Cultural Memory and the Berlin Wall

“as far as consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person…” [1]

Enlightenment philosopher John Locke considered how personal identity can be understood. Simply put, he argued persons achieve a sense of identity over time through their memories and sense of psychological continuity. Assmann proposes a similar theory on a cultural scale. Indeed, memory occurs between the individual and the collective, disrupting historical narratives.[2] Thus, paralleling Locke’s method of recognising personal identity through personal memory, Assmann suggests cultural identities can be recognised through cultural memories[3] – past events become a ‘lieux de memoire’ rather than merely fade into history.[4] In this essay, I apply Assmann’s theory to the fall of the Berlin Wall by charting how cultural memories have developed chronologically and analysing the resulting impact on German and Berlin identities.

Before I begin, I note some of the complexities of applying Assmann’s theory to my case study. Identity holds particular significance in Berlin. Identity turns an urban space into a distinguishable space [5], and the wall undoubtedly became inseparable from the city’s identity.[6] Tölle recognises that as a both post-socialist and post-western city, identity production in Berlin “is bound to be more complicated than anywhere else”.[7] Additionally, the wall as monument is atypical. Assmann’s theory reasonably assumes the traditional pattern in which monumentation occurs after the monumented event. The Berlin Wall is an anomaly – the remnants of the wall act as monument to its fall and what once was (see right), but of course, they pre-existed the fall. This temporal reversal of event and monumentation adds complexity to this essay.

Despite Anglo-French dismay at the prospect of a unified Germany, the initial reaction to the fall of the wall was widespread euphoria across Germany. That said, German elation through remembrance in the months that followed did not focus strictly on the events of 9th November. Interestingly, cultural memory in the aftermath of the fall was a nostalgic focus on pre-Nazi and pre-war Germany i.e. memory of a better time encouraged looking forward to a re-invented western metropolis.[8] The era of the Iron Curtain was perceived as an absurd interruption of the natural flow of history, constructed almost as a void in the nation’s timeline: “When the Wall came down, Berlin added another chapter to its narrative of voids”. [9] This concept of void within German cultural memory had existed throughout the life of the Berlin Wall: West Berlin always appeared as void within East German maps and vice versa (see above). Establishing what is not part of cultural memory is equally as important as establishing what is. Cultural memory is a selective process, that decides if narratives become part of cultural identity, or if narratives fall into historical void. Nietzsche wrote that knowing ourselves is both “our memory and that which we forget”.[10] By constructing wall-era Berlin as a void in German history, cultural memory could look back to before the 75 years of disturbance, and channel these peaceful and unifying memory themes into an optimism into the 1990s. This strategy became known as ‘critical reconstruction’ within Berlin urban planning policy – even the director of urban development Hans Stimmann noted that Berlin had lost ‘‘a large proportion of its memory” by the time of reunification.[11] The years following the fall also coincided with most successful recent period for the European Union – the commission of Jacques Delors and the Maastricht Treaty (1992). Indeed, although the EU’s stark opposition to the wall was not made fully apparent in the short term, a 2005 declaration claimed that following “the renewed tyranny inflicted by the Stalinist Soviet Union”, “true freedom was only to come with the fall of the Berlin Wall”.[12] This evidence furthers the point that the Berlin Wall and the EU represent polar opposite ideological camps, making this paradigm shift towards an EU-centric Germany all the more noteworthy. This shift became the focal point of post-wall hopefulness and bolstered the rejection of the socialist past. Thus, the cultural memory in the early 1990s became a tool of optimism through contrast between a divided past of socialist legacy and possible futures of a unified Germany.

