AMERICANS IN BERLIN 2003: NIKOLAUS HAFERMAAS
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About This Video
Americans in Berlin 2003: Nikolaus Hafermaas. The final portrait in the Berlin documentary series. Van was 28, completing a multi-part record of American expatriate creative life at a specific historical moment. The series is finished. Every name accounted for.
Transcript
oh my God in 2003 I lived in Berlin as part of Tom Sax's nsis installation at
the Deutsche gugenheim I was 28 years old and I had a social life there and through friends I met a bunch of
Americans who were living in Berlin at the time this was 2 years after September 11th 2001 and I began filming
these interviews on September 11th 2003 so um can you just tell us like who you
are and what you're you're doing here in Berlin well I'm Nicolas Nicolas Hamas and uh I'm here actually in my
20th year now this year and um I run an agency together
with two partners it's called Berlin and we do exhibitions and fairs and shows and things like that
and at the same time I teach as a professor for environmental design we call it tempor
architecture and that takes place in ban which is about 2 and a half 3 hours away from
here okay and what can you tell us about what you're doing with the American kids now with your project well this project
is called study abroad and um it is set up with the environmental design Des Department in Pasadena of Arts Center
College in pasadina and it's about it's 14 students who came over here for one term one term
is about 10 11 weeks and basically they study on the street they're being dumped
into the city of Berlin and um they learn to survive in a very strange environment to them because I mean it
can't be much more opposite from driving cars in Sunny La walking through cold in wet
Berlin and um yes they have a full term here and they have to do all all the
studies they would have to do at home so it's full school for them and um I did
the first studio with them which takes place uh took about three and a half weeks and what I tried to do with them
were Urban interventions so for example what would what would be an urban intervention an
urban intervention uh would be using an Outsiders tourist
perspective to the city because a tourist and an outsider sees things differently obviously than
for example me I'm complete I'm half blind towards Berlin after 20 years and to use as this PO potential of a fresh
view to uh then manipulate certain Urban things here the way people communicate
the way people perceive their surroundings um so basically uh the
students came up with ideas for strange things to happen in Berlin in the urban
part of Berlin um and for things to happen that would alter a little bit the
view of of berin so the whole thing was called hyper tourism they considered themselves hyper tourists and um they
came up with a great title for the whole project it was it's called en shigong Berlin and en shigong uh is excuse me
and excuse me is pretty much the first word that a a foreign person coming to
Germany would want to learn so excuse me you say when you step on somebody's foot excuse me you say when you have a
question excuse me you say when you want to grab the attention of the waiter so
the whole thing andin were about 14 little projects um there was one student who uh
did a media street performer because in Berlin there have many street performers just playing music and he turned that
into a media experience by uh equipping his falat which is a folding bike the
got at the Swap Mar um equipping it with a huge gas generator and an old
projector and a screen and uh he put that all together and then he showed on
the screen um himself cycling so it was like a picture within the picture um a
very Sur surrealistic thing I would say um driving down the street showing
himself driving down the street so that was one project that was really geared towards uh tourism so to speak and
Street performance um another girl she actually she she um wanted to have um
virtual squatting and for virtual squatting she uh took photographs of all the other students all the fellow students in in
their apartments in their Berlin apartments and uh blew all those images up size one to one and stuck it to the
window of the street facade to the windows so to inhabit the whole thing the only problem was that the building
she reinhabited was completely sealed off so she had to break in in the into the building in order to put up her work
and then she had to break in again um to bring a generator to for the electricity
to light up all the windows at night so they learned a little bit about trespassing there another guy um um
actually got into touch with the cops they called me up about an hour before the presentation are you Professor aamas
we have this Korean guy here he claims you're the professor and he wants to put up his living room on Alexander plus he
can't do that without permission so jwan um I had to do a little negotiation
there and then jwan put up a scale one to one styrofoam especially for the trash cans to be listened to and so forth and so on we did um one
student she did a a movie experience a moving Movie experience using the the
Berlin Subway um using the fact that the train is passing tiled walls and she
manipulated the graphic patterns on the tiled walls so with a train going by you then would see a cinematic experience so
this one was a legal intervention and um so all in all we had about 14 interventions and the presentation was a
guided tourist tour that took us to all the different interventions along viewfinders one student did very fancy
public viewfinders that would redirect The tourist's View away from the standard tourist attraction to
