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The New Berlin Memory Politics Place 1st Edition Karen
E. Till Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Karen E. Till
ISBN(s): 0816640114
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 11.76 MB
Year: 2005
Language: english
June 1999
In the center o f Berlin is a wooden fence. It was erected t o protect the 4.2-acre con-
struction lot destined t o become the central Memorial to the Murdered Jews o f Europe.
Plastered on the most-trafficked corner o f this fence is an ever-changing montage o f
posters, political graffiti, and enlarged newspaper articles that either support or o p -
pose the memorial. This fence is a temporary structure in the landscape that marks
long-standing contested social identities.
Large posters put up by the citizen group responsible for the memorial announce,
"Here is the place!"' On one, a familiar historical photo depicts a bedraggled elderly
man wearing a thick coat stitched w i t h a Star o f David. A lonely figure, he reminds
onlookers in t h e present about the unjust death he and others suffered; his image
haunts the city and the imaginations o f onlookers. It is a familiar face, one that some
tourists walking by would most likely recognize, perhaps having seen i t before in
black-and-white photographs at museum exhibitions or in historical films. As a histori-
cal document, this (reproduced) photograph provides evidence that he existed, and
that necessarily, given the history o f Jews in the Third Reich, he was persecuted. Still,
he remains nameless. It is not clear who captured the image (Nazi soldiers? German
citizens?), why he was photographed (documentation? propaganda?), or where he
was when the photograph was taken (a processing center? a train station? a street
in a Jewish ghetto in another city? a neighborhood here in Berlin?).
Printed on a small band at the top o f another poster, a different citizen initiative
invokes the authority o f Theodor Adorno: "The past can only be dealt with when the
causes o f t h e past are r e m ~ v e d . "Viewing
~ the memorial as yet another attempt t o
"draw a final line" with the past (Schluflstrich), this citizen group advocates discus-
sion about the continued presence o f anti-Semitism and xenophobia in contemporary
" Memorial for the Murdered Jewso f Europe: Here i s the place!" Forderkreis zur Errichtung
eines Denkmals fiir die errnordeten Juden Europas eV (Association for the Establishment of a
[Holocaust] Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe). Photograph courtesy of Karin Joggerst.
 A FENCE

"6,ooo,ooo minus 54 years of 'we didn't know anything' minus I Germany minus I war minus
1 memorial = H." lnitiativkreis gegen den SchluBstrich (Initiative against Drawing a Final Line
with the Past). Photograph courtesy of Karin Joggerst.

Germany. For them, the past is always constituted by the present; the vio[ent history
of National Socialism and the Holocaust should be left open to interpretation and de-
bate indefinitely. They see this memorial as symptomatic of contemporary Germans'
desire to put an end to discussions about their social responsibility for the past.
Someone else has posted a handwritten sign that declares: "The discussion IS a
memorial!" Another asserts, "The memorial is already there," only to be emended to
read: "The memorial is already here." These proclamations point to the very real pres-
ence of the memorial in Berlin and in Germany's national imaginary despite i t s lack of
a sculptural form in 1999.
The fence protects an empty lot.
 cent?: r

art scf:
lion :r?
thar. L 1
title if I
1x5:
and t:i:
the ;;I

Maybe it's this feeling, the internationality, the cosmopolitanism, that

brings people here, as well as the market because of its proximity to
Eastern Europe. Berlin changed its geographical location, from the and ::r
margins to the center of Europe. That is important for young people.
- Interview with spokesperson for Partners for Berlin, 2000
 Hauntings, Memory, Place
1
1 Berlin is unlike every other city because it is new. There is so much
construction and change going on now, and it won't be the case
ten years from now.
-Interview with marketing company spokesperson for Partners
for Berlin, zoo0

T
he "New Berlin" represents the promise of Germany's future. The unified
national c:apital now includes sleek corporate buildings, a federal government dis-
trict, new regional transportation and communication links, a renovated historic
district, gentrified neighborhoods, urban parks and riverfronts, and a growing suburban
ring. This cos~nopolitancity of the twenty-first century is also an international cultural
center, ranked above London in a recent Conde Nast Traveler magazine for its numerous
symphonic orchestras, opera houses, choirs, galleries and museums, theaters, alternative
art scene, and buildings designed by internationally famous architects. "With 3.5 mil-
lion inhabitants, Berlin has as many theaters as Paris and more symphony orchestras
than London, both metropoles of some 10 million inhabitants and contenders for the
title of Europe's cultural capital."'
Just as the New Berlin has been given a radiant material form through buildings
and districts designed by world-famous architects, so places and landscapes throughout
the contemporary city embody new Berlins imagined in the past and historic Berlins
imagined today. As the capital of five different historical Germanys, Berlin represents
the "unstable optic identity" of the nation2-for it is the city where, more than any other
city, German nationalism and modernity have been staged and restaged, represented
and c o n t e ~ t e dBerlin
.~ is a city that cannot be contained by marketing representations of
time, of the "new."4It is a place with "heterogeneous references, ancient scars," a city that
"create[s] bumps on the smooth utopias" of its imagined future^.^ Even the marketing
6 H A U N T I N G S , MEMORY, P L A C E

