Monument(s) to Freedom and Unity (original) (raw)
Related papers
In the slipstream of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, there has been a global mobilisation around monuments and statues of famous figures involved in the slave trade and European colonial conquest. In former colonial statessuch as France and Britainand states shaped by the legacies of slaverysuch as the United Statesactivists have defaced, damaged or torn down monuments associated with these contested pasts. This is hardly a novelty. The destruction of physical symbols is often a response to regime change. But, in this case, the mobilisation has taken a different form. Instead of legitimising a new regime and new elites, the destruction of monuments is part of a demand for justice from historically marginalised groups who are seeking to reclaim their heritage. The deconstruction of these monuments automatically entails the deconstruction of dominant national narratives that have contributed to such marginalisation. Given this omnipresent global context, it is striking that exactly the opposite process is taking place in Germany, where monuments are being rebuilt as part of a project of national reconstruction. This may have something to do with the unusual regime change that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall. German unification has generally been called 're-unification' (Wiedervereinigung). The prefix 're' suggests a restoration. It places the 'second unification' on a spectrum that starts with the first unification in 1871. Over the years, this connection has been reinforced by various political symbols. In 1991, the Bundestag votedby a very narrow majorityto move the main German ministries to Berlin, the former capital of the Kaiserreich. And, since 1999, the parliament has been sitting in the Reichstag, the building of the imperial parliament inaugurated in 1894. 1 The Berlin Republic (Berliner Republik) made a clear break with the truncated West German Bonn Republic (Bonner Republik) as well as with the weak Weimar Republic, a short democratic experiment brutally interrupted by Hitler's rise to power in 1933. These crucial decisions rested on a specific interpretation of German history, which has been made especially visible in discussions surrounding the 're'-building of monuments or statues that were damaged during the Second World War and/or destroyed in its immediate aftermath. These destructions, often ordered by the communist leadership, were intended to break symbolically with a tragic Prussian legacy that many believed had led to Nazism. However, the reconstruction of these monuments after unification also served to systematically erase traces of East Germanywhich was 'absorbed' by West Germany rather than unified with it in 1990. Without necessarily being new 'sites of memory', 2 these reconstructed monuments are the 'sites of a new memory'. They highlight a narrative that abandons the fixation on Nazism and reevaluates Germany's Prussian heritage at
Stumbling Stones: Holocaust Memorials, National Identity, and Democratic Inclusion in Berlin
German Politics and Society, 2005
In 1997, Hinrich Seeba offered a graduate seminar on Berlin at the University of California, Berkeley. He called it: "Cityscape: Berlin as Cultural Artifact in Literature, Art, Architecture, Academia." It was a true German studies course in its interdisciplinary and cultural anthropological approach to the topic: Berlin, to be analyzed as a "scape," a "view or picture of a scene," subject to the predilections of visual perception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This course inspired my research on contemporary German history as represented in Berlin's Holocaust memorials. The number and diversity of these memorials has made this city into a laboratory of collective memory. Since the unification of East and West Germany in 1990, memorials in Berlin have become means to shape a new national identity via the history shared by both Germanys. In this article, I explore two particular memorials to show the tension between creating a collective, ...
Germany's Metamorphosis: Memory and the Holocaust in the Berlin Repulic
Cultural Studies Review, 2013
I want to focus on two recent debates in Germany from the same inaugural period of Germany’s SPD–Green government, which both have as their focus the contestation of memory in relation to the Holocaust. In both debates the Holocaust serves as a negative myth of origin and a primal phantasmatic scene of guilt and shame around which German national identifications are organised. The first is the Walser–Bubis debate and the second the much more protracted but no less fierce debate about the building of a Holocaust memorial in Berlin, which peaked around the same time. Both debates are important in the German context because they come at the end of a long period of Christian Democratic (CDU) rule and at the beginning of a new SPD era in German politics. They are significant, moreover, because they appear to send contradictory messages about German self- understanding to the international community.
International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2016
The debate about a German Leitkultur (leading culture), as it attempts to address issues around the integration of immigrants, contributes to the discourse of “normalization” i that began in the early 1980s. With an attack on the Erinnerungskultur (culture of remembrance), conservatives aimed to reestablish a ‘normal’ German national consciousness within a European context. However, forty years after the end of WWII, President Richard Weizacker reminded the public that the traumatic Nazi past should be in the memory of every Germanii. Within Leitkultur narratives, Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (coming to terms with the past) raises further questions about what constitutes a contemporary German identity, particularly as Germany becomes increasingly dynamic within global political and cultural spheres. The collapse of the Berlin wall and subsequent influx of a large numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers led to one of the greatest challenges Germany faces today: how to reconcile the dif...