Entangled Memories: Complicating the Memory of Area Bombing Through the Haunted Ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof

Abstract

This article investigates the possibilities for experiential encounters with ruins in Berlin to complicate the dominant articulations of the cultural memory of Allied bombing attacks on German cities during the Second World War. Building on works that seek to disrupt normative models of cultural memory of the bombings, and entangling them with existing literature that uses new materialism to engage the sensorial nature of memory site-encounters, I examine my own fieldwork visits the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof—a former train station—as an entanglement of both. Specifically, I investigate how encountering Anhalter through this entangled method allows the site to emerge as haunted. Encountering Anhalter as haunted might complicate the linear temporality that underpins enduring the narrative that the Allies’ actions during the war were completely ethical because they are largely framed as a response to— ergo following—the Holocaust.

The Privilege of Control and the Constraint of Presence: Fieldwork and Ontologies of Time

“…Events affect places and people, leaving marks of their own. Time can wash these away, but it can also calcify them into collective memory that affects everyday choices (see, for example, Armstrong, 2010; Florence, 2021; Light, 2016). But time can also be a privilege and control of it matters.…”