attractions that tend to be overlooked um there was a discrete tourist map which was was a handkerchief
printed with our Tour on it so if you don't want to be seen as a tourist you uh could then just very discreetly uh
look at the map um and I'm sure I'm missing some of the uh things they did
but was there re the students General reaction to Berlin um yeah well we turned that into
an into an exercise as well because I asked them to to First State all their preconception about Berlin or about Germany and then
to to see uh what their first perceptions their first encounters would be and how they
would react to it and um so they had all kinds of funny preconceptions about
German people like eating meat all the day and being huge and blonde and uh being very straight and
very narrow and very formalistic and um they were kind of surprised that this is at least in Berlin completely different
so I think they were very surprised by the diversity of of Street Culture by um the music by the fashion
by all the open vast spaces all the empty apartments that can be taken for virtually
nothing um yeah I mean you should ask Himel time so now what's I just want to know your
experience with Berlin and what have you noticed over the last 20 years because that's probably one of the most significant 20year blocks in Berlin's
history and like if you can sort of tell us what give us some historical perspective as to what happened you know
from a kind of a textbook point of view versus you know your experience or how that translated into an individual like
yourself experience like I remember you told me that Berlin traditionally was a place where you would go to avoid going into the army oh
sure well depends on how long your your your tape is still because I mean to put
it to put it in a nutshell that's that's a very hard exercise well anyway I mean
um when I was in my late teens um at in Germany you have your your what do you
call it full age at 18 so you're able to drink and you're able to drive a car and stuff like that you're able to vote at
18 and um at that time in the early 80s um Berlin was a ferocious Place
absolutely it was like still the High Times of the Cold War um Berlin being an island really with that huge wall around
the kids around right now who won't believe that they teenagers who say well what was that this wall but there it was
and uh it was basically an island and it was also an attractor for a huge amount
of subculture of for people who really didn't want to uh uh face the its
establishment and so on and uh at the same time in the'80s it was a very tough
City and uh people were not very Gally not very communic communicating
and in a friendly way and um so for me it was a tremendous challenge being very
young coming from a mediumsized German city which is kind of quiet compared to that and then making this for me a very
big leap in trying to to survive basically in Berlin and uh well the reason for coming here was I mean it was
a challenge but there was also the reason to avoid the military draft and this was the only only illegal way or
the only way to get around this whole thing so basically uh in the morning you would sign off sign off with the police
the local police in the hometown and then without proper paper you would have them to jump into a car and somehow
navigate your way through West German and East German border patrol and somehow being very very lucky not being
looked at too closely you would end up in Berlin and then and next morning just try to sign for legal residence in
Berlin so that was the very first beginning of the whole thing but why would you have to go through East and West Germany very easy very easy I mean
here you have West Germany yeah here you have East Germany and here is a little tiny spec and that's Berlin and this is
being divided in east and west again so when you came from West Germany you would have to pass a corridor through
East Germany and then you would arrive in that tiny tiny little island of Western Berlin so it was like going
through a tunnel a very awkward very weird uh uh situation and you feel very very much
controlled there I mean it was just a Motorway a highway and there were no walls on the highway but every tiny
street that would lead off the highway would be controlled and uh people wouldn't dare to get off the
highway because he would be put into jail and detention and whatever and so that was Russian American French and
English exactly can you talk about that cuz I don't think I mean I didn't understand that when I first came here well um okay here's West Germany West
Germany is West Germany bundus Republic and then there's East Germany East Germany had its own s it so they were
not controlled by the Russians or anything well not officially at least and then you had this tiny Island Berlin
and this would be divided into a western part and there there were the Western allies the French the British and the
Americans and then the eastern part with Russian military
present so that was pretty much it and because they were the Western allies controlling West Berlin there was no
German army so that was the reason why there was no draft because the Germans were not allowed to have their own Army in the western part of
Berlin in the 80s was it mostly German kids there or was it like it is now I'm finding now there's a lot
of kids I mean there was something like like like an American boam or avangard
some artists like David Boe as as an English guy so there was an international avangard in Berlin but it
was not a mainstream kind of thing it was not like a real open thing I remember uh uh being visited by my my
American host parents who came over to see me in West Berlin and those were like the most awkward situations because
