The Habit/at Project includes several pieces: Untitled (Conversion), a video work depicting the demolition of an old WW-II bunker wall; Untitled (Structure T), a miniature concrete model of Berlin’s huge Schwerbelastungskörper structure; Untitled (Blind), a photo of a bunker over a blind; and Habit/ at (#3+#4), two one-man bunkers (Einmannbunker). The remaining WW-II concrete bunkers spread across Germany have attracted Ella Littwitz’s curiosity as a resident of Berlin. Some of the larger bunkers have been converted after the war to residential or other uses, and some – particularly those designed as one-man bunkers for individual protection – have survived as useless scars in the landscape. The bunkers were built during the war mainly to protect key operators of strategic systems such as power stations and railroads targeted by air raids. The large number of bunkers still dotting the German landscape represent a challenge in current urban space. Untitled (Blind) mirrors this difficulty, with the bunker depicted in it acting much like a blind which blocks the view behind it. The single-person bunkers indicate for the artist the tension between the individual and his surrounding space under extreme circumstances, a kind of assimilation of the human body in the armor designed to protect it. Littwitz’s preoccupation with the theme has been partly inspired by French theoretician and architect Paul Virilio, who in 1975 first suggested the idea that “If man has no need for the machine to live in his natural environment, he needs the machine to survive in a hostile one. Now, during combat, the surface of the earth became uninhabitable and the simplest of gestures became impossible. This constraint modified the clothing – the uniform – and the habitat – the casemate.” Thus, according to Virilio, the relationship between clothing (habit) and dwelling (habitat) became particularly intimate. The miniaturized bunker, Untitled (Structure T) models a still existent Berlin building called the Schwerbelastungskörper, or literally, “heavy load-bearing body”. It was erected in 1941 in an attempt to test the ground’s ability to bear the heavy loads required under the Germania World Capital master plan designed by Nazi visionary architect Albert Speer. The idea was to build a gigantic victory arch on this location to embody the power of the Third Reich. The object in Littwitz’s work is one hundred times smaller than the gargantuan original design (12,000 tons, 21m in diameter, 14m high above ground 18m deep underground). After the war, it proved impossible to tear down the structure without damaging its urban environment; it was therefore declared a historical monument, attesting ever since to the Nazi regime’s megalomaniac city plans. The video work Untitled (Conversion) demonstrates the powerful energies required to erase the memory of these monolithic concrete structures off the face of the earth. The artist’s reference to the urban challenges currently faced by Germany raises issues of preservation, destruction or conversion of war remains. As shameful historical remains, the bunkers enable her to explore how German society copes with its memories and past, which likewise refuse to disappear, either above or below ground.
[1] Paul Virilio, Bunker Archeology, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994, p. 41.

Ella Littwitz, What there is / What is there?, 2012- 2014, installation Whistle, 2013, vinyl
record, 8:19 min: The Take Off, 2013, poster diptych / Negative, 2013, archive pigment print / The Last Image, 2013, archive pigment print / artifacts, 2012-2014, 3D print

The What there is / What is there? installation is comprised of several works inspired by archeological digs which started in 2012 in Tempelhofer Freiheit – a park in southern Berlin, formerly the city’s Tempelhof Airport (1923-2008): sounds and voices produced from a broken piece of a vinyl record, an enlarged scan of the only negative found in the digs with emulsion remains on it, posters with an enlarged photo of the imperial eagle statue found in the airport’s archive (BFG: Bestand Archiv Flughafen Tempelhof), and 34 three-dimensional prints of scanned archeological artifacts. The Tempelhof Airport was inaugurated in 1923 and was one of the first in the world. Albert Speer1, the Third Reich’s chief architect, redesigned it in 1939 by as part of the plan to rebuild Berlin as World Capital Germania. As the future hub of all Europe, the terminal of the new and expanded airport renamed Zentralflughafen Tempelhof was known as the largest building of its time, with a style matching is monumental-Fascist character. A dark chapter in the history of this monument has to do with Camp Columbia, the first concentration camp in Nazi Germany, situated on the airport grounds. During 1933- 1936 the camp was used as a torture training school for future SS officers,and in 1940-1944 the military airfield built in the Tempelhof complex was used as a forced labor camp, where aircraft manufacturer Weserflug and airliner Lufthansa employed tens of thousands of prisoners in building fighter planes. In April 1945, the airport was occupied by the Red Army. Its fighters tried to break into the terminal’s cellars to reach the Wehrmacht’s secret archive, but as a result a fire broke out which completely consumed the archive’s contents. Several months later, the airport was handed over to the US armed forces, which used it for military purposes for several decades, until 1993. A key to reading the installation before us may be found in the photo of the eagle statue taken in 1962 by the Americans. In this photo, we can see the American soldiers dismantling the controversial statue which towered above the Tempelhof Airport between 1940-1962. The eagle, used as a mythological symbol of power and victory in Europe since the days of the Holy Roman Empire, was adopted by Hitler and the Third Reich. In the Nazi statue, the eagle holds a laurel wreath and a swastika in its claws and its head is turned left. When the Americans took over the airport, they redesigned the statue by painting the eagle’s head white and covering the swastika with a symbol of the USA, thereby turning it into their very own American Bald Eagle. In 1962, the statue’s head was separated from its body and sent to the US, while the body was scrapped. In 1985, the head was returned to Berlin as a gesture for Germany, and today it has been reinstated in front of the Tempelhof main terminal building. In Littwitz’s work we can see the original version of the leftwardheaded statue as in the Nazi period in the right poster, while in the left the reverse image is shown: the eagle looks to the right, and in that the artist has returned it to its original shape and reinstated it as a symbol of pre- and post-Nazi Germany. Artist Ella Littwitz joined a team of archeologists and researchers headed by Susan Pollock and Reinhard Bernbeck in the Tempelhof’s forced labor camp area. Their forensicarcheological study was designed to raise the awareness of Nazi acts of terrorism and oppression in the airport area by revealing the aspects of the camp prisoners’ daily lives, “from eating to personal hygiene to connections (if any) to families and communities back home”. The digs revealed objects from several periods:
from before the original airport’s construction, when it was used as a graveyard in World War I, from the military airfield period, the labor camp period, and the American era. Anthropologist Maria T. Strazmann argued that the vary absence of archeological finds from certain periods constitutes a testimony: “… archeology, by investigating what remains after the Holocaust, may allow us to manifest absence, loss and historical silence”. The artist has selected several disinterred objects, scanned and printed them in three dimensions. Her emphasis was on personal and cultural artifacts from the various periods. The gap between the statement “What there is” and the question “What is there?” in the project’s title indicates the difference between the existence of an object and what it represents. The technique used by the artist also evokes the gap between original and copy, source and translation, since the 3D scanning technology manages to reproduce the “real” objects almost perfectly, but the uniformity of the material serves to flatten the hierarchy between the objects; for example, a human bone and disposable cutlery tend to look
quite similar. The dug up artifacts seem banal and their reproduction using this cutting-edge technology blurs the place’s gruesome past even further. To return to the airport’s history, Littwitz uses a collection of symbols that are iconic both in substance and in representation. This applies to the Weimarian eagle decorating what seem at first as military banners, to the object shelves which echo archeological practices and embodies the artist’s search for “truth”, a process which apparently recovers the archives erased in the past and enlivens their story; it also applies to the last image blown up and framed, and to the surviving sounds rerecorded on vinyl. In her installation What there is / What is there? Littwitz seems to freeze testimonies and expose, through their powerful and deteriorated condition, the terrible past of an idyllic, bustling Berlin park.

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