Book Reviews 291
Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and
Beyond, by Jennifer A. Jordan. California: Stanford University Press,
2006. 284 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $25.95 (paper) and The New Berlin:
Memory, Politics, Place, by Karen E. Till. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005. 296 pp. $75.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper)
DOI: 10.1177/1078087407300892
The memorial landscape which emerged in Berlin after 1989 has been
widely observed by the national and international public as well as by
scholars from various disciplines. The reason is obvious: After 1990, German
society had to develop a new identity, that of the “Berliner Republik.” Because
memorials have an important impact on the so-called Funktionsgedächtnis
(Assmann 1999; i.e., the part of collective memory that shapes the identity of
a society), the urban environment of Berlin was both a motor and a product of
the formation of this new identity. In their respective books, Jennifer Jordan
and Karen Till examine the preconditions and forces that have produced the
urban memorial landscape in Berlin.
The central question of Jennifer Jordan’s book Structures of Memory is
why “some sites are ensconced in official collective memory, while others
fade into the landscape” (p. 1). She also explores how this relates to the devel-
opment of a rapidly changing urban environment, which is structured by var-
ious heterogeneous public and private interests and legal institutions. Jordan
aims to understand how the visible landscapes of memory shaping collective
memory come into being. Moreover, she seeks to track the “structures of
memory” that might be at work also at other sites that are haunted by their
pasts, such as the World Trade Center site, the Oklahoma City bombing site,
or Phnom Penh in Cambodia.
To answer these questions Jordan looks at the memorial landscape of
post-1989 East Berlin. Not only are there multiple layers of German history
embodied in the urban structure, but also radical political, economic, social,
and spatial changes took place in the urban environment over the last sev-
eral hundred years. As such, Jordan narrows her investigation to the specific
traces of National Socialism.
Jordan’s investigation is situated at the crossing of urban sociology, cul-
tural studies, history, and urban planning. She applies a qualitative and a
historical approach, using archival research, analysis of secondary sources
in German language, and interviews with key players such as civil society
actors, journalists, planners and architects, and politicians, as well as state
officials from various public authorities.
Jordan briefly describes how National Socialism has been differently
represented in East and West Berlin given the distinct political and historical
contexts of the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the
Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). She points to the political function
which memorializing the Nazi past had in both states, and how it played out
in both sides of Berlin. Moreover, she shows some connections to the overar-
ching aesthetic debates on memorizing National Socialism and the Holocaust
such as the role of conceptual memorials or the authenticity of places. The fol-
lowing three chapters are devoted to the complicated stories of three categories
of sites: She first examines pre-1989 GDR-monuments, which have not been
removed. Then she turns to those memorial sites that have been developed
after 1989. Up to this point, Jordan discusses memorial stones, cemeteries,
plaques, and conceptual memorials sites, i.e., sites that are part of the official
landscape of memory. Jordan finally looks at forgotten places associated with
the Nazi past such as destroyed synagogues, “wild concentration camps” (i.e.,
torture chambers scattered throughout Berlin), and forced labor camps.
The volume concludes with an evaluation of the social and institutional
origins of Berlin’s memorial landscape. Jordan identifies four major factors
that determine whether a place becomes or remains an officially remembered
site. Two of them are the existence of strong advocates whom she calls
“memorial entrepreneurs” and a broader public responsive to these advo-
cates. Furthermore, Jordan sees land use and ownership as crucial mediating
factors. Jordan shows that sites located on privately owned land and buildings
which are already in use are less likely to become memorials. Apart from this,
Jordan refrains from identifying a clear pattern. Because sites that meet even
three out of four of these criteria do not necessarily become part of the offi-
cial memorial landscape, what happens to a place remains, at least to a wide
extent, a matter of contingency and specific local conditions. Consequently,
the processes observed in Berlin might indeed do little more than “speak to
the production of memorial spaces in other settings as well” (p. 195). This
answer might be disappointing for the reader. However, the disappointment
only reflects the problematic assumption which underlies one of Jordan’s key
research questions: that the complexity of urban memorial development
could be reduced to a universal and generalizable pattern.
Nevertheless, the book is an important contribution to the debate on the
production of memory in Berlin. Its detailed description of the various social
forces (e.g., land use policy and property ownership) creating the urban land-
scape in Berlin and their specific role is the strongest asset of the book.
