Berlin and Memory

Bu yazıya, "Emine Sevgi Özdamar'ın metinlerinde acı, travma ve ağırlıklı olarak trajik, kasvetli unsurlar olduğu halde, neden bunların hemen ardından, sıralı bir şekilde gülmece, komik ve hafifletici olan saçma unsurlar bulunur?" sorusuyla başlandı. Bu soruya verilen cevap ve hipotez ise "Özdamar, acı kaynağı

Kaum ein Kulturprojekt findet hierzulande in den letzten Jahren eine so kontinuierliche feuilletonistische Aufmerksamkeit wie das in Berlin geplante Humboldt-Forum. Hier sollen ab 2019 die außereuropäischen Sammlungen der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin gezeigt werden und vis-à-vis der Museumsinsel einen »Dialog der Kulturen der Welt« ermöglichen. Das Vorhaben wird gerade aufgrund der kolonialen Provenienz eines Großteils der ethnologischen Sammlungen zunehmend kritisch diskutiert, doch ist in der Öffentlichkeit bisher nur wenig über die konkrete inhaltliche Ausgestaltung der Ausstellungen im wiederaufgebauten Stadtschloss bekannt. Die vorliegende Studie gibt erstmals grundlegende Einblicke in die Planungsprozesse und diskutiert diese im Kontext der transnationalen Debatten über das Ausstellen außereuropäischer Kunst und Kultur.

Über mehrere Jahre hat der Autor Schlüsselakteure begleitet, Planungsrunden beigewohnt, Materialien gesichtet und Probeausstellungen analysiert. Das Ergebnis ist eine dichte Beschreibung der historischen Entstehungsbedingungen sowie der oftmals konflikthaften Aushandlungsprozesse, die der Planung des Humboldt-Forums zugrunde liegen. Als Kulturanalyse des ›Making-of‹ gibt die Studie damit bereits mehrere Jahre vor Eröffnung wichtige Einblicke hinter die Kulissen des Großprojekts. Über das Humboldt-Forum hinausgehend versteht sich das Buch dabei auch als Beitrag zu einer fundierten Standortbestimmung ethnologischer Museen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts.

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) lived in Berlin at Motzstrasse for two of the most important decades of his life (1903-1923). For the first of those decades, Berlin was home, and for the second decade it was his home-away-from-home (after the move to Dornach, Switzerland in 1913). Moving to Berlin changed the fortunes of Rudolf Steiner. He was embraced by the Theosophists and this gave him a platform to hone his skills as an orator, and the opportunity to discover his life mission. “In 1902, Marie von Sivers and I entered upon the leadership of the German section of the Theosophical Society”. Rudolf Steiner and Marie von Sivers occupied the Gartenhaus apartment of Level 3 on the left, the library and Society occupied Level 4 (top floor), Clara and Kurt Walther occupied Level 2, and the publishing company (Verlag) occupied Level 1. The ground level was occupied by an unrelated tenant. Rudolf Steiner moved to Dornach, Switzerland in 1913 to establish the headquarters of his Anthroposophy movement. It was a residential upgrade, as the Steiners moved into an imposing free-standing home, Haus Hansi, set high on the street with a pleasant outlook, and its own atrium and front and rear gardens. Steiner continued his close association with Berlin after the move to Switzerland. From a lifetime tally of 6783 lectures, 1751 (26%) were delivered in Berlin. During WW1, when he might have been expected to avoid Berlin (and Germany generally), Steiner spent long swathes of time in Berlin, despite the privations of wartime, food rationing, and the blockade of imports by the Allies  Rudolf Steiner’s visits to Berlin rapidly tapered off after the Armistice (of 11 November 1918). His final Berlin lecture was on the 22nd May 1923. Steiner’s neighbourhood was severely damaged by WW2 bombing. The southern side of his street, Motzstrasse (= Motzstraße = Motz Street), now comprises nondescript post-WW2 residential apartment buildings. Steiner’s apartment block, which was then number 17, and is now number 30, has survived. Motzstrasse is 3 kilometres  from the twenty-first century ‘Berlin destinations’ of Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie, the Topographie des Terrors (Topography of Terror), and the longest extant remnant of the Berlin Wall.

Emptiness acts as a method of communication in itself; an unorthodox approach to the relaying of narrative, even by contemporary standards. The spaces entirely represent the history of Jews in Europe: ruptured, dark, disorienting, but ultimately continuing.

