Staging the past: landscape designs, cultural identity and Erinnerungspolitik at Berlin’s Neue Wache (original) (raw)
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‘Germany is full of ghosts’, and Berlin in particular is a city constructed by layers of history and memory. As the city that shows most deeply the scars of the twentieth century, Berlin has struggled to re-create an architectural identity post-1945. The recently started replica-rebuilding of the Palace (raised to the ground by the Soviets in 1950) is just one example of the unusual approaches the city has taken. Concepts of authenticity and purpose are questioned in creating a palace for a country without a monarch. The opening of the Berlin Wall Memorial, with its reconstructed death zone also shows an attitude to the past that is caught somewhere between museum and Disneyland architecture; local residents are confronted once again with overlooking the Wall. At a time when West Berlin was removed from maps of East Germany, there were mass clearances of nineteenth century tenement blocks in favour of sixties satellite housing estates that made a complete break with history. In the late 1960s, history was once again promoted, partially in extremes – for example, in the reconstruction of the medieval town centre at Nikolaiviertel. The discord between urban planners and local residents is exemplified in Berlin. The city’s urban landscape is layered with multiple histories and memories and the debate regarding how to deal with this past is constant. This paper intends to investigate some of the approaches to urban space, which have focused on one element of Berlin’s past, in order to construct a particular urban narrative.
Introduction: Narrating the New Berlin: Site, Sound, Image, Word
Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 2015
Cities have long challenged, captivated, and inspired the cultural imagination of their inhabitants and non-inhabitants alike. In contemporary society, urban areas seem to gain importance in every imaginable way and are recognized as privileged sites that engender, enable, and nourish creative endeavours, multicultural environments, economic mobility, and innovative responses to the challenges posed by capitalism and globalization. However, these urban narratives of ambition and creation are often undercut by material realities and ethnic, religious, and social tensions and are shot through with a myriad of thwarted aspirations. Gentrification leaves its marks on city demographics as it dramatically reconfigures urban landscapes and populations, pushing to the geographical margins those who are already restricted socially and culturally. Impinging on and deeply enmeshed with potent material realities are the political and cultural histories that haunt cites and forge their unique identities. This issue of Seminar focuses on the New Berlin as created through various cultural productions and gestures to the contemporary importance of the rising global culture of creative forms of dissent through the occupation of urban physical and ideational space. One of the economic and cultural powerhouses of Europe, Berlin also holds a unique place in the shaping of historical and contemporary images of Germany and Germanness. The historical, cultural, and geographical peculiarities of the German capital-"its delayed jump-start into the world-city ranks of Imperial and Weimar modernity, and its subsequent near-fatal marring by Nazi planning, wartime bombing, Cold War division, and now post-Wall reclamation and reinventionare the reason why the identity of this city remains so disjointed" (Ward 5). However, it is precisely this "disjointedness" and the lack of a fixed identity that allowed Berlin "to host one of the most dramatic processes of urban reinvention" (6). Since the fall of the Wall in 1989 and the concomitant shift in global relations of power, the renewed German capital has been the site of intense social, political, and cultural transformations. Although the "voids of Berlin" (Huyssen) have mostly been filled, there remain today seemingly unoccupied spaces of memory and possibility that titillate the imagination. Unlike other crowded, tradition-bound cities of western Europe, this newly loosened and less than completely capitalized and revitalized urban
Berlin: Dream and Awakening. A Collection of Images of the German Capital after Reunification
2017
Since German Reunification the city of Berlin has been the object of a carefully designed campaign to reinvent its identity and to promote its image. The propagated city image does not always include the wide variety of social and urban expressions, and frequently compels an elitist vision of the city that, far from alleviating emerging social tensions, reinforces them. This research offers a comparative analysis of the city image produced by the local government, and the imagery produced by other actors involved in urban processes. To this end, a collection of images representing the city of Berlin was integrated, with materials produced by three main sectors: the local government, the tourism industry and a variety of social movements. The collected images are described and analyzed with the aim of knowing the assumptions they comprise, and are afterwards compared against each other to find similarities and differences between the city visions of their producers. Topics like historical memory, urban change, commercialization, public participation, subcultural expressions and multiculturalism arose from this comparison. In addition, the dissertation proposes a visual approach for the analysis of issues linked to urbanism and the construction of city image. Such approach is inspired in the idea of "dialectical image", described by Walter Benjamin in his unfinished 'Arcades Project', and consists in putting together a set of chosen pictures in small groups or "constellations" that make evident their similarities and differences. The research shows that the image prompted by the local government and by the tourist industry are alike, while there are significant divergences between the official image and the representations of citizens. These divergences seem to reflect a deep dissatisfaction of some sectors of the population with the official city model, based on assumptions of a postindustrial economy.
