CONTESTED PUBLIC SPACE: MEMORIES & HISTORY
Contested Public Space: Memories and History
Das Denkmal fur Die Ermordeten Juden Europas
The Memory Landscape.
Mary's is a large old-style brick church belonging to the council of the Hanseatic city of Lubeck. On the floor at the rear of the church, broken pieces of two large bells remain where they fell during an air raid in World War II. The third largest church in Germany, it took 100 years to construct St. Mary's but just one Palm Sunday night in March of 1942 to nearly destroy it. As with so many churches ruined by bombing during the war, parishioners debated about restoration. Citizens living on war-torn homeland are caught: There is a lingering desire to preserve physical destruction as a message or signal to subsequent generations, or as an effort to share the horror of war time experience. If the physical evidence of war is wiped away, then memory lives only in that intangible, solo world of the mind. No one can ever quite understand war who has not endured it. And there is also a defiant need to return everything to the way it was, or to an even more glorious state, to wipe out the ugliness, and hopefully, the ugly memories along with it. Often the desire to preserve the memories dominates the wish to forget.
The study of how the public engages with the past through built space encompasses the fields of history, cultural and critical theory, and memory studies. This paper will explore a contested space through an examination of the dynamics that shaped the actual physicality, beliefs about how the contested space informs history, or deliberately decouples from it, and how stakeholders express their perceptions of the cultural memory. "Identifying the use of space in any given moment -- the occupation of space in any given moment -- provides the opportunity to reveal contrasting, contradictory uses of space, to identify the ideological struggles that look to inscribe meaning."[footnoteRef:1] [1: Dobrin, Sidney I. (2007). The Occupation of Composition. In Christopher J. Keller and Christian R. Weissner. The Locations of Composition. New York, NY: Suny Press.]
Vergangenheitsbewaltigung is one of those extraordinary compound words that baffle first by their sheer length and ability to stump a tongue not schooled in classic German, and baffle again in the struggle to interpret an exact meaning. In English, the closest translation is "struggle to come to terms with the past." Vergangenheit means "past" in German, and means Bewaltigung "coming to terms with or mastering." Although the reader could fairly assume that the past that is referred to means history, that interpretation would be too broad. For contemporary Germans, the word conveys a very explicit meaning. Vergangenheitsbewaltigung refers to the process of digesting, analyzing, and finally learning to live with the Holocaust as part of Germany's history.
One of the ways Germany has come to terms with its past is to create a "memory landscape"[footnoteRef:2] in its cities and across the countryside, wherever Nazis and World War II left terrible traces. Journalist Lea Rosh worked dedicated 17 years of her life to an addition of the memory landscape that many Germans -- Jews and non-Jews -- did not believe necessary. Rosh first proposed the idea of a central memorial to Jews murdered by the Nazis in 1988. She set up a foundation and began to collect donations toward its construction. One year later, Berlin citizens turned their attention to the fall of the Berlin Wall. An intense focus on the present -- not the past -- occupied German citizenry. The tasks of rebuilding and reorganizing Berlin, the challenges of unifying two states, were at the forefront. But in 1998, the idea of locating a Holocaust memorial in Berlin appealed to the Bundestag and a resolution to erect the memorial was passed. Rosh insisted, as she had all along, that the memorial had to be built for the Germans and not for the Jews. That the memorial is referred in several ways by Germans underscores this issue. [2: (n.a.) (2008, January 3).Germany's Jews:latkes and vodka, he Economist. Retrieved http://www.economist.com/node/10424406]
The Siting of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.
The formal name for the memorial is Das Denkmal fur Die Ermordeten Juden Europas, which translates to "The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe." Significantly, the memorial is commonly referred to as Holocaust-Mahnmal. Mahnmal translates to the English memorial, while Denkmal refers to a large structure -- a monument. But to German, the word Mahnmal carries more meaning than just that of a remembrance memorial -- it conveys a sense of admonition and warning, an...
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