The founding conferences of the IGP group were careful to compare Paris and Berlin. The first two (2013 and 2014) made several contributions on this issue. Christoph Bernhardt spoke on the premises of the governance of the Greater Paris area and its metropolization through an analysis of the real estate market between the center and the periphery. Hartmut Frank gave a paper on Werner Hegemann, a cultural bridge between the United States, France and Germany. Jean-Louis Cohen spoke about the circulation between the two countries of the theories on the city through the famous studies of Eugène Hénart presented at the Berlin exhibition in 1910. Finally, Markus Tubbesing presented Léon Jaussely’s project for the 1910 Greater Berlin competition. Finally, for the 2015 conference, Carola Hein analyzed the contribution of French architects to the 1958 Berlin Capital (Berlin Hauptstadt) competition.
By going to Berlin in search of points of comparison to measure French urban planning culture, we followed in the footsteps of French architects and urban planners who were interested in the metropolitan question at the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, the comparison with German cities has long been the order of the day, particularly with Berlin, which was then a young metropolis, capital of a nation-state in full economic expansion, in which standards of urban comfort were higher than ours. The writer Jean Giraudoux will thus speak of this « urban ease » (aisance urbaine) which, according to him, is the hallmark of great civilizations. Between the two world wars, such important figures as Henri Sellier and André Morizet sought models – or rather arguments – in Weimar Germany to accompany the Grand Parisians towards greater modernity. Of course, this inclination towards the German model was not unequivocal or without resentment because of the great European fratricidal war and the massive destruction of northern France that it had caused, with the alternating occupation of border regions in the background, which left traces of the other country, the other culture, in urban planning and infrastructure and in architecture as well.
The aim of today’s seminar is to examine the conjunctural interferences between the historiographical work on Greater Berlin (social history and urban forms) and the discourse of the city’s politicians and makers (elected officials, councillors and architects). Berlin is therefore a very good field of observation. Empirically, there is a strong involvement between academics, designers and political actors at different moments in its history. This was particularly noticeable in the years of reunification, in the 1990s, when groups of experts, historians, mediators, and architects were convened to justify the official doctrine of « critical reconstruction », at the same time as a historical revision of the architectural and urban legacy of East Germany was underway.
Going further back in the last century, we observe similar situations but which, conversely, may have served the modernist discourse in favour of the destruction of inherited urban fabrics encouraging heavy urban renewal.
In today’s seminar, we will try to better understand the conditions of this history under debate, which is particularly vivid in Berlin. We will return to the epistemological stakes and the institutional positioning of historians when they participate as actors in the transformations of the present time. There is no historical construction that does not respond to the injunctions of the present time, as the historian Marc Bloch had evoked in a sibylline way in Le Métier d’historien (1949). It is therefore a question of mirroring for Berlin this questioning of Marc Bloch’s on the part of historians’ commitment to their time.
In 2020, the centennial of Greater Berlin will give rise to a number of events, including an exhibition and an ideas competition on the development of Berlin and its region.
Our colleagues in Berlin are being asked today to shed more light on the subject:
– Current research topics on the history of Greater Berlin and emerging issues, according to scientific fields.
– The intersection of agendas between historians and actors of the city within the centennial framework of Greater Berlin (1920-2120).