Advertising Berlin, 2000.

images that now adorn city billboards to promote the New Berlin as a cosmopolitan
beauty queen, surrounded by corporate power and wealth and bejeweled by cultural
icons, are haunted by former hopes for the future of Weimar, National Socialist, and
Cold War Berlins6
While Berlin may be unusual in Europe because of the sheer scale of construction
and renovation that has occurred since 1990, it remains distinctive because of the array Hohcr z :
of places that have been (re)established that convey both the desires and fears of return- 1ongir;i
ing to traumatic national pasts. The specters of the past are felt in the contemporary city Gerr::-.
when groups or individuals intentionally or unexpectedly evoke ghosts, such as when of thc E?
they plan and market another "new" Berlin, identify artifacts and ruins as culturally sig- Other r=
nificant, "discover" and mark formerly deserted landscapes as historic, claim a national Must-1
heritage and dig for past cities, establish museums and memorials, or visit places of natii.::.
memory through tours.' Even postunification urban landscapes continue to be defined identir-:
by presences from the recent past. Recently built corporate buildings and consumer tion 5:::'
spaces designed by internationally known architects, including 0 . M. Ungers, Philip sams:.-
Johnson, and Aldo Rossi, characterize Germany's aspirations toward being a "normal" with r xi
European nation-state8 and are squarely located at sites of former East-West Bloc con- m a i t r:
frontation: Potsdamer Platz, Friedrichstraiie, and Checkpoint Charlie. The glimmering come ?-.-
Daimler-Benz and Sony towers in the center of the city at Potsdamer Platz grew out of corn~:~
the former "death strip" between the two Berlin Walls-a no-man's-land that existed as
a result of the trauma of National Sociali~m.~
Historic Berlins are also part of the new city; some places that once existed in
the distant past have been proposed for reconstruction after unification, such as the
 HAUNTINGS, MEMORY, PLACE

Advertising Berlin, 1950.Tourism brochure cover,

/ T H E INTERNATIONAL CITY
published by Verkehrsamt der Stadt Berlin. Cour-
1 a E H l N D T H E IRON CURTAIN
tesy of Historisches Archiv z u m Tourismus des
1 i
Willy-Scharnow-lnstituts, Freie Universitat Berlin.

Hohenzollern City Palace. A newly reconstructed city palace would satisfy nostalgic
longings for royal (i.e., pre-Nazi) European pasts previously denied to the Cold War
Germanys but would necessitate the erasure of other pasts, in particular the demolition
of the East German Palace of the Republic, a former government and cultural center.1°
Other new "historic" places proposed before unification, such as the German Historical
Museum, were established under the former Kohl administration to ameliorate that
national trauma, to "master" the past and promote a positive understanding of German
identity." Now located in the historic district near the museum island, the postunifica-
tion historical institution is housed in the Prussian armory building, or Zeughaus-the
same place where the East German Museum for History was located only years earlier-
with a new extension designed by I. M. Pei. At the same time that these places are being
made to contain undesirable pasts, a cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust has be-
come hypervisible in the center of the city. An emerging memory district will soon be
completed near the new federal district and corporate skyscrapers at Potsdamer Platz
that will include the Jewish Museum (designed by Daniel Libeskind); the Memorial to
the Murdered Jews of Europe (designed by Peter Eisenman); and the Topography of
Terror International Documentation Center projected to be finished in 2008 (designed
by Peter Zumthor). These new, yet historic and commemorative, places communicate
8 H A U N T I N G S , MEMORY, P L A C E