Constructing the void image of divided Berlin became synonymous with destructing the wall itself. The wall became “a void saturated with invisible history”.[13] Many Germans were, however, wary of this approach to remembering the wall. Attempts to forget the Holocaust had always been deemed vastly inappropriate – critics asked why the horrors of a divided Germany be any different. Tensions over this issue emerged in the late 1990s/2000s. Failed efforts to rebuild East Germany at a time of economic stagnation collapsed the wave of optimism that carried ‘critical reconstruction’ ideology – attempts to utterly erase wall-era history became scrutable. Furthermore, Assmann’s theory notes that the first stage of cultural memory, the disorganised communicative memory, has a limited temporal horizon of 80 to 100 years.[14] I propose that attempts in the early 90s to eradicate the memory of a divided Germany resulted in a momentous shrinking of this temporal horizon. This phenomenon was bolstered by the fact that communicative memory was required to a lesser extent for the wall: as prior mentioned, the ruins of the wall themselves acted as monument, ‘leapfrogging’ cultural memory towards the concretion of identity rather than communicative memory. In short, the fall of the wall had a relatively limited place in the communicative memory of Germans and Berliners. As a result, there was “a growing awareness that the youngest generation had an appalling low knowledge about the times of German and European division”. [15] In the early 2000s, the Berlin Senate became attentive towards both the physical task of preserving the wall (e.g. voting in 2001 to protect any remnants of the wall), but also to take measures to promote understanding of the significance of the wall. These strategies were part of the ‘overall concept’ for Berlin authorities – this new method represented a pragmatic recognition of facts. ‘Critical reconstruction’ failed, and there still existed a clear “mental and socioeconomic East–West divide” [16] that couldn’t be brushed under the rug. However, Berlin authorities now faced the new challenge of recognising the divide, while remaining progressive and unifying at a time where “the assessment of what new Berlin has become more fluid and ambiguous than it was five years ago”.[17] Having somewhat wiped the history books through ‘critical reconstruction’, remembrance strategies could now build a new image of the fall of the wall as the ‘happy ending’.[18] This reformed memory was constructed to a greater extent to appeal to tourists – the wall had become a central tourist attraction, conveniently bringing income to the areas of central Berlin that needed it most: the scar of the wall.

Despite the overall concept’s ostensible attempt to recognise division, the fact it was ultimately expressed through a ‘happy ending’ has resulted in the continued suppression of the GDR legacy. The emergence of Germany as the EU economic power into the 21st century re-affirmed residual 1990s attitudes – a unified Germany must be truly celebrated. Moreover, it’s surely a backhanded suppression of the Socialist legacy to make the wall itself a victim of capitalism by making it tourist-friendly. Every year, cries to make 9th November the national holiday (rather than official reunification on October 3rd) become louder and louder.[19] More recent case studies in Berlin urban planning policy support this trend that despite the ‘overall concept’, fundamental cultural memory continues to encourage a rejection of the socialist past. Constabile-Heming’s case study of the reconstruction of the City Palace supports the claim that the GDR is becoming more illegible in the cultural memory of Berliners.[20] She quotes influential journalist Jürgen Engert, who claimed this reconstruction would be " a monument of freedom and unity… that would be a reference to a new collectivity and a new collective memory".[21] Implied here is that this marginalisation is not merely ‘stand-alone’ evidence: Constabile-Fleming’s concludes the City Palace is “only one piece of a much larger planning and building project. Given its size and scope, it is certain to influence other remembrance projects in the city centre”.[22] Modern trends seem to suggest that an emphasis on the unifying and peaceful memory of the fall of the wall involves a recognition of the divide, but also a distinct bias towards suppressing GDR legacies.

For the second section of this essay, we can analyse the extent of the impact on cultural identities in Berlin and across Germany. Traditionally within Assmann’s theory, the stage of identity concretion occurs predominantly in the latter stage of cultural memory, and thus after a much longer time than the 30 years of my chosen case study. However, discussions of identity in Berlin are hardly limited. The search for identity became a fundamental and permanent process ever since the construction of the wall in 1961.[23] Thus, the fall of the wall was not an event that independently created identities, but rather an event that had a significant impact on pre-existing ones. The first and most obvious impact of the fall of the wall on identity was to bolster the concept of a unified German identity. Ladd notes that monuments tend to define group identity towards unified identities by bringing together communities that honour a common narrative. Thus, the Berlin Wall, as a symbol of division and injustice during its life, became a monument to unification in the immediate years after its collapse.

Another identity trend since the unification of Germany has been the increasing view of Germans to see themselves as Europeans. As prior mentioned, the growth of a supra-national EU in the 90s became one of the key focal points of the newly unified Germany. That said, I briefly note that as an overall trend across Europe, the concretion of a European identity has largely failed – perceptions of the EU have been largely centred upon technocratic exercises serving economic efficiency i.e. economic and post-national values have not proven strong enough to bind European identity.[24] In fact, German attempts to play a central role in the EU have drawn criticism – fiscal union is perceived as the Germanisation of Europe.[25] However, the failure of European identity is unrelated to cultural memories of the wall – thus, I still maintain that the growth of a European identity in Germany is a notable impact from memories of the wall.

