Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany by Eli Rubin (review)

Eli Rubin’s succinct study of Marzahn, a Berlin neighborhood that became the largest prefabricated settlement in East Germany, invites readers to experience the everyday history of a planned community from perspectives alternating among its residents, its buildings, and the overarching histories in which they may be located. Evaluating the planned settlement both as a lived environment specific to the GDR and as a space constructed on the grounds of previous settlements with materials deriving in part from western nations, Rubin marks ruptures and continuities between an under-studied part of the GDR and German history. The author’s ambitious combination of theoretical frameworks and his clever exploration of GDR material culture after the end of the official state makes for an interesting and informative read that leaves room for further elaboration.

In five main chapters Rubin details Marzahn’s construction from its blueprints up, situating the neighborhood first among colonizing movements that it reproduces and unearths, and then distinguishing its architects’ modernist plans from previous plans for urban development. Marzahn was one of several prefabricated developments initiated by Erich Honecker’s 1973 Housing Project, which sought to alleviate the housing shortage resulting from buildings destroyed during World War II and inadequately maintained thereafter. Although the housing units were mass-produced—meaning quality was often sacrificed for quantity—Rubin’s archival research in the Deutsche Bauakademie and related offices reminds readers of the urban planners’ utopian intentions. The new “Apartment Construction System 70” (34) contained not only individual apartment buildings, but also integrated them into a socialist settlement complete with green spaces, safe routes for school children, shopping centers, and all the amenities thought necessary for a holistic solution to the housing crisis.

Yet, although this space was constructed within the temporal and geographical boundaries demarcating the official GDR state, it also fits into a series of utopian projects and colonial movements that are not specific to the GDR. In the first half of the volume, Rubin creatively traces two historical continuities through which he narrates Marzahn’s development: the history of the working classes and previous waves of settlers. Instead of reproducing Cold War binaries between East and West, Rubin shows that Marzahn brought to fruition a series of attempts to solve the housing crisis by displacing working-class populations. First, slum-like rental barracks were built to house immigrants at the former city margins in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1928, Berlin City Building Commissioner Martin Wagner envisioned improved, affordable housing in his “New Berlin,” as did Albert Speer in his 1938 General Plan for Berlin. Arguing that “the SED and the GDR had their origins, in part, in the miserable slums of Berlin” (13), Rubin shows that Marzahn both realizes previous urban planning projects and disciplines popular unrest, a methodological maneuver that critically traces sociopolitical continuities between GDR and German history.

To avoid too optimistic a reading of Marzahn’s spaces, Rubin balances his engaging summary of the socialist community constructed according to plan (and material mishap) with its darker aspects of state surveillance and twentieth-century socialist desires to efface traces of capitalist culture. Although Marzahn’s residents experienced a “radically new space” (6), the neighborhood’s construction literally unearthed reminders of pasts that Rubin fits into a series of colonizing processes inscribed into the sand of Mark Brandenburg. The GDR discourses guiding Marzahn’s construction sought to placate residents with greenery and better amenities in a manner similar to Le Corbusier’s modernist urban planning. In practice, they unearthed prehistoric remains ranging from the Stone Age to World War II, including Ur-German, Slavic, and twelfth-century German settlements, as well as armaments from the 1945 Battle of Berlin. These remnants set Marzahn atop contested territories that its construction exposed rather than effaced.

Rubin’s keen ability to articulate complex materials, desires, histories, and memories shines in his recapitulation of interviews and memoirs from Marzahn’s residents. Demonstrating how Marzahn...