Framing the Past in Berlin since 1945: The Urban Sights of Memory

我们通常认为纪念碑是为了纪念历史事件而故意建造的。然而，统一后的柏林到处都是“无意的纪念碑”，比如共和国宫、前纳粹地堡和柏林墙的碎片。这些都是在城市中失去了原有功能的城市物体，受到记忆的投射和经济压力的影响。但自二战结束以来，柏林的地形上就出现了这样的“意外纪念碑”，冷战、柏林墙和政治分裂只会加剧这种情况。这项研究不仅关注了这些“非有意古迹”的历史，还关注了它们在一系列视觉媒体中的表现历史：报纸、建筑、摄影和电影，并分析了维姆·文德斯和雷纳·沃纳·法斯宾德等主要导演和丹尼尔·里伯斯金等建筑师的主要例子。它调查了在构建过去的过程中，这些表现是如何在记忆的情感力量、历史知识和对历史的理性理解之间进行协商的。当代城市发挥着怀旧的作用，将自己推销为改写的“记忆空间”，似乎旨在为全球资本对城市空间的影响提供特定的地方补偿。将柏林与其他当代城市的历史联系在一起，让我们看到这些不仅仅是当地的解决方案，而是全球主题的变化；柏林围绕纪念活动的特定伦理困境可以与其他城市的类似策略进行有益的比较和对比。

We conventionally think of monuments as objects that were intentionally created to mark historical events. Post-unification Berlin is littered, however, with 'unintended monuments', such as the Palace of the Republic, former Nazi bunkers, and fragments of the Berlin Wall. These are urban objects that have lost their original function within the city and are subject both to the projections of memory and the pressures of economics. But Berlin's topography has been marked with such 'unintended monuments' since the destructive end of the Second World War, a situation only exacerbated by the Cold War, the Berlin Wall and political division. This study looks not just at the history of such 'unintended monuments', but the history of their representation in a range of visual media: newspapers, architecture, photography and film, analysing key examples by major directors such as Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder and architects such as Daniel Libeskind. It investigates how, in framing the past, these representations negotiate between the emotional power of memory, historical knowledge, and the rational understanding of history.Contemporary cities play on the tug of nostalgia, marketing themselves as palimpsestic 'memory spaces' that seem designed to offer a specifically local compensation for the impact of global capital on urban space. Looking at Berlin in tandem with other contemporary cities' engagement with the past allows us to see how these are not merely local solutions, but actually variations on a global theme; Berlin's specific ethical dilemmas surrounding memorialization can be usefully compared and contrasted with similar strategies in other cities.