ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the problem of the destruction, ruination and erasure of traces of others and the ways in which cultural memory of lost pre-war others continued to exist even in these adverse circumstances. It also focuses on Kaliningrad and Warsaw, two cities that experienced ruination on a dramatic scale. The post-Jewish and post-German ruins of Warsaw and Kaliningrad are in many ways very different. The relationship between the post-and pre-war cities is different, the circumstances in which the ruins were created were different, while the course of the creation and suppression of memory under communism and after it betrays important divergences. The city’s cathedral, along with the adjoining Kant mausoleum, was severely damaged by British bombing raids in 1944, but its ruins were never cleared, and restoration work began in the 1990s. James Young, in his study of the commemorative transformation of the remnants of concentration camps, highlights the ambivalence of the ruin as a site of memory.
