Trigger
Point
Karina Nimmerfall
La Cité (Die Siedlung)
After the end of the Berlin
Airlift in 1949, Tegel Airport
in West Berlin became the
military base for the Armée de
l’Air, the French Air Force. In
order to house its military and
civilian members, the French
military started, at the beginning
of the 1950s, to build
entire neighbourhoods around
the base. These miniature cities
were designed in the tradition
of modernist, large-scale
planning and functioned completely
autonomously of the
city of Berlin, somewhat as
cities within cities. With German
re-unification and the deactivation
of the Allied Forces,
these small settlements were
abandoned in the early 1990s
by the French military and
then turned over to the German
Federal Agency, whose
attempts towards subsequent
re-use failed in most cases.
Cité Foch, built in different
stages between 1957 and the
1970s, contains more than 780
residential units, a large shopping
and recreational centre,
and educational as well as
entertainment facilities, and
was the largest of these developments.
It was also home to
the French Secret Service and
later the German Federal Intelligence
Service, who used the
transmission tower on this site
for its electronic intelligence
operations. After the end of
the Cold War, the complex
was sold to a private developer
and has stood neglected
for the last two decades. The
dilapidated buildings, suffering
from severe decay and
currently abandoned, face an
uncertain future. The film La
Cité shows the different configurations
of space through
its various layers of history.
Somewhere between document
and fiction, oral history
and urban myth, it engages
questions of the history of the
site and its politics, as well
as their conditions within the
past, present and, even, the
possible, near future.