Memory, Politics, Place
2005
•
Author:
Karen E. Till
An innovative exploration of German memory, national identity, and modernity
Four locations frame The New Berlin: the Topography of Terror, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Jewish Museum, and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial and Museum. Through field notes, interviews, archival texts, personal narratives, public art, maps, images, and other sources, Karen Till describes how these places and spaces exemplify the contradictions and tensions of social memory and national identity.
The New Berlin is an insightful and articulate study on the remaking of Berlin as a microcosm of debates about memory at this moment in history.
—
Marita Sturken, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California
Tags
The New Berlin reveals a city haunted by ghosts from difficult pasts and “remembered futures,” a place where past, present, and future collide in unexpected ways as individuals and groups search for what it means to be German. Karen Till skillfully moves through the spaces and times of a city marked by voids, ruins, and construction cranes to search through material and affective landscapes of intentional forgetting and painful remembering. In doing so, she deepens our understanding of the practice and politics of place making—and of how particular places embody and narrate distinct national pasts and futures, stories of belonging, and the absences and presences of social memory-work.
Four locations frame The New Berlin: the Topography of Terror, the much-debated Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Jewish Museum, and the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial and Museum. Through these and other sites, we encounter people unexpectedly colliding with and evoking ghosts from multiple Berlins as they dig through social and material landscapes, claim public spaces, market the city, go on tours, or debate what national past should be remembered, for whom, where, and in what form. Through a complex interweaving of field notes, interviews, archival texts, personal narratives, public art, maps, images, and other sources, Till deftly describes how these places and spaces uniquely exemplify the contradictions and tensions of social memory and national identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Highlighting an interdisciplinary “geo-ethnographic” and nonlinear temporal approach to place making and memory in postunification Germany, The New Berlin introduces readers to people confronting loss and past injustices amid the construction sites and ghosts of the contemporary city.
$26.00 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-4011-9
$75.00 cloth ISBN 978-0-8166-4010-2
296 pages, 69 b&w photos, 4 maps, 7 x 10, 2005
Karen E. Till is senior lecturer of geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, and co-director of the Space and Place Research Collective at the Institute of Global Studies, University of Minnesota.
The New Berlin is an insightful and articulate study on the remaking of Berlin as a microcosm of debates about memory at this moment in history.
—
Marita Sturken, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California
The New Berlin is a notable contribution to human geography and to the interdisciplinary literature on social memory and place making. Till’s methods and scholarship have provided the conceptual groundwork for the exploration and development of place making, social memory, and spatial haunting through the particular practices and politics of the new Berlin. Her readable style is marked by a narrative economy in which every word and sentence serves the larger purposes of the book. I recommend this book to anyone—student, scholar, or practitioner—who is interested in the social dynamics of memory formation and place making.
—
Professional Geographer
This book is a well-written ‘first-hand’ account, though it also thoroughly covers academic literature, contemporary news accounts, and archival records.
—
German Studies Review
Karen E. Till’s The New Berlin describes the modern metropolis and the ghosts of the past that it has to deal with.
Well illustrated and copiously footnoted, this is a cutting-edge study of the power of identity-construction/analysis. Highly recommended.
—
Choice
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Fence
1. Hauntings, Memory, Place A Metro Stop 25
2. The New Berlin: From Kiez to Kosmos A Flyer 59
3. The Gestapo Terrain: Landscape, Digging, Open Wounds Fieldnotes 107
4. Berlin’s Ort der Täter: A Historic Site of Perpetrators A Neighborhood 155
5. Aestheticizing the Rupture: Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial A Newspaper Article 189
6. Memory in the New Berlin
Notes
Index
About This Book
- Overview
- Full Details
- Author Bio
- Reviews
- Table of Contents
Related Publications
Textures of Place Exploring Humanist Geographies
Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate
Knowledge Power and Discipline German Studies and National Identity
A Women’s Berlin Building the Modern City
Through Amateur Eyes Film and Photography in Nazi Germany
Architectural Agents The Delusional, Abusive, Addictive Lives of Buildings
Turkish Berlin Integration Policy and Urban Space
The Nazi Perpetrator Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right
Commemorating and Forgetting Challenges for the New South Africa
