Unbearable Lightness

Ancient Greece and Paris have the so-called caryatids, female statues that serve as supporting
elements on building façades in lieu of columns, pillars or pilasters. Their male counterpart is the atlas, the titan condemned by the gods to hold up the heavens for eternity. Pre-war Berlin must have had a considerable number of them as well, but I’m only aware of one surviv-ing example: three pairs of semi-nude caryatids and atlantes supporting the weight of a former hotel on Dorotheenstrasse, about a kilometer north of here.

I wonder if local building inspectors ever had to reject a proposal that sought to abuse the Berlin Buddy Bear mascot as a supporting architectural structure, perhaps on grounds of malap-propriation (the outstretched arms are meant to represent a welcoming gesture, not a load bear-ing stance) or copyright infringement. It always struck me as a kind of shrugging, mirroring my own lukewarm attitude toward them and their eclectic ornament, almost always somewhere between Miro and Hundertwasser, signifying diversity and tolerance, I guess, like the words “diversi-ty” or “tolerance” written with a different font for each letter.

Berlin’s heraldry materialized in fiberglass and merrily painted, is intended to inspire tol-erance and understanding, the formation of values, etc. An ongoing charity project since 2001, when it was founded by philanthropist Eva Herlitz, today there are some 2000 Buddy bears that have been dispatched throughout the world on a sort of ambassadorial mission. What happens when you scale down this most huggable of alpha predators: you get a teddy bear. Stripping it of its coating and enlisting it to the honorable but cumbersome task of upholding transparency is to emphasize another role altogether, one they have played all along: as psychological slave, es-sentially exchangable, in our infantile symbolic play, striving for Geborgenheit, shelter from life’s intricacies.

In this part of the world, almost no one, including me, has read Ayn Rand‘s Atlas Shrugged, or any of her works. The thousand-page novel, at least from what I gather, revolves around a topsy-turvy dystopian scenario in which the world’s industrial elite, its “prime movers,” go on strike against all the freeloaders out there (i.e. pretty much everyone else) who had thus far only taken advantage of the trickling down surplus of their productivity. In other words, those few upon which global socio-economic progress supposedly hinges, those who up to this point shouldered all the burden, buckle under its weight and shrug it off in an act of defiant selfishness.

A more familiar representation of class stratification is perhaps that of the capitalist pyra-mid, based on a political cartoon widely distributed among socialist movements around the turn of the 20th century. In it, the sovereign or capital itself (depending on the version) ominous-ly ranks at the top, while the lowest tier, the foundation, overflows with plebs, some of whom, instead of shrugging, have left their post to wave a red flag. With minor adjustments – adding a layer of elephants and social media, all of which in turn rest upon an infinite regress of cosmic tortoises who, as we know, are the true pillars of the world – this image could still make do today as the more logical, which is to say, applicable, model of world hierarchy.

Since the 1970s, after the GDR had already signed the Helsinki Accords, committing itself to safeguarding human rights, forced labor practices began to play an integral part in the na-tion’s business plan. The economical exploitation of prison inmates, including political pris-oners who had criticized the regime or attempted to flee the country, had been part of a scheme to profit from the compulsive consumerism of its neighboring class enemies. Instead of resort-ing to passive wonderment over their economic rise, the GDR entered into contracts linking some of its publicly owned enterprises (Volkseigene Betriebe) to the product chains of Western com-panies, notably those of a certain nordic furniture maker.

A visceral intimacy binds us to the domestic objects we surround ourselves with, perhaps blinding us to their symptomatic character, the story they tell, their content. And that’s fine, else we stub our toes and pause to realize who we’ve become. Where did all these plants come from? Interiority is necessarily patchwork, a matter of one thing at a time, and I suppose we‘ve become sufficiently transparent to ourselves by now to know better than to excavate all the things, all the time.

Lian Rangkuty