conflicting social desires-to remember and to forget violent national pasts that still
linger in the present.
Much has been written about Germany's attempt to master thc Ic'ational social is^
past (Vergangenheitsbewaltigung) and about the controversial politics of memory in
Berlin.12In these works the city, as well as place more generally, is treated as a stage on
which the drama of history-represented as contested negotiations between key political
figures, historians, philosophers, and artists-is performed.'%ut places are never merely
backdrops for action or containers for the past. They are fluid mosaics and moments of
memory, matter, metaphor, scene, and experience that create and mediate social spaces
and temporalities." Through place making, people mark social spaces as haunted sites
where they can return, make contact with their loss, contain unwanted presences, or
confront past injustices.
This book focuses on the practices and politics ofplace making, and how those prac-
tices mediate and construct social memory and identity by localizing personal emotions
and defining social relations to the past. It explores how particular places of memory
narrate national pasts and futures through the spaces and times of a city that is itself a
place of social memory. Berlin is a place haunted with landscapes that simultaneously
embody presences and absences, voids and ruins, intentional forgetting and painful
remembering." If the Holocaust and its memory still stand as a test case for humanist
and universal claims of Western civillzation,'%ne might argue that these place-making

German Historical Museum (Deutsches Historisches Museum). Extension designed by I. M . Pei,

2004. Photograph courtesy of Iguana Photo.
 HAUNTINGS, MEMORY, PLACE 9

processes in Berlin are central symbolic and material sites of the crisis of modernity,
uniquely embodying the contradictions and tensions of social memory and national
identity in the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first.
The places of memory I explore in this book were made to confront and contain
the lingering legacies of a violent national history. But each embodies a different narra-
tive of the past and imagined future. All were controversial: the Topography of Terror
International Documentation Center, the Bavarian Quarter memorial, the Memorial to
the Murdered Jews of Europe, a proposed memorial called Bus Stop!, the Jewish Museum,
and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial Museum. Each was established or
proposed before reunification, and each was subsequently relocated in the space-times of
the New Berlin after 1990. While these memorial, museal, artistic, and educational sites
may be interpreted in a number of ways, the controversial debates that accompanied their
making point to the distinct ways that Germans continue to negotiate their contradictory
feelings of being haunted by a dark national past in the present. The stories about them
indicate how dominant understandings of place may simultaneously constrain, direct,
and enable the mourning and commemorative practices of a nation.
When people feel personally and culturally haunted by the past, they may evoke
ghosts by making places that commemorate, question, remember, mourn, and forget.
According to Avery Gordon, the ghost is a social figure through which something lost
can be made to appear before our eyes, a way of coming to know the traumas that ac-
company modern life, even though those traumas may be socially repressed." One
way people make ghosts appear is by selectively remembering particular understandings
of the past through place.lSAs Steve Pile writes, "to haunt is to possess some place."19Al-
though places are understood to be materially real and temporally stable, that is, they
give a spatial "fix" to time, their meanings are made and remade in the present. Places
are not only continuously interpreted; they are haunted by past structures of meaning
and material presences from other times and lives."
Places of memory are created by individuals and social groups to give a shape to felt
absences, fears, and desires that haunt contemporary society. Traditionally national
places of memory were created and understood as glorifying the pasts of "a people.""
But such places are also made today to forget: they contain and house disturbing ab-
sences and ruptures, tales of violence. Places of memory both remember pasts and
encrypt2' unnamed, yet powerfully felt, absences-absences that might be considered
modernity's ghosts of the nation. People speak of historic sites as eyewitnesses to the
past or describe landscapes as original artifacts and traces (Spzrren) from another time;
they believe that by visiting these places they can experience, and perhaps work through,
their contradictory emotions associated with feeling haunted by the past, including fear,
anger, guilt, shame, sadness, longing, and unease. By representing places in these ways,
people create social spaces defined by contemporary needs and desires; they emplace
their social dreams and hopes for the future.
When people make places of memory, they often give evoked ghosts a spatial form
through land~cape.'~ Through the material authority of a landscape and the metaphor
of archaeology, a particular understanding of the past is believed to be uncovered and
10 H A U N T I N G S , MEMORY, P L A C E

made visible. Simon Schama writes that some myths about landscape endure through
the centuries, functioning like a "ghostly outline.. . beneath the superiicial covering
of the contemporary" and accessed by "digging down through layers of memories add
representations toward the primary bedrock."'9e archaeological metaphor is often
used to give a spatial form to the past: it locates time in neatly defined vertical layers. ated :
Representing place as an archaeological site, an unchanging, materially embodied past, con::: -
is a discursive-material practice: the past is organized and structured through place to anc r 5 - 7
create a chronotope, or time-space formation, through which contemporary narrations his::::::
> - -
and performances of subjectivity and authority are inscribed.15 People believe that a .A..-

