Urban Memory and Visual Culture in Berlin

Front matter

Framing the Asynchronous City, 1957-2012

Amsterdam University Press CITIESANDCULTURES

Cities and Cultures is an interdisciplinary humanities book series addressing the interrelations between contemporary cities and the cultures they produce. The series takes a special interest in the impact of globalization on urban space and cultural production, but remains concerned with all forms of cultural expression and transformation associated with contemporary cities.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction Berlin and the Question of ‘Urban Memory’

1. Rememberingthe ‘Murdered City’

Epilogue

Notes Bibliography Filmography

List of Illustrations

Index ai.

Acknowledgements

This book has its origins in the paths I walked across the open space between the Potsdamer Platz S-Bahn station and the Staatsbibliothek in the winter of 1992, during a year I spent in Berlin as a part of my doctoral studies. I did not possess a camera at the time, so I do not possess what would now be a rich repository of photographs of that strange, liminal wasteland in the middle of the former divided city. Of course, I can always search Flickr.

Ten years later I returned to Berlin on a scholarship from the Berlin Parliament (the Studienstiftung des Abgeordnetenhauses von Berlin), to begin work on a tentative project on the ruins of Berlin. Potsdamer Platz was certainly different, but more crucial was the renewing of the intellectual friendships I had made during that first visit, as I sought to think through some of the conundrums with which the cityscape confronted me. More than another ten years on, and thanks in large part to the support of AHRC Research Leave Scheme from September 2009 to January 2010, regular research assistance from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and the British Academy, and research leave periods granted by my former employer, the University of Aberdeen, this book has finally found a form.

My thanks are due, primarily, to all those editors who read and commented so carefully on my ideas as they crystallized over the years. Thanks are also owed to the many friends and colleagues in Berlin, Aberdeen, Durham, and elsewhere, who have given of their time in indulging, and questioning, my obsession with the ruins of this city. A non-exhaustive list must include David Barnett, Martin Dammann, Paul Flaig, Katherine Groo, Uta Kornmeier, Karen Leeder, Christoph Lindner, Jonathan Long, Nikolaj Lubecker, Arwed Messmer, Bill Niven, Dora Osborne, Joachim Seinfeld and Geoff Westgate.

My greatest thanks go to my enthusiastic children, Verity and Dominic, who provided great company on recent tours of Berlin, and above all to my acutest editor and least melancholic reader, my wife, Janet Stewart, without whose unwavering support and belief this work would not have seen the light of day.

As is the nature of such a long-term project, fragments of it have been previously published in different forms and contexts, none of which specifically addressed the book’s central question of urban memory. Material that is reused here in Chapter Two first appeared with Wiley in a special issue of German Life and Letters in 2010 dealing with ‘Cityscapes of the GDR’, and more recently in Edinburgh German Yearbook 2016 (Camden House). Some of the writing in Chapter Three previously appeared in Peter McIsaac and Gabriele Mueller’s ‘Exhibiting the German Past’ (University of Toronto Press, 2015). Some material in Chapter Four previously appeared in Christoph Lindner’s volume Globalization, Violence and the Visual Culture of Cities (Routledge, 2009) and Berlin: Kultur und Metropole in den zwanziger und seit den neunziger Jahren (iudicium, 2007), and other parts more recently in Karen Leeder’s special edition of New German Critique (Duke University Press, 2015) on ‘Figuring Lateness in Modern German Culture’. I am grateful to all these publishers for allowing me to reuse this material as part of a coherent whole.