However, following the collapse of post-wall euphoria, it became clear that re-unification had not removed the concepts of Eastern and Western identity. As prior mentioned, there was a growing sense of difference between the ossis and the wessis towards the late 1990s and early 2000s.[26] This is re-enforced by a further examination of the ‘overall concept’ of urban planning that coincided with this time period – Tölle argues that the ‘overall concept’ can be interpreted as an attempt to bring the wall out of the “archival memory” to turn it into a vital part of the identity forming life story of Berlin.[27]

All being said, perhaps the most fascinating trend I’ve observed in my research is the suggestion that the complexities of identity formation in Berlin have given it a distinct dynamic and vissicitudinous identity.[28] Both the rejection of wall-era history and the ‘happy ending’ memory attitudes have drawn widespread criticism. Perhaps identifying with a transitory identity or lack of permanent identity is the most appropriate stance for inhabitants of a city with such turbulent modern history. It is perhaps also this turbulent history that has meant that “Some Germans fear that the weight of past misdeeds has made their fellow Germans uncertain what it means to be German and afraid to act in the name of Germany” [29], further contributing to this notion of non-identity. This theme would also fit my earlier investigation of the voids that are so prominent in Berlin historiography. Furthermore, to remain consistent with my earlier proposition that monuments have a notable impact on cultural identity, I must recognise that because the Berlin landscape has been politicised to extremity, undisputed monuments are the exception.[30]

In conclusion, there have been clear memory trends over the last 30 years since the fall of the wall: initial euphoria expressed itself in a complete rejection of a divided past (‘critical reconstruction’; a counter-movement responded through certain protections and recognitions (‘overall concept’); but in modern times the underlying anti-socialist trend has continued in perhaps a more subtle manner. These developing collective memories have had a notable impact on identity formation in Berlin; from the initial unifying and Europeanising trend, to the later divisions and perhaps dynamic void identity, it’s clear there are many valid interpretations on this case study. As a final note, I briefly raise some concerns with Assmann’s theory in the modern day. For the most part, it remains a brilliant theory and methodology within cultural studies. However, the rapid growth of new social platforms, namely social media, has resulted in the temporal breakdown between the objectivation and transmission of communicated meaning – in the era of instant sharing, the former is no longer a strict pre-requisite of the latter as Assmann suggests.[31] I believe this has a significant impact on the all-important transition from communicative memory to archival memory.

Bibliography

Assmann, J., (1995), ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, Translated by J. Czaplicka, New German Critique 65

Costabile-Heming, C., (2017), The reconstructed City Palace and Humboldt, Forum in Berlin: restoring architectural identity or distorting the memory of historic spaces?, Journal of Contemporary European Studies 25:4, pp.441-454

European Commission, (2005), Europe Day Commission Declaration, 9 May, no. 49/05

Fukuyama, F., (2012), The Challenges for European Identity, Global Minds, available at: [http://www.theglobaljournal.net/article/view/469/], accessed May 2019

Hague, E., Legg, S., (2006), ‘Paris, Capital of Modernity’. David Harvey; The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Karen E. Till, Urban Geography 27:3, p.294

Huyssen, A., (2003), ‘Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory’, Stanford, Stanford University Press

Kellerhoff, S., (2009), Should the 9th November be a national holiday?, available at: [https://archive.is/20090625205056/http://debatte.welt.de/kontroverse/48213/soll+der+9+november+nationalfeiertag+werden] accessed May 2019

Ladd, B., (1997), ‘The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape’, Chicago, Chicago University Press

Locke, J., (1692), ‘Of Identity and Diversity’, Chapter 22 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2nd Ed., Available at [http://www.uvm.edu/~lderosse/courses/intro/locke_essay.pdf] accessed April 2019

Mälksoo, M., (2009), ‘The Memory Politics of Becoming European’, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 15(4)

Nietzsche, F., (1874), Untimely Meditations Third Part, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, PDF available at: [http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEENietzscheSchopenTable.pdf] accessed May 2019

Nora, P., (1989), ‘Between Memory and History, Representations’, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, University of California Press

