Title: Memory Traces: 1989 and the Question of German Cultural Identity
Abstract: Simine, Silke Arnold-de, ed. Memory Traces: 1989 And the. Question of German Cultural Identity. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005. 343pp. $67.95 paperback. Memory Traces, volume 5 in the Cultural History and Literary Imagination series edited by Christian Emden and David Midgley, includes articles by an international group of scholars whose work on cultural, literary, and popular modes of diverging memories evoked by German unification engages in critical dialogue with methodologies forged by Jan and Aleida Assman, Pierre Nora, Maurice Halbwachs, Andreas Huyssen, and others dedicated to illuminating the formation of cultural memory. Faced with an avalanche of interdisciplinary monographs and collections on memory, Silke Arnold-de Simine's succinct overview of approaches dedicated to defining and describing the development of cultural memory in light of the 1989 Wende is timely. In her introduction, Arnold-de Simine emphasizes the political and cultural processes that construct, shape, and transmit collective memories by material or procedural representations (14). The primary theme linking the eleven essays is how remembering takes place and through which means. Whereas identity remains a central trope in describing the processes by which memory is enacted, performed, and constituted, the volume urges us to examine case studies in order to move from a metanarrative of memory in philosophical and rhetorical terms to an investigation of the materiality and exchange value of cultural memories. In accomplishing this task, the essays, for the most part, break new ground by distilling the imagery and means of transmitting the past in literary genres ranging from Thomas Mann's oeuvre as cultural inheritance (Marc Oliver Huber) to Wende poetry as a form allowing for enactments of absence (Ruth J. Owen), and in the production of spaces of memory through visual technologies, architecture, and objects in public spaces. Three essays in particular deserve mention for opening up a discussion on the material depth of commemoration as constructed through virtual media on the one hand, and concrete constructions of space on the other. Cultural icons reminiscent of the GDR, for example, become resituated within a larger context of cultural politics after unification in Simon Ward's article on the value of memory traces. In his essay, he traces how the debates around preserving or demolishing actual objects such as the Berlin Wall or the Palast der Republik in the midst of massive architectural and building projects in Berlin sometimes miss the actual value that these places take on as producers of space inhabited and coded by everyday use. By focusing on the significance of the controversy concerning the Ernst Thalmann monument for establishing alternative expressions of German national identity, Russel Lemmons also shows that public debate about physical remnants representing GDR identity and ideology may in fact democratize public dialogue about memory. …
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 8
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