Abstract
Historic preservation is concerned with cultural heritage. Yet in an age of heightened historical awareness and contestation of meanings, cultural heritage has itself come to be understood as a narrative subject to modification, alteration, and reinterpretation. In the case of architectural monuments, which often concentrate cultural memories and evoke them through material form, preservation implies a material politics of place: that is, people negotiate what will be saved and what will be demolished, what will be preserved, altered, or, indeed reconstructed if a building was destroyed at some earlier time. Reconstructions also raise complicated questions about the past, present, and future meanings of a place; what is reconstructed or preserved is always central to narratives of nationhood and to constituent local and individual identities that coexist, often in considerable tension, within that place.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
At opposite poles of current reconstruction debates are Winfried Nerdinger, ed., Geschichte der Rekonstruktion / Konstruktion der Geschichte, Publikation zur Ausstellung des Architekturmuseums der TU München in der Pinakothek der Moderne vom 22. Juli bis 31. Oktober 2010 (Munich: Prestel, 2010); and
Adrian von Buttlar, Johannes Habich, Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper, Michael S. Falser, Achim Hubel and Georg Mörsch, eds., Denkmalpflege statt Attrappenkult. Gegen die Rekonstruktion von Baudenkmälern—eine Anthologie (Basel and Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2011).
Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, trans. Lauren M. O’Connell (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also
Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer, eds., Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
For two views on the Moscow reconstruction see Isabelle de Keghel, “Der Wiederaufbau der Moskauer Erlöserkathedrale. Überlegungen zur Konstruktion und Repräsentation nationaler Identität in Russland,” in Beate Binder, Wolfgang Kaschuba, and Peter Niedermüller et al., eds., Inszenierung des Nationalen. Geschichte, Kultur und die Politik der Identitäten am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2001), 211–232; and
Marina Dmitrieva, “Christus-Erlöser-Kathedrale versus Palast der Sowjets: Zur Semantik zeitgenossischer Architektur in Moskau,” in Kultur und Krise. Russland 1987–1997, ed. Elisabeth Cheauré (Berlin: Arno Spitz Verlag, 1997), 121–135.
Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010); and
John H. Stubbs and Emily G. Makaš, Architectural Conservation in Europe and the Americas: National Experiences and Practice (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011).
Bolesław Bierut, The Six-Year Plan for the Reconstruction of Warsaw: Report at the Warsaw Conference of the Polish United Workers Party on the 3rd of July 1949 (Warsaw: Ksiazka I Wiedza, 1949);
Anna Jozefacka, Rebuilding Warsaw: Conflicting Visions of a Capital City, 1916–1956 (PhD diss., New York University, 2011).
Dieter Bingen and Hans-Martin Hinz, eds., Die Schleifung: Zerstörung und Wiederaufbau historischer Bauten in Deutschland und Polen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005).
I am grateful to Greg Castillo for several illuminating conversations on this point. See also Greg Castillo, Constructing the Cold War: Architecture and the Cultural Division of Germany, 1946–1956, (PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 2000); and
Castillo, Cold War On the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (London, UK: Faber & Faber, 1936);
Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941); and
Henry Russell Hitchcock, Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1958).
Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt, eds., Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970–1990 (London, UK: V&A Publishing, 2011). For a perceptive reading of Berlin in terms of simulation and citation of the past see
Rolf J. Goebel, “Berlin’s Architectural Citations: Reconstruction, Simulation, and the Problem of Historical Authenticity,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 118, no.5 (October 2003): 1268–1289.
Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument, 138–143; see also Marvin Trachtenberg, Building-in-Time: From Giotto to Alberti and Modern Oblivion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).
Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and its Origin,” trans. Kurt Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (1982): 21–51.
This process is detailed in Kevin D. Murphy, “The Villa Savoye and the Modernist Historic Monument,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no. 1 (March 2002): 68–89.
Rem Koolhaas, “Preservation Is Overtaking Us,” Future Anterior 1, no.2 (Fall 2004): 1–3, 2. Koolhaas expands on the predicament faced by the field of historic preservation in the closing chapters of the idiosyncratic book:
Rem Koolhaas / Office of Metropolitan Architecture, Content: Triumph of Realization (Cologne / London, UK: Taschen, 2004).
Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Confino is not writing about architecture or the materialization of memory in this way; I am merely bringing the built environment into alignment with his provocative discussion of the role of cultural memory in society.
Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance, 206. Confino builds on the work of Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); see also
Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). On an individual level, an adage commonly heard among Germans in Berlin during the 1990s and early 2000s may illustrate the phenomenon Confino describes. “We tore down the Wall in 1989,” Germans from both the Former East and West would say during these years: “The problem is that the Wall still exists in our heads.”
Christiane Hertel, “Beyond In/Authenticity: Dresden’s Frauenkirche,” in Architourism: Authentic, Escapist, Exotic, Spectacular, ed. Joan Ockman and Salomon Frausto (Munich: Prestel, 2005), 42–49, 44.
Janet Ward, “Sacralized Spaces and the Urban Remembrance of War,” in Memory Culture and the Contemporary City: Building Sites, ed. Uta Staiger, Henriette Steiner, and Andrew Webber (New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 145–160.
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 186–187.
Förderverein Berliner Stadtschloss e.V., ed., Das Schloss? Eine Ausstellung über die Mitte Berlins (Berlin: Ernst und Sohn Verlag, 1993). I am grateful to Janice Reiff for a copy of this catalog, complete with the original Überweisungsformular.
A very fine study that places the Palace of the Republic within the historiography of modern architecture and, in particular, within the tradition of post-World War II Soviet bloc “cultural palaces” is Anke Kuhrmann, Der Palast der Republik. Geschichte und Bedeutung des Ost-Berliner Parlaments- und Kulturhauses (Petersberg: Michael Imhoff Verlag, 2006).
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2014 Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Janet Ward
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Maciuika, J.V. (2014). The Historic Preservation Fallacy? Transnational Culture, Urban Identity, and Monumental Architecture in Berlin and Dresden. In: Diefendorf, J.M., Ward, J. (eds) Transnationalism and the German City. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137390172_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137390172_15
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-48257-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-39017-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)