This text questions to what extent Gunter Demnig's ongoing Stolpersteine project can be seen as a form of silent protest against the cultural and political debates of the late 1980s and 1990s surrounding The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. In particular, the premise that a single centralised memorial could ever express collective memory and identity following decades of national trauma.

Zum 50. Jahrestag des Baues der Berliner Mauer veröffentlicht die Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur eine Übersicht über Orte des Erinnerns an Berliner Mauer und deutsche Teilung. Von Gedenkzeichen über Gedenkstätten bis zu Museen erinnern bundesweit rund 320 Orte an die innerdeutsche Grenze und die Berliner Mauer, so wie an die Opfer dieser Grenze. Auch zahlreiche originale Mauersegmente, die an verschiedenen Orten als Denkmäler aufgestellt wurden, sind verzeichnet. „Nach ihrem Fall verschwand die Berliner Mauer sehr schnell aus dem Stadtbild“, sagt Dr. Anna Kaminsky, Geschäftsführerin der Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur. „Es freut mich deshalb, dass es heute in der gesamten Bundesrepublik so viele Orte gibt, die an die Geschichte der Teilung und Wiedervereinigung erinnern.“ Die Dokumentation kann auf der Homepage der Bundesstiftung heruntergeladen werden.

http://www.bundesstiftung-aufarbeitung.de/pressemitteilungen-2011-1528,402,18.html

Feiert der von einigen Seiten bereits lange totgesagte Flaneur seine erneute Wiederkehr? Neuauflagen bereits vergessener oder unbekannter Bücher, von und über Flaneure geschrieben, haben deren Ideen und Praktiken der Stadtwahrnehmung wieder in Erinnerung und in die Diskussion gebracht. Das Werk Franz Hessels steht hier geradezu exemplarisch. Hatte er in den 1920er Jahren die Pariser Flanerie nach Berlin transformiert, wurde in den 1980er Jahren nach langer Zeit der Vergessenheit der Flaneur Hesselscher Prägung wiederentdeckt. Diese plötzliche Zuwendung zum Flaneriekonzept eines Autors, der mehr als vierzig Jahre als vergessen galt, wirft einige Fragen auf. In welcher Form hat sich Hessel mit der Großstadt auseinandergesetzt? Warum tat er dies? Was genau hat er in ihr wahrgenommen? Und was läßt seinen Ansatz heute wieder relevant erscheinen? Darzustellen, worin Franz Hessels spezifischer Blick auf die Stadt bestand und diesen Blick einer kritischen Betrachtung zu unterwerfen, hat sich die folgende Arbeit zur Aufgabe gemacht.

In this article, I analyze two Berlin novels, that is, Zafer Şenocak’s Gefährliche Verwandtschaft (1998) and Marica Bodrožić’s Kirschholz und alte Gefühle (2012), in order to trace their use of Berlin as a site through which to renegotiate the historical atrocities committed on European soil during the 20th century. First, I analyze Şenocak’s novel in light of its alleged failure to adequately represent the Armenian genocide. Rather than constituting a failure, I argue that this lack of representation is the logical outcome of the novel’s often acknowledged critique of memory and identity discourses in the Berlin Republic. In an attempt to avoid the monumentalizing and exclusionary tendencies of these discourses, the novel uses narrative gaps, fragments, ellipses, and allusions in order to engage the reader actively in a process of remembrance. In so doing, it gestures towards future-oriented possibilities inherent in the past, pointing to the potential futurity inherent in memory discourses surrounding Berlin. In the second part, I offer a reading of Bodrožić’s novel Kirschholz and alte Gefühle. Taking issue with post-Yugoslav memory and identity politics, the novel approaches representations of the past cautiously. Like Şenocak, Bodrožić experiments with narrative silences and allusions in order to leave the represented past open for present and future renegotiation, and to safeguard it from becoming co-opted by identity politics. I conclude by showing that, next to all of their similarities, the novels’ differ in their depiction of Berlin. Whereas Şenocak’s post-Wende Berlin is still firmly located within Germany and its past, Bodrožić’s Berlin gestures towards the city’s European future.

Sharon Macdonald is the founding director of the Centre of Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) located at the Institute of European Ethnology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Trained as a social anthropologist, Macdonald has made museums and heritage institutions her – and CARMAH’s – primary field sites. Her commitment to identifying broader societal issues in daily museum work has made her a sympathetic, yet also critical, observer of, and participant in, Berlin’s and Germany’s museum debates.

