Stumbling Stones
Holocaust Memorials, National Identity, and Democratic Inclusion in Berlin
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3615435 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kirsten Harjes (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 138-151 |
| Publication date | 2005-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | German Politics & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1045-0300 • E-ISSN: 1558-5441 |
| Publisher | Berghahn Books (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3167/104503005780889237 |
| OpenAlex | W2014668808 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 15 |
In 1997, Hinrich Seeba offered a graduate seminar on Berlin at the University of California, Berkeley. He called it: "Cityscape: Berlin as Cultural Artifact in Literature, Art, Architecture, Academia." It was a true German studies course in its interdisciplinary and cultural anthropological approach to the topic: Berlin, to be analyzed as a "scape," a "view or picture of a scene," subject to the predilections of visual perception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This course inspired my research on contemporary German history as represented in Berlin's Holocaust memorials. The number and diversity of these memorials has made this city into a laboratory of collective memory. Since the unification of East and West Germany in 1990, memorials in Berlin have become means to shape a new national identity via the history shared by both Germanys. In this article, I explore two particular memorials to show the tension between creating a collective, national identity, and representing the cultural and historical diversity of today's Germany. I compare the Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas (Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, or "national Holocaust memorial") which opened in central Berlin on May 10, 2005, to the lesser known, privately sponsored, decentralized "stumbling stone" project by artist Gunter Demnig
Archaeology · Art · Art history · Cityscape · Collective memory · German · Media studies · National identity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · The Holocaust · Visual arts · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration
Anchoring Memory in a City of Flux
Landscape, boundaries, and the limits of representation
Stumbling over History
Towards a taxonomy of arguments for and against street renaming
Stumbling upon history
Baltic Escape Boats in Sweden
Imperial designs
Non-committal memory
Parallel Societies” of the Past? Articulations of Citizenship’s Commemorative Dimension in Berlin’s Cityscape
Transnational, transborder, antinational? The memory of the Jewish past in Poland
Victor's memory
Remembering May 4, 1970
It was horrible, but we live now
Commemorative city-texts
Raising the Dead
| Citations per year | 0.27 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1970 - 2026 (57) |
| Highly cited | No |