The Distortion of Space and the Ruinous Gaze

The Distortion of Space. War Ruins in German Cityscapes and Literature Kasper Green Krejberg, [email protected], University of Aarhus

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The Distortion of Space and the Ruinous Gaze:

War Ruins in German Cityscapes and Literature

Ruins are some of the most visible and remarkable physical traces of war and

destruction. They are uncomfortable reminders of the incredible brutal violence that

humankind is capable of inflicting on one another. Therefore, they are normally

cleared away, rebuilt, or replaced by new buildings as soon as the weapons have

fallen silent. In rare cases, however, the ruins of war are still visible decades or

centuries later, be it as a result of neglect, out of pragmatic reasons, or to fulfil

memorial and preserving ambitions. The effect of the ruins still being present in the

midst of a rebuilt city can be unsettling and disturbing, especially if they point to a

problematic historical heritage as is the case with the relatively few German ruins left

from the Second World War.

In this paper I examine how some of these German ruins are framed, how they

present themselves, and what impact they have on locals and visitors. This of course

requires some specific historical contextualisation. But representing a troubled, non-

heroic and anti-glorious legacy, the German World War Two-ruins also highlight

some general qualities of war ruins as sites and carriers of war memories; qualities

that are often more difficult to identify in the cultural heritage of victorious nations

where the ruins are justified and redeemed as necessary sacrifices for the successful

outcome of the war.

War ruins not only exist unmediated as architectural structures at some specific

stage of disintegration. Films, paintings and literature abound with depictions of them

as well.1 To examine the perception and the afterlife of these ruins I also draw in a

number of literary examples from the German ‘children of war’-generation in which

the Second World War-ruins are depicted as carriers or images of an alternative kind

of memory, endowing the authors with a highly ambiguous yet artistically productive

1 A particular kind of early German postwar literature was even named after the ruined surroundings in which their narratives took place, namely the ‘Trümmerliteratur’ or ‘the literature of the rubble’.


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‘ruinous’ gaze, which opposes the dominant history of how West Germany and

Austria were successfully rebuilt and democratised in the first postwar decades.

I use the Egyptologist Jan Assmann’s dichotomy between ‘scenic’ and

‘narrative’ memory as a theoretical frame for the discussion of ruins and individual

and collective memory. Assmann makes the distinction between “a visually

organized, scenic memory and a narrative memory that is organized linguistically.

Scenic memory tends to be incoherent and remote from meaning, while narrative

memory tends to have a meaningful and coherent structure” (Assmann 2006, 2).

Ruins are of course neither linguistically organized nor meaningful and coherent

structures, but in their conspicuous state of decay they point to the fundamental

difference between present and past shapes and to the changeability inherent in every

timely process. Focusing on the temporality intrinsic to the ruin, my general claim is

that war ruins relate the past to the present in a more coherent and meaningful way

than monuments and memorials of war tend to do.

The ambiguous ruin

Before I get to the examples, let me take a brief tour into the history and theory of the

ruin. Art historians have shown how the ruin was established in renaissance painting

as a symbol of the temporality of human existence. In opposition to the eternal glory

of God, the ruin demonstrated the eventual destruction of every kingdom on earth.

Equal to the portrait painting, the motif of the ruin marked the new self-consciousness

of humanity in the Renaissance.2 For the Romantics the ruin became an object of

melancholic contemplation. Highlighting the concept of loss, the ruin took on a tragic

meaning in pointing to the inevitable absence of unity. But in later analyses, for

example by Walter Benjamin, the fragmented nature of the ruin also became a

promise of new orders to come.3

2 Cf. Hansen 1999. See especially chapter 6 and 7, in which the linkage between the motif of the ruin and the idea of the modern consciousness is thoroughly explained. 3 In Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928) Walter Benjamin states that the concept of allegory is comparable to the ruin (“Allegorien sind im Reiche der Gedanken was Ruine im Reiche der Dinge”, Benjamin 1974a, 354) in so far that they both point to an absent and lost unity. In Benjamin’s


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The image of ruins, in other words, is intimately linked to modernity, to the

concept of change, and to the belief that the present state of affairs is not the only one

imaginable. Not only is there a utopian dimension to the ruin; there is a strong critical

one as well. By showing the scattered remains of former civilisations, the ruin tells us

that the monumental grandeur of today’s modern society will be the ruins of

tomorrow. As Benjamin suggests in „Über den Begriff der Geschichte“ (1939) with

the conceptual image of the Angel of History, historical events are nothing but a pile

of ruins growing into the sky: “Wo eine Kette von Begenheiten vor uns erscheint, da

sieht er [der Engel der Geschichte, KGK] eine einzige Katastrophe, die unablässig

Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft” (Benjamin 1974b, 697). This means that as an object

the ruin is time-related, but as a concept it reaches into eternity – at least if you accept

the physical-biological concept of history as an everlasting chain of constructions and

destructions.

