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Babe-Bolyai UniversityInstitute of Central European Studies

ColloquiaJournal of Central European History

Volume XIX, 2012

MEGAPUBLISHINGHOUSE2012


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Founding EditorPompiliu Teodor

Editorial PanelOvidiu Ghitta

Tams LnhrtMria Lupescu Mak

Toader NicoarJudit Pl

Doru RadosavAna Victoria Sima

Advisory BoardCesare Alzati,University of Milano, Italy

Nicolae Bocan,Babe-Bolyai University, Cluj, RomaniaDennis Deletant,School of Slavonic and East European Studies,

University College London, U.K.Catherine Durandin,I.N.A.L.C.O., Paris, France

Bridget Heal, University of St Andrews, U.K.Keith Hitchins,University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana, U.S.A.

Graeme Murdock, Trinity College, Dublin, Irelanderban Papacostea,Institute of History Nicolae Iorga, Bucharest, Romania

Samantha Riches, University of Lancaster, U.K.Joseph Wolf,Institute for Danubian Swabian History, Tbingen, Germany

Translated byCarmen Veronica Borbly, Maria Crciun, Ana-Maria Gruia, Ofelia Man, Zsolt Orbn

DTP: Francisc Baja

Published with the support of Project no. PN-II-RU-TE 201130172 funded by Romanian NationalAuthority for Scientific Research CNCS-UEFISCDI and the Faculty of History and Philosophy of the

Babe-Bolyai University

Manuscripts and books for review should be sent to the editors.Adress: Babe-Bolyai University, Institute of Central European Studies,

Str. Koglniceanu 1, 400084 Cluj, RomaniaTel./fax: 0040/264/431659

e-mail: [email protected] the housestyle see the guidelines on the Colloquia webpage.

Colloquiais published annually.Yearly subscription USD 20

ISSN: 12235261

EDITURAMEGA

Cluj-Napocae-mail: [email protected]

www.edituramega.ro

EditorMaria Crciun

Babe-Bolyai University,Cluj, Romania

Editorial AssistantsElena FireaRadu Mrza


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Colloquia,Volume XIX, 2012

20

As a mirror of the present, their meaning is also continuously shifting,

as public discourses are themselves unfixed, and change with the change

of political regimes, ideologies, semantic rewritings of the social space,

and not ultimately, public taste. This suggests, paradoxically, a dynamic

perspective of the monument, for nothing is apparently more static and

fixed than monuments.

It is from this perspective that I will try to explore and discuss Berlin as

a very particular case, where the multiple political and historical traumas

of the twentieth century have left a conflicted and extremely vivid memorial

landscape. This landscape is defined by a memorial discourse often used

(perhaps more than in other former East European countries) to legitimize

the present ideological arena.

The long 90s4have witnessed in Berlin radical changes of the urban

stage, in sometimes convulsive events, where the question of memory has

almost always been central.

Monumental obsession

Besides the complex intertwine of social, aesthetic, political, economical

and ethical issues describing the cultural landscape in general,

memorial landscapes are particularly linked to those elements that appeal

directly and explicitly to memory. Among these, monuments occupy a

privileged place in providing public memory with visibility. Either as public

objects in the urban space or as monuments of architecture, the question

of monument and monumentality is intimately linked to the construction

of memorial landscapes.

Kerwin Lee Klein5 suggests that memory is always associated with

the rhetoric of healing and redemption, and this rhetoric might become

dangerous when uncritical. One of Kleins compelling arguments for the

recent emergence of memory as a key word (one that would replace the old

favorites: nature, culture, language) is the recurrent reference to trauma as

a key to authentic forms of memory. This would account for a perspective

that, as Klein puts it imagines memory as the return of the repressed.6

As much recent scholarship remarks, the memorial boom of the last

decades has been mirrored by a similar obsession to engrave urban

memory with signs of remembrance, either in the form of the monument or

in that of the memorial. Authors such as Erika Doss even speak of a proper

memorial mania7in discussing American contemporary national obsession

with issues of memory and history and the urgent desire to secure those

issues with various forms of public commemoration. While she detects this

mania as linked to a recent surge of the interest in WWII, she shows how

by engaging with recollections of war (and its heroes), these memorials

embody and appeal to a certain affective mode of public reception, one that

would help construct a public archive of feelings. Doss notices a recent

shift that has taken place in contemporary commemorative culture, from


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Memories of the East: Images, Objects, Landscapes

21

monument to the memorial, a shift that she identifies as a turn from the

monolithic master narratives of official art to the diverse, subjective, and

often conflicted expression of multiple publics.8

Addressing the same inflation of memorials and obsession with

monuments, Andreas Huyssen9indicates that the questions raised by this

preoccupation are always aesthetic as well as political, central to them

being the category of the monumental itself, and the difficulties to deal

with it contemporarily, without falling into heroic, figurative, pre-modern

forms of commemoration or the opposite, risking an excessive abstraction

that would lose the power of communicating to the public.

