This course will address the relationship between history, memory and identity. Berlin’s history has been shaped by conflicting identities and ideologies. We will focus on how these conflicts have left their traces in literature, memory, and urban geography.
We will address the relationship between history, memory and identity through considering modes of commemoration through the narratives of fiction, testimonial literature, photography and film, and we will deal with ideological manipulations of commemorative forms. While considering how literature, architecture and films process individual and collective memory, our approach will be comparative and interdisciplinary with an emphasis on relevant social and cultural events.
How does the interplay between landscape, experience and memory create a sense of identity? How do we make sense of the multiplicity of meanings that resonate with landscapes and memories, in particular in a city like Berlin where we will encounter multiple Berlins and distinct stories of belonging? What is the relationship between narratives of memory and perceptions of current transformations of the city?
The course will work with the following assumptions about memory politics:
Memory is always selective and manipulated. It reveals an interpretation rather than a mirror image of the past. National memory narratives promote an official version of events. They change in accordance with political and societal circumstances.
Memories are symbolic representations of the past. They cannot recreate it, but only suggest what the past might have been, and what of it should or should not matter today.
Memory is about identity and belonging. People’s ability to remember always depends on socio-political and cultural circumstances. When private memory disappears or has to be suppressed for the sake of normalcy, it gets replaced by an interpretation and use of that memory that claims to be objective.
Memory is indeterminate and controversial. It can never be fully controlled by political elites. Nonetheless, governments shape what, when, and how people remember or forget the past through providing funds for memorials and museums.
Memory is about the interplay between remembering and forgetting. A city is composed of affective landscapes of intentional forgetting and painful remembering.
There will be regular field trips, city walks and film screenings.
Prerequisites:
None
Learning outcomes:
By the end of the course, students are able to:
Analyze, with a critical understanding, the concepts of identity and memory politics in order to read historical sites as landscapes of memory and shifting identities.
Explain the multiplicity of meanings that resonate with landscapes and memories while dealing with different and even contradicting interpretations.
Method of presentation:
Lecture, discussion, student presentations, and field trips. Moodle will be used for storing material, for interaction between the teacher and students (and students among students), and for storing students’ analytical journals.
Required work and form of assessment:
Final grades will be based on an analytical journal (10%), oral presentation and participation in class discussions (30%), final written examination (30%), and a term paper (30%)
Term Paper
In your term paper you will make a persuasive, evidence-based, and historiographically sophisticated argument about an aspect of the politics of remembrance. You will write the paper for a reader who is not intimately familiar with German history and memory politics. The paper should be 10 double-spaced pages written in 12-point font with standard margins.
Analytical Journal
You will be asked to submit a journal that links the field study with class work. In the journal entries I expect you to combine impressions and detailed descriptions with analytical thoughts. How did the field trip change or confirm your understanding of the particular aspect of memory politics that it is supposed to cover? Use your journal to explore new ideas and to test interpretations of what you learned or experienced during our field trips.
content:
Week 1
Session 1: Introduction to the course. Historical layers of Berlin: Overview
Session 2: Field Trip to Museum of German History, Schinkel’s New Guardhouse, The underground
Sunken Library at Bebelplatz
The New Guardhouse which now serves as a memorial to all victims of war and dictatorship has been used in the Weimar Republic as well as in Nazi Germany and the GDR for honoring victims, but with different priorities, while the Sunken Library commemorates the public burning of books labeled as Jewish, Marxist and un-German took place in May 1933 in front of the Berlin University.
- Required Reading: Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces. Artefacts of German Memory 1870-
1990. University of California Press, Berkeley 2000, 107-111, 117-128 (Neue Wache),
Session 3: The Concepts of Memory and Identity
We will discuss the ambiguity of memory and identity and how it plays out in the German landscapes of memory that we will be dealing with.
Required Reading:
- Excerpts from: John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton 1994;
- Paul P Connerton, How Societies Remember. Cambridge 1989;
- Thomas Butler (ed.), Memory: History, Culture and the Mind. Oxford 1989.
Recommended Reading:
- Siobhan Kattago, Ambiguous Memory. The Nazi Past and German National Identity. Praeger Publishers, Westport 2001, 11-35
- Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. Routledge 1991, 57-75
- Cathy Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Johns Hopkins University Press 1995, 158-182
Week 2
Session 1: The Golden Twenties in Berlin
We will focus on how Berlin became a center of mass culture and avant-garde experiments during the Weimar Republic, as well as a liberal safe haven for a versatile Jewish community.