This is also the underlying notion in Georg Simmel’s writings about the ruin. In

his view the fundamental struggle between spirit and nature (‘Geist’ and ‘Natur’) is

nowhere as significant as in the ruin. In spite of nature’s destructive force, the

constructive idea of the human spirit is still visible in the ruin. Simmel writes: „Was

den Bau nach oben geführt hat, ist der menschliche Wille, was ihm sein jetziges

Aussehen gibt, ist die mechanische, nach unten ziehende, zernagende und

zertrümmernde Naturgewalt“ (Simmel 1919, 128).

A ruin caused by natural decay offers a site in which the condition of alienation

of humankind (‘the particular’) from nature (‘the general’) is overcome in the

imagination. Simmel uses the image of Mother Nature as the mild avenger who

patiently awaits the return of her children after they have violently tried to elevate the

force of their spirit in monumental buildings. But mankind is bound to the cosmic

tragedy of ruination; that is the lesson to be learned from the ruin.

description of baroque literature, in which fragments of antique forms are innovatively brought together, the ruin becomes an image of the new: “Was die Antike hinterlassen hat, sind ihnen Stück für Stück die Elemente, aus welchen sich das neue Ganze mischt. Nein: baut. Denn die vollendete Vision von diesem Neuen war: Ruine.” (ibid.)


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Diese Verschiebung [zugunsten der Natur] schlägt in eine kosmische Tragik aus, die für unser Empfinden jede Ruine in den Schatten der Wehmut rückt, denn jetzt erscheint der Verfall als die Rache der Natur für die Vergewaltigung, die der Geist ihr durch die Formung nach seinem Bilde angetan hat. (ibid. 126)

In this way ruins have something fundamentally ambiguous about their very essence.

They are products of time passing by and signify the instability of all that seem solid.

But at the same time, they transcend everyday life with their affinity to the eternal and

their rock-solid nature-like shape. This schism has the logical outcome that it is

impossible to maintain and preserve a proper ruin. If restored and repaired it turns

into a monument, thereby having a fixated meaning ascribed to it. If not restored and

repaired it turns into nothing, thereby gradually loosing every meaning.

The making of a ruinous monument typically takes place when societies claim

that certain ruins are important elements in their tradition or collective identity and

therefore must be preserved. The fundamental ambiguity of the ruin, however, only

allows meanings and memories to be temporarily attributed to it, while societies tend

to insist that fixed physical objects take part in constituting collective identity.

Therefore, ruins cannot signify any frozen image of the past. Instead, they embody

the floating and changeable relation between the present and the past.

According to Simmel it is only decay and dissolution caused by human

inactivity that defines a proper ruin. Ruins produced by human destruction, such as

war ruins, do not display an authentic floating vision of the past, but show traces of

sudden man-made destruction. War ruins furthermore often figure – as in the German

case – as “undesirable heritage”,4 and they generally tend to distort their nowadays

4 I borrow this term from anthropologist Sharon Macdonald who uses it in a pragmatic analysis of the gigantic physical remains of National Socialist Germany at the former Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nuremberg, cf. Macdonald 2006. I do not agree with Macdonald’s claim that documentation of the past, ‘trivialization’ of the undesirable ruins, and pedagogical initiatives to tell about their origin is the only right way to establish an acceptable historical consciousness in order to live with the difficult German past today. Macdonald praises the “serious cognitive work and an ability to self-distance” (Macdonald 2006, 22) that is demanded from the visitor at the Reichsparteitagsgelände Documentation Centre because it counters the emotive appeals inherent in fascist architecture as well as in many museums of today that try to evoke “an immediate emotive response of awe” (ibid.). But simple curiosity and emotive responses are unavoidable for many of the visitors to the Reichsparteitagsgelände ruins. It is illusionary to think that the heritage of fascism can be dealt with


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peaceful surroundings with the uncanny sense that the belligerent past is somehow

still present.

Consequently, war ruins connect the past, the present and the future by

unpleasantly reminding us that this kind of destruction, war, is not necessarily

overcome and erased from the surface of the earth. Just like the ruin in Simmel’s

general description functions as a memento mori-image, war ruins figure as a bad

omen for the future. As Dylan Trigg has suggested, regarding ruins caused by human

violence, they are sites haunted with a traumatic past. They have an unsettling

“spectral quality” (Trigg 2009, 98) and present us with “the metaphysical strangeness

of embodied disembodiment: that is, an architectural emergence without time and

stability. In a word, an architecture of disappearance”. (ibid. 99)

However, to subdue the ghastly unease of the war ruins and to demonstrate their

ability to master their warlike heritage, post-war societies typically turn war ruins into

picturesque anti-war monuments for the present, but in so doing the war ruins stop

functioning as proper ruins.