deep underlying "essence," an unchanging reality from the past, exists underneath the R~F";=-
-.--

sedimented layers of history. But as they dig, the past becomes a ghostlike presence. The
past is never settled, sedimented, neatly arranged in horizontal layers. Similarly, places
. .
do not have an essential set of qualities resulting from an internalized history, even that .r:
though we may construct them to function in this way. Places are unique due to the lin- be. F r ;
gering imprints of particular interactions that transpire: "nowhere else does this precise
mixture o c c u r . " ' ~ u tthose same imprints and interactions will result in new (and often
unexpected) spatial, social, and temporal effects.
Places of memory give a shape to that which is metaphysically absent through mate-
rial and imagined settings that appear to be relatively permanent and stable in time.
According to Walter Benjamin, memory is the "scene" (Schal~platz)of the past as well are ;:ri
as "the medium of what has been experienced the way the earthen realm is the medium
in which dead cities lie buried."', As the scene of the past, social memory and its out-
comes are fluid and changing with the needs of the present. A scene implies making

tioni :r :

peop.: 1
turn. i.

Topography of Terror, 2002.

 HAUNTINGS, MEMORY, PLACE 11

particular actions, actors, and events visible by situating them, giving them a context.
Schauplatz in the German also refers to the place from which one can see and be seen,
a location imbued with power relations. For Benjamin, memory is not just information
that individuals recall or stories being retold in the present. It is not layered time situ-
ated in the landscape. Rather, memory is the self-reflexive act of contextualizing and
continuously digging for the past through place. It is a process of continually remaking
and re-membering the past in the present rather than a process of discovering objective
historical "facts."
And yet there is always a tension when marking absence and loss, longing and desire.
Representation is impossible without the play of the trace, of absence and presence, of
stories told and not told.28In Berlin, it was precisely the question of what ghosts should
be invoked, what pasts should be remembered and forgotten, and through what forms,
that led to heated public debates over what and where these places of memory should
be. People made memorials, created historical exhibitions, dug up the past, and went
on tours to represent, confront, and ignore a violent national past and to define and
forge possible national futures. They made places as open wounds in the city to remind
them of their hauntings and to feel u n c ~ m f o r t a b l eAnd
. ~ ~ while these places of memory
gained authority as landscape markers from the past, they were nonetheless powerful
as places of memory because they were also traces of the future. Traces from the past
are constructed as "figures strained toward the future across a fabled present, figures
we inscribe because they can outlast us, beyond the present of their i n s ~ r i p t i o n . "The
~~
promise of a resurrected past through symbols and material objects gives us hope. For
some, it is a promise of redemption.
As a geographer and ethnographer, I am intrigued by the ways people construct
places to narrate time and embody the past and future. I am interested in the stories
people tell about the places they make. As Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard surmise,
without those stories, places are empty. "Through stories about places, they become in-
habitable. Living is narrativi~ing."~'In this book, I use different narratives and represen-
tational forms to tell stories about places of memory and to retell the stories about place
making that Berliners, Germans, and Americans described while I conducted research
(through interviews, informal conversations, and printed d o c ~ m e n t s )My . ~ ~research
approach-what I call a geo-ethnography-draws from qualitative and feminist tradi-
tions in ethnography, and from critical and humanities traditions in geography.33It is
an approach that focuses on why people make places to create meaning about who and
where they are in the world, and how, in the process of place making, they communicate
feelings of belonging and attachment.
Central to the ways that people create meaning about themselves and their pasts is
how they expect places to work emotionally, socially, culturally, and politically. How do
people make places to delimit and represent time (past, present, and future)? How, in
turn, do those places define social relations? Often a dominant set of culturally place-
n
based practices-what Linda McDowell calls "regimes of place -comes to define how
people think about a place's location, social function, landscape form and aesthetics,
about international commemorative display, and even personal experiential q ~ a l i t i e s . ~ ~
12 H A U N T I N G S , MEMORY, PLACE

But those regimes of place may be questioned during times of social and political tran-
sition. When practices at one locale are challenged, understandings of how places are
supposed to work elsewhere (locally, in the city, nationally, or even internationally) may
be disputed. During times of social change, people may wish to return to the past and
search for a mythic self through place making as a means of confronting inherited
legacies of national violence that haunt and influence their everyday live^.^' Their place-
making activities and stories teach an important lesson, one that Shakespeare and Freud
knew all too well: we must learn to take our ghosts seriously.