To Huyssen, especially because of its proximity to categories such as

the sublime and bigness, the monument in general is seen at the end

of the twentieth century as plurally suspect: politically (representative

for nineteenth century nationalisms and twentieth century totalitari-

anisms), socially (privileged mode of expression of mass movements and

mass politics), ethically (in its preference for bigness, in its attempt to

overwhelm the spectator), psychoanalytically because it is tied to narcis-

sistic delusions of grandeur and to imaginary wholeness. But most of all,

it has become aesthetically suspect as linked to nineteenth century bad

taste, to kitsch, and to mass culture.10

By questioning some of the ways in which the monumental engages

with notions such as memory, rhetoric, nostalgia and iconoclasm, this

paper will explore different instances of the memorial landscape arena,

as expressed through monumental expressions of architecture, either as

a symbol of a rejected past (Palast der Republik) or as the re-enactment of

the nineteenth century as promise for a better future (Stadtschloss).

Disputed11urban memory

Debates about the city as a locus for collective memory are not new.

Already in the 1960s, Aldo Rossis influential essay Architecture of the

Citylinked Halbwachs classical understanding of collective memory with

the ways in which the citys social and cultural continuity are preserved

and granted by the continuity of urban form, condensed in fragments of

architecture and city, that Rossi calls urban artifacts. During the last few

decades, the interest in memory has significantly increased, leading to a

veritable memory boom, expressed in the creation of a new discipline in

the humanities: the memory studies.12

Referring to the urban context in relation to the memory studies, Mark

Crinson13introduces the term urban memory. Closely related to memory

in general (both in its archival as a collector of the past -and processual-

as the act of remembering understanding), urban memory refers to the

city as endowed with memory (the anthropomorphic perspective) but also

to the city as a collector of objects, practices and visual images that allow

recollections of the past. In the same way memory has become an uncritical


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category, commonly associated with positive meanings (as conferring a

sense of identity, redemption and humanity etc.), urban memory or rather

cities as depositories of memorial strata are positively and unquestionably

appreciated, for they are identified with the space of the lived experience.

This is one of the reasons why a discourse that appeals to memory as a

value in an attempt to restore the past is a very persuasive one.

Yet memorial discourses are far from being innocent, and many authors

have warned about their semantic and rhetorical overload. As in any

rhetorical use, discourses, events, objects and practices have a partisan

side, depending on how they are manipulated.

Sometimes memory, if taken as an uncritical notion, can serve opposite

ideas. The two examples that will follow show how the use of the rhetoric

of urban memory can serve both for erasure and reconstruction.

The two urban situations that will be commented reflect extreme

attitudes towards urban memory and renewal, that both engage the

question of memory as a central theme.

The first refers to the recent demolition of the Palast der Republik(Palace

of the Republic), a large glass and bronze cube built in 19731976 to host

the Parliament of the GDR, as well as two large auditoria, art galleries,

a theatre, restaurants, a bowling alley, a post office and a disco. Simply

enumerating these functions of the Palace qualifies as a large piece of

urban equipment, where mixed public use was held together under the

unifying symbolic function as seat of the political power. It was built on the

place of the former Stadtschloss(City Palace), which was damaged during

the bombings over Berlin in the WWII and then demolished in 1950.

After the reunification in 1990, large amounts of asbestos were found in

the Palastand this was one of the official reasons to abandon and close it

to the public. During the 1990s, the asbestos elements had been removed,

so that in 2003 the building was declared safe, but still no use had been

given to it.

Yet even during the cleaning works, a lot of artists took over the empty

spaces of the Palace, using them for performances, exhibitions and uncon-

ventional artistic display.

Artist squatting is a phenomenon quite frequent in East Berlin, so whynot take over the most spectacular abandoned structure of them all, the

Palace? Actually, squatting in Berlin is part of the Ostalgic14recovery of

architectural structures left-over after the Fall, inhabiting neglected struc-

tures, empty tenements transformed in galleries, experimental theaters and

performances in deserted factories. To many, After-Wall Berlin presented

itself as the capital of second chances,15 a cool mixture of failure and

abandonment, filled with the promise of new beginnings.

It is within this context of artistic and young hip recoveries taking over

a traumatized city on its way to redefine itself that the Bundestag decided,

at the end of 2003, that the Palace was to be bulldozed. The few years ofinterim use of the Palace had confirmed it as a promising place for artistic


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interventions, so the official decision

to finally tear it down was received

with a wave of disapproval and

indignation, from the artistic and

leftist milieus as well as from many

East Berliners that grew fond of the

large imposing mass of bronze and

glass. The Palace appeared to be

uncomfortable for the new reunified

Germany, yet it is in this very place

that in August 1990, the former

GDR decided this reunification.

The dismantling began in 2006

and took over two years to be

completed. In the meantime, while

the Parliament was voting a literal

reconstruction of the former Prussian

Stadtschloss that came down in

1950, the demolition of the Palast der

Republik was staged and presented

to the public, in the form of a viewing

platform that would transform its

disappearance into a demonstrative

theater of disassembling.16(foto 01)

Mise-en-abyme. Kaiserpanorama17

The idea to reconstruct the ancient Hohenzollern Palace of the City that

used to be on the same site as the Palace of the Republic was put on

the agenda of the Bundestag as early as 2002,18but the final decision to

literally rebuild the Stadtschlosswas voted only in 2007, when the GDR

Palast was just being dismantled.

An architectural competition was organized in 2008, won by Genovese

architect Franco Stella. The brief specifically asked for three of the former

baroque facades of the old Palace to be rebuilt. Only the fourth facade, the

one facing the river, could be subject to innovation. Franco Stella chose to

treat it in a grid of loggias, as a reference to both Schinkels Neoclassical

design for the Altes Museum and as a sort of late reverence to the language

of his Italian Neo-rationalist teacher, Aldo Rossi.19

The construction site began in 2010, and the old-new Stadtschloss is

supposed to be completed sometime in 2014.20In the meantime, an infor-

mation blue cube installed on one of the sides is supposed to play the role

of a transitional element.