In the article the author will attempt to interpret the architectural structure of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, designed in 1989 by Daniel Libeskind. The context of deliberations presented here will rely on a broadly understood idea of tower, an entity identical with the Judaic as well as Christian vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem. However, the key to the metaphor is the assumption that the structure symbolizes a toppled tower, in its turn is a meaningful analogy to the concepts derived from the issues of the Holocaust.

This article was written in 2015 and published in late 2016. It was meant to analyze and deconstruct the general criticism on the project of Humboldt Forum in the reconstructed Palace of Berlin. Why seemed the criticism to overweigh positive reaction? Who were the critics and what was their motivation? The article reflects the ever changing expectations on the site of the politicians and the academia resulting in challenges to the individuals  and teams in charge over a period of 16 years.

Times change. Go to any milonga (tango ball) in London, and you will find same-gender couples, women leading men, and men following. These practices, historically chiefly associated with queer tango, now attract little comment beyond approval, as the dance floor adjusts to changes in the wider world. The closing of established queer tango venues in Buenos Aires might seem to point to queer tango's "success"-having so much in common with the mainstream, that the mainstream absorbs it. Is queer tango still needed? Changed times are also dangerous times. Recently, at a milonga in St Petersburg, "the organiser pushed two women dancing together off the dancefloor" claiming to defend "traditions" (Toumanova 2019). In Istanbul, queer tango activist Faysal Tekoğlu (2019) says "verbal attacks are the order of the day: they ask us if we are faggots, inverted, [if] there are men who claim to be lesbians"-examples symptomatic of socially and politically deteriorating contexts. Dancing queer tango is powerful politics. And the "queer" in it has matured. With a developing emphasis on countering trans-and bi-phobias, it now looks towards older people, disabled people, the racially abused, or others risking marginalisation, because they have so much in common with those of us who risk being marginalised for reasons of gender and sexuality. Argentinian queer tango activists Liliana Furío, Edgardo Fernández Sesma and Chino Andres Reyes argue we should dance with them. Increasingly, we do.

Special supplement to Mittelweg 36, the journal of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, on virtual memorials. Introduction by Mischa Gabowitsch, essays by Aleida Assmann and Vera Dubina. This section came out of a Berlin Colloquium on Contemporary History titled Brussels, Beutelsbach, and Butovo: Economic, Social, and Political Constraints on the Work of Memorial Museums.

In summer 2014, the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art curator Juan Gaitán chose the Dahlem Museums (Ethnologisches Museum and Museum für Asiatische Kunst) in
Berlin as one of the main locations for the Biennale exhibition. Discourses and thoughts about center and periphery, considered both from a local and global perspective, were crucial for the curator who became particularly interested in this opposition while exploring Berlin’s history.
This issue could be easily related to the two museums in the Western periphery of Berlin, which are moving to the city center in the Humboldt-Forum in a couple of years. The dialogue and confrontation of contemporary art and ethnological artifacts served as a starting point for this paper.
The museum’s rooms were clearly not neutral places and the positions of the artists were very different in the context of the historical exhibitions: from a direct contact and work within the
museum collection, to a consideration of an exhibition display as part of the artistic installation itself and to a creation of an “island” within the museum. The main questions provoked by the juxtaposition of the diverse kinds of objects concerned definition of representation and perspective,
issues of colonialism and post-colonialism, as well as eurocentrism and globalization.
[Contemporary art, Ethnological Museum, representation, Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art]

La divisione, qui, ha nome lacerazione […]; la visione panoramica non è comunque una visione giusta. MA U R I C E BL A N C H O T Un confine in questo punto opera come una categoria letteraria. UW E JO H N S O N Es kommt mir nur noch darauf an, ein ruhiges Zimmer zu haben, mit zwei Tischen womöglich und vielen Büchern an der Wand. […] Über Orte läßt sich schlecht rechten, und warum einer da lebt, wo er lebt, das kann er einem anderen sowieso nie begreiflich machen. Die Gründe, die er anführe n kann, sind ihm selbst nicht geheuer: Berlin hat eine so gute Luft. Rom -mit dieser Arc h i t e k t u r, und zehn Monate lang die Sonne obendrein. In München kann man die besten Konzerte hören. In Hintertupfing wird die ersehnte Einsamkeit perfekt. In Paris ist eben doch immer noch am meisten los. -Das kennen wir. Aber das sind doch, genau besehen, keine Gründe, sondern nachgeplapperte oder offizielle Ve r a b redungen über den Ort, mit denen man sich aus der Aff ä re zu ziehen versucht, um über Fluchtpunkte und Schwerpunkte, die man sich selber schafft, schweigen zu können 1 .