Hauntings: Of Places and Returns

I remember when I decided to become an educator in this field the
fear I had when I began to look through archival materials. I Ikept
searching through the documents, and especially the photos. It
is an awful feeling not knowing whom you might find. I remember
studying each photo, looking for the image of my father or uncle.
- Interview with German seminar leader and tour guide for the
Memorial Museum of German Resistance, 1992

What does it mean to say that the spaces of the nation are haunted or that ghosts are
evoked through the process of place making? How do social hauntologies and personal
hauntings i n t e r ~ e c t Often
? ~ ~ unexpectedly, many of us feel the presence of ghosts in our

Memorial Museum of German Resistance (Gedenkstatte Deutscher Widerstand), historical

exhibition, 1993.
 H A U N T I N G S , MEMORY, P L A C E 13

everyday lives. Ghosts are real and imagined, intensely personal and emotive, and haunt
our social spaces when we are open to their pre~ence.~' Not only do individuals feel
haunted by the past; they sometimes feel the need to be haunted.
Being haunted involves the desire and repetitive practice of returning to a past time
and self that never was. People create homes for their ghosts through telling stories about
places and returning to the places that haunt them.'x Returning to places that haunt our
imaginations folds and warps imagined times and selves (past, present, and future), yet
the ritual practice of returning creates a sense of temporal continuity and coherence.
When someone goes back home (and each of us may have many homes), he or she may
experience such vivid memories that it may appear (even if only momentarily) as though
the place and the person returning are exactly the same as they once were. Time stands
still. Such moments are actually quite rare, but it is in pursuit of those moments and
rediscovering the emotions tied to them that individuals engage in such pilgrimage^.'^
When we return to a place, remember an experience in a place, and perform a ren-
dition of the past through a place, we may feel haunted by that which appears not to
be there in material space but is, in fact, a powerful presence.40IVhen people speak of
ghosts, they use a metaphor to describe their feelings of being haunted. As de Certeau
describes, "there is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in
silence, spirits one can 'invoke' or not."" He argues that people can only live in haunted
places, where, to quote T. S. Eliot, "Time past and time future / What might have been
and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present."42People set aside ruins,
wastelands, or fragments as belonging to some other time and protect them as places
that are haunted and somehow lost or stuck in the temporalities of the present. Through
place making, people try to contain the past.
But even these places are haunted by our social needs in the present. Dydia DeLyser
argues that one reason people make and go to ghost towns is because they can see
what they want to see about the past, believe what they already know is true about the
American West or about themselves as Americans." From a secure place in the pres-
ent moment, people create places as eyewitnesses to the past. They may preserve ruins.
They may archive documents. They may exhibit artifacts. They try in some way to give a
form to the past and to their feelings of being haunted. In so doing, they engage in social
memory, an ongoing process whereby groups map understandings of themselves onto
and through a place and time.
Material remnants haunt our imaginations and performances by materializing so-
cial relations. We collect and make photographs, buildings, scrapbooks, films, archives,
memorials, tourist pilgrimage routes, and other artifacts to document and save the past, as
outcomes and sites of memory.44Through the juxtaposition, interpretation, and represen-
tation of these sites in the cultural spaces of their production, we try to localize meaning
about what we think the past is. Marita Sturken argues that the outcomes of memory
are always entangled with the very technologies and processes of their production." But
why the obsession with material traces? Individuals and groups may try to validate their
recollections and their myths of self through an anxious saturation of "bygone reliquary
details, reaffirming memory and history in tangible format."4hAlthough we may think
14 H A U N T I N G S , MEMORY, P L A C E

the past exists, without textualized and material remains we may feel uncertain about for
the "reality" of the past. nc>rr
People become obsessed with material remnants because the past is a fiction: what b?.'
remains are memories that are defined by our mourning for that which can no longer \\-?:?

be p r e ~ e n t . We
~ ' try to preserve memory by creating traces of a past that by definition ..
can never be present. When places are made and understood in this way, their perceived sic:::
material or emotive presence may seem comforting in the present moment because they Rfr -1
are interpreted as giving the past a material form. Euclidean science tells us moderns the::
. .
that no two things can be simultaneously in the same location; hence place has come to J\7--. :::
signify a fixed quality, of being situated, of locational and temporal ~tability.~' We often thrr r
assume that these rules of located site also apply to time. Because we think of places as thrr :
stable, we often understand them as having a timeless quality. p?" '
However, if the past is a construction, if our understandings of time change with our 1125:
needs in the present, then what is being made? Why do people spend so much energy nc ir
giving the past a form through place making? When people make places as stable sites ..

that materially embody the past, they are attempting to give form to their search for a IT. -1:
:1

mythic self, a coherent, timeless identity. Moreover, in the process of locating and map- tu:.;
ping the past through place, social groups and individuals give a shape to their desire to ex: Z :
be connected to that which is no longer metaphysically present, but that which continues ar.: g
to have an important presence in their contemporary lives. 0: - .