The Stadtschloss, called the Humboldt Forum a name officially quali-

fying it to symbolize, as declared, knowledge, openness to other cultures,

Foto 01. Palast der Republikin demolition.2006 (seen from the Alexander Tower).

Photo Tudor Constantinescu


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and to culture... that fits Germany, will host exhibition spaces open to

exotic artists (coming from Africa, Asia etc.), as well as recreational spaces,

auditoriums, and a part of the Humboldt University.

Franco Stellas argument for using a classic historicist language is at

the least debatable. He declared to Michael Kimmelman21that one wouldnt

build a modern building in San Marco in Venice! He adds that the Schloss

was important for the German nation and because Berlin is disjointed, not

homogeneous, its all the more important to recover its history. Memory is

what distinguishes Europe from America. (sic!)

Although highly advertised as a faithful restitution of the Stadtschloss

demolished in its turn by the communists in 1950 GDR, the process of

reconstruction worked as a proper mise-en-abyme: in order to be installed,

it had to erase all signs of the former regime, through a brutal and demon-

strative act of replacement.

The reconstruction did not remain unquestioned and it provoked an

ongoing debate about, on the one hand, the destruction of the GDR Palace,

and on the other hand, about the opportunity to reconstruct the City Palace

in the original baroque form.

An online petition has been launched, kein-schloss-in-meinem-namen.

de,22signed by hundreds of people. The first page of the petition summa-

rizes the arguments against the reconstruction of the Stadtschloss:

We oppose the palace replica because it stands for an image of

Germanys past and present we do not share because it turns its back

on the city because the scheme for its use is unconvincing because we

are critical of the manner in which the project has been pushed through.

Even the members of the competition jury were rather reserved with

regard to the competition brief: Mario Vittorio Lampugnani (IBA) would

have preferred a more flexible and freer brief, while David Chipperfield,

author of the very subtle extension and repair of the New Museum (Neues

Museum) also suggested that a modern building in the old proportion would

have been more suitable.23Another prominent member of the jury, Giorgio

Grassi,24 in a very sensitive and critical text on the question of recon-

struction in architecture, himself an author of architectural reconstruction

for the theater of Sagunto implied that a contemporary challenged projectwould be far more appropriate for Berlin. His position is worth quoting at a

longer length, for it provides a better understanding of the symmetry of the

consecutive destruction/reconstruction of the two Palaces:

... treating monuments as if they were merely political symbols is not

just simplistic but politically childish; and it is also always an act of gratu-

itous violence. That is what the GDR did when it destroyed the Berliner

Schloss and built the Palast der Republik in its place (). But it is also

what the city is preparing to do today in an effort to `put things back in

their proper place, as the saying goes formally in their proper place, and

yet in the process obliterating a piece of the citys history, which belongs toit in spite of everything. ()


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In considering possible options for the new building from literal recon-

struction to a large cultural hub, he continues:

In my opinion, none of these responses is worthy of the city of Berlin,

neither of its new situation nor much or less of the city as it was before the

demolition. I believe the only viable alternative is the one that has already

been mentioned, that is, to replace the old castle with a new one A Berlin

city castle constructed today, with todays eyes and means (for that matter,

is there an alternative?). Frankly, an almost impossible challenge, in my

view at least (however, one in which more than a hundred architects were

involved).

Although never just merely political, to rephrase Grassis remark, buildings

are however especially at times of political change at stake in the middle of

conflicts, and since they are the most visible remnants and signs of the past,

they are also, among the first ones to be destroyed and replaced.

Rhetoric of place and memory

In discussing the monumental meaning of architecture, Lawrence Vale

observes how there is a strong, inseparable link between politically

charged architectural monuments and the media campaigns constructed

to control (or subvert) their interpretation.25As he compellingly argues,

political ideologies use the built environment as a means to interpret

national identity and forge politically useful connections to the past. The

city is thus imagined and constructed through visually enhanced symbols

that serve the construction of a nation imaging. In this respect, Vale

uses the term mediated-monument, in order to define an architectural

monument that needs media campaigns that are supposed to shape its

interpretation.

Taking up Vales idea, I suggest that the whole media campaign to subvert

the Palast der Republik and justify its demolition was at the same time

supposed to help advertise the re-construction of the old-new Stadtschloss.

The two campaigns ran simultaneously, and while the destruction of the

GDR Palace involved a whole range of arguments, from the utilitarian (its

uselessness in the new urban and political context) to the hygienic26(the

asbestos elements that constituted a threat to public health) and finally,

less emphasized yet, I would argue, the most important, the symbolic

argument: through its location in the very heart of the city, next to the

Dome and Schinkels Altes Museum, the Palace wrongfullyoccupied the

site most symbolically charged and, thus becoming a creator of urban and

collective identity.

Reinstalling this highly symbolical site to its former configuration of

the nineteenth century would then equal restoring the urban memory27

to a moment of glorious, supposedly consensual public space. Part of the

answer to the question why (if absolutely necessary) replacing the GDR

Palace did not involve a more contemporary architectural approach resides


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in the seduction of the surrogate28for the public taste. Why are surrogates

seductive? Their emotional power is that they manage to trigger a sort of

nostalgic feeling for an allegedly better past, transformed into a promise

for the future.