Additionally, the book is unique in devoting attention to the many places fallen
in oblivion. Thereby, Jordan unveils the actual spatial consequences of the
292 Urban Affairs Review
inseparableness of forgetting and remembering. She shows that examining
why some places are not included in the cannon of official memory leads
to a better understanding of any urban memorial landscape.
Whereas Jordan looks at a broad range of different memorials, Karen E. Till
in The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place focuses on the well-known triad
of Nazi and Holocaust memorials in the center of Berlin: The Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe, the Topography of Terror, and the Jewish Museum.
Her aim is to explain how the practices and politics of place-making “mediate
and construct social memory and identity by localizing personal emotions and
defining social relations to the past” (p. 8). Till uses a geo-ethnographic
approach which focuses on the motivations of people creating identity-
shaping places. She tells stories about places of memory, and she retells the
stories which the people creating those places told her.
Till’s attitude toward her own text is influenced by feminist and poststruc-
turalist skepticism towards the creation of “artificial narrative coherence” and
“valid knowledge” by creating an ethnographic present and by using distinct
disciplinary narrative practices (p. 23). She therefore organizes her book in an
unconventional way. Theoretical and historical chapters and case studies are
interrupted by interludes that are intended to “undermine the narratives and
claims to authority” made by herself (p. 23). In addition, within the historical
and empirical chapters, authentic voices of people involved in the place-
making as well as analytical comments alternate. This manner of structuring
the book is supposed to enable the reader to reflect on its methodology.
In the introductory chapter Till outlines her basic assumptions. The
metaphor of the “haunting ghosts” of the past is of great importance for her
work. The metaphor, which recurs somewhat insistently throughout the
book, is meant to force people to search for the past. Place-making is, in
Till’s view, a way of dealing with the “ghosts of the past” as it connects to
“that which is no longer metaphysically present, but that which continues
to have an important presence in [people’s] contemporary lives” (p. 14).
Creating places of memory is therefore important for shaping the identity
of individuals or social groups. Till describes the evolution of the landscape
of memory in Berlin as a highly contested means of shaping the identity of
the German nation as the nation of perpetrators.
Before presenting her case studies, Till describes the urban develop-
ment that has occurred in Berlin after 1990. She describes the architectural
and urban design trends and shows their relations to past visions of Berlin
as a representation of national identity. Till then depicts the establishment
of the Topography of Terror, an open air exhibition on the site where the
headquarters of the Gestapo was located. Until 1981 when a group of
Book Reviews 293
citizens started symbolically to dig for the remainders of the former Gestapo
headquarters, the history of this vast area next to the Berlin Wall was
unknown to most Berliners. Till also presents the broad array of differing
perspectives on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Heavily con-
tested was the question of not only whether such a memorial should be built
at all in Germany and by the German government as the successors of the
perpetrators, but also where it could be located and what aesthetic form
would be appropriate.
The book eventually closes with a discussion of memory in Berlin after
1989 in general. Till asserts that a new “centralized public culture of com-
memoration” (p. 202) has emerged with the “memory district” (the triad of
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Topography of Terror,
and the Jewish Museum) in the center of Berlin that “locates Germany as
central to an emerging global moral community” (p. 196) and at the same
time has become an important tourism space. But even though the triad of
memorization is almost completed, the process of memorization for Till is
not completed for a long time yet. For it is not only the material presence
of the memory district’s parts but “the ways their meanings will continue to
be contested and interpreted by locals and tourists” (p. 224) through which
the identity of Berlin and the German nation will be defined.
Till’s geo-ethnographic approach generates a comprehensive picture of the
discourses and historic events that have shaped the landscape of memory in
Berlin’s center. It also reveals the shallowness of the official German discourse
on memorials. But the text—the narratives of her informants and descriptions
of Till’s research process—is in parts a little confusing, as was the evolution of
this landscape. However, with her approach Till is able to present the eco-
nomic, political, and moral functions of the urban landscape of memory in
Berlin in a very differentiated way. The diverse narratives about this landscape
combined with Till’s analytical presentation of political, historic, and economic
conditions of the process of its emergence provide a brilliant insight into the
complexity of German discourses about the memorization of the Nazi past—a
field which too often remains obscure to foreign visitors and scholars alike.
Barbara Schönig
Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
Reference
Assmann, A. 1999. Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses
(München: C.H. Beck Verlag, 1999).
294 Urban Affairs Review
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