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Nothing distinguishes ancient from modern experience so much as their respective attitudes toward the cosmos, writes Walter Benjamin in ‘To the Planetarium’, the concluding prose piece of his 1928 collection One-Way Street. Whereas, according to Benjamin, the ancients maintained close contact with the stars in a communal, ecstatic trance, since the days of Copernicus, Kepler and Tycho Brahe, we have instead approached it optically and individually. This did not obviate the need for cosmic experience, however. Moderns were to find it in warfare on a planetary scale, and in revolutions that promised new political constellations. Given these coordinates, the planetarium, which never actually appears in Benjamin’s short essay, is an ambiguous figure. Is it an extension of the optical technologies of early modern astronomy and thus a further alienation of humanity from the cosmos? Or is it a technological balm for the problems created by technology, artificially returning to the dweller of the metropolis the possibility of cosmic ecstasy?

These tensions – between the cosmos and the machine, between space and time – were present in the building and the marketing of the first planetarium. Invented by Walther Bauersfeld, the chief engineer of the Carl Zeiss Optical Company in Jena, and Oskar von Miller, the director of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the ‘Wonder of Jena’ opened in 1926. It was perhaps the quintessential technology of the Weimar Republic. Replicated in other cities, a new and improved version in dumbbell-shaped form was erected in Berlin on the grounds of the Zoologischer Garten in November 1926. Benjamin, who first experienced the garden with his nursemaids, his ‘early guides’ to the city, visited the Berlin planetarium in 1927 or 1928. Next door was the Ufa-Palast, then the largest movie theater in Germany in what was the most exciting period in its cinematic history; within six months on either end of the opening of the planetarium, viewers could have attended the premieres of F.W. Murnau’s Faust and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

The two most popular programs at the Berlin planetarium in its first year of operation were The Skies of Home and The Year in a Matter of Minutes. In the former, the rim of the dome was illuminated with a silhouette of the Berlin skyline to orient the viewer as the projector slowly spun in order to permit them, in the words of the script that would have been read by a lecturer, to see the planets and constellations in the night sky ‘as it really appears, without any of the sight-obstructing influences around us’. Noting the irony that the sky ‘as it really appears’ could only be viewed in the form of a technological simulation, the historian Katherine Boyce-Jacino attributes the immense success of the program to viewers’ nostalgic desire for the ‘grounding effect’ of seeing the sky as it might have looked one or two generations previously, in the countryside from which many of the viewers’ families had migrated, or in the city before the advent of factory smoke and electric lighting and neon signage.

The Year in a Matter of Minutes, by contrast, appealed to those who embraced the jagged rhythms of industrial modernity. Here the script was upfront about the relationship between simulation and reality: the viewer was about to be shown something that could not be seen with the eye alone. ‘We would like,’ the lecturer would have intoned, ‘in these artificial skies, to let time advance wildly.’ The motor of the projector would be sped up to show how the planets and constellations would look over the course of a single year: first in seven minutes, then in four minutes, then in a minute and a half. The lecturer would bring the projection to a stop, exclaiming, ‘We are making an intervention into the natural order! We are stopping the rotation of the earth, for just a moment.’ Nothing, except perhaps the world viewed from the window of a railway car, would have prepared viewers for such a disorienting visual experience of acceleration and deceleration. ‘We are bound to neither time nor space,’ one viewer said. ‘It looks as if in a jazz age even the heavens were moving in jazz time.’

The Berlin planetarium was destroyed, along with the zoo and the Ufa-Palast, in an Allied bombing raid in 1943, three years after Benjamin’s death, by suicide, during a frantic attempt to flee occupied France. For the 750th anniversary of the city of Berlin, the government of East Germany (GDR) commissioned the building of the Zeiss-Großplanetarium, with a state-of-the-art Cosmorama star projector, on the site, rather fittingly, of the decommissioned gasworks that had polluted the sky over Prenzlauer Allee since the first years of the Kaiserreich. The entire leadership of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei, including General Secretary Erich Honecker – who was responsible for the GDR’s most notorious piece of architecture, the Berlin Wall – attended the opening on 9 October 1987. What was initially conceived of as a public educational center and tourist attraction was now regarded as an important accoutrement of state power. It signaled that East Germany and its government were technologically advanced, future-oriented. But the future had something different in mind. One of the largest and most modern of its kind, the Zeiss-Großplanetarium, whose rooftop is visible from my balcony, was to be the last major construction project undertaken in the GDR. Three years later, the country would no longer exist.