This is the case with the famous church ruins in Berlin (Gedächtniskirche, fig.

1) and Hamburg (St.-Nikolai-kirche, fig. 2), and some years ago the ruin of the

Frauenkirche in Dresden, which I shall return to in the last part of this paper,

functioned as an anti-war monument as well, but in an even more ideological and

propagandistic sense. These church ruins do not connect the present to the past in

terms of a cosmic tragedy or as adventurous traces of a mysterious past, but in terms

of moral or pedagogical warnings to secure future peace and harmony – or for future

enmity and ideological support for a certain group, nation, or culture.5 The church

ruins might function as memorial sites, but the cultural memories attached to them

almost disappear in abstract and generalized pacific statements such as ‘never again

through cognitive work alone: the emotions stirred by physical traces of cultural heritage – be it undesirable or not – must be taken into account as well. 5 In German the word ‘Mahnmal’ is used in relation with memorials not only commemorating the past but also carrying a message or a warning for the future, while the word ‘Denkmal’ is used to describe memorials commemorating past events without employing any directives for the future. The church ruins mentioned above are typically described as ‘Mahnmal’s, and inscriptions like: ‘den Opfern zum Gedächtnis, den Lebenden zur Mahnung’ are commonplace at German memorial sites.


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war’. They activate a pure scenic memory-function in the viewer and close the

relation off between the memorial site and the surrounding society and history. In

short, they seem like postcard-images, incoherent as they are with their own past and

with the nice modern buildings surrounding them.6

The Flakturm in Berlin-Humboldthain

In contrast to these so called memorials, I will draw in an example of how a German

war ruin can open up several forms of memory of the war by activating the narrative

6 In several books and articles James E. Young has described how German and British artists have insisted on installing what he terms “counter-monuments” (Young 1999, 3) on memorial sites with relation to German National Socialism and the Holocaust, while public opinion has typically demanded traditional monuments, even though monumental aesthetics itself is central to fascist ways of expression. Whereas Sharon Macdonald’s rejection of monumentality is based mainly on its fascist connotations, Young supplements his plea for the counter-monument by calling upon public remembrance as a never-ending process that must have some common places and discourses in the public sphere. More importantly, though, the memorial work must take place inside each and every one of us. Young warns against the urge to create a “finished monument that completes memory itself, puts a cap on memory work, and draws a bottom line underneath the era that must always hunt Germany. Better a thousand years of Holocaust memorial competitions than any single ‘final solution’ to Germany’s memorial problem” (ibid. 2).

Fig. 1, Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, Berlin Fig. 2, St.-Nicolai-kirche, Hamburg


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memory-function more directly. Today, the half destroyed concrete structure of the

Humboldthain flak tower in Berlin is partly invisible. It has almost returned to Mother

Nature, who – in the shape of an idyllic park (fig. 3) – has overgrown most of the

former anti-aircraft bunker with grass, bushes and trees. This means, that you can

walk around the park without being reminded of the bellicose ground you step on.

The Humboldthain flak tower is an almost hidden sign, so to speak, of the Second

World War, and even if you go to the top of the bunker you can mistake it for an

ordinary viewing platform (fig. 4).

During the war, the bunker was used by the Luftwaffe to defend Berlin against Allied

air raids. It also served as an air-raid shelter for thousands of people. After the war,

Humboldthain became part of the French occupation zone, and as every large

monument reminding of National Socialist militarism the flak tower was supposed to

be completely destroyed as soon as possible. But it turned out to be too difficult and

too dangerous to blow it all up, so the French decided to make a so called

‘Trümmerberg’ out of the partly demolished building, depositing several tons of

rubble in and around the bunker, and leaving it to nature to cover up the mess.

For many years the bunker was closed to public access. Curious children and

explorers of all kinds were the only visitors in the dark underworld – some of them

with a deadly outcome, though, but all of them out of the belief that the old war ruins

Fig. 3, Volkspark Humboldthain, Berlin Fig. 4, Humboldthain Flakturm, Berlin


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meant adventure. In the year 2000, however, the bunker was opened for public

access, and nowadays guided tours into the bunker show visitors the remnants of the

dramatic story. All sorts of facts are presented by the guide, who in many instances

has a personal relation to the bunker. His mother may have taken him there for

protection during the war, or his father or grandfather helped firing the heavy guns on

top of the bunker. The tour guides are generally very fund of plans, numbers and

measures. They tell you in detail how the Nazis build the bunker, they account very

accurate for the precise amount of ammunition being fired every minute from the flak

canons, and they describe how very precise radar-control was necessary for the

Germans to hit the English bomber machines (see fig. 5 for an example of how a

functioning flak tower looked).