On the other hand, as Florian Urban29suggests, the use of neo-historical

architecture to provide the experience of historicity is not new: the idea of

a reconstruction of a nineteenth century Berlin has been a fantasy shared

by both East and West Berliners.

So the taste for nineteenth century architecture provides in a way a

possible recovery of an untraumatic, undivided, collective city.

The use of the past thus implies that the rhetoric of memory is always

activated. Rhetoric is common to both place and discourses about

memory,30and it is precisely the ways in which they connect that define our

public culture. Moreover, in referring to the memory place relationship,

the authors imply something that has often been pointed out in studies

about place,31that it outlines the rhetorical qualities of places. It seems

indeed that significant urban places are endowed with rhetorical qualities.

Moreover, in cities that bear a heavy burden of traumatic memory, like

Berlin, places are particularly symbolic forms. It is precisely this symbolic

character of places that invests them with intense rhetorical qualities.

In this perspective, the context of destruction / recreation of Berlins

symbolic center engages with a complex rhetoric of place and memory,

where the city projects a memory into the empty block that remains after

the destruction of the Palast. However this memory seems to be overly

selective. The question remains on how truthful and legitimate this alleged

memory is with respect to the citys history and recovery, thus to the

memorial discourse itself.

Nostalgia

In her book The Future of Nostalgia,32 Svetlana Boym recalls that

nostalgia originally means a longing for a home that no longer exists, or

has even never existed, a mixed feeling of loss and a romance with ones

own fantasy.33Classically associated with melancholy and identified as

a disease, common mostly to soldiers longing for home, it was believed

in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that this condition could be

cured with the displacement and estrangement of oneself, either through

drugs or through a recuperatory journey (preferably in the Swiss Alps). As

melancholy used to be associated with an organ (the black bile), nostalgia

was also believed to have a specific locus, and in the eighteenth century

scientists were looking for the existence of a nostalgic bone that would

account for the condition.

Highly exploited by the Romantics, the twentieth century recuperates

nostalgia introducing an utopian dimension, as a longing for a time and

place that are yet unknown, enhanced by the ever-growing technological


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capacity to recreate the past in vivid, realistic reconstructions. As Boym

argues, paradoxically progress didnt cure nostalgia but exacerbated it.

In counterpoint to our fascination with cyberspace and the virtual global

village, there is no less global epidemic of nostalgia, an affective yearning

for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a

fragmented world, Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism

in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.34

Yet nostalgia seems to be commonly understood as a lower and unethi-

cally charged version of memory, one that has lost all the heavy burden

of guilt and responsibility. In her compelling study, Boym explores the

recent predicaments of nostalgia in the former communist countries, as

it seems to have become a symptom of our age, a historical emotion.35

Nostalgia would thus be rather a prolonging of memory than its poor

relative, as Charles Maier would have put it nostalgia is to memory what

kitsch is to art.36

In a now classical essay, Frederic Jameson37suggests that nostalgia or

the retro cult as staged by the film industry of the 19701980 is as much

about an idealized image of the past as it is about a version of the future

as an attempt to reinvent the past in the form of the pastiche. It thus

seems that there is an inherent persuasive and conservative dimension

of nostalgia, consisting of its idealizing force and historical manipulation.

One might argue that the postmodern position as discussed by Jameson

in the late 90s would apply to a lesser extent to the early 2010. Yet it is

precisely this inadvertence that I find interesting in the way it highlights

the presence and actuality of the whole nostalgia rhetoric when appealing

to urban memory in order to justify pastiche reconstructions.

Already in the late 90s, there has been a vigorous comeback of nostalgia,

especially in former socialist countries, where it seemed to become the

predominant form of popular memory of the everyday socialist life. Artifacts

of the former socialist epoch, although rejected in the early 90s, immediately

after the fall of the Wall, became more and more fashionable. Cleansed of

their ideological burden, objects, music, clothes from the popular socialist

culture soon became the new code for the urban cool and chic, especially

among the young generations that at the beginning of the 90s were tooyoung to have experienced the deprivations and lack of freedom of living

under communism, but close enough to recuperate the fashion.

This fashion is common to most of the post-socialist countries, with

obvious local38particularities that go from its name to the kind of music

played. In former East Germany this retro-cult is known as Ostalgie or

Ostalgia, designating a nostalgia for the East (Ost + nostalgia), and has

come to refer generally to life under socialism, even for other former

communist countries.

Moreover, there has been very recently a sudden rise of such aspects of

east-nostalgia, especially linked to the symbolic anniversary of twenty yearssince the fall of communism. Events throughout Europe have marked this


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symbolic moment, one of the most prominent for the end of the twentieth

century. In NY, a large exhibition entitled Ostalgiatook place in the New

Museum, in 2011.39

In the particular case of Berlin, Ostalgia is complicated by the traumatic

division of the city. After the reunification, remains of this division (the Wall,

the border check-points etc.) became in their turn, at the same time relics,

memorabilia symbolical fragments of artifacts, and fashionable objects to

be exploited by the commemoration and tourism industries. (foto 02)

In a way, east-nostalgia is explained by the necessity to come to terms

with the recent past. Within the context of a total reshaping of the social,

political, economical and most important, symbolic landscapes, most ofthe former East countries experienced a need for legitimacy, one that could

reconnect them with their present. Against historys broken promises,40

it was only natural to turn to memory (as opposed to official, previously

manipulated history) as well as to a remote past, one that seemed to be

exempt of guilt and recent deception.