Personal and social memory are experientially punctuated and fragmented and
reflect the needs and desires of individuals in the present. When people remember the
past, they are physically located in contemporary social and spatial context^;^' through
the experience of being in certain kinds of places, they may wish to (re)imagine the past
and themselves. Memories are unexpectedly triggered by smells, songs, stories, people,
travels, and places. When in the presence of a familiar place, recollections may cascade
back, mixed with imagination, hopes for the future, and desires for knowing a "true"
self. When individuals "go hack home," they go to a place because they feel a need to
visit a familiar past. One visits a childhood home or school or returns to a well-known
neighborhood in a city; these places become thresholds through which an individual may
experience intense memories that become fleeting moments of returning, reexperiencing,
remembering.
Stories about the self are always situated; they have a particular time and place.''
People may find comfort in at least believing that the places to which they return are
more or less unchanged, for they house experiences and memories from and about
other times through their materiality and spatialities. Yet every return also includes
those confusing and shocking moments when the places are not the same as the places
so fondly remembered: the twenty-story-high building in one's mind is really only
three stories high, the expansive wooded lake is actually a small pond, one's childhood
hiding place is just a small bush. Equally shocking are those moments when a place
from one's childhood memory is no longer there, like the neighborhood dairy in my
hometown-with its small pasture, cows, and drive-through milk pickup under the
giant plaster cow-that had become a parking lot and minimall when I returned home
 H A U N T I N G S , MEMORY, P L A C E 15

for a visit from college one summer. In these moments, the sense of time and decay is
nostalgic, reminding us of our own lives: "'Oh yes, that's where the old cinema used to
be,' we say, or 'do you remember, that's where those houses were all squatted, before they
were pulled do~vn.'"~'
When people tell stories and fictions about their pasts, they also constitute places as
significant contexts and as actors that define who they are and who they may become.
Returns narrate time yet are not placed in time. Returns narrate self yet remind us that
there are many selves. Elizabeth Wilson suggests that when one returns to a city i n
which one has lived for a long time or has often visited, that person is not only aware
that he or she is returning to a place that has changed since last visited (for most know
that cities are in continual change); one is also aware that one is returning as a different
person. A person is someone else when returning but may want to remember what it was
like to be the person that once lived in that city.j2Visiting past places brings a sense of
nostalgia for the past and for past selves.j3
Sometimes, through the ritual of returning, one may experience a transformative
moment and confront personal and social hauntings. This may be true when one re-
turns to familiar place-times to which one has affective attachments but has neither
experienced nor visited in person. Through rnemories of listening to stories of parents
and grandparents, watching films, looking at old photographs, engaging or making art,
or visiting places that have special personal or cultural meaning, people evoke social
ghosts that communicate yet other people's past experiences. Those ghosts are familiar
through the images and stories that circulate in the popular imagination as well as in
families. 'Through these encounters, through these returns, the past is not defined by
recollections of "firsthand" knowledge but rather creatively imagined through the re-
constructions and repetitive viewings of images, stories, and other representations by
second or later generations.
Marianne Hirsch and Andrea Liss use the term "postmemory" to indicate the
process whereby knowledge about past events, and in particular violent pasts, is medi-
ated through the circulation of representations of other people's memories in popular
domain^.'^ Second, third, and future generations may seek to bridge their experiential
distance to an "empirical" past (History) through familiar images and stories and in
the process may feel closer to that past or even their ancestors through imaginative
space and postmemorial practice." 'They may also embark on pilgrimages, sometimes
to places that are social symbols of trauma for their cultural nation or contemporary
era, such as Auschwitz or Hiroshima. They "return" to a place that is known to them
through representation (popular films, narratives, family stories). Ofien individuals
who go on a pilgrimage will upset the sacred image known through their imaginations,
for the experience of visiting a place may disturb their ideal of what the place should be
or, even worse, the emotional attachments they believe they should have in the presence
of a sacred pastisite haunted by ancestral ghosts. In the documentary film Pence o f i l i l i d
coproduced by Israeli and Palestinian teens, for example, Bushra, a Palestinian woman
living in a West Bank refugee camp, travels to what was once Iraq al-Manshivpya, the
ancient homeland uf her family's illa age.'^ Her family instructs her to "see everything,"
16 HAUNTINGS, MEMORY, PLACE

