Berlin's Changing Memory Landscape: New Scholarship in German and English (original) (raw)
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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.
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, ...
Jews and Other Others at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin
ABSTRACT Is the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin a Jewish space? How are Jews presented there? What are the points of interest about Jews in the memorial from the perspective of the foundation that runs it as well as from various visitors’ perspectives? This article focuses on interac- tion and performance at the memorial, an understudied topic in com- parison to what the memorial presents in its installation and the debates that preceded its realisation. I argue that the memorial’s form and location create interpretation strategies that are based on the dialectics of representation and non-representation, emotional ex- perience versus knowledge about the Holocaust. This is differently manifested in the action of various groups visiting the memorial. Inter- pretation strategies rest on Jews being a category of memory. In sub- stantiating this claim, I focus on the experience of German visitors, compared to that of Jewish visitors and claim that whereas Jews’ expe- rience of the site is directly linked to sharing intimate knowledge about the Holocaust, Germans tend to talk about the site metaphorically and in emotional terms, confirming the memorial’s own ontology.
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...