Although seen at first as a finally accomplished and long-awaited

promise, the reunification of the two Germanies would soon raise a lot

of questions and difficulties. On the one hand, it seemed to respond to

nostalgia for a national unity lost after World War II, yet a half-century

of political, economical, social and symbolical separation left them moredivided and estranged than it might have looked in the early 1990s. As

Foto 02. Nostalgic Landscapes Checkpoint Charlie, 2012. Foto Celia Ghyka


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Andreas Huyssen remarks, it brought, not just in Germany but in most of

the former Eastern countries, a sharpening of the national question, the

opening of new fissures and faultiness in the problematic of nation.41

It would then appear understandable to appeal to a moment of the past

that would at the same time counterbalance the recent shameful events

in German history, such as the national-socialist moment, and restore the

glorious, monumental splendor of the lost Prussian military state, such as

the Stadtschloss.

Moreover, this restoration would wipe out another ambiguous (or at

least un-consensual) moment of the very recent past: the GDR period,

which not only essentially contributed to historys broken promises, but

also symbolically sealed the separation of the two Germanies.

Returning to my former question as to why are surrogates seductive,

I would add that the general unfocused nostalgia inspired by surrogate-

environments in general has here more dramatic tones, that address the

difficulties of the reunification, where a lot of East Germans do not feel at

home in their new country, while West Berliners would like to recreate a

sort of historic (translated through urban) continuity in the symbolic place

of the city, formerly belonging to the GDR.

Iconoclasm

Iwould now like to get back to the question of disputed memory intro-

duced earlier. It seems that in the realm of the visible, there is another

attitude where the disputed nature of memories is central: iconoclasm.

Contemporary iconoclasm, cleansed of most of its religious content resides

in the politicized and non-consensual nature of public memory. Each

regime decides to erase marks of the precedent, especially if the transition

has been abrupt or violent, such as after 1989. Most of the post-communist

countries had to deal, to various extents and intensities, with a recon-

figuration of their symbolical landscapes, an important part of which is

described by the political nature of monuments.

In Berlin, the iconoclast movement began shortly after 1990, especially

after the decision, in June 1991, to transfer the capital from Bonn to Berlin

and became official with the creation of a commission that was charged

to handle monuments in East Berlin. Yet its initiation did not occur until

after the dismantling of the colossal statue of Lenin by Tomsky,42 in

November 1991.

The decision to destroy Lenins statue was followed by a wave of protests,

cataloging it as blind destructive fury and primitive iconoclasm.43

A whole range of artistic and vernacular interventions transformed the

monument into an intense site of public debate. Arguments invoked

urbanistic reasons the dislocation of the square that would remain void

and itself dismantled after the removal, the monument being part of the

architectural conception of the whole urban ensemble.


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Another powerful set of arguments concentrated on East Germans

uneasiness to identify with the new reunified Germany, perceived by many

as an economical and political threat of being colonized by the Wessis.44One

of the first performances to stage these conflicts was Krzysztof Wodickos

projection in 1990, during the exhibition Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit(The

Finitude of Freedom), transforming Lenin into a Polish Shopper, a common

figure in Berlin in the early 1990s, equipped with a cart full of cheap

electronic devices, symbols of the new society of consumption.45

The vivid reactions triggered by the disappearance of former communist

monuments and symbols (such as street names, statues, or, in the case of

the Palace, whole buildings) are on the one hand a result of the formerly

mentioned nostalgia, and on the other of a general reconsideration of

the architecture built in the former socialist countries, especially during

the 1970s and 1980s. Another, more general level of the anti-iconoclast

attitude is that of considering that a citys memory is a palimpsest of

multiple, even traumatic strata and erasing these strata is a violent, anti-

memorial act.

However, shortly after Lenins disappearance, the Deputy Chamber

adopted a decision that would legitimate the newly created commission,

an iconoclast statement that invested monuments with a sort of extended

political and ideological power, at stake every time that ideologies change:

Immediately after a system of government is dissoluted or reversed,

its monuments at least those that served to legitimate and maintain its

power have no longer a reason to exist.46

From this perspective, I would argue that the disappearance of the

Palast der Republik is part of such an iconoclast attitude that extends

both the nostalgia for a presumably better past (the nineteenth century), a

refusal of the recent past and a quest for legitimation through the rhetoric

of memory.

Unifying promises: Einheitsdenkmal

In describing the dynamics of the Berlin memorial landscape, another

example seems to be quite revealing. Within the same grandiose project

of reconstruction of the Schlossplatz, symbolically recreated as heart

of the city, the municipality decided to match the public place to be

with a new monument, dedicated to the German unity:Einheitsdenkmal

(Monument to unity).

The idea to build such a monument to reunification came along in 1998,

and was brought to the public agenda by Florian Mausbach, president of

the German Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning. At the time,

other more urgent memorial issues divided the Berliners, namely the

controversies over the memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, soon

to be joined by the extended controversy over the Rroma and homosexual

victims of the Holocaust.


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Yet, in 2007, the German Bundestag approved Mausbachs idea to

build a memorial to freedom and unity, to be realized in 2009, symboli-

cally marking 20 years after the Fall. Nevertheless, the distance from an

idea to its implementation needed a little longer, so that the competition for

the memorial only took place in 2010. Again, the competition brief proved

to be a delicate and difficult one: the monument was supposed not only to

commemorate the events of 1989, but, as stated by the Bundestag, the

freedom movements and efforts to achieve unity in the past centuries.(!)

