Germany's Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century / Edition 1

by Rudy J. Koshar

Overview

Over the course of the twentieth century, Germans have venerated and maintained a variety of historical buildings—from medieval fortresses and cathedrals to urban districts and nineteenth-century working-class housing. But the practice of historic preservation has sometimes proven controversial, as different groups of Germans have sought to use historical architecture to represent competing versions of their nation's history.

Transient Pasts is the first book to examine the role that the historic preservation movement has played in German cultural history and memory from the end of the nineteenth century to the
early 1970s.

Focusing on key public debates over historic preservation, Rudy Koshar charts a trajectory of cultural politics in which historical architecture both facilitated and limited Germans' efforts to identify as a nation. He demonstrates that historical buildings and monuments have served as enduring symbols of national history in a country scarred by the traumas of two world wars, Nazism, the Holocaust, and political division. His findings challenge both the widely accepted argument that Germans have constantly repressed their past and the contention that Germany's intense public engagement with history since reunification is unprecedented.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807847015
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	06/29/1998
Edition description:	1
Pages:	440
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.98(d)
Lexile:	1700L (what's this?)

About the Author

Rudy Koshar is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880-1935.

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface
Introduction

Chapter 1. Documents of Stone
Toward a National Optics
Preservation and National Life
Micropolitics
Scrutiny, License, and Control
Multiplication and Appropriation

Chapter 2. City of the Unborn
Rules and Transgressions
Artifacts and War Machines
Toward Laudomania?
The Being and Force of Everyday Life

Chapter 3. Modernist Crucible
Mixed Blessings
The Vulnerable Nation
Only to Be Sincere

Chapter 4. Where German Hearts Are Molded
The Culture of Leistung
Performance-Oriented Preservation
Privileged Marginality
Cultural Revolution?
Sodom and Gomorrah

Chapter 5. Commemorative Noise
Murky Transitions
Archipelagoes of Memory
Fragments of a Nation
Desire and Doubt

Chapter 6. A Normal Memory
The New Past
Revived Institutions
A Nation Like Any Other
The New Past and the Old

Chapter 7. The New Cult of Monuments
The New Society
Demand for Totality?
A Transformed Nation
Every Text, Grand or Humble
A Future for the Past

Conclusion. Wrapped Reichstag
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Illustrations
Alter Markt 20/22, Cologne
Strasbourg cathedral
Georg Dehio
Paul Clemen
Cologne's Gürzenich assembly hall
Marienburg
Lübeck
Dresden
Bacharach house
The Alsatian fortress Hohkönigsburg
Alois Riegl
Cologne cityscape at night
Rothenburg ob der Tauber
Halberstadt
Trier
Reims cathedral in World War I
Reims statuary before and after German bombing
German war monuments vandalized
Duderstadt streetscapes
Wartburg
Stuttgart Old Castle
Gustav Decker's Cologne ensemble
Ernst Stern's Brandenburger Tor
Bruno Taut's colorful facade
Jacobikirche bells
Nuremberg's old German ambience
Munich in Weimar poster art
Marksburg in the Rhineland
Genovevaburg in the Eifel region
Performance of Nazi building plans
Braunschweig cathedral as a model for relevant historic preservation
Nazi psychotopography of Berlin
Speyer cathedral
Autobahn as a window on commercialized history and landscape
Frankfurt am Main Altstadt
Paul Herrmann's The Flag
Marching columns in decorated Nuremberg
Nazi kitsch
Cologne after the bombings
Troops march through Münster rubble
Doing away with unsavory monuments on the Munich Königsplatz
St. Alban's and Gürzenich
St. Alban's as a cultivated ruin
Ruins as bulletin board in Dresden
Ruins as souvenir for GI and his German wife
Ruins as movie set
Prinzipalmarkt before and after World War II
St. Lorenz in its prewar grandeur
Walter Ulbricht and the rebuilding of Dresden
Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church
Rothenburg ob der Tauber
Römerberg flora, Frankfurt am Main
Hildesheim market square in 1900 and 1962
Dresden corpses and DDR memory
Leonhard church and zeppelin in Frankfurt am Main
Frankfurt am Main cathedral in the programmed city
Römerberg and the "Mickey Mouse Middle Ages"
Nikolaikirche ensemble and DDR "Disneyland"
Eisenheim in the Ruhr

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A nuanced and very full examination.—Choice

A penetrating examination of national memory and identity in modern Germany. To achieve his goal, Koshar has chosen wisely to examine the public discourse of preservationists, the people directly concerned with the cultivation of memory through the care and maintenance of historic structures. He argues persuasively that, despite these efforts, German national identity has been and remains unstable, provisional, and transient. This is an important work of value to everyone interested in the study of memory and identity.—Vernon Lidtke, Johns Hopkins University

Editorial Reviews

A penetrating examination of national memory and identity in modern Germany.

Vernon Lidtke, Johns Hopkins University

"A penetrating examination of national memory and identity in modern Germany.

Vernon Lidtke, Johns Hopkins University"

A nuanced and very full examination.

"Choice"

From the Publisher

An examination of national memory and identity in modern Germany. Koshar (history, U. of Wisconsin at Madison) looks at key public debates over historic preservation in a country scarred by the traumas of two World Wars, Nazism, the Holocaust, and political division. He argues that despite the best efforts of politicians and preservationists, German national identity has been and remains unstable, provisional, and transient. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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