtext. Von Strawalde überarbeitete
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SUGGESTED CITATION
Böser, U. (2010), ‘Preserving the Wall’s Ambivalence – Language, Structure
and History in Jürgen Böttcher’s Die Mauer’, Studies in Documentary Film
4: 1, pp. 79–89, doi: 10.1386/sdf.4.1.79_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Ursula Böser lectures in the Department of Languages and Intercultural
Studies at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. Her research interests are
found footage film and alternative film modes. She has written a book on the
work of the avant-garde film-makers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.
Contact: Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies, School of
Management and Languages, Heriot-Watt University, Riccarton Campus,
Edinburgh EH14 4AS.