Stimmann, S., (2001), The memory of the European city, in Von der Architektur- zur Stadtdebatte, Die Diskussion um das Planwerk Innenstadt, pp.11-27. Braun, Berlin

Tölle, A., (2009), ‘Urban identity policies in Berlin: From critical reconstruction to reconstructing the Wall’, Cities 27

[1] Locke, J., (1692), ‘Of Identity and Diversity’, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Chapter 22, 2nd Ed., Available at [http://www.uvm.edu/~lderosse/courses/intro/locke_essay.pdf], p.9

[2] Hague, E., Legg, S., (2006), ‘Paris, Capital of Modernity’. David Harvey; The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Karen E. Till, Urban Geography 27:3, p.294

[3] Assmann, J., (1995), ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, Translated by J. Czaplicka, New German Critique 65, pp.125-133

[4] Nora, P., (1989), ‘Between Memory and History, Representations’, No. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory, University of California Press, p.23

[5] Tölle, A., (2009), ‘Urban identity policies in Berlin: From critical reconstruction to reconstructing the Wall’, Cities 27, p.348

[6] Ladd, B., (1997), ‘The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape’, Chicago, Chicago University Press, p.20

[7] Tölle, A., (2009), ‘Urban identity policies in Berlin: From critical reconstruction to reconstructing the Wall’, Cities 27, p.349

[8] Tölle, A., (2009), ‘Urban identity policies in Berlin: From critical reconstruction to reconstructing the Wall’, Cities 27, p.356

[9] Huyssen, A., (2003), ‘Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory’, Stanford, Stanford University Press, p.55

[10] Nietzsche, F., (1874), Untimely Meditations Third Part, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, PDF available at: [http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEENietzscheSchopenTable.pdf], p.2

[11] Stimmann, S., (2001), The memory of the European city, in Von der Architektur- zur Stadtdebatte. Die Diskussion um das Planwerk Innenstadt,.Braun, Berlin, pp. 11-27

[12] European Commission, (2005), Europe Day Commission Declaration, 9 May, no. 49/05

[13] Huyssen, A., (2003), ‘Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory’, Stanford, Stanford University Press, p.55

[14] Assmann, J., (1995), ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, Translated by J. Czaplicka, New German Critique 65, pp.127

[15] Tölle, A., (2009), ‘Urban identity policies in Berlin: From critical reconstruction to reconstructing the Wall’, Cities 27, p.354

[16] Tölle, A., (2009), ‘Urban identity policies in Berlin: From critical reconstruction to reconstructing the Wall’, Cities 27, p.352

[17] Huyssen, A., (2003), ‘Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory’, Stanford, Stanford University Press, p.75

[18] Tölle, A., (2009), ‘Urban identity policies in Berlin: From critical reconstruction to reconstructing the Wall’, Cities 27, p.356

[19] Kellerhoff, S., (2009), Should the 9th November be a national holiday?, available at: [https://archive.is/20090625205056/http://debatte.welt.de/kontroverse/48213/soll+der+9+november+nationalfeiertag+werden] accessed May 2019

[20] Costabile-Heming, C., (2017), The reconstructed City Palace and Humboldt, Forum in Berlin: restoring architectural identity or distorting the memory of historic spaces?, Journal of Contemporary European Studies 25:4, pp.451

[21] ibid.

[22] ibid.

[23] Tölle, A., (2009), ‘Urban identity policies in Berlin: From critical reconstruction to reconstructing the Wall’, Cities 27, p.350

[24] Fukuyama, F., (2012), The Challenges for European Identity, Global Minds, available at: [http://www.theglobaljournal.net/article/view/469/], accessed May 2019

[25] ibid.

[26] Tölle, A., (2009), ‘Urban identity policies in Berlin: From critical reconstruction to reconstructing the Wall’, Cities 27, p.352

[27] Tölle, A., (2009), ‘Urban identity policies in Berlin: From critical reconstruction to reconstructing the Wall’, Cities 27, p.355

[28] Tölle, A., (2009), ‘Urban identity policies in Berlin: From critical reconstruction to reconstructing the Wall’, Cities 27, p.356

[29] Ladd, B., (1997), ‘The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape’, Chicago, Chicago University Press, p.11

[30] ibid.

[31] Assmann, J., (1995), ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’, Translated by J. Czaplicka, New German Critique 65, p.130