Such a visit underground in the beautiful park is actually quite an uncanny

experience, as you look directly into the remnants of a terrible kind of warfare. The

bunker ruin is monumental, but it has neither been monumentalised nor hidden totally

away as it has been done with the two similar flak towers in Berlin. So, the possibility

of listening to the past war story and looking at its remnants, while regarding the

steady work of nature during the postwar decades, brings about an ambiguous image

of history. There are no reminders of the ‘never again war’-kind, but a fragmentary

transmission of personal and collective memories as well as historical facts, and

Fig. 5, Flakturm Tiergarten, Berlin, 1943


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visitors are thus given the sense that several pasts are simultaneously present in and

around the bunker.

In the words of Dylan Trigg “there is a sense of being displaced here, of having

come to a scene too late, as though the presence is defined by what fails to materialize

in the present.” (Trigg 2009, 98) But whereas Trigg exclusively underpins the

traumatic testimonial quality of the ruin (he analyses ruins of the Auschwitz gas

chambers), the Humboldthain ruin also breeds fascination and curiosity about the

almost disappeared past, scantly visible in the eroded bunker architecture, but largely

evident in the imagination of the visitor because of the marked difference between

now and then; a difference that activates the narrative memory-function by forcing

the viewer to seek out the cause of and explanation to the present state of

disintegration.

The children of war

In German post-war literature an entire generation of authors displays a fascination of

the war ruins quite similar to the kind of interest and curiosity sparked by the

Humbolthain bunker. It is the generation born between 1931 and 1945, exactly too

young to have participated in the war, but old enough to remember the war or its

immediate aftermath. The childhood memories of the generation are naturally linked

to the image of war, and some of the authors feel an almost romantic attachment to

the ruins. Writers such as Dieter Forte, Thomas Bernhard, Monika Maron and W.G.

Sebald have written about their childhood and youth as a span of time intimately

connected to the destructed cities of Germany and Austria.

As Monika Maron once said in an interview: “Man spielte eben in Ruinen. Eine

Stadt ohne Ruinen kannte ich gar nicht. Das ist einer ganzen Generation so gegangen.

Sie haben die Augen aufgemacht und was sie sahen, war Krieg“ (Hage 2003, 220). In

Maron’s autobiographical novel Pawels Briefe (1999) this line of thought is given a

literary expression in the voice of the narrator reflecting on her origin in the midst of

the destructions of World War Two and the way in which this destruction is still

present inside of her:


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Ich wage es fast nicht zu schreiben, aber der Satz: »Ich bin ein Kriegskind« hatte für mich seit jeher einen poetischen Reiz. Dahinter steckt ein vergessenes Geheimnis. Vier Jahre Bomben, Sirenen, die tote Tochter vom Kaufmann Kupicki, ein dunkles Bild von gedrängt sitzenden Menschen im Luftschutzkeller […]. Die ersten fünf Lebensjahre sind die wichtigsten, heißt es. Wo ist der Krieg in mir geblieben? Irgendwo muss er stecken, aber ich erkenne ihn nicht, außer in dem fernen Schrecken, wenn eine Sirene heult oder wenn Sylvester das Feuerwerk kracht. (Maron 2004, 116-117)

For Maron and her generational fellows the war was both an initial trauma and a well-

known state of affairs. The war ruins seemed to be a natural condition and as such a

place for childhood freedom, for playing, and for adventure. Only later did they

discover that the destruction was man-made; a result of the unfortunate decisions

made by their parents’ generation, to put it mildly. The rebuilding of the cities and the

economic miracle coincided with the adolescence of the children of war-generation.

Perhaps this coincidence explains why the authors often describe the economic

miracle and reconstruction of their homeland as an abrupt demystification and a

disappointing end to their childhood.

In some cases, the rebuilding is even presented as something having worse

effects than the initial war trauma, such as the feeling of homelessness when the

familiar world is destroyed. Dieter Forte, for example, has explained that he still feels

more at home when watching the TV-images of the destroyed Grozny in Chechnya

(fig. 6) or Kabul in Afghanistan than he does when walking on the streets of his

beautifully rebuilt hometown Düsseldorf (fig. 7):

Fig. 6, Grozny, Chechnya, 1995 Fig. 7, Königsallee , Düsseldorf, 2005


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Ich bekomme fast – ich bitte das zu verstehen – Heimatgefühle. Es sind vertraute Bilder. Es sind die Gefühle meiner Kindheit, wenn ich Grosny im Fernsehen sehe. In solchen Trümmern bin ich aufgewachsen, da kenne ich mich aus, da weiß ich zu überleben […]. Aber ich bekomme Angst, wenn ich in Düsseldorf über die Königsallee gehe, nur Gold und Marmor, nirgendwo eine kleine Flucht, wo man sich verstecken könnte. […] Diese ganze Wohlstandgesellschaft macht mir zutiefst Angst, weil ich sie auf Sand gebaut sehe. Es ist eine Momentaufnahme, die bald wieder anders aussehen wird. […] Ich sehe auf der Kö die Brandmauern, die zerstörten Fassaden. Das sehe ich, das war meine Königsallee. (Hage 2003, 160-161)

For Dieter Forte the ruins of the childhood are counterpart to the displacement that he

feels in the late capitalist German society. The war ruins and their implication of

destruction and trauma are much more essential to his identity than the glimmering

pictures of the present, which are revealed as floating and transitory – as the ruins of

the future – by Forte’s ruinous gaze.