Thus, a monument to historical memory...? The monument is to become a

German national monument, one that would encompass everything from

1848 to 1989!

The site chosen for the monument is itself a controversial one: the huge

pedestal (4080 m) of the former equestrian statue of Wilhelm I, located on the

Schlossplatz, in front of the former now dismantled Palast der Republik.

Other politicians implied however that Schlossplatzis a meaningless place

with regards to 1989, and that Alexanderplatzor Brandenburger Torwould

be more appropriate, being symbolically and physically linked to the 1989

events. Mausbachs arguments suggest that, while Alexanderplatz has

become the center of consumerism, Brandenburger Tor is, on the other

hand, already saturated with memory and monuments. Yet another

argument comes to light, for to Mausbach the monument should be closer

to Western Berlin, for, he says, it is the West that brought freedom to

the East. Moreover, for him, placing the monument in the Schlossplatz

would create an urban arc of architectural tension that would be placed

between the Holocaust memorial and the unity monument, alluding to the

symbolism of a monument to revolution replacing Kaiser Wilhelm I.47

The wining project (designed by Milla&Partner in collaboration with

Berlin choreographer Sasha Waltz) proposes a 55 m long bowl that

see-saws visitors as they climb in. The project is entitled Citizens in

Motion and should not be approached, the authors tell us, Merely as

an object for contemplation the intention is that it be entered and set

in motion, movement being achieved by visitors working together as a

group. The design was created in a spirit where, by means of creative

action, each is enabled to bring benefit to the community and as a conse-quence shape society... The visitors themselves the citizens who set the

whole in motion comprise an active constituent of the monument. The

vision is that it would be a continually changing choreographic expression

of the Peaceful Revolution of 1989.

The balancing bowls is inscribed with Wir sind das Volk. Wir sind ein

Volk (We are the nation. We are one nation) and is supposed to be located

just in front of the new reconstructed Schloss, on a platform above the

river, on the place of the former Kaiser Wilhelm monument. The authors

call the bowl boat / leaf a social sculpture, by this engaging with the idea

that visitors will be an active part of the sculpture, and that their movingpresence will create an expression for the peaceful revolution of 1989.


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By way of contrast, a critical use of the nation (united or not) in recent

artistic production would be Hans Haackes project Der Bevlckerung, in

the inner court of the Bundestag, a project that through its symbolic title

displaces the interest in the nation (as also stated on the frontispiece of

the building: Dem Deutchen Volketo the German Nation) towards a more

general, less ideological appeal to the population. (foto 03)

Critical recoveries

As often, the issue of the disputed dismantling of the Palast der Republik

has rapidly been recovered by the artistic community. Impressed by

the symbolism of this huge abandoned skeleton in the middle of the city,

many artists documented its disappearance, turning it into a nostalgic

object.

British artist Tacita Dean used the reflective surfaces of the Palace for

a poetic sequence of still shots for her film Palast (2004). She describes

the two opposite positions: the destructive iconoclast and the ones that

believe the Palace should be kept in place. The latter position is a plea

for preservation: to level such a building is to level memory, and that a

city needs to keep its scars within the fabric of its architecture in order to

preserve what our finite human memory will soon forget.48

03. Hans Haacke, Der Bevlkerung. 2012. Photo Celia Ghyka


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Berlin artists team Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani rebuilt the Palastas

a small-scale model, which they renamed Club of the Republic, recalling

the much used restaurants and dance clubs formerly found in the so-called

GDR Cultural Palace. (foto 04)

Photographer Thomas Florschuetz realized a series of large-scale works

on the ruins of the building, just before its demolition, capturing the

strange force of this abandoned architecture. (foto 05)

In a subtle and very sensitive project, French artist Sophie Calle

documented in 1996 the disappearance of the symbols of the former GDR.

Under the theme Souvenirs de Berlin Est (Memories from East Berlin),she

collects opinions from the passers-by, about disappeared signs of the GDR.

Peoples responses attest how memories are never the same for everyone,

and this is why they are subject to contestation. One of her works that

accompanies the interviews shows the central symbol of the Palast, in the

process of being removed. (foto 06)

The German pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2010 was centered

on the disappearance of the Palast. Entitled Sehnsucht (Longing), as a

dimension essential to nostalgia, the pavilion consisted in an installation

of the original bronze globe lights from the foyer of the Palast der Republik,assembled in the Hall of Mirrors of the Pavilion. (foto 07)

Such artistic practices, often ironic, are a way to subvert the heavy

rhetoric of memory and history in official uses, transferring it to a more

metaphorical, poetic and critical understanding.

Rhetoric of nostalgia

Berlin is a privileged city of memory. The traumas it suffered during

the twentieth century had left a devastated, divided city that took this

situation as an opportunity to build on, to grasp all the second and third

chances it has been given.

Foto 04. Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani. Club of the Republic.(expo Architektonika,2011-2012. Hamburger Bahnhof Museum fr Gegenwart, Berlin). Photo Celia Ghyka


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Foto 05. Thomas Florschuetz

Ohne Titel (Palast) 53,

2006 (expo Architektonika.

