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]
This article analyzes the popular, award-winning German film The Lives of Others as an intervention in memory politics focused on the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR). Confronting the crimes of the East German regime has been framed as coming to terms with Germany's "second dictatorship, " suggesting an equivalence not only between the Nazi and socialist states and their abuses, but also the moral and historical stakes of facing up to the two legacies. The Lives of Others reinforces the "second dictatorship" discourse and fails to provide a nuanced portrayal of the GDR, opting instead for a moral drama that elides the political world it claims to represent. Drawing on ethnographic research on identity in Eastern Germany and critical readings of recent public discourse, I analyze claims about the film's authentic portrayal of GDR repression and its importance as a corrective to Ostalgie by situating The Lives of Others as a text and cultural phenomenon within the cultural landscape of postsocialist memory in Germany. This landscape, in turn, must be placed within the still broader context of national unification, identity, and memory in unified Germany. (
In the years following unification, East German cityscapes have been subject to fierce contention because historic preservation and urban renewal have served as a local allegory of national redemption. Using conflicts over preservation and renewal in the city of Eisenach as a case study, I argue that historic cityscapes have served as the focus of many East Germans' efforts to grapple with the problem of Germanness because they address the past as a material cultural legacy to be retrieved and protected, rather than as a past to be worked through. In Eisenach's conflicts, heritage and Heimat serve as talismans of redemption not just because they symbolize an unspoiled German past, but also because they represent structures of difference that evoke a victimized Germanness-they are above all precious, vulnerable possessions threatened with disruption, pollution, or destruction by agents placed outside the moral boundaries of the hometown by its bourgeois custodians.
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