to visit the tomb of a holy man, and to bring back soil from this sacred place. The stories
of village elders depict a rich and fruitful land, an imagined future for a Palestinian
nation-state. Bushra travels to this place, now an Israeli neighborhood called Qiryat Gat,
to find a deserted area and destroyed tomb. As she looks at the site not knowing how to
respond, one of her film coproducers, an Israeli youth, awkwardly states, "At least it is
still there." Past and present collide. This is not the homeland she had imagined. Bushra
prays at the site and brings back the sacred soil for her family and elders but remains
silent about her experiences.
Postmemorial returns like Bushra's are motivated by an intense desire to know who
one is. But there are no answers. Nothing can be recovered because the past one attempts
to visit is haunted by someone else's ghosts and secrets, even as those ghosts continue to
haunt and define social spaces of belonging and attachment. Such returns are different
from returns to places associated with personally experienced pasts, for the former is a
quest to make a connection to past lives, and the latter (re)constitutes traumatic recall.
In traumatic recall, individuals compulsively repeat acts, repress the memories of what
happened, or create multiple stories of what happened to continue living an ordinary
life in the present.'; Being in a place where one experienced violent events may cause
a person to relive memories of one's pasts, even if only for a moment. Rearticulating
what happened through narrative form may be too difficult for some individuals due to
the intensity of the event(s) experienced, such as the horrific events associated with the
H o l o c a ~ s tIn
. ~these
~ instances, people may make places to supplant narrative and locate
their loss. They return to emplace their traumatic memories of the past and relive part of
that past as a little death in the present.j9
These (post)memories and returns, created by and forming personal and social haunt- gri :;
ings, are thus always spatially situated. As such the practices of place making may be one thzr
way that people work through trauma. As phenomenologist Edward Casey describes, "To
be embodied is ips0facto to assume a particular perspective and position; it is to have not
just a point of view but aplace in which we are situated. It is to occupy a portion of space
from out of which we both undergo given experiences and remember them."60Through
performance and cultural reenactment, an individual may use his or her body to com-
municate memories of the past, to connect with the dead, to confront guilt or anger, and
to work through past traumas in the present. Sonja Kuftinec, for example, describes how
place-based theater in the war-torn and haunted streets of Mostar, Bosnia, has helped
youth of different ethnic groups to work through fear, hate, and grief.61They theatri-
cally enacted their memories of a place, their longings for a past that no longer exists, in
the context of a conflict-ridden present. The actors and audiences of this theater had to
confront their own realities of a haunted present by moving through divided territories
and urban spaces to enact and witness the performance. Through these artistic sites, the
performers and audience created new spaces through which to experience their pasts and
remade personal attachments to the places they called home.
Individuals perform their identities in particular places and through their bodies; by
acting, speaking, dressing, and interacting in certain ways at different locales, they cite
who it is they are supposed to be.62In so doing they create bodieslplaces through which
 H A U N T I N G S , MEMORY, P L A C E 17

they experience, remember, and imagine the world, and through which they fashion
an identity.63While each person is physically and socially embodied in distinct ways,
through routine and repetitive actions a person situates himself or herself in social
spaces. Through those repetitive acts, each may experience a reassuring (or distressing)
fiction: it is the fiction of the self, that there is some coherent person underneath all of
their confusing actions (past and present), that there is someone that remains at least in
some respects more or less the same. It is a fiction, of course, because a person is always
a different self with each return and with every performance, a self styled according to
specific needs and the particular contexts of the present moment.