This is also reflected by the end of his novel In der Erinnerung (1998), where

the protagonist returns to his hometown Düsseldorf several years after having

experienced the firebombing of the city. Walking the streets of modern Düsseldorf,

memories of air-raid shelters, sirens, dead bodies, ruins and firestorms come rushing

back to him. In the following excerpt these memories are unsettlingly ‘ignited’ by the

city’s modernness in the shape of the gigantic glass-structures that by a rhetorical

comparison reflects the firestorms of many years ago. The memories continue to pup

up as an associative line of different war images, activated by different senses.

Die untergehende Sonne brannte in den Glassfassaden, erinnerte ihn an die Feuerstürme, an die Toten, die schreienden Verletzten, die unter einem Schock erstarrten Gesichter. Er spürte den beißenden Rauch der Brände, die Hitze der einstürzenden Häuser, und er erinnerte sich wieder an den Mann, der mit einem weißglühenden Spiegel in den Händen durch die Strassen irrte. // Eine rundliche Frau in wallenden Gewändern und mit einem Kopftuch sprach ihn, den Fremden, in einer gutturalen Sprache an, es klang ziemlich energisch. Sie wollte wohl wissen, was er hier zu suchen habe, warum er so lange in der Strasse stand und auf die Häuser starrte. Er verstand die Frau nicht. Er kannte hier keinen mehr. Er war Fremd in seiner Heimat. (Forte 2004, 846)

Forte’s paradigmatic paradox of feeling homeless in the hometown – feeling out of

place in his place of origin – emphasise the mournful as well as the productive side of


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the destruction, during which his narrator and the children of war-generation grew up.

It has given them a double artistic vision, enabling them to see that the structure of

the present is fragile and surrounded by a much larger history. For these writers the

economic miracle in West Germany – and later the so called reunification of the two

Germanys – has cleared away the romantic war ruins of their childhood. Their

experience and depiction reveal the materially rich capitalist society as poor or

distorting in terms of remembrance, since it reduces the tragic history of World War

Two to nothing but entertaining fancy-images on a screen, while the deep historical

traumas and personal memories of the war are repressed and destroyed in the same

way as the war ruins has disappeared or been domesticated and monumentalised.

Thus, the literary expressions of these marginalized memories are correctives to the

amnesiac future-oriented liberal society as well as to the traditional past-oriented

conservative society.7

A more radical example of such a corrective than the autobiographical novels of

Maron and Forte is Thomas Bernhard’s memoir book Die Ursache (1975), in which

the author tells about his childhood experiences in Salzburg. As 12-year-old he

experienced the American bombings of the city. Controversial as always Bernhard

claims at first to have enjoyed the sight of the Salzburger cathedrals burning. But the

aesthetic pleasure is replaced by anxiety and terror, when he is directly confronted

with crashing buildings, dead bodies, and torn-off limbs. When he returns to Salzburg

as an adult these memories from the bombings come rushing back to him. But the

worst thing is that none of the inhabitants of Salzburg seem to have any piece of

memory left of the immense destruction and death they witnessed only a few decades

ago. And symbolically, the destroyed house in which his beloved English teacher was

killed by a bomb has now been replaced by a film theatre, which – in Bernhard’s

7 The notion of capitalism and the liberal society as basically amnesiac is central to German critical theory. It is famously described in the ‘culture industry’-chapter in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947). In recent decades, memory studies seem to have struggled to overcome Adorno and Horkheimer’s “reductive collapsing of commodity form and psychic structure [of] mnemonic desires and practices that pervade our culture” (Huyssen 1995, 7), as Andreas Huyssen expresses the challenge in Twilight Memories. In the writings of the children of war-generation I see an approach similar to that of Huyssen’s, which seeks “to think memory and amnesia together rather than simply to oppose them.” (ibid.)


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prose – is the master-metaphor of the amnesiac entertainment society that has been

build on the ruins of the old world (which by the way was no more good in

Bernhard’s pessimistic and misanthropic literary logic).

