In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 22.2 (2000) 168-170



[Access article in PDF]

Book Review

Undoing Memory

Matthew Griffin


Sophie Calle. The Detachment/Die Entfernung: A Berlin Travel Guide. Dresden: Verlag der Kunst with Arndt & Partner Gallery and G+B Arts International, 1997. 96 pp. Text in English and German. Illustrated with 12 original color postcards.

The vote this past June 1999 by the German Bundestag in favor of a national memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe marked the end of a decade-long debate that has yielded a rich discussion within contemporary German society around issues of memory and public culture. Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, Christo and Jean-Claude's wrapped Reichstag, and Norman Foster's glass cupola are the prominent examples of the boom in public sites of memory such as museum, memorial, and monument in a culture seemingly obsessed with its past. The agreed-upon design for the Holocaust memorial is, however, unlikely to put to rest the conflicts at the heart of Germany's memorial culture. The addition of an information center to Peter Eisenman's vast field of columns has been widely criticized for compromising the memorial's avowedly intractable character. In contrast to the heroic tradition of the legitimizing, identity-nurturing monument, Eisenman's search for a form with which to memorialize the unrepresentability of the Holocaust led his project to be thought of as a counter-monument.

One of the best embodiments of the trend in Germany toward such negative-form monuments is a submission by the artist Horst Hoheisel to the 1995 Holocaust memorial competition. His proposal to blow up the Brandenburger Tor, scatter its dust over the site, and then cover it with granite plates would remember a destroyed people through a destroyed monument. Clearly such a project could never be sanctioned by the state, because it represents, in the words of James Young, author of the definitive The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, a "memorial undoing." Incredible as it might seem, such memorial undoings were, nonetheless, being realized at this time in the Bundesrepublik, where the symbols of the former East German state were being removed. [End Page 168]

The undoing of monuments and memorials is the subject of Sophie Calle's The Detachment, a book that documents the removal of the emblems of the GDR after its dissolution. Calle bases her research on a communiqué from the Berlin senate concerning the preservation, redesignation, and removal of monuments in East Berlin representing Communism and the GDR's cult of personality. "To record this process," Calle writes in her introduction, "I visited places from which symbols of GDR history have been effaced. I asked passers-by and residents to describe the objects that once filled these empty spaces. I photographed the absence and replaced the missing monuments with their memories."

Foremost on this list are familiar cases such as the removal of the GDR insignia from the Palace of the Republic, the dismantling of the towering Lenin memorial on U.N. Square, and the dismissal of the Honor Guard at the Neue Wache; lesser-known cases include an enshrouded bust of Lenin before the Russian Embassy, a plaque commemorating Lenin's visit to the Bebelplatz Library, two clusters of armed workers along Hohenschönhauserallee, a soldier's statue at the Soviet cemetery, an inscription in the Nikolai-Viertal, and a re-named street sign.

The text provides a sample of East Berliners' views after reunification, portraying them as embittered by but also nostalgic for the GDR. Along with the clichés about "Ossies" and "Wessies," the book offers some deeper insights, not just into the historical facts surrounding the physical removal of the former GDR's monuments and memorials--the information we receive in the texts is often contradictory--but into the psychological Entfernung or distance arising from a population's collective memory that has become undone.

The memorials and monuments Calle examines in The Detachment complement the various legitimizing narratives of the GDR, in particular, the myth of the GDR as a state founded on anti-fascism. A plaque to...

pdf

Share