Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History by Helmut Puff (review)

Helmut Puff’s Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History, in the de Gruyter series Media and Cultural Memory, is a highly creative endeavour which convincingly represents the intriguing sides of cultural memory studies today. At first, the reader may be unsure of what to expect. The title promises a genre analysis of miniature models and their representations of German history. The title image, a detail of a model of Hanover with a view of its city hall in 1945, shows the destruction around the mostly intact city hall and points to rubble models representing the destruction of German cities after the aerial bombing in the Second World War. This creates some tension as to whether the book is about models of destruction after 1945 or about city models in a much wider sense. This ambiguity matches the richness of the book, which is arranged in five case studies. In the introduction (chapter 1), Puff suggests three paths through the book: the reader can read the five subsequent chapters either in chronological order or in the zigzagging order in which Puff arranged the chapters for theoretical reasons. In addition, the reader who wants to focus primarily on German post–Second World War culture can skip the historical chapters to concentrate on the discussion of war ruins and the reconstruction of city space. This would, however, mean that the reader misses out on some of Puff’s most interesting moves that merge media aesthetics over the sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries.

In his analysis of Robert and Hermann Treuner’s miniature model of Frankfurt’s destroyed centre (ca. 1946) and the discussion of the planned, but never realized, Mahnmal für die wehrlosen Opfer des Bombenkrieges by Benno Elkan in the mid-1950s (chapter 2), Puff shows the co-presence of different historical layers, including the damage to Frankfurt in the 1867 fire, and how the model represents a complex temporality and memoryscape of interwoven ideas of past, present, and future: “We can now build on a formula coined at the outset of this book: this chapter has demonstrated how a model’s miniature monumentality is a spatial form thick with temporal layers, a frozen moment of history that exists both within time and outside of it” (79). The following chapters put the rubble models in a dialogue with city models of Munich and other sixteenth-century Bavarian Renaissance cities, marking their relevance in the power relations between rulers and their subjects, and with the aesthetics of (ancient) ruins in the late eighteenth century, exemplified by the gardens of Schwetzingen. The idea of how imagined ruins span space and time connects the outside space of the gardens to the rubble models that function as miniature ruins of destroyed city space. Puff then traces the three-dimensional miniature cities in ruins in Germany (chapter 5): he identifies ten existing rubble models of 1945 cities that were created between 1946 and 2001. The display of three models of Heilbronn – the old Heilbronn, Heilbronn in ruins in 1945, and postwar Heilbronn in 1960 – in the city’s Ehrenhalle signifies “a melancholic engagement with a present that cannot disentangle itself from the past” (202). Puff demonstrates in his analysis of the rubble model of 1945 Würzburg, completed in 1989, how in the later twentieth century naturalistic effects in model-making were directed toward “post-war generations without first-hand knowledge of the attacks or memories of their aftermath” (221). In his epilogue (chapter 6), which is followed by a brief systematic conclusion, Puff expands his German subject matter to discuss the use of models in Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) as well as models of the destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their presentation in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Memorial Park (which opened in 1955), pinpointing how rubble models with their simulated qualities allow for communication across traumatic...