This article presents a case study examining the slow-death of the Berlin Führerbunker since 1945. Its seventy year longitudinal perspective shows how processes of ruination, demolition and urban renewal in central Berlin have been affected by materially and politically awkward relict Nazi subterranean structures. Despite now being a buried pile of rubble, the Führerbunker's continued resonance is shown to be the product of a heterogeneous range of influences, spanning wartime concrete bunkers' formidable material resistance, their affective affordances and evolving cultural attitudes towards ruins, demolition, memory, memorialisation, tourism and real estate in the German capital.

Je ne parle pas la langue de mes parents, je ne partage aucun des souvenirs qu'ils purent avoir, quelque chose qui était à eux, qui faisait qu'ils étaient eux, leur histoire, leur culture, leur espoir, ne m'a pas été transmis. Georges Perec, Récits d'Ellis Island 1 Meine Mutter hatte aufgehört, in ihrer Muttersprache zu sprechen, weil es zu gefährlich war. Lebensgefahr. Sie konnte aber ihre Mutter verstehen, die weiter so sprach, und ich verstand ein wenig, wie beabsichtigt, dank dir.

This course was offered in English, during the Summer-Semester 2013, within the Module "Comparative Literary History (Vergleichende Literaturgeschichte)", which is a part of the teaching- and research-programme leading towards a B.A./M.A. in Comparative Literature (Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft) at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
The Second World War has been one of the radically-transforming influences-if not the most-on mid/late-twentieth-century European cityscapes, nowhere more intensely than in Berlin, which was subjected to political ideologies and military manoeuvres that led to the near-total physical destruction of the city. It would be quite appropriate to observe, as Bertolt Brecht had done, after 1945, that Berlin was "ein Trümmerhaufen bei Potsdam" (a rubble-heap near Potsdam). In this course, we will seek to analyse the rather ambiguous relationship of fiction and contemporary historical processes, through a comparative study of war-time novels and later ones dealing with the period, by British and German authors, who had first-hand experience of their material. We will attempt to look at war as not only the traumatic and dehumanising breach with normalcy that it is, but also as a heightened narrative of the gross exacerbation of pre-existent ethno-cultural, class-based, ideological and gendered biases that it brings about. In this context, it becomes important to look at warfare, especially in the case of WW2, as not only capable of destroying lives, built heritage and infrastructure, but also tearing asunder pre-existent norms of conduct and restraint.
http://archiv.vv.fu-berlin.de/ss13/de/lv/077b_k90/98983/29010/

z okładki:
„Przewodnik pomaga w poszukiwaniach odpowiedzi na
fundamentalne, a zarazem bardzo trudne pytania: o czym
Berlin pamięta, czego nie może sobie przypomnieć i o czym
chciałby zapomnieć.”

Młodzi polscy historycy, socjolodzy oraz kulturoznawcy
stworzyli wyjątkowy przewodnik. Prowadzi on Czytelnika
przez stolicę Niemiec, przybliżając nie tylko historię,
ale przede wszystkim symboliczne znaczenia
wybranych miejsc pamięci.

„Berlin. Miasto pamięci” zawiera 20 artykułów
poświęconych zarówno tym najbardziej rozpoznawalnym,
jak i mniej znanym obiektom, na których
piętno odcisnęły dwa dwudziestowieczne systemy
totalitarne. Książka pomaga zrozumieć fenomen złożonej
tkanki miejskiej Berlina, wpisując ją w szerszy
kontekst niemieckiej polityki historycznej i pamięci
społecznej.

Die jüdische Selbstemanzipation des 18. Jahrhunderts (Haskala) ist in der neueren Aufklärungsforschung zu einem zentralen Thema avanciert. Buchtitel wie Cultural Revolution in Berlin. Jews in the Age of Enlightenment sind bezeichnend dafür. Der vorliegende Band, der auf eine Konferenz im Jüdischen Museum Berlin im Jahr 2016 zurückgeht, ergänzt das komplexe Bild dieses Umbruchs um einen in der Regel unterschätzten Aspekt – nämlich die um 1800 reich dokumentierte Symbiose zwischen jüdischen und christlichen Intellektuellen der Stadt. In ihrer Vielgestaltigkeit geht sie weit über den kanonisch gewordenen Fall Lessing/Moses Mendelssohn hinaus. Ihr Antrieb war das beidseitige Wunschbild einer jüdischen Mitbürgerschaft nicht nur in rechtlicher, sondern auch kultureller Hinsicht. Im Aktionsraum dieses doppelten Lernprozesses, den die 14 Fallstudien des Bandes entfalten, finden sich neben Namen, die man kennt – wie David Friedländer, Salomon Maimon und Rahel Levin bzw. Friedrich Nicolai, Karl Philipp Moritz und Wilhelm von Humboldt – auch relativ unbekannte, die es sich lohnt weiter zu beforschen. Umso mehr, als das symbiotische Experiment Berlin 1800 offensichtlich die Basis für den in der Welt singulären jüdischen Beitrag zur deutschsprachigen Kultur bis 1933 war. Was danach, ebenfalls von Berlin ausgehend, kam, ist bekannt. Es sollte die historische Erinnerung an die frühe Utopie nicht verdecken. (https://www.wehrhahn-verlag.de/public/index.php?ID_Section=1&ID_Product=1422)

Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt sich zum Ziel, litererische Streitegien einer urbanen Geschichtschreibung in Annett Gröschners Roman „Walpurgistag“ (2011) aufzuzeigen. Die Autorin unternimmt in „Walpurgisnacht“ einen Versuch, die stets vorhandene, aber unmöglich simultan zu erzählende Geschichte der Stadt in einen historiographischen Text zu übertragen, indem sie konkrete Schichten der Stadtgeschichte präpariert und sie in gegenwärtigen Kontext, d.h. in die Lebensgeschichten der Romanfiguren einbaut.

This course was offered in English, during the Winter-Semesters  of 2014-15 and 2015-16, within the 2nd Module, "Aspects of German Culture", which is a part of the teaching-programme "Module-Package Berlin- and German Studies (Modulpaket Berlin- und Deutschlandstudien)" designed for Erasmus- and other direct-exchange-students at the Institute for German and Dutch Philology (Institut für Deutsche und Niederländische Philologie), Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. In this course, we will seek to analyse the rather ambiguous relationship of fiction and contemporary historical processes, through a comparative study of post-WW2 literary and cinematic texts, by both long-time Berliners and immigrants and travellers, who had first-hand experience of the processes that have shaped Berlin as a poly-centric frenetically-cosmopolitan 'global' city with a 'local' Kiez or Bezirk-centered sensibility that resists obsolescence. From this perspective, it becomes important to look at the breaches of normalcy caused by WW2 and the Cold War, as not only capable of destroying lives, built heritage and infrastructure, and tearing asunder pre-existent norms of conduct and restraint—as will be seen in Marta Hillers’ novel (if she, indeed, is the real author of "Eine Frau in Berlin")—but also opening the doors to new forms of socialisation and political-cultural outreach, consensual or forced. We will look at how post-1945 discourses of “shame” and “guilt”, in the context of the colossal human rights’ abuses, on all sides, during and soon after WW2, led to the evolution of certain kinds of literary and cinematic discourses dealing with the horrors of WW2 and the Cold War that are still being processed within European societies.
http://www.fu-berlin.de/vv/de/lv/187270?query=Chakrabarti&sm=129212

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Berlin, inaugurated in 2005, and the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism within the Memory Park (Parque de la Memoria) in Buenos Aires, unveiled in 2007, have both been controversial from start to finish. While these sites differ in many respects, Germany and Argentina share a history of dictatorial regimes that murdered civilians on a massive scale. The Nazis implemented the genocide of millions of Jews and other minorities during World War II. In Argentina, the junta-led state repression was responsible for the “disappearance” and subsequent murder of thousands of civilians between 1976 and 1983. Decades later, new governments in Germany and Argentina acknowledged the responsibility of their respective states for these mass murders by memorializing the victims with a national monument in the capital city for the first time. This study of two memorials develops a model and method for analyzing the memorialization of recent tragedies that share several basic characteristics: the state creates a self-indicting national memorial to the victims of state-sponsored mass murder in the absence of their bodies. Analyzed as sites of conflicting performances and as performances themselves, these memorials illuminate the ways in which people engage with them, and how an architecture of absence triggers embodied memory through somatic experience. While death tourism and architourism are a key to their success in attracting visitors, they also pose a threat to their commemorative role. Besides assessing the success and failure of these memorials, Brigitte Sion explores the ways in which these sites are paradigmatic and offers a model for analyzing a transnational circuit of commemorative practices.