Required Reading:
- David Clay Large, Berlin. Basic Books 2000, 203-255 (“The World City of Order and Beauty”)
Films: Berlin in the Twenties, Legendary Sin Cities. Berlin
Session 2: Field trip to the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, Holocaust Museum and Topography of Terror
These museums and memorials address different elements of Berlin under the swastika and the sensitive question of how to deal with the Nazi past and the Holocaust in the successor state of the perpetrators.
Required Reading:
- Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Univ Of Minnesota Press 2005, 161-188 (Holocaust Memorial), 151-152 (Topography of Terror)
Session 3: Berlin under the Swastika
After Goebbels had conquered red (communist) Berlin for the Nazis in the late Twenties and early Thirties the city became the political center of Nazi power.
Required Reading:
- Large: Berlin, 255-317 (“Hitler’s Berlin”)
- Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin. Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago and London 1997, 127-175 (“Nazi Berlin”)
Film: Berlin under the Swastika (Irmgard von zur Mühlen), optional: Valkyrie
Week 3
Session 1: Jewish Berlin
Berlin was the city with the largest Jewish community in Germany where a multifaceted Jewish life took place.
Required Reading:
- Andreas Nachama, Julius H. Schoeps, Hermann Simons (eds.) Jews in Berlin. Berlin 2001, 181-220
Session 2: Visit of the Jewish Museum
The museum pays testimony to the rich history and culture of Germany's Jewish community that cannot be reduced to the persecution of the Jews, but was much more complex.
Session 3: Memory and History on Sale: Excursion to the Flea Market at Mauerpark (on Sunday)
Week 4
Session 1: Commemorating Nazism and World War II
This class will discuss German attempts to overcome the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust while particular attention is paid to East-West German controversies with respect to memory politics.
Required Reading:
- Kattago: Ambiguous Memory. 39-59 (“West German Internalization of the Past”); 81-89 (“East German Memory);103-110 (Commemorating Kristallnacht)
- Koshar: From Monuments to Traces, 146-153 (Germany 1945), 157-164 (East Berlin after the War) 169-172 (Reminders of the Third Reich in Berlin); 181-198, 277-285 (Commemorating Resistance against the Nazis in East and West)
Recommended Reading:
- Robert G. Moeller: The Third Reich in Post-War German Memory. In: Nazi Germany, 147-166, Oxford UP 2008, 147-166
- Wulf Kansteiner, Losing the War, Winning the Memory battle: The Legacy of Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust in the FRG, in: The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe,102-147
- Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory. Stanford University Pres 2006, 23-59 (“Blank Slates and Authentic Traces: Memorial Culture in Berlin After 1945”)
Session 2: Field trip to the Soviet War Memorial (Treptow Park)
The memorial was dedicated to the Soviet soldiers who fell in the battle for Berlin in 1945 and served as the central war memorial of East Germany in which capacity it intended to convey the idea of Russian - (East) German friendship.
Session 3: The Berlin Wall: Field trip to the Berlin Wall Memorial
We will see the still visible traces of the Berlin Wall that are now part of an outdoor exhibition that gives a vivid impression of the purpose and function of the Berlin Wall.
Week 5
Session 1: Post War Berlin: The Divided City
We will discuss how, after the fall of Nazi Germany, the divided city of Berlin became the main battlefield of the Cold War.
Required Reading:
- Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 175-216
Session 2: Visit to Check Point Charlie Museum
The Check Point Charlie Museum, located where the stand-off between Soviet and US tanks took place in October 1961, documents successful escape attempts of East Germans as well as victims of the wall who were killed while trying to escape to the West.
Session 3: 1968 in East and West Germany: Protesting the Vietnam War (West) and the Soviet Invasion in Prague (East)
1968 is a symbolic date of civil disobedience and political protest that in East and West Germany developed independently while responding to different, but in each case homegrown, political events and conflicts.
Required Reading:
- Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, Cambridge UP 2007, 186-219 (“1968”)
Week 6
Session 1: The East German Revolution and the Fall of the Wall: Post-Socialist Politics of Memory
Based on a discussion of the East German revolution of 1989, we will deal with the intellectual discourse in the New Germany that, among others, focused on the Holocaust and the New Germany and the comparison of the East German dictatorship with the Nazi dictatorship.
