ABSTRACT
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
Napoleon.
The previous chapter considered the socio-spatial process of remembering the Nazi period and the Holocaust in particular in national identity-narrative construction in Germany’s capital city. This chapter examines how the memory of the GDR state is being handled in recent urban planning in Berlin. This is a complementary process, which proceeds in tandem and is largely about identity construction through forgetting. The judgement is made that erasure of the built legacy of the GDR is being taken too far. In 2002, for example, with the report of a federal and city of Berlin committee set up to consider the fate of the ‘Palace of the Republic’ (Palast der Republik), the most important symbolic building of the GDR in central Berlin, the crust of ‘normal’ history seems to be closing over the top of the molten lava of human possibilities, both good and bad, that should be kept in the watchful eye not just of academic historical seismologists but of public memory. This chapter places the debate over the future of Berlin’s Palast der Republik, former home of the Volkskammer (People’s Chamber) of the GDR, in a wider context. A victorious capitalism threatens to erase all memory of socialism, the other ‘wayward child of the Enlightenment’, to borrow a term from Günter Grass (Grass, 2002: 65). The denial by neo-liberalism, now without the historical counterweight of communism, that there is any alternative to the free market (Grass, 2002: 66) can be seen in the urban-planning tendency in Berlin to repress the notion that there was once the possibility of a different system and with it the realization of the ultimate arbitrariness of human social and economic relationships and its latent niggling threat to capitalist legitimacy. The chapter proceeds by way of a general consideration of the relationship of East and West Berliners to the memory of the German Democratic Republic. With the GDR, after the fall of the Wall, virtually annexed by the West, and despite the fact that the heirs of the SED, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) are now in coalition government in Berlin, sentiment by former easterners for some aspects of their 40-year unique history is still likely to be dismissed by western Germans as ‘Ostalgia’. Certainly the erasure of many potent symbols of physical division have rightfully gone unmourned. The Berlin Wall itself and its watchtowers and crossing points sit alongside the inevitable removal of many other communist traces and the reclaiming of places through
renaming. However, this process of reclamation is arguably being taken too far in the case of present urban planning for the centre of the former GDR state. Here the recently approved urban design plan (Planwerk Innenstadt) to connect Berlin back to its ‘normal’ pre-World-War-II ground plan and plans to at least partially reconstruct, on the site of the Palast der Republik, the old Berlin city castle (Stadtschloss), home of the Hohenzollern, seem to be normalization by way of amnesia. Urban planning and design is being used as an instrument of selective collective memory-construction, emphasizing a common German past before troublesome difficulties in the 1930s and beyond. However, the questions posed by ‘scar tissue’ are perhaps preferable to a falsely reassuring reality of continuity presented by cosmetic suture. Indeed it is the presence of 20th-century ‘scar tissue’ that makes Berlin unique as a place of memory and reflection. As President George W. Bush put it in the sound bite of his speech to the German Bundestag in Berlin in May 2002: ‘The history of our time is written in Berlin’ (quoted Widmer, 2002). This being so, it should at least be legible.
