The green hills of rubble in black and white

摘要

When Edmund, the child star of Germania Anno Zero, crosses VoBstrasse to sell the faded relics to American soldiers visiting the ruined building of the new Reich Chancellery in the summer of 1948, the area around Potsdamer Platz, though still recognizable, is invaded by debris caused by the destruction of Allied bombing and all shots and tracking shots that Roberto Rossellini has handed down of the German capital are packed with these materials: ruins and rubble. Almost forty years later, Cassiel, an angel from Der Himmel iiber Berlin by Wim Wenders, accompanying the elderly poet who is unsuccessfully looking for Potsdamer Platz, crosses a vacant lot overgrown only by the fateful wall -that here saw its first line drawn on the ground - and a flyover. Where did the debris and the ruins of Berlin get to in the forty years that separate the two films? Potsdamer Platz where is it? Is it still possible that traces of the lost capital can be found anywhere and that pieces and fragments of the ruins as well have given, in spite of themselves, a new face to the geography of Berlin today? From these questions and from the story of the German mountains of debris, known as Trummerbergen, was conceived the topic for the research "Ruins, rubble and debris of the theaters of war: the problems of decontamination and disposal to the configuration of new landscapes", that has been carried out by the research unit of the IUAV Architecture, Archaeology, landscape: theaters of war. The first results of such research will only be available in a year. Meanwhile, in this brief essay I'll try to reconnect the threads of a story, also partially known, to explain the architectural interest of the topic.