Abstract
Berlin was in many ways both symbol and flashpoint of much of twentieth-century German, European and Cold War history; it is now arguably one of the most historically self-aware cities in the world. Berlin appears, on a cursory visit, to be a city that bears even the lowest points in its history not only openly but brazenly, self-consciously, almost obsessively — certainly in contrast with a city like Vienna, where the Nazi past is remarkably quiescent. There is barely a street in Berlin’s centre that does not have a plaque, a memorial, a sign telling passersby about what previously stood or occurred on a particular site: from imperialism and industrialization, through Weimar modernism, into the depths of terror and persecution under Nazism; and through Cold War division and Communist repression to, finally, the capital of the united Germany of today.1
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Notes
See for example: A. J. McAdams (2001), Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
W. J. Niven (2002), Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London: Routledge);
K. E. Till (2008), The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press);
D. Verheyen (2008), United City, Divided Memories? Cold War Legacies in Contemporary Berlin (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield).
P. Nora (1984–92), Lieux de mémoire, 7 vols (Paris: Gallimard).
See also, for example, J. E. Young (1993), The Texture of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press);
and P. Reichel (1999), Politik mit der Erinnerung: Gedächtnisorte im Streit um die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit, 2nd edn (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag).
See also E. Soja (1989), Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London and New York: Verso), pp. 1–2.
See the still seminal: M. Halbwachs (1992 (1925)), On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
The distinction between cultural memory and communicative memory made by J. Assmann (1992), Das Kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und Politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck) is of little help beyond a preliminary typology.
A. Huyssen (2003), ‘The Voids of Berlin’ and ‘After the War: Berlin as Palimpsest’, in Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
See R. Rürup (1987), ed., Topographie des Terrors: Gestapo, SS und Reichssicher-heitshauptamt auf dem “Prinz-Albrecht-Gelände”. Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Willmuth Arenhövel).
R. Schneider (1987), ed., Historische Stätten in Berlin (Frankfurt am Main and Berlin: Ullstein);
P. Neumann and F. Wengler (1990), Wo war was in Berlin (Berlin: Dietz);
M. Uschner (1995), Die zweite Etage: Funktionsweise eines Machtapparates, 2nd edn (Berlin: Dietz).
See also M. Fulbrook (1999), German National Identity after the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity Press).
E. Noelle and E. P. Neumann (1956), eds, Jahrbuch der öffentlichen Meinung (Allensbach: Verlag für Demoskopie), p. 277;
E. Noelle and E. P. Neumann (1958–64), eds, Jahrbuch der öffentlichen Meinung, 3 (Allensbach: Verlag für Demoskopie), p. 230.
See V. Wollenberger (1992), Virus der Heuchler (Berlin: Elefanten Press);
more generally, M. Fulbrook (1995), Anatomy of a Dictatorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Chapter 8.
See, for example, A. Kahane (2004), Ich sehe, was du nicht siehst: Meine deutschen Geschichten (Berlin: Rowohlt).
See, for example, N. Frei (2002), Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration (New York, Columbia University Press);
F. Stern (1992), The Whitewashing of the Yellow Badge: Antisemitism and Philosemitism in Postwar Germany (Oxford: Pergamon Press).
U. Jureit (2005), ‘Generationen als Erinnerungsgemeinschaften: Das “Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas” als Generationsobjekt’, in U. Jureit and M. Wildt, eds, Generationen (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition), pp. 244–65.
On similar lines, see A. Körner (2000), ‘“The Arrogance of Youth” — a Metaphor for Social Change? The Goldhagen-Debate in Germany as Generational Conflict’, New German Critique, 80 (Spring–Summer), 59–6.
Ironically, a similarly sharp distinction between ‘Germans’ and ‘Jews’ is made by a second-generation survivor in D. J. Goldhagen (1996), Hitler’s Willing Executioners (London: Little, Brown and Co.).
W. Gruner (1996), Judenverfolgung in Berlin 1933–1945: Eine Chronologie der Behördenmassnahmen in der Reichshauptstadt (Berlin: Stiftung Topographie des Terrors);
N. Frei (2003), ed., Hitlers Eliten nach 1945 (Munich: dtv).
For example, I. Deutschkron (2005), Ich trug den gelben Stern (Munich: dtv).
See J. Friedrich (2004), Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1944–1945 (Berlin: List);
W. G. Sebald (2004), On the Natural History of Destruction (New York: Random House).
See M. Brumlik (2005), Wer Sturm sät: Die Vertreibung der Deutschen (Berlin: Aufbau).
H. Heer and K. Naumann (1995), eds, Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition);
H. Heer (2004), Vom Verschwinden der Täter: Der Vernichtungskrieg fand statt, aber keiner war dabei (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag).
M. Fulbrook (2009), “Normalisation” in Retrospect: East German Perspectives on their own Lives’, in M. Fulbrook, ed., Power and Society in the GDR, 1961–1979: The ‘Normalisation of Rule?’ (Oxford: Berghahn), pp. 278–319;
and M. Fulbrook (2005), The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (London: Yale University Press).
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© 2009 Mary Fulbrook
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Fulbrook, M. (2009). Historical Tourism: Reading Berlin’s Doubly Dictatorial Past. In: Staiger, U., Steiner, H., Webber, A. (eds) Memory Culture and the Contemporary City. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246959_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230246959_8
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