Beyond Berlin

by Rosenfeld, Gavriel D.

• ISBN13: 9780472116119
• ISBN10: 0472116118
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-02-27
• Publisher: Univ of Michigan Pr

Summary

Beyond Berlinbreaks new ground in the ongoing effort to understand how memorials, buildings, and other spaces have figured in Germany's confrontation with its Nazi past. The contributors challenge reigning views of Germany's postwar memory work by examining how specific urban centers apart from the nation's capital have wrestled with their respective Nazi legacies. A wide range of West and East German cities is profiled in the volume: prominent metropolises like Hamburg, dynamic regional centers like Dresden, gritty industrial cities like Wolfsburg, and idyllic rural towns like Quedlinburg. In employing historical, art historical, anthropological, and geographical methodologies to examine these and other important urban centers, the volume's case studies shed new light upon the complex ways in which the confrontation with the Nazi past has directly shaped the German urban landscape since the end of the Second World War."Beyond Berlinis one of the most fascinating, deeply probing collections ever published on Germany's ongoing confrontation with its Nazi past. Its editors, Gavriel Rosenfeld and Paul Jaskot, have taken the exploration of Germany's urban memorial landscape to its highest level yet." ---James E. Young, Professor and Chair, Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and author ofThe Texture of MemoryandAt Memory's Edge"This is a top-notch collection of essays that positions itself in the populated field of memory studies by bringing together original contributions representing the best of new scholarship on architecture, urban design, monuments, and memory in East and West Germany. Taken together, the essays remind readers that the Nazi past is always present when German architects, urban planners, and politicians make decisions to tear down, rebuild, restore, and memorialize." ---S. Jonathan Wiesen, Department of History, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction: Urban Space and the Nazi Past in Postwar Germany	p. 1
Sites of Reconstruction: Between Reclaiming and Evading the Past
The Politics of New Beginnings: The Continued Exclusion of the Nazi Past in Dresden's Cityscape	p. 25
Reconciling Competing Pasts in Postwar Cologne	p. 48
Evading What the Nazis Left Behind: An Ethnographic and Phenomenological Examination of Historic Preservation in Postwar Rostock	p. 67
Sites of New Construction: Industrial Cities and the Embrace of Modernism
Memento Machinae: Engineering the Past in Wolfsburg	p. 89
Inventing Industrial Culture in Essen	p. 116
Perpetrator Sites: Representing Nazi Criminality
The Reich Party Rally Grounds Revisited: The Nazi Past in Postwar Nuremberg	p. 143
Memory and the Museum: Munich's Struggle to Create a Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism	p. 163
Concrete Memory: The Struggle over Air-Raid and Submarine Shelters in Bremen after 1945	p. 185
Restored, Reassessed, Redeemed: The SS Past at the Collegiate Church of St. Servatius in Quedlinburg	p. 209
Jewish Sites: Commemorating the Holocaust
The Politics of Antifascism: Historic Preservation, Jewish Sites, and the Rebuilding of Potsdam's Altstadt	p. 231
Marking Absence: Remembrance and Hamburg's Holocaust Memorials	p. 251
The New Borneplatz Memorial and the Nazi Past in Frankfurt am Main	p. 273
Epilogue: The View from Berlin	p. 295
Contributors	p. 303
Index	p. 307
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.