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fter the Bundestag voted for Berlin as the new seat of government for a united Federal Republic in 1991, the reconstruction of the city centre accelerated. The sum of $135 billion has been devoted to this massive urban renewal project by the federal government and the city of Berlin (Figure 1). Former icons of the East-West division are being replaced by new government and business complexes, including the former 'death strip' at Potsdamer Platz (the wide zone between the East and West Berlin Walls which spanned several hundred feet), Pariser Platz at the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, and the area around the Reichstag. As Berlin's city building director, Hans Stimann, explained, 'Berlin is the only place in the world where the centre is empty. It's like an operation on the heart without the rest of the body feeling anything.' 1

Through a comparative analysis of Germany and Russia, this paper explores how participation in the memorialization process affects and reflects national identity formation in post-totalitarian societies. These post-totalitarian societies face the common problem of re-presenting their national character as civic and democratic, in great part because their national identities were closely bound to oppressive regimes. Through a comparison of three memorial sites-Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial in Germany, and Lubianka Square and the Park of Arts in Russia-we argue that even where dramatic reductions in state power and the opening of civil society have occurred, a simple elite-public dichotomy cannot adequately capture the nature of participation in the process of memory re-formation. Rather, mutual interactions among multiple publics and elites, differing in kind and intensity across contexts, combine to form a complex pastiche of public memory that both interprets a nation's past and suggests desirable models for its future. The domination of a 'Western' style of memorialization in former East Germany illustrates how even relatively open debates can lead to the exclusion of certain representations of the nation. Nonetheless, Germany has had comparatively vigorous public debates about memorializing its totalitarian periods. In contrast, Russian elite groups have typically circumvented or manipulated participation in the memorialization process, reflecting both a reluctance to deal with Russia's totalitarian past and a emerging national identity less civic and democratic than in Germany.

While an emerging interdisciplinary field of memory studies exists, what it is and might become remains open to debate. This article calls for a memory studies agenda that remains sensitive to the ways individuals and groups experience memory as multisensual, spatial ways of understanding their worlds. Artistic and activist memory-work in particular offers at least two contributions to such an agenda. It challenges ontological assumptions that underpin much of the recent interdisciplinary body of research on memory, including understandings of site, social and body memory, and the role of place in memory; and it invites scholars to consider their research in terms of socially responsible place-based practice. In this article, I discuss sites of social engagement, embodied and social memory, and wounded places to consider how artistic and activist place-based practice might fundamentally change how memory studies scholars think about their research. Key words