The Berlinische Galerie's exhibition Anything Goes? recounts how a global, contradictory Postmodernism took root on both sides of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s. Florian Heilmeyer in his piece originally published on Metropolis discusses the ambitious exhibition that was able to look simultaneously at both sides of the German city at that time.
The 1980s in Berlin was a strange decade: The city on both sides of the wall was dark, gray, largely empty, and strangely slow—as if exhausted from decades of Cold War—and longing for something fresh to happen. Even David Bowie and Iggy Pop had left. Finally, the wall fell in 1989, ending not only the decade but, as some say, a shortened 20th century in Germany.