Chapter 7. Disappearing History: Challenges of Imagining Berlin after 1989
Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin, 2017
The book : Since Unification and the end of the Cold War, Berlin has witnessed a series of uncommonly intense social, political, and cultural transformations. While positioning itself as a creative center populated by young and cosmopolitan global citizens, the “New Berlin” is at the same time a rich site of historical memory, defined inescapably by its past even as it articulates German and European hopes for the future. Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin presents a fascinating cross-section of life in Germany’s largest city, revealing the complex ways in which globalization, ethnicity, economics, memory, and national identity inflect how its urban spaces are inhabited and depicted.
The Role of Urban Space in Berlin’s Transformation into a City of Culture after Reunification
This paper builds on research on urban space, culture, and change in order to bring to light the role that urban space has played in Berlin’s transformation into a city of culture after its reunification. The first part of the paper reviews the history of urban space in Germany. This review highlights connections between urban space and modernization. It puts current developments in urban policies that are routinely attributed to globalization into historical and, to a limited extent, comparative perspective. The second part of this paper dwells on the post-reunification period in the history of Berlin. This section focuses on changes that Berlin has undergone since 1989, as it sought to transform itself into a global city. The architectural strategies that are usually deployed to this end are widely adopted by regeneration efforts of leading global cities and ones seeking such status. Moreover, the large scale of urban development projects geared to such efforts has had negative effects on the cultural life of cities, such as declining funding for independent arts groups. As art museums, heritage districts, and cultural complexes proliferate, global pressure for including cultural projects in strategies of urban development only increases. The third part of this paper reviews how architecture bolsters existing and new claims to global-city status. In this context, Berlin’s urban environment was widely incorporated into this city’s efforts to project a global image of a city of culture in the wake of its reunification. The original contribution of this paper lies in showing how urban space is made part of urban change, offering historical, comparative, and policy-making perspectives on the example of Berlin’s efforts to transform itself into a city of culture after 1989.
Is the way the German people dealt with architecture - belonging to the former totalitarian regime - a reflection of grief, or a way to dissociate and forget the past ? Can the five stages of grief, as defined in the field of psychology, be traced through the actions of the German people towards the remaining architecture of the former political regime, or do the contradictory opinions regarding these remaining architectural objects render this process impossible ? Are memorials places of perpetual remembrance, or just civilized and polite manners of dissociating from the past in order to forget ? National Socialist ambitions and ideals are visible in the architecture it produced and left behind. Power is best reflected in the drastic urban measures planned for the capital city and in the scale of the architectural objects proposed for its development. The political regime has left behind buildings burdened with memory of past crimes and suffering. • There is a great quantity of scientific literature discussing the link between space, perception and psychology, as well as the influence these factors bear upon each-other. The way architectural remnants of the former political regime were dealt with mirrors the social events, the spirit of the epoch and the general point of view towards the events symbolized by this unwanted architecture. The five stages of grief, as defined by the American Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 work “On death and dying” are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Since the publishing of her book, the five stages of grief have been identified by modern psychologists in other situations. The paper will trace down the five stages of grief as reflected by the German people’s actions on architecture of the Third Reich.
Georg Ulrich Grossmann and Petra Krutisch, The Challenge of the Object = Die Herausforderung des Objekts: 33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art (Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art - CIHA) Nuremberg, 15th-20th July 2012, Germanishes National Museum, Nürnberg, 2013., 2013
Abstract: In an attempt to resolve contested memory narratives, the urban landscape of Berlin has given rise to the process of reconstructing German identity itself. This paper provides a critical analysis of the controversial cycle of growth, demolition and reconstruction of the built environment on Schlossplatz in Berlin-mitte. In the context of Erinnerungskultur, it will argue that the removal of the Palast der Republik is not as significant as the planned Wiederaufbau of the former Prussian Stadtschloss in its place. Independent of the Stadtschloss’ resurrection as potentially detrimental to the organic authenticity of the urban landscape, this paper will ask what this action may tell about Germany’s current relationship with its Prussian past. Does the decision to rebuild the Stadtschloss (even in partial form) represent a normalized relationship with Prussian identity, and if so, exemplify a ‘mastery of the past’? Could a confrontation with complex historical legacies help forge a new sense of united German identity on the urban landscape? If so, would this be desirable, or could it present a slippery slope of renewed nationalism? What is at stake for the identities of former East (and West) Germans to achieve an emotional integration and a sound historical self understanding? Finally, in relation to Germany’s continued dialogue with GDR memory, is destruction of the Palast/reconstruction of the Stadtschloss reminiscent of the same dialectic of memory and repression that facilitated a kind of self-justification rather than an acceptance of responsibility in the immediate post-war era? These questions should act as prisms through which wider problems of collective memory and cultural identity in reunified Berlin can be examined. Citation: MaryKate Cleary, "Destroying the Palace/Rebuilding the Castle: Collective Memory and the Search for Historical Identity in Berlin," in: Georg Ulrich Grossmann and Petra Krutisch, The Challenge of the Object = Die Herausforderung des Objekts: 33rd Congress of the International Committee of the History of Art (Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art - CIHA) Nuremberg, 15th-20th July 2012, Germanishes National Museum, Nürnberg, 2013, pp. 460-464.