Dresden, European City

Ethos, 2006

This article is an examination of the recent reconstruction of the Church of Our Lady (Frauenkirche) in Dresden, Germany, in relation to a desire for normalcy, which in this case finds expression in a fantasy of resurrection. The reconstruction of a monumental edifice framed as a victim of World War II and socialism both depends on and enacts the fantasy that historical loss can be undone. In addition, the project identifies Germany with German cultural heritage, which appears wholly distinct from the nation's burdened pasts, and offers a monumental symbolic touchstone for narratives of modern German history in which the nation and its citizens figure primarily as suffering victims. In this way, the reconstruction of the church embodies something more complex than mere forgetting. It enacts a fantasy of undoing loss, rendering the work of mourning unnecessary, while at the same time embracing injury and victimhood. [Germany, Dresden, nationalism, architecture, memory]

Germanic Review, 2005

... lective memory of its people," a relationship that is responsible for the special significance an urban structure ... This ideological death was also mirrored by physical destruction. ... 1945 led directly to a peri-od of political restoration.3 Immediately after the war, political and societal ...

Memory and Politics of Cultural Heritage in Poland and Germany, 2015

[from "Introduction" by Klaus Ziemer] Grzegorz Kęsik analyses another motif connected with memory and cultural politics. He is interested in policies regarding urban historical spaces in Poland and Germany. He proposes six different categories of attitudes towards such spaces, ranging from restoration and conservation, to retroversion and reconstruction. His findings are surprising. The principles according to which the historical spaces destroyed during World War II were rebuilt were originally opposite. In Poland, the dominant principle was that of reconstruction, for example in Warsaw or Gdańsk. In contrast, in Germany, it was of high priority to create living space as quickly as possible, which was dominated by architectural modernism, with historical tradition being considered only in exceptional cases. What is surprising in this article is that the author demonstrates that during the last decades this paradigm has changed in Poland and Germany. Each country has adopted the principles that were observed in the other country sixty years ago. The author regards the future of Polish policies concerning historical spaces as open; they can develop either way.

This chapter assesses how local constituencies have used architectural reconstructions to "edit" their urban landscapes in the case of Dresden's Church of Our Lady (Frauenkirche) and Berlin's Hohenzollern palace (Stadtschloss). In doing so, the chapter moves beyond an existing body of fractious literature that more often than not declares itself "for" or "against" reconstruction in all times, places, and cultures. Instead, it analyzes the relatoinship of architectural reconstructions to cultural memory, local power dynamics, and the risk that a growing world heritage tourism economy is prompting the conversion of historic monuments that were once territorially and culturally specific into the commodified scenography of U.N.-sanctioned "world heritage."

Following reunification in 1990, Berlin’s urban form has undergone vast change in order to stitch together the city that had been divided for almost forty years. This process saw East Germany (referred to as either the GDR of DDR) join West Germany (Federal Republic of Germany) to create a united Germany, erasing the political, social and cultural landscape of the GDR overnight and absorbing it into West Germany, leaving the question of what happens to the heritage of two generations of East Germans that had existed for those forty years. The two countries were quite different and this is no more obvious than in Berlin, were East and Wast existed side by side. Therefore the process of reconstruction examines the role of this heritage in the city as it seeks a new identity to represent a united Germany on a Global scale. The context to explore this will be Franco Stella’s Humboldt Forum, a project that sees the partial reconstruction the Stadtschloss (City Palace) that had existed at the centre of the medieval city. Using this example and further projects in Dresden and Skopje, this dissertation investigates why cities are being restored back to a 19th Century appearance and examines the nature of the architecture being used to do so. The question is what is the real purpose of such projects? Do they seek to reconcile what was a divided country and people, do they aim to remove traces of an unwanted past? Is their aim to establish an image of a united Germany to represent the country in Europe and a globalised world? Exploring the purpose and approach to the reconstruction of the Stadtschloss as the Humboldt Forum provides framework in which to explore wider issues of identity, memory, image and authenticity in Berlin. Between these two buildings existed the GDR and the Palast der Republik, a centre of social and political life in East Berlin. In rebuilding the Stadtschloss, or at least the image of it, as the Humboldt Forum seemingly erases this period of history from the city. Stella’s Forum sees the repurposing of the historical image of the baroque palace to find a new place in the contemporary city, adorned with contemporary interiors and new functions different from the original. In doing so its seeks to shape an identity for itself away from the palace and reduces questions over its authenticity to just the outer surface of its architecture.