Required Reading:
- Till, The New Berlin,193-229 (“Memory in the New Berlin”);
- Kattago: Ambiguous Memory, 117-123 (Unified Germany’s Memory), 129-144 (Neue Wache, War Memorials, Holocaust Memorial), 155-160 (Walser-Bubis-Debate)
Recommended Reading:
- Jordan, Structures of Memory, 59-134 (“Persistent Memory: Pre-1989 Memorials after the Fall of the Wall” and “Changing Places: New Memorials Since 1989”);
- Large, Berlin, 519-545 (“The Fall of the Wall”); Dorothee Wierling. “The East as the Past: Problems with Memory and Identity.” German Politics and Society 15.2 (Summer 1997): 53-75.
Session 2: Visit to the Stasi Prison in Hohenschönhausen
We will visit the Hohenschönhausen Stasi prison that was used by East Germany's secret police as a detainment and transit camp in order to get an idea of what happens when historical locations are transformed into memorial centers for memory politics.
Session 3: Final Discussion
Week 7
Finals
Required readings:
Siobhan Kattago, Ambiguous Memory. The Nazi Past and German National Identity. Praeger Publishers, Westport 2001
Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces. Artefacts of German Memory 1870-1990. University of California Press, Berkeley 2000
Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin. Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago and London 1997
David Clay Large, Berlin. Basic Books 2000
Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, Cambridge UP 2007
Andreas Nachama, Julius H. Schoeps, Hermann Simons (eds.) Jews in Berlin. Berlin 2001
Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Univ Of Minnesota Press 2005
Recommended readings:
Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Johns Hopkins University Press 1995
Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, Routledge 1991
Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge. A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920ies. Harper Perennial 1995
Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory. Stanford University Pres 2006
Richard Lebow, Wulf Kansteiner, Claudio Fogu (eds), The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe. Duke University Press 2006
Robert G. Moeller: The Third Reich in Post-War German Memory. In: Nazi Germany, 147-166, Oxford UP 2008
Dorothee Wierling, “The East as the Past: Problems with Memory and Identity.” German Politics and Society 15.2 (Summer 1997): 53-75.
Other Resources:
Films Documentaries
Berlin under the Swastika Berlin in the Twenties Berlin under the Allies
The Berlin Wall
Berlin Sin City
Feature Films
Life of the Others
Valkyrie
The Baader Meinhof Gang
Go for Zucker
Pop cultural clips on German history and memory politics
Additional OPTIONAL Field Trips
House of the Wannsee Conference
East Side Gallery
Karl Marx Allee and “Kaffee Sybille”-Exhibition
East German Museum
Bendlerblock - Memorial to the German Resistance.
Brief Biography of Instructor:
Wolfgang Bialas works on a research project on Nazi Ideology and Ethics, sponsored by the DFG and affiliated with the Hannah-Arendt-Institute Dresden. Most recently he held a position as an Associate Professor of Political Philosophy and Cultural Studies in the United Arab Emirates. He has also taught courses in modern European intellectual and cultural history at the University of California, Irvine (2000 -2003). In addition, he had teaching positions at universities in Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Turkey. He has published numerous books and articles in various areas of the humanities, most recently "Nazi Germany and the Humanities" (co-edited with Anson Rabinbach), Oxford 2007. His current research interests are intellectual history of Nazism, political philosophy and comparative cultural studies. Dr. Bialas is a member of the international and interdisciplinary research group "Political Culture of the Weimar Republic" and co-editor (with Gerard Raulet) of the "Series on Political Culture in the Weimar Republic". He has taught at IES Abroad Berlin since 2004.
This course will address the relationship between history, memory and identity. Berlin’s history has been shaped by conflicting identities and ideologies. We will focus on how these conflicts have left their traces in literature, memory, and urban geography.
We will address the relationship between history, memory and identity through considering modes of commemoration through the narratives of fiction, testimonial literature, photography and film, and we will deal with ideological manipulations of commemorative forms. While considering how literature, architecture and films process individual and collective memory, our approach will be comparative and interdisciplinary with an emphasis on relevant social and cultural events.
How does the interplay between landscape, experience and memory create a sense of identity? How do we make sense of the multiplicity of meanings that resonate with landscapes and memories, in particular in a city like Berlin where we will encounter multiple Berlins and distinct stories of belonging? What is the relationship between narratives of memory and perceptions of current transformations of the city?
The course will work with the following assumptions about memory politics:
There will be regular field trips, city walks and film screenings.
None
By the end of the course, students are able to:
Lecture, discussion, student presentations, and field trips. Moodle will be used for storing material, for interaction between the teacher and students (and students among students), and for storing students’ analytical journals.