when you wanted to make a tour into East Germany uh into East Berlin we were not to take the same um how' you call that
the Border passes the Border how do you call that the doors in the Border um the checkpoint yeah you would have to take
different checkpoints so they would have to use Checkpoint Charlie and I would have to go to checkpoint FR and then we
would have to meet on the Eastern side again so it was very very awkward very formalistic so you allowed to go into
East Germany if you had a proper application if you had a a passport and
if you were um willing to uh transfer East uh West German money into East German
money and you had to transfer a certain amount of money and since everything was that de that cheap in East
Germany and you were not allowed to take back East German money into West Berlin you had to spend it all and that was
kind of fun were you allowed to bring back goods from EAS yeah yeah but there was not much to be
bought so could but the East Germans couldn't come into West for a or whatever no so it's was like a oneway door that was pretty much like a oneway
door yeah some could if they were very loyal and they had many many measures and they were very limited very
restricted because obviously there were many people trying to flee from the East to the West so we you so what was it
like right around the time leading up to and the time after the wall came down yeah well the time leading up to was as
I said for me very scary but it was like a nice tickle to it as well I mean it
was a little bit like an adventure I'd say so my first apartment was in the house the next house to the wall so it
had closed windows to one facade because they were facing the wall my first job in Berlin was riding a snowplow in the
winter time as a student and uh my snowplow tour was all along Checkpoint Charlie all along the wall and I used to
listen to an old tape from the the which was like very strong 80s uh nihilistic music and it all fit into one kind of
whenever I listen to that music I'm I'm completely back in that time and and this kind of
nihilistic approach completely changed virtually on the night when the wall opened
up and then people really started to party and to open up and friendliness
was all of a sudden was something cool to do and uh very soon after that the
whole Rave thing the whole techno thing took off we had like huge and gigantic
illegal warehouse parties all the illegal clubs opened up pretty much uh uh in in in the old quarters of MIT
because there were so many rundown buildings and you could just claim them and you could get an apartment legally
if you broke into a house um owned by the government uh government living whatever
agency and then you would just uh break into it if there was if you could prove that there was nobody previously in in
that apartment and start uh paying the rent and that's the way how many many people and how many many kids got their
apartments in in the very early 90s so it was a it was a real crazy time
back then is that that's going away now because of the money oh yeah um I mean if you compare it
with other cities like other big cities like London or Paris or even New York
um things are still very very flexible I mean the creative scene of Berlin can afford to be very
experimental because they don't have such a financial pressure it it it
doesn't need so much money to survive in Berlin you can rent a place very cheaply you can have your idea for a product or
for for a company and turn this idea into reality for very for relatively cheap
money so um this is up to date up to the date right now is still valid and and
this is still a major distinction of Berlin and other International big
cities and uh when the students from California came over here they were amazed how cheap things would be here
like a beer or the rent or this or that so we still have enjoyed this kind of Liberty but on the other hand it has
also has a downside because things are so cheap because there's no money in the city anyway so the major industry where
we designers or agency would feed off from they're just not here by tradition
and after very short boom period after the wall came down like in
the mid90s I would say um everything pretty much slacked again and so now
we're in this awkward state of having had all this massive construction and all those fancy buildings but virtually
nobody living there and doing any business there you fill in like so many polls I
was I'm so glad I had this with you because I've been meeting with a lot of Creative Kids and kids who like my
friend and do you know this friend Mia yeah okay I'm going bowling with them oh good but uh
and they have this Creative Energy and attitude and there's this neat kind of Communism that happens within them they're all East German kids and they
all help each other like their friends who do videos do their videos and do their graphic design and so forth and then you have the American kids who come
over and they're really into that sort of philosophy did you talk to the American kids as well mostly yeah mostly
I talk to for my West German you're my like West German um point of view perspective Andy Ross who's a musician
in my East German he's young he's like 24 and then the rest is basically all Americans I have like black Americans
gay Americans like do you talk to any of the students none of your students know it's about it's about Americans who
expatriate okay to just like kind of give up their country cuz to me that's kind of Hardcore to make that decision especially if you're from America where
it's supp to be you know the land of milk and honey yeah but I'm really glad we had this talk that was good interesting
People Referenced
Tom Sachs, Nikolaus Hafermaas