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From the Grünen Wiesen to Urban Space: Berlin, Expansion, and the Longue Durée
The essays in this special issue all focus on the city of Berlin, in particular, its relationship with its margins and borders over the longue dureé. The authors--Kristin Poling, Marion Gray, Barry Jackisch, and Eli Rubin--all consider the history of Berlin over the last two centuries, with special emphasis on how Berlin expanded over this time and how it encountered the open spaces surrounding it and within it--the "green fields" (grüne Wiesen) referred to in the theme title.1Each of them explores a different period in Berlin's history, and so together, the essays form a long dureé history of Berlin, although each of the essays in its own way explores the roots of Berlin's history in deeper time scales, from the early modern period, to the Middle Ages, and even to the very end of the last ice age, more than 10,000 years ago.
Each of these essays takes a separate part of Berlin's history as its subject. Kristin Poling's essay, "Shantytowns and Pioneers beyond the City Wall: Berlin's Urban Frontier in the Nineteenth Century," examines the period during Berlin's rapid industrialization before and just after the unification of Germany, roughly, from the 1840s to the 1870s. Marion Gray's essay, "Urban Sewage and Green Meadows: Berlin's Expansion to the South, 1870-1920," looks at the expansion of Berlin toward the villages of Steglitz, Dahlem, and Klein Ziethen, and considers in particular the issue of the city's sewage and its use of outlying areas as "sewage farms." Barry Jackisch's essay, "The Nature of Berlin: Green Space and Visions of a New German Capital, 1900-45," focuses on the incorporation of green space within the city as it expanded, especially the Grunewald, during the Weimar and then the Nazi era. And Eli Rubin's essay, "Amnesiopolis: From Mietskaserne to Wohnungsbauserie 70 in East Berlin's Northeast," focuses on the mammoth prefabricated housing settlement of Marzahn-Hellersdorf, built in the 1970s and 1980s on the "green fields" on Berlin's northeast margins as part of the ruling Socialist Unity Party's ambitious "Housing Program."
In addition to providing a chronological continuity, the essays also offer a somewhat comprehensive geographical study of...