Hamburger Bahnhof Museum fr Gegenwart,

Berlin). Photo Celia Ghyka

Foto 06. Sophie Calle. Faade

of the Palast (originally in the

installation The Detachment

Die Entfernung, 1996) in

Architektonika. Hamburger

Bahnhof Museum frGegenwart, 2011-12, Berlin.

Photo Celia Ghyka


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In this context, the urban and symbolical landscape is, to a great

extent, shaped through the recovery of memory. Memory is, for Berlin

as well as for many of the former socialist countries, a way to reconnect

with a supposedly better past, at the same time a promise for a better

future and a promise to recover a legitimacy that the recent past had

wiped away.

But memory though public is never singular and unified, it is

always partial, fragmented, and thus partisan. Memorys discourses are

rhetorical, inasmuch as they are partisan and persuasive. This means that

the memorial landscape interwoven by expressions of memory is in its

turn subject to change, conflict, and multiple re-enactments. Central to

these, public architecture and monuments engage in their turn rhetoric

overloads. Among the most visible signs of the past, collectors of urban

memory, they are often the first ones to be attacked and replaced, to serve

as the support for iconoclasms.

The dialectic of demolition/reconstruction, as illustrated by the twoBerlin Palaces is centered, although in opposite directions, on the questions

Foto 07. Sehnsucht, installation, German Pavilion at theVenice Biennale, 2012 photo Tudor Constantinescu


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of memory, history, recovery and nostalgia. Rejection of an uncomfortable

past or fantasy of a reunified, potentially consensual and glorious future

acquired through the image of the past, they illustrate Pierre Noras49

warning about the conflicting nature of memory and the supposedly

unifying power of history. If approached uncritically, nostalgia may justify

pastiche, surrogate reconstructions of history. In its radical expression, it

can justify iconoclastic attitudes. It can also serve to idealize a past that

has lost its ideological meaning, implying a longing for an everyday that

used to be better valued.

NOTES

1 As a subspecies of the cultural landscape as it was defined by John B. Jackson and

Denis Cosgrove and operating as a system of representation that comprises the inter-

laced aesthetic, political, ethical, economical, social elements etc., that are responsible

for the transmission of culture.

2 Owen Dwyer Derek Alderman, Memorial Landscapes: Analytic Questions and

Metaphors, GeoJournal, 73 (2008): 165178.

3 I use the terms collective and public memory as quasi overlapping, although their genealogy

in the humanities would reveal nuances in their understanding. Although it exceeds the

scope of this article, it is worth mentioning how discourses about memory have become

central to studies in humanities, forcing each discipline and author to try and refine orquestion the classical notion collective memory, as formulated by Halbwachs in 1939.

Terms such as social memory, popular memory, cultural memory, and public memory at

the same time broaden and complicate the original understanding of the notion. Public

memory, according to Edward S. Casey, would be a more accurate name for the memory

that is endowed with visibility, in the space of appearance. This is of course a perspective

influenced by Hannah Arendts definition of the public space as the space of appearance.

Following this distinction, memory is central to the construction of the public space. Or,

more radically, I would argue that memory is constitutive of the public space.

4 As has been called the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Charles Esche Maria

Hlavanova, Former West: Introductory Notes http://www.formerwest.org/ResearchCongresses/1stFORMERWESTCongress/FormerWest.

5 Kerwin Lee Klein, On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse, Representations,no. 69 (January 2000): 127150.

6 Klein, On the Emergence of Memory, p. 138.

7 Erika Lee Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University OfChicago Press, 2010). She equals the present day memorial mania to the statue-mania

of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, taking on Maurice Agulhons account of

the statuomania, linked to the forging of the modern nation-states in the nineteenth

century in Europe, as well as to the monumental and nationalistic impulses following

the Civil War in the United States. As Doss remarks, many artists saw themselves as

the cultural custodians of public taste and viewed their statues as ways to educate the

public about official and hence appropriate national histories and ideals.

8 Erika Lee Doss, The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theoryof Temporary Memorials(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008).


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9 Andreas Huyssen, Monumental Seduction, in Idem, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsestsand the Politics of Memory(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 3337.

10 Huyssen, Monumental Seduction, p. 39.

11 I refer here to la mmoire dispute, as defined by Jacques Le Goff in discussing the fall of

communist countries and the recuperation of memory, in his foreword for Alain Brossat

Sonia Combe et al., lEst, La Mmoire Retrouve(Paris: La Dcouverte, 1990).

12 The boom in memory studies is in itself a very interesting topic when applied to monument,

architecture and the city. Yet it is not the aim of my article to assess the discourses and

critical approaches of the field. For reviews of the open debate on memorial studies, I

suggest a few excellent accounts, among others: Jeffrey K. Olick Joyce Robbins, Social

Memory Studies: From Collective Memory to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic

Practices, Annual Review of Sociology,24 (1998): 105140; Klein, On the Emergence ofMemory, pp. 127150; David Berliner, Social Thought & Commentary: The Abuses of

Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly,

78/1 (Winter 2005): 197211.

13 Mark Crinson (ed.), Urban Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City(New York:Routledge, 2005).

14 Ostalgiarefers to a longing for everyday life of the former GDR and is a concept thatdeveloped in Germany in the late 1990s. I will refer to this later on in the article.

