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Cities of Memory: Urban Space and the Nazi Past in Postwar Germany
Gavriel Rosenfeld Germany - - 10/04
x-post: H-Soz-u-Kult
Gavriel Rosenfeld and Paul Jaskot 15.10.2004
Call for Papers Cities of Memory:
Urban Space and the Nazi Past in Postwar Germany Gavriel Rosenfeld and Paul Jaskot, Editors
We are seeking abstracts and manuscripts for a book on the Nazi past's impact on the postwar physical and social development of German cities.
For all of the recent scholarship on the German people's struggle to come to terms with the Nazi experience (Vergangenheitsbewältigung), and despite the considerable scholarship on the specific case of Berlin, we still know very little about how the confrontation with the Nazi past
has been pursued in, or shaped the physical development of, most German cities since 1945. This volume aims to rectify this situation by
assembling a wide range of essays exploring how diverse German cities beyond Berlin have wrestled with the Nazi legacy.
Working from Maurice Halbwachs's contention that memories are always rooted in spatial frameworks and David Harvey's careful work on the spatialization of political economy, we aim to show how the
confrontation with the Nazi legacy during the postwar period found wide expression in debates over architecture, urban planning, historic
preservation, monuments, and other features of the German urban environment. We welcome contributions that utilize methodologies from diverse academic fields -- whether history, geography, art and
architectural history, and cultural studies -- that help shed light on
our primary focus: how the struggle over remembering and memorializing the Nazi era has shaped the form of the urban environment, how the urban environment, in turn, stands as a physical expression of memory, and how ideological and political debates concerning the National Socialist past
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have been functionally instrumentalized through built forms. In exploring this question, we intend to analyze not only the visual form of German cities, but the role played by their inhabitants in shaping them. We aim, in short, to combine aesthetic analysis with a focus on agency. Our ultimate goal is to complicate the discussion of the Germans' confrontation with the Nazi past by moving from a singular focus on the national level toward the more local, urban level, in the hope of shedding new light upon the dynamics of remembrance in the postwar period.
Among the many specific questions that we aim to explore are:
- How did different German cities respond to the Nazi legacy after 1945? To what extent did they attempt to evade or confront it? To what degree did the nature of a given city or town's experience during the Nazi era determine its ability to wrestle with its legacy after 1945?
- How did German cities' strategies of dealing with the Nazi past (whether evasion or confrontation) physically shape their urban environments? How did Germans attempt to instrumentalize specific spaces, memorials and unmarked sites related to the Nazi past?
- How has the treatment of "perpetrator sites" differed from that of
"victim sites?"
- Has the German response to specific sites typically been decided from the top down, by political officials, or from the bottom up by ordinary citizens?
- What conflicts have erupted over specific sites of memory? How have conflicts over memory manifested themselves differently in architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, and monuments? Has the ability of German cities to deal with the Nazi past become easier or more difficult over the course of the postwar era?
- How have cities responded to or reacted against the model of Berlin as the dominant focus of remembrance? Is there a comparative urban or architectural relationship between specific city projects and those in Berlin?
- How has the built environment been used in terms of the changing significance of debates around the Holocaust and National Socialism? Is there a chronology or developing historical philosophy for specific postwar urban geographies?
- Have specific architects or urban planners been particular associated with the project of remembrance in cities outside of Berlin? Is there a local aesthetic or professional debate that makes the agency of these architects or planners more evident?
- Finally, can we generalize whatsoever about specific cities'
"success" or "failure" in coming to terms with the Nazi era? If so,
which cities have distinguished themselves as the best examples of one trend or the other?
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Our goal is to assemble ten to twelve papers for this volume that cover a representative sample of cities and towns across Germany (both West and East) over the course of the postwar period. Final submissions should be 20-25 double-spaced pages (5,000-7,000 words). Maps, photographs, and other visual material are welcome.
We intend to have the manuscript ready for publication by 2006. We are currently in discussions with various publishers who have expressed interest in our volume. Once we have assembled the contributors and a complete set of abstracts we will finalize the contract.
If you are interest in submitting a proposal to the volume, please contact us by the following dates:
October 1, 2004, Title and abstract of proposed paper September 1, 2005, Completed Manuscript
For more information, please contact the editors at:
grosenfeld@mail.fairfield.edu (Department of History, Fairfield University, USA) or pjaskot@depaul.edu (Department of Art History, DePaul University, USA).
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Gavriel Rosenfeld
Fairfield University, Fairfield CT, USA, 06430 grosenfeld@mail.fairfield.edu
__________________________________________________________________
HUMANITIES - SOZIAL- UND KULTURGESCHICHTE H-SOZ-U-KULT@H-NET.MSU.EDU
Redaktion:
E-Mail: hsk.redaktion@geschichte.hu-berlin.de WWW: http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de
Reference:
CFP: Cities of Memory: Urban Space and the Nazi Past in Postwar Germany. In: ArtHist.net, Aug 15, 2004 (accessed Feb 27, 2022), <https://arthist.net/archive/26543>.