Heute steht ein Kino auf dem platz, das einmal ein Gasthaus gewesen war, in welchem die Dame aus Hannover in Englisch unterrichtet hatte, und kein Mensch weiß, wovon ich rede, wenn ich davon rede, wie überhaupt alle, wie es scheint, ihr Gedächtnis verloren haben, die vielen zerstörten Häuser und getöteten Menschen von damals betreffend, alles vergessen haben oder nichts mehr davon wissen wollen, wenn man sie darauf anspricht, und komme ich heute in die Stadt, rede ich doch immer wieder die Leute nach dieser fürchterlichen Zeit an, aber sie reagieren kopfschüttelnd. (Bernhard 2006, 44)

The point here is clear: While the author managed to get away from Salzburg and

thereby save his ability to remember, the inhabitants of the city has completely lost

not only their ability to remember, but also their ability to mourn the dead because

they stayed and rebuilt the city.8

The Frauenkirche in Dresden

Before I reach my conclusions I will return to the ruins themselves, or – to be more

precise – to a remarkable example of what could be called a post-ruin, namely the

reconstructed Frauenkirche in Dresden; a project that has provoked a number of

reactions reminiscent of the protests from the children of war-generation against the

forgetful and repressive rebuilding of West Germany after World War Two. The

8 Bernhard’s depiction of his fellow Austrians echoes the collective psychological study of Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s much discussed Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (1967, eng. translation: The

inability to Mourn). The Mitscherlichs claim that the early postwar decades were characterised by a collective repression and silence about how widespread National Socialism had actually been in the Third Reich. Instead most Germans – and Austrians, not least – positioned themselves as victims of Hitler and his terror regime. This self-victimisation made it impossible also to identify with and mourn the millions of victims of German aggression, hence the title of the book. However, as Bernhard suggests in Die Ursache and as W.G. Sebald later discussed in his essay-book Luftkrieg und Literatur the collective repression also had consequences for the empathy with the actual German victims of the Second World War: the approximately 600.000 civilians killed because of the Allied firebombing of the major cities of the Third Reich. Bernhard and Sebald alike diagnose the Germans and Austrians of the postwar years to be a people blind to their own most recent history, as it is too unsettling and too uncomfortable to deal with. “Trotz der angestrengten Bemühung um die sogenannte Bewältigung der Vergangenheit scheint es mir, als seien wir Deutsche heute ein auffallend geschichtblindes und traditionsloses Volk“. (Sebald 2005a, 6)


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opening up of an almost overgrown war ruin such as the Humboldthain bunker can be

seen as a rather innocent kind of curiosity in the way Germans view their history

today. But the so called ‘resurrection’ of the Frauenkirche signals a fundamentally

different approach to the troubled history of Germany.

After being destroyed in the infamous firestorm in February 1945, the

Frauenkirche was no more than an enormous pile of rubble (fig. 8) until the

unification of the two Germanys 45 year later. During the Cold War the ruin served as

an antiwar monument, ideologically directed against both fascism and the allegedly

‘imperialist barbarism’ of the Western world. On a plaque beneath the ruin, citizens

of the German Democratic Republic could read this encouraging and instructive

memorial text: “To the tens of thousands of dead, and an inspiration to the living in

their struggle against imperialist barbarism and for the peace and happiness of man.”

(Vees-Gulani 2003, 58-59)

After the unification in 1990 the decision was made to rebuild the church, and in 2005

it was re-opened for ceremonies (fig. 9). Almost 40 percent of the old material has

been used for the reconstruction, and as a contrast to the carefully crafted new

Fig. 8, Ruins of the Frauenkirche, Dresden, 1970 Fig. 9, The rebuilt Frauenkirche,

Dresden, 2007


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sandstones in a bright colour, these pieces of the former ruin are now visible as dark

spots representing both figuratively and literally the past destruction of the church.

The idea of reusing the old building materials is to demonstrate a healing and

forgiving attitude towards the violent devastation of Dresden without forgetting the

destruction and suffering inflicted on and not least by the German people.

The project has been criticised, though, for monumentalising old German

history and obscuring and ignoring the tragedies of the 20th Century, primarily the

Holocaust. One of the most ardent critics, Jason James, has written that “even if the

‘wound’ remains visible in the new edifice, the church’s recovered presence may

overwhelm those elements that recall its destruction” (James 2006, 257). James calls

for a less overwhelming and thereby more appropriate memorial to the destruction of

Dresden and the Frauenkirche. He considers the actual result of the rebuilding project

as a phantasmagorical “fantasy of resurrection”, a “palatable, seemingly

unadulterated symbol of national culture”, and a “fantasy of undoing loss and

retrieving a former state of wholeness” (ibid. 249; 257; 262), revelling in so called

monumental and narrative fetishism, which means that it purports a picture of the past

as one single continuous story that erases every traumatic and disturbing event on its

way.