SYMPOSIUM: LANDSCAPES OF SOCIALISM: ROMANTIC ALTERNATIVES TO SOVIET ENLIGHTENMENT 1. Serguei Alex Oushakine Sotzromantizm and Its Theaters of Life: Editor's Introduction 2. Fabien Bellat An Uneasy Metamorphosis: The Afterlife of Constructivism in Stalinist Gardens 3. Juliana Maxim Building the Collective: Theories of the Archaic in Socialist Modernism, Romania circa 1958 4. Mari Laanemets In Search of a Humane Environment: Environment, Identity, and Design in the 1960s–70s 5. Oliver Sukrow Subversive Landscapes: The Symbolic Representation of Socialist Landscapes in the Visual Arts of the German Democratic Republic 6. Alexey Golubev “A Wonderful Song of Wood”: Heritage Architecture and the Search for Historical Authenticity in North Russia 7. Elena Gapova “The Land under the White Wings”: The Romantic Landscaping of Socialist Belarus The contents of the first issue of volume 29 of Rethinking Marxism are reflections on the relation between space and society. They all explore how the imaginations of particular historical eras take shape in space. In that spirit, we start the volume with a symposium, “Landscapes of Socialism: Romantic Alternatives to Soviet Enlightenment,” edited by Serguei A. Oushakine, on architecture, art, and landscape design in former socialist countries, and exploring the relation between these historical forms and transformations in society. In “Sotzromantizm and Its Theaters of Life,” Serguei A. Oushakine contextualizes the contributions to the symposium. He starts his narrative with a reference to a visionary of Soviet architecture, to El Lissitzky’s manifesto, wherein the leading constructivist set out the spatial imagination of suprematism, which would shape the new world of socialism. In this utterly radical imagining, the reshaping of the world would take place through the “rhythmic” dissection of space and time into meaningfully organized units, which would move together with the transformation of the tools of representation, resulting in what Lissitzky named a “new theater of life.” Oushakine argues that the utopian radicalism of the constructivists remained—despite the industrialization embarked on in 1928—with leading architects such as Moisei Ginzburg and Mikhail Barshch designing Moscow as a “green city” that would be transformed into a huge park; this would be realized in an economical way with a view to solving the problems of the big city, such as dense traffic. The new imagination represented both a desire for a radical break with and erasure of the past and also a refusal to inherit. The contributions to the symposium, argues Oushakine, develop more critical and complex stories of this “historical nihilism” of Soviet modernity. Each points to how this original refusal to claim history gave way to historicizing and historicist perspectives. These disparate ways of alluding to the past are aggregated under the name of Sotzromantizm, in which the spatial vision of early Soviet modernity synthesized with influences of the past, a seminal reference being made by Anna Elistratova in 1957 when the author questioned Socialist realism, pointing at the romantic traditions as possible sources of inspiration. Sotzromantizm, argues Oushakine, flowed in the works of architects, artists, and writers in diverse forms, creating a new “politico-poetical theater of life” and along the way providing alternatives to the rationalism of Soviet Enlightenment.

A German nurse in World War II falls in love with an English pilot and leaves her physician fiancé to be with him. What made this melodramatic love triangle a German television blockbuster that captured over twelve million viewers when it aired in 2006? The fact that it took place in Dresden in Feb-ruary 1945 during the air raids and ensuing firestorm that consumed much of the city, killed twenty-five thousand people, and left many others injured and homeless. 1 The two-part miniseries Dresden, directed by Roland Suso Rich-ter and produced by Nico Hoffmann (Teamworx), owed much of its immense success to the way that it provided an outlet for the public discussions of German wartime suffering in Germany for the past two decades. At the same

session chair with Ass. Prof. Petra Brouwer (Amsterdam). European Architectural History Network Fifth International Meeting, hosted by Estonian Academy of Arts, 14th June 2018, National Library of Estonia, Tallinn