The Secret Life and Death of Ornament in Berlin

A riveting and deftly rendered meditation on the removal of ornament from the built environment in Berlin.

An illustrated urban history guaranteed to make you see your city anew, from an award-winning contemporary poet.

When the poet Donna Stonecipher first moved to Berlin in 2004, she noticed something strange: street after street was lined with blank façades. Where once ornament had gamboled across those surfaces, now rows of scraped-clean apartment buildings greeted the passerby. As she began to dig deeper into the question, she discovered that over half of Berlin’s pre–World War I buildings had had their ornament removed. There was a dramatic story behind this removal—a story containing a pocket history of ideas about class, taste, excess, deceit, art, aesthetics, meaning, authenticity, and more—and how they are reflected through our built environment.

A personal, propulsive, and insightful meditation, The Secret Life and Death of Ornament in Berlin tells the story of this intriguing quest. Taking the reader along on her long revelatory walks and bike rides around Berlin, Stonecipher delves into the surprising, uncanny, enchanting, and sometimes haunting stories that figured in the banishing of ornament. We learn about everything from an obsession with hygiene to a mania for crystals, from a housing structure called “rent barracks” to the humiliation of losing a world war—and ultimately, why the erasing of ornament had such a profound effect on Berlin’s visual landscape, and in turn, the world’s.