East Berlin Political Monuments in the Late German Democratic Republic
Finding a Place for Marx and Engels
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10075717 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Brian Ladd (0000-0002-0445-7775, American Academy in Berlin, State University of New York at Albany, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 91-104 |
| Publication date | 2002-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00220094020370011101 |
| OpenAlex | W1969915567 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
It has long been customary to characterize vanished states and their leaders by examining the monuments they built. To understand the recently defunct socialist regimes of eastern Europe, historians have available a wide range of evidence, lessening the need to generalize from mute documents of stone. We also have a wealth of evidence with which to reconstruct the decision-making processes behind major construction projects, enabling us better to assess the appearance of the projects themselves. When we compare this visual evidence with our (still fragmentary) knowledge of what the leaders hoped to put on display, we can begin to understand the particular combination of changing taste, crumbling cultural authority, hollow revolutionary posturing and official timidity that transformed the centre of East Berlin during the four decades of communist rule there. Some visitors to East Berlin at the end of the communist era thought they saw the product of a totalitarian impulse to erase all privacy and intimacy in public space. Others saw a mishmash of historical reconstruction, socialist iconography and feeble attempts to satisfy consumers. One project that confounds viewers is the Marx-Engels memorial in central Berlin, completed in 1986. Its dogmatic message comes packaged in an unheroic form far removed from the soaring Stalinist bombast familiar to everyone in eastern Europe. Since 1989 it has been cited as visual evidence of a regime that had surrendered its ideals, or perhaps one that learned to temper its most tyrannical impulses, or perhaps one that simply lost its nerve. If nothing else, the history of the memorial reveals a regime that lost control of its own iconography as the desires of competing constituencies artists, the broader public and party leaders themselves pulled it in different directions. After the second world war the new German Democratic Republic (GDR) needed to establish its own identity, distinct from both the previous (nazi) regime and the rival West German state. That need for identity, whether expressed visually or socially, clearly shaped plans for the eastern sector of Berlin. What the regime (and many of its architects) wanted to build was the socialist city, but changing dictates about its appropriate architectural forms prevented the emergence of any clear visual identity. Nor was there consensus rnal of Contempo ary History Copyright ? 2002 SAGE Publicati s, London, Thousand O ks, CA and Delhi, Vol 37(), 9 -104. 2-0094(2 0201)37:1 ;91 -1 4;020757]
Ancient history · Archaeology · Democracy · Economic history · German · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Law
| Citations per year | 0.2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2006 - 2010 (5) |
| Highly cited | No |