Final grades will be based on an analytical journal (10%), oral presentation and participation in class discussions (30%), final written examination (30%), and a term paper (30%)
Term Paper
In your term paper you will make a persuasive, evidence-based, and historiographically sophisticated argument about an aspect of the politics of remembrance. You will write the paper for a reader who is not intimately familiar with German history and memory politics. The paper should be 10 double-spaced pages written in 12-point font with standard margins.
Analytical Journal
You will be asked to submit a journal that links the field study with class work. In the journal entries I expect you to combine impressions and detailed descriptions with analytical thoughts. How did the field trip change or confirm your understanding of the particular aspect of memory politics that it is supposed to cover? Use your journal to explore new ideas and to test interpretations of what you learned or experienced during our field trips.
Week 1
Session 1: Introduction to the course. Historical layers of Berlin: Overview
Session 2: Field Trip to Museum of German History, Schinkel’s New Guardhouse, The underground
Sunken Library at Bebelplatz
The New Guardhouse which now serves as a memorial to all victims of war and dictatorship has been used in the Weimar Republic as well as in Nazi Germany and the GDR for honoring victims, but with different priorities, while the Sunken Library commemorates the public burning of books labeled as Jewish, Marxist and un-German took place in May 1933 in front of the Berlin University.
- Required Reading: Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces. Artefacts of German Memory 1870-
1990. University of California Press, Berkeley 2000, 107-111, 117-128 (Neue Wache),
Session 3: The Concepts of Memory and Identity
We will discuss the ambiguity of memory and identity and how it plays out in the German landscapes of memory that we will be dealing with.
Required Reading:
- Excerpts from: John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton 1994;
- Paul P Connerton, How Societies Remember. Cambridge 1989;
- Thomas Butler (ed.), Memory: History, Culture and the Mind. Oxford 1989.
Recommended Reading:
- Siobhan Kattago, Ambiguous Memory. The Nazi Past and German National Identity. Praeger Publishers, Westport 2001, 11-35
- Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. Routledge 1991, 57-75
- Cathy Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Johns Hopkins University Press 1995, 158-182
Week 2
Session 1: The Golden Twenties in Berlin
We will focus on how Berlin became a center of mass culture and avant-garde experiments during the Weimar Republic, as well as a liberal safe haven for a versatile Jewish community.
Required Reading:
- David Clay Large, Berlin. Basic Books 2000, 203-255 (“The World City of Order and Beauty”)
Films: Berlin in the Twenties, Legendary Sin Cities. Berlin
Session 2: Field trip to the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, Holocaust Museum and Topography of Terror
These museums and memorials address different elements of Berlin under the swastika and the sensitive question of how to deal with the Nazi past and the Holocaust in the successor state of the perpetrators.
Required Reading:
- Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Univ Of Minnesota Press 2005, 161-188 (Holocaust Memorial), 151-152 (Topography of Terror)
Session 3: Berlin under the Swastika
After Goebbels had conquered red (communist) Berlin for the Nazis in the late Twenties and early Thirties the city became the political center of Nazi power.
Required Reading:
- Large: Berlin, 255-317 (“Hitler’s Berlin”)
- Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin. Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago and London 1997, 127-175 (“Nazi Berlin”)
Film: Berlin under the Swastika (Irmgard von zur Mühlen), optional: Valkyrie
Week 3
Session 1: Jewish Berlin
Berlin was the city with the largest Jewish community in Germany where a multifaceted Jewish life took place.
Required Reading:
- Andreas Nachama, Julius H. Schoeps, Hermann Simons (eds.) Jews in Berlin. Berlin 2001, 181-220
Session 2: Visit of the Jewish Museum
The museum pays testimony to the rich history and culture of Germany's Jewish community that cannot be reduced to the persecution of the Jews, but was much more complex.
Session 3: Memory and History on Sale: Excursion to the Flea Market at Mauerpark (on Sunday)
Week 4
Session 1: Commemorating Nazism and World War II
This class will discuss German attempts to overcome the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust while particular attention is paid to East-West German controversies with respect to memory politics.