Especially the concept of “narrative fetishism” (James 2006, 265) is of interest

here, since it seems at odds with Assmann’s notion of narrative memory. While the

fetishist approach to narration creates coherence and meaning through the logic of

continuity that excludes and omits traumatic experience, the memorial approach

potentially includes the lacunas of trauma and terror through the logic of difference,

inviting our narrative faculty to fill out the gap between the past and the present.

Jason James borrows the concept of narrative fetishism from Eric Santner’s

psychoanalytic writings on the collective work of mourning, in which it is described

as a compensatory and redeeming process that dislocates questions of trauma and

guilt in order to maintain an intact picture of the self or the collective.


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It is a strategy of undoing, in fantasy, the need for mourning by simulating a condition of intactness, typically by situating the site and origin of loss elsewhere. Narrative fetishism releases one from the burden of having to reconstitute one’s self-identity under ‘post-traumatic’ conditions; in narrative fetishism, the “post” is indefinitely postponed (Santner quoted in James 2006, 265).

This redemptive narrative is in James’ critique opposed to a more complicated work

of mourning or Trauerarbeit that does not postpone but confront the conditions of

trauma. This ambition is not expressed in traditional, historical, and didactic

memorial practices such as the anti-war church-ruins, but in the so called counter-

monument (cf. note 6), which is described as

a monument against itself: against the traditionally didactic function of monuments, against their tendency to displace the past they would have us contemplate – and finally, against the authoritarian propensity in monumental spaces that reduces viewers to passive spectators. [Counter-monuments are] memorial spaces conceived to challenge the very premise of the monument. (Young 1999, 3)

Inspired by the writings of James E. Young, Jason James emphasizes how different

war- and Holocaust-memorials paradigmatically challenge the widespread temptation

to promote a ‘narrative fetishism’-attitude towards history. He refers for instance to

the rebuilding of the Coventry Cathedral (fig. 10) as an ideal alternative to the

Frauenkirche. The two projects commemorate identical parts of the World War Two-

experience, namely the air bombings, but whereas the Frauenkirche suppresses

historical traumas according to James, “the new cathedral in Coventry [is] a striking

mixture of conserved ruins and contemporary architecture – certainly not a structure

that could be mistaken for its predecessor” (James 2006, 261) and therefore an

appropriate memorial to a tragic and burdening past.

However, three questions seem to disturb James’ suggestion for a proper

commemorational use of church ruins: Is it really possible to create an adequate

physical memorial for unimaginable events? Is it actually viable to mistake the new

Frauenkirche in Dresden for its predecessor? And do the Coventry Cathedral-project

and its aesthetics of montage altogether differ that much from the Frauenkirche and

its aesthetics of bricolage (fig. 11)?


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In both instances we outsource a collective memorial process to a site of

commemoration, even a religious site. But according to Young “spaces that either

console viewers or redeem tragic events” (Young 1999, 3), like churches, constitute a

compensatory obstacle for memory to become an active process. Young even claims

that “instead of embodying memory, such memorials may only displace memory

[and] to the extent that we encourage monuments to do our memory work for us, we

become much more forgetful” (ibid. 3). So, even though James repeatedly refers to

the concepts of counter-memory and counter-monument, he seems to neglect

Young’s primary insight that memorials are first and foremost to be found within

ourselves, while physical monuments paradoxically compensate for or repress the

memory it was supposed to keep alive.

James’ aesthetic and architectural arguments for the appropriateness of the

Coventry Cathedral are furthermore applicable to the Frauenkirche-project and the

rebuilding of the entire historic centre of Dresden as well. Not only is the former ruin

visible in the reconstructed church because of the vast amount of reused building

material. The city is in general filled will war ruins, voids, and construction sites (fig.

12); in itself ‘counter-monuments’ in the sense of Young. In many parts of the city

the traces of destruction are actually still apparent and mark eye-opening contrasts to

the rebuilt areas surrounding them.

Fig. 10. The Coventry Cathedral, 2006.

The new church building to the left was

consecrated on 25 May 1962.

Fig. 11. The Frauenkirche, Dresden, 2007.

The old (dark) bricks are easily

distinguishable from the new (bright) ones


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But of course nobody wants to live among ruins for ever, and even though it is

extremely exciting and historically instructive that an entire city still offers so many

direct glimpses of the consequences of war, it must be disturbing for the inhabitants

to live and work among these numerous traces of pain and suffering. Compromises

must be made if we are neither to forget the violent destruction of the city, nor to give

up the idea of living there today. And I think the compromise of the resurrected

Frauenkirche makes up an acceptable solution. While Jason James and likeminded

critics focus mainly on the overall structure of the Frauenkirche and the impressing

scenic effect it has on the visitor, the fragments – the ruin parts – of the old church in

effect add the notion of temporality and changing historical circumstances to the

building’s overall visual expression. By using different pedagogical strategies such as

placing ruin fragments in front of the church (fig. 13), the reconstruction committee

has even emphasised to the public that the new church is both a copy and a rebuilding

of an old church.

