Walking in the city: memory and place

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Maurice Halbwachs, Collective Memory, quoted in C. Boyer, The City in Collective Memory (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1996), pp. 137–8. See Maoz Azaryahu, ‘From remains to relics: authentic monuments in the Israeli landscape’, History and Memory, 5:2 (1993), p. 87, for a discussion of this aspect of the authenticity: ‘Objects that serve as primary witnesses… derive their poetic eloquence from the fact that they “experienced” the event at the time that it occurred or even participated in the event itself.’ Caroline Wiedmer points out the difficulty of reading a site in her discussion of the concentration camps: ‘but of course there is no such thing as a pure site affording access to a knowledge of the Holocaust untouched by interpretation or construction. And a historically significant site cannot necessarily speak for itself.’ See C. Wiedmer, The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France ( Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 171. For a discussion of this issue, see D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994); M. Crang, P.S. Travlou, ‘The city and topologies of memory’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 19 (2001), pp. 161–177; M. Landzelius, ‘Commemorative dis(re)membering: erasing heritage, spatializing disinheritance’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21 (2003), pp.195–221. K. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics and Place (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 9. See also Landzelius (2003) and Crang and Travlou (2001), op. cit., for a discussion of the relationship of temporality and spatiality. Several scholars have developed typologies of walking: see F. Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice (Barcelona, Gustavo Gili, 2002) for a discussion of the twentieth-century introduction of walking as an aesthetic practice, based on dada, surrealism and land art; see J. D. Hunt, ‘“Lordship of the Feet”: Toward a Poetics of Movement in the Garden', in, M. Conan, ed., Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion (Washington, DC