15 Michael Kimmelman, Rebuilding a Palace May Become a Great Blunder, The New YorkTimes, December 31, 2008.

16 As captured in the video by Reynold Reynolds, Letzter Tag der Republik, 2010 (http://vimeo.com/26032322)

17 I allude here to Walter Benjamins chapter Kaiserpanorama from his famous text

Einbahnstrasse (1928), translated as One-Way Street and Other Writings (London:Penguin, 2009). The chapter discusses extensively what he sees as the disastrous

situation of Germany (political, economical, social) on the eve of the WWII.

18 http://www.bmvbs.de/Anlage/original_933720/Beschluss-des-Deutschen-

Bundestages-vom4.-Juli2002.pdf

19 The fact that Franco Stella has been identified as Aldo Rossis student should not lead

to unjustified judgment about Rossis architectural discourse and does not in the least

account for Stellas aesthetic (and ideological) choices. After all, how much can a teacher

be responsible for his pupils actions?

20 http://www.stadtschloss-berlin.de/bildergalerie.html

http://europaconcorsi.com/projects/82021--Berliner-Schloss-Humboldt-Forum- Here can be seen models and the project of the future construction.

21 Kimmelman, Rebuilding a Palace.

22 http://schlossdebatte.de/?cat=23 ht tp ://schlossdebatte.de/wp-content/

uploads/2008/12/13_humboldt-forum_auslobungstext.pdf

23 Chris Foges, Franco Stella: Hohernzollern Stadtschloss, Berlin, Architecture Today,no. 186 (2009). http://www.architecturetoday.co.uk/?p=1112.

24 http://schlossdebatte.de/?p=449 (accessed 23.11.2012).

25 Lawrence Vale, Mediated Monuments and National Identity, The Journal of Architecture,4 (Winter 1999): 391408.

26 It is interesting to remark how a very modern argument demolition of the existentbuilding for reasons of hygiene and public health is used in order to rebuild an


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example of anachronic, nineteenth century architecture, the same architecture that

moderns held in contempt.

27 For a detailed account of the history of the place (the Palace Square Schlossplatz), seeMoritz Holfelder, Palast Der Republik(Berlin: Links Christoph Verlag, 2008).

28 I extend here Naomi Kleins inquiry into the reasons that make the Disney towns and

theme-parks seductive environments and what are the discursive mechanisms that

trigger the emotional response to these surrogates. In Naomi Klein, NO LOGO(London:Harper Perennial, 2000), pp. 156157.

29 Florian Urban, Neo-Historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the GermanDemocratic Republic 19701990(Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

30 Dr. Greg Dickinson Carole Blair Brian L. Ott (eds.), Places of Public Memory: TheRhetoric of Museums and Memorials(Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2010). Theydefine rhetoric as the study of discourses, events, objects and practices that attend to

their character as meaningful, legible, partisan, and consequential. I will use a more

general understanding of rhetoric, deriving from the previous definition that emphasizes

especially the persuasive (and thus implicitly partisan) character of rhetoric.

31 For a socio-spatial approach of the rhetorical qualities of places, see Bernard Debarbieux,

Le lieu, fragment et symbole du territoire, Espaces et Socits, 8283(1995): 1336. Also,for an extensive bibliography on place, see Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A PhilosophicalHistory(Berkeley Los Angeles London: University of California Press, 1998).

32 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia(New York: Basic Books, 2001).

33 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia,p. 12.



36 Charles S. Maier, The End of Longing? Notes toward a History of Postwar German

National Longing, in John S. Brady Beverly Crawford Sarah Elise Wiliarty (eds.),ThePostwar Transformation of Germany: Democracy, Prosperity, and Nationhood(Ann Arbor,MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 271285, especially 273.

37 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society, in Hal Foster (ed.),

The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: The New Press, 1998),pp. 111125.

38 For example in former Yugoslavia it is known as Yugonostalgia, in URSS soviet chic

etc. The phenomenon is spread to other former socialist countries. Cinema has played

an important role in this come back, through films such as Good Bye, Lenin! (Wolfgang

Becker, 2003).

39 http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/ostalgia.

40 Alain Brossat, Introduction, in Brossat Combe et al., lEst, La Mmoire Retrouve.

41 Huyssen, Monumental Seduction.

42 The 19 meter monument to Lenin was inaugurated in 1970 and placed in the former

Lenin Platz, renamed today as Platz der Vereinten Nationen (United Nations Place).For a detailed account of the Lenin monument and its avatars, see Dario Gamboni,

The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution(London:Reaktion Books, 2007), pp. 7985.

43 Winter, quoted in Gamboni, The Destruction of Art,p. 83.44 Ironic denomination for the Western Germans.


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45 Kzrysztof Wodiczko, Critical Vehicles. Writings, Projects, Interviews (Cambridge,Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999).

46 Announcement of the Deputy Chamber, Berlin, June 1992, quoted in Sophie Calle,

Souvenirs de Berlin-Est(Arles: Actes Sud, 1999).

47 Memorial Fatigue. Disunity in Berlin over Unity Monument. Der Spiegel, 12/12/2008.http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/memorial-fatigue-disunity-in-berlin-

over-unity-monument-a596173.html.

48 Tacita Dean, Berlin Works. Exhibition catalogue(London: Tate St Ives, 2005), p. 22. Quotedby Elizabeth Manchester, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dean-palast-t12212/

text-summary.

49 Memory divides, history unifies, see Pierre Nora, Nachwort, in Etienne Franois

Hagen Schulze (eds.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (3 vols, Mnchen: C. H. Beck Verlag,2001), vol. 3, p. 686.

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