Different possibilities for activating the narrative memory to make us comprehend

what the scenic memory function cannot grasp are thus available. Like in the

Humboldthain-example it is the partial visibility of an old ruin – the present image of

Fig. 12. Construction site with ruins and weed,

Neumarkt, Dresden, 2007. In 2008, the

rebuilding of a so called Bürgerhaus was

launched on this very spot.

Fig. 13. Fragment of the dome

of the old Frauenkirche, 2006.


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the disintegration of the past – that gives us the possibility to create a coherent and

meaningful memory structure, leading us through various layers of the past, including

the traumatic ones, and not allowing the internalised memorial process to rest.

Concluding remarks

For the children of war-generation it was a terrifying experience to discover that the

adventurous war ruins were caused by human beings and not some sort of god or

natural catastrophe. As the narrator in W.G Sebald’s 1990-book Schwindel. Gefühle.

recalls from his childhood in the provincial German town of W., he believed ruins to

be an integral part of every larger city.

[I]n fast jeder Wochenschau sah man auch die Ruinenhaufen von Städten wie Berlin oder Hamburg, die ich lange nicht mit der in den letzten Kriegsjahren erfolgten Zerstörung, von der ich nichts wusste, in Verbindung brachte, sondern für eine sozusagen natürliche Gegebenheit aller größeren Städte gehalten haben. (Sebald 2005b, 204)

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the discussion of reunification during the

1990’s, it now seems as if the younger generations in Germany has made a kind of

reverse discovery: that the nice and modern cities in which they grew up are not a

natural given in Western civilisation. And the increased interest in literature about the

Second World War may very well be explained by this re-discovery: that modern

Germany is built on ruins. In recent German novels such as Die Mittagsfrau (2007)

by Julia Franck (b. 1970), and Kaltenburg (2008) by Marcel Beyer (b. 1965) – and in

the poetry of Durs Grünbein (b. 1962), especially Porzellan. Poem vom Untergang

meiner Stadt from 2005 – the ruins of the Second World War not only figure as

important themes, but also function as literary devices and poetic images, building up

the fictional narratives and the imaginative structures. Even though they present

mainly well-known and similar images of, for example, children playing in the ruins,

these novels are less bound to the sad and traumatic burden of historical reality than

the writings of Sebald, Forte, Maron and Bernhard. The children of war-generation

insisted, however, on the alternative version of modern German history inherent in


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‘the good war ruins’ of their childhood. And it is thanks to their kind of war-

experience and their imaginative ruinous gaze that the ruin-mode of remembrance

lives on in recent German literature as well as in some of the real ruins still left out

there.

References

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. 1988. Dialektik der Aufklärung:

Philosophische Fragmente. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag Assmann, Jan. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Stanford University Press Benjamin, Walter. 1974a. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. In Gesammelte

Schriften. Bd. I-1. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann & Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Benjamin, Walter. 1974b. Über den Begriff der Geschichte [1940]. In Gesammelte

Schriften. Bd. I-2. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann & Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Bernhard, Thomas. 2006. Die Ursache. Eine Andeutung. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag Beyer, Marcel. 2008. Kaltenburg. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Forte, Dieter. 2004. Das Haus auf meinen Schultern. Romantrilogie [incl. In der

Erinnerung]. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag Franck, Julia. 2007. Die Mittagsfrau. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag Grünbein, Durs. 2005. Porzellan. Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Hage, Volker. 2003. Zeugen der Zerstörung. Die Literaten und der Luftkrieg. Essays

und Gespräche. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag Hansen, Maria Fabricius, 1999. RUINBILLEDER. Antikfascinationens baggrunde i

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Huyssen, Andreas. 1995. Twilight Memories. Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, New York & London: Routledge James, Jason. 2006. Undoing Trauma: Reconstructing the Church of Our Lady in Dresden. In ETHOS 34.2: 244–272 Macdonald, Sharon. 2006. Undesirable Heritage. Fascist Material Culture and Historical Consciousness in Nuremberg. In International Journal of Heritage Studies 12.1: 9-28 Maron, Monika. 2004. Pawel’s Briefe. Eine Familiengeschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete. 1967. Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern.

Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens. München: Piper Sebald, W.G. 2005a. Luftkrieg und Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag Sebald, W.G. 2005b. Schwindel.Gefühle.. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag Simmel, Georg. 1919. Die Ruine. In Philosophische Kultur, Leipzig: Alfred Kröner Verlag Trigg, Dylan. 2009. The place of trauma: Memory, hauntings, and the temporality of ruins. In Memory Studies 2.1: 87-101 Vees-Gulani, Susanne. 2003: Trauma and Guilt. Literature of Wartime bombing in

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The Distortion of Space and the Ruinous Gaze

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