United City, Divided Memories?

Cold War Legacies in Contemporary Berlin

By (author) Dirk Verheyen

Publication date:

25 February 2008

Length of book:

320 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739118399

United City, Divided Memories? focuses on the basic question of how Berlin today deals with three specific Cold War-era legacies: the presence of the four Great Powers, the East German Stasi, and the Berlin Wall. Dirk Verheyen looks at monuments, museums, and memorial sites as illustrations of Berlin's struggle to craft an effective shared identity that ties together its western and eastern halves. Verheyen's comprehensive and critical analysis is considered against the broader background of Germany's efforts at coming to grips with its dual twentieth-century totalitarian past. This book demonstrates that important elements of east-west contrast linger and complicate the city's efforts at crafting a more definitively future-oriented united identity. United City, Divided Memories? will stimulate debate among German studies scholars, as well as among those interested in German history and cultural studies.

Chapter 1 A City and a Nation Between Memory and Future
Chapter 2 Capturing Memory and Crafting Identity
Part 3 Victors and Adversaries: The Legacy of the Great Powers
Chapter 4 Occupation, Confrontation, Departure: the Great Powers in Postwar Berlin
Chapter 5 Soviet Traces
Chapter 6 The Western Allies: A Vanishing Legacy?
Chapter 7 Great Powers on Display: A Brief Tale of Two Museums
Part 8 Beyond Files and Trials: Public Remembrance and the Legacy of the Stasi
Chapter 9 Bureaucratic Shield and Repressive Sword: Rise and Demise of the Stasi
Chapter 10 Tyrannical Banality on Display: the "Stasi Museum"
Chapter 11 The Commemoration of Persecution in Hohenschönhausen
Chapter 12 Coming to Terms with the "Second" German Dictatorship
Part 13 The Berlin Wall: Meaning and Memory
Chapter 14 Monumental Schizophrenia: The Berlin Wall and Concrete Closure
Chapter 15 Commemorating a Vanishing Monument
Chapter 16 Checkpoint and Watchtower Museums
Chapter 17 Painting and Tracing the Wall

Each topic is very thoroughly documented, weaving together historical information and current political debates surrounding memorial sites....Highly valuable as a chronicle of the politics of memory....Recommended. Two-star review.