Mesmo após quase 27 anos da queda do Muro de Berlim, a memória da Alemanha Oriental ainda é alvo de disputas. Sua apropriação se dá, hoje, principalmente por meio da musealização e da comercialização de símbolos do passado, mas o peso das memórias individuais ainda é suficientemente grande para impedir o esquecimento pela via do consumo. Neste trabalho, procuro abordar diferentes modos de lembrar a Alemanha Oriental por meio de depoimentos de pessoas que vivenciaram, de maneiras muito distintas, o regime socialista que findou definitivamente com a unificação do país com a Alemanha Ocidental, em 3 de outubro de 1990. Pretendo também apresentar um olhar estrangeiro sobre as complexidades de Berlim e seu apego ao não-esquecimento de seu difícil passado.

Even after almost 27 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the memory of East Germany is still disputed. Its appropriation today happens mainly through ‘museumization’ and the marketing of symbols from the past, but individual memories are still sufficiently powerful to prevent forgetting through consumerism. In this dissertation, I seek to approach different ways of remembering East Germany through testimonies of people who, in very distinctive ways, lived the socialist regime that ended with the country’s unification with West Germany in 3 October 1990. I also intend to present a foreign outlook into Berlin’s complexities and its commitment to not forgetting its difficult past.

Pieta as an Artistic response to the Holocaust in the Works of Jewish and Non-Jewish Female Artists The paper I would like to read out today was written on the basis of a chapter from my book about the Jewish Museum Berlin, which I wrote for my postdoctoral degree obtained at the University of Warsaw. The book was published in Polish in 2015 by the Adam Mickiewicz University Press and I have high hopes of it being translated into English. 2 In 1988 Berlin authorities held a contest for the project of the Jewish Museum commemorating 2000 years of the German-Jewish history, with Daniel Libeskind being selected as the winner.

Die Rekonstruktion des ehemaligen Hohenzollernschlosses in der Mitte Berlins ist nach sieben Jahren Bauzeit abgeschlossen. Die Debatte um den Wiederaufbau ist damit jedoch keineswegs zu Ende, prognostiziert die Kulturwissenschaftlerin Marlene Militz. Denn das Bauprojekt knüpfe allzu unkritisch an preußische Traditionen an und befördere damit einen „restaurativen Charakter der Gesellschaft“. Geschichte lasse sich aber nun einmal nicht rückgängig machen – erst recht nicht mit Hilfe barocker Schlossfassaden.

"Spaces of memory in post-socialist Berlin"
A quarter-century after the fall of the Wall the heritage of the German Democratic Republic still raises unsolved identity and political problems, which are paradigmatically reflected in the contradictions of the new Berlin. This study explores the different expressions of memory of the GDR in the capital city, their changes and reciprocal relationships. The dynamics of the public institutional memory have been compared with the individual strategies of remembering, bringing fragile mechanisms of the construction of the past to light.
Investigations, conducted with an original multidisciplinary approach, examine the urban traces, the museal and mediatic representations, the historiographical and private images of the GDR within a city, which is continuously fermenting. A journey in the cicatrized heart of the united Berlin through the eyes of its protagonists.

In the early 1990s, Berlin and Shanghai witnessed the dramatic social changes in both national and global contexts. While in 1991 Berlin became the new capital of the reunified Germany, from 1992 Shanghai began to once again play its role as the most powerful engine of economic development in the post-1989 China. This critical moment of history has fundamentally transformed the later development of both cities, above all in terms of urban spatial order. The construction mania in Shanghai and Berlin shares the
similar aspiration of «re-modernizing» themselves. In this sense, the current experience of Shanghai and Berlin informs many of the features of urban modernity in the post-Cold-War era. The book unfolds the complexity of the urban space per se as highly revealing cultural texts. Also this project doesn’t examine the spatial changes in chronological terms, but rather takes the present moment as the temporal standing point of this research. By comparing the memory discourse related to these spatial changes, the book poses the question of how modernity is understood in the matrix of local, national and global power struggles.

Profile pictures from gay dating sites of young men posing with the stelae of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe in Berlin have been subject to an art exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York and a tribute online blog. This paper unveils the meaning of these pictures on this particular site, in an effort to understand why these men chose to portray themselves at the Holocaust Memorial in order to cruise the digital sphere of gay dating websites. In three consecutive sections, the paper asserts that, on the one hand, the conversion of the Holocaust Memorial into a cruising scenario is facilitated by a design that —putting forward autonomy and abstraction— allows and even invites its constant resignification in terms of everyday practices. And, on the other hand, it posits that the images exhibited at the Jewish Museum can be interpreted as a performative memorial which reinscribes sexuality and gender into Holocaust narratives.