Memory-Work and the Politics of Memory

As a professional planner, I know that you need a transparent and
structured process o f planning i f you want t o have results. This
process has had t o be open and inclusive o f new findings. The
debates [about t h e Holocaust Memorial] have t o continue, and
many people should participate in them. . . .This sensibility is
especially important when memory is built, when cultural values
are represented.
-Interview with Giinter Schlusche, urban planner and Holocaust
Memorial Foundation building coordinator, 2001

Cultural practices of social memory take place and define a public space through which
groups debate their understandings of the past and contemporary social relationships to
that past. This planner emphasized that "memory is built," that its forms are negotiated
rather than inherent to a place. To establish a memorial, for example, a society agrees
to set aside a parcel of land, build a social site for ritual and tourism, sculpt an aesthetic
form, name a place, and inscribe what and who is to be remembered and in whose name.
This open and inclusive process in Berlin is, for Schlusche, not only a critical part of
constituting the cultural and political meanings of a controversial place of memory (in
this case, the Holocaust Memorial); it also creates a public realm, a "sensibility," that
inscribes what a democratic nation and its citizens should be.
The legacies of National Socialism in contemporary Germany continue to be nego-
tiated through parliamentary debate, media representations, public art competitions,
tourism, and popular protest actions. This negotiated "politics of memory" (Erinnerungs-
politik) narrates national and transnational belonging through the practices of foreign
policy decisions, legal institutions, educational reform, party politics, and place mak-
ing6' In this book, I focus on the establishment of public places of memory that call at-
tention to the inherent contradictions of remembering the period of National Socialism,
mourning the aftermath of the Holocaust, and claiming a democratic nation in the
so-called land of the perpetrators. That these places of memory remain controversial
years after reunification demonstrates just how politically fraught national imaginaries
in Germany continue to be, despite-or more likely because of-the increasing temporal
18 HAUNTINGS, MEMORY, PLACE

distance between contemporary German society and its National Socialist past. In
his comments about the proposed Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, for example, Jerzy
Halbersztadt, the director of the Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw, stated that the me-
morial may have "national importance" but will not be critical for (international) Jewish
memory because the historic sites of the Shoah are far more signifi~ant.'~ Halbersztadt
reminds us that social memory and place-making activities tell us more about the people
building a memorial than the peoples and pasts being commemorated.
Two social place-making practices in particular were critical to the establishment
of all the places described in this book: public art competitions and citizen actions. In
Germany, public art competitions are a venue through which federal and local officials,
city elite, experts (historians, artists, art historians, and others), and citizens negotiate
how to represent the histories and legacies of National Socialism and the Holocaust. The
Association of Artists and Architects and other urban planning and architecture orga-
nizations formally administer these competitions, and expert juries evaluate the proj-
ects submitted by artists and architect^.^^ These competitions are often expensive, take a
long time, and are highly politicized. But they are also interpreted by many politicians,
social groups, and citizens as an important part of the democratic process. In Berlin,
when competitions are not held, people become suspicious of the political motives of
a project, and media debates, public controversies, and popular protests often ensue.6'
During the 1970s and 1980s in West Berlin, a distinctive culture for public art competi-
tions emerged: they were used to explore and discuss different possibilities for memori-
als as a type of place, and to rethink the possibilities of using art to create public spaces
that would encourage residents and visitors to remember and question the past.@
Another way that the past was negotiated through the places discussed in this book
was through the activist work of citizen groups, survivors' groups, human rights ac-
tivists, historians, artists, politicians, and others. These groups and individuals called
attention to the ways that political figures and elite normalized the histories of state-
perpetrated violence after World War 11. By the 1980s and 1990s, many grassroots
initiatives remapped urban topographies and uncovered past terrains and pathways of
power that had intentionally been silenced and forgotten by public officials. In Berlin, a
number of individuals and social groups used landscape practices to communicate their
understanding of the social responsibilities of being German in the present and future.
Rather than deny or encrypt past losses, these citizen groups, artists, social groups, and
politicians gave a form to what they called the "wounds" of their nation. They engaged in
a critical process of memory-work by acknowledging what was forgotten, what was not
seen, what was lost in the process of remembering and constructing the past.
Memory-work (Erinnerungsarbeit), a term used by many memory experts with whom
I spoke, is the process of working through the losses and trauma resulting from past
national violence and imagining a better future through place. It is a powerful, albeit
difficult, way to live with the ongoing presence of modernity's ghosts. Artists as well
as citizens have made "haunting reminders" in their everyday settings to acknowledge
their social responsibility for the past, as well as remember the remarkable lives that
constitute their social world.69They make places to which they can return to confront
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- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
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- Example: Practical application scenario
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Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
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- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
- Note: Important consideration
Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
[Figure 9: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
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[Figure 21: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
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[Figure 29: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
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Formula: [Mathematical expression or equation]
[Figure 30: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
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- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
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- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
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• Literature review and discussion
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
- Example: Practical application scenario
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• Study tips and learning strategies
- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
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[Figure 41: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
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- Sub-point: Additional details and explanations
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[Figure 44: Diagram/Chart/Graph]
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