Der Reichstag war diesen Sommer (1995) das Zentrum eines modernen Kunstprojekts. Christo Javacheff, ein bulgarischer Künstler, wollte seit 20 Jahren den Reichstag in silbernes Gewebe einwickeln. Das deutsche Parlament diskutierte sehr emotional über das Reichstagsprojekt. Kanzler Kohl und andere Parlamentsabgeordnete hielten das Projekt für beleidigend für Deutschland, die Menschen und die Geschichte. Am Ende sammelten sich tausende von Leuten in Berlin, um die moderne Kunst und das Symbol deutscher Wiedervereinigung zu sehen.
Berlin- They wrapped up the wrapping of the Reichstag yesterday as dusk fell over this city. Swathed in sheets of white polypropylene, the building now looks as huge, as silent and as mysterious as an Alp, as it stands against a typically dark and stormy Berlin sky.
The job got finished a day late. Thursday, wind and rain whipped across the partially draped building. The bad weather pulled one sheet out of alignment. Desperately maneuvering it back into place, workers rappelled up and down the face of the building like mountain climbers, which, in fact, is what they are, 200 of them, especially contracted for this job. At times they looked more frightening: like skiers, about to plunge helplessly down the slopes of white fabric.
As everybody must know by now, the wrap job culminates a long effort by Christo, the Bulgarian-born artist who conceived the project, and his wife and partner, Jeanne-Claude. It took them 23 years to get permission. The Reichstag is a massive and craggy building near the heart of Berlin, built as the German capitol in 1894. When Christo first proposed to wrap it, it was a burned-out ruin in the Soviet dominated zone of a divided Berlin. Now it is slated to become, in 1999, again the capitol of a reunified nation.
Christo's artworks always sound like jokes when you first hear of them. Why wrap a building? But the reality is often very different. The wrapped Reichstag, once seen, is unforgettable. The sheets move gently in the wind, giving to what was once a solid building the shapeless evanescence of a dream. White makes anything look bigger, and the Reichstag now looks ungraspably huge. To borrow a little from Germany's greatest novelist, the Reichstag has become the Magic Mountain, and as with Thomas Mann's mountain, we are free to see in it whatever we wish.
Christo leaves it up to us to figure out the meanings. Like any artist who's wise to his market, he knows better than to supply his own interpretations of his work. He's made that very clear by surrounding the building with a human fence of 600 volunteer students, working in shifts, all of them multilingual, all uniformed in yellow, and all programmed to evade your questions. "No, there's nothing symbolic about the project," they say. "Christo only wanted to see what the building would look like when it was wrapped."
It's a dodge, of course. You can't even think about the Reichstag without drowning in symbolism. This is the building that catapulted Hitler to power when arsonists burned it in 1933. The Nazis blamed the Communists, but many historians think the Nazis themselves started the fire for just that purpose. Riding a wave public outrage; Hitler vastly increased his power. The gutted Reichstag proved to be the gravestone of German freedom. No symbolism? Give us a break.
The wrapped Reichstag is like a sheeted piece of furniture in an abandoned house. When chairs and tables are covered with white cloth, they look like ghosts of themselves. They speak of emptiness, of loneliness, of waiting. In that same way, the Reichstag has become a ghost of itself, a vast ghost building in the middle of a city that, itself, has long been a ghost of what it once was. Whether intended or not, the wrapping is indeed a symbol. When the wraps come off, two weeks from now, the Reichstag will be reborn. Contractors and architects will begin the task of transforming it. They will gut the shell and, within it, will create a new parliamentary capitol of Germany. When those sheets come off, it will be an unveiling: an unveiling of the restored house of democracy.
By wrapping and then unwrapping the Reichstag, Christo has made a great temporary work of art. No other act would so clearly dramatize this moment in history. Like a newborn child, the battered Reichstag will emerge from swaddling into a whole new life.
Crowds are generous but nothing like the 3 million predicted in the early hype. These's no dearth of room in my own hotel, just three blocks away. But the crowds are still big, and they get very involved, endlessly discussing the meaning of it all, taking pictures of one another in front of the strange white mass or playing games, like the young couple who wrapped themselves in a sheet and posed for snapshots.
So the wrapping is also a great public ritual. It's one that will, with both joy and puzzlement, be long remembered in Berlin.
Quelle: The Boston Globe
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