Required Reading:
- Kattago: Ambiguous Memory. 39-59 (“West German Internalization of the Past”); 81-89 (“East German Memory);103-110 (Commemorating Kristallnacht)
- Koshar: From Monuments to Traces, 146-153 (Germany 1945), 157-164 (East Berlin after the War) 169-172 (Reminders of the Third Reich in Berlin); 181-198, 277-285 (Commemorating Resistance against the Nazis in East and West)
Recommended Reading:
- Robert G. Moeller: The Third Reich in Post-War German Memory. In: Nazi Germany, 147-166, Oxford UP 2008, 147-166
- Wulf Kansteiner, Losing the War, Winning the Memory battle: The Legacy of Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust in the FRG, in: The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe,102-147
- Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory. Stanford University Pres 2006, 23-59 (“Blank Slates and Authentic Traces: Memorial Culture in Berlin After 1945”)
Session 2: Field trip to the Soviet War Memorial (Treptow Park)
The memorial was dedicated to the Soviet soldiers who fell in the battle for Berlin in 1945 and served as the central war memorial of East Germany in which capacity it intended to convey the idea of Russian - (East) German friendship.
Session 3: The Berlin Wall: Field trip to the Berlin Wall Memorial
We will see the still visible traces of the Berlin Wall that are now part of an outdoor exhibition that gives a vivid impression of the purpose and function of the Berlin Wall.
Week 5
Session 1: Post War Berlin: The Divided City
We will discuss how, after the fall of Nazi Germany, the divided city of Berlin became the main battlefield of the Cold War.
Required Reading:
- Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 175-216
Session 2: Visit to Check Point Charlie Museum
The Check Point Charlie Museum, located where the stand-off between Soviet and US tanks took place in October 1961, documents successful escape attempts of East Germans as well as victims of the wall who were killed while trying to escape to the West.
Session 3: 1968 in East and West Germany: Protesting the Vietnam War (West) and the Soviet Invasion in Prague (East)
1968 is a symbolic date of civil disobedience and political protest that in East and West Germany developed independently while responding to different, but in each case homegrown, political events and conflicts.
Required Reading:
- Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, Cambridge UP 2007, 186-219 (“1968”)
Week 6
Session 1: The East German Revolution and the Fall of the Wall: Post-Socialist Politics of Memory
Based on a discussion of the East German revolution of 1989, we will deal with the intellectual discourse in the New Germany that, among others, focused on the Holocaust and the New Germany and the comparison of the East German dictatorship with the Nazi dictatorship.
Required Reading:
- Till, The New Berlin,193-229 (“Memory in the New Berlin”);
- Kattago: Ambiguous Memory, 117-123 (Unified Germany’s Memory), 129-144 (Neue Wache, War Memorials, Holocaust Memorial), 155-160 (Walser-Bubis-Debate)
Recommended Reading:
- Jordan, Structures of Memory, 59-134 (“Persistent Memory: Pre-1989 Memorials after the Fall of the Wall” and “Changing Places: New Memorials Since 1989”);
- Large, Berlin, 519-545 (“The Fall of the Wall”); Dorothee Wierling. “The East as the Past: Problems with Memory and Identity.” German Politics and Society 15.2 (Summer 1997): 53-75.
Session 2: Visit to the Stasi Prison in Hohenschönhausen
We will visit the Hohenschönhausen Stasi prison that was used by East Germany's secret police as a detainment and transit camp in order to get an idea of what happens when historical locations are transformed into memorial centers for memory politics.
Session 3: Final Discussion
Week 7
Finals
Films
Documentaries
Berlin under the Swastika Berlin in the Twenties Berlin under the Allies
The Berlin Wall
Berlin Sin City
Feature Films
Life of the Others
Valkyrie
The Baader Meinhof Gang
Go for Zucker
Pop cultural clips on German history and memory politics
Additional OPTIONAL Field Trips
House of the Wannsee Conference
East Side Gallery
Karl Marx Allee and “Kaffee Sybille”-Exhibition
East German Museum
Bendlerblock - Memorial to the German Resistance.
Wolfgang Bialas works on a research project on Nazi Ideology and Ethics, sponsored by the DFG and affiliated with the Hannah-Arendt-Institute Dresden. Most recently he held a position as an Associate Professor of Political Philosophy and Cultural Studies in the United Arab Emirates. He has also taught courses in modern European intellectual and cultural history at the University of California, Irvine (2000 -2003). In addition, he had teaching positions at universities in Germany, Switzerland, Japan and Turkey. He has published numerous books and articles in various areas of the humanities, most recently "Nazi Germany and the Humanities" (co-edited with Anson Rabinbach), Oxford 2007. His current research interests are intellectual history of Nazism, political philosophy and comparative cultural studies. Dr. Bialas is a member of the international and interdisciplinary research group "Political Culture of the Weimar Republic" and co-editor (with Gerard Raulet) of the "Series on Political Culture in the Weimar Republic". He has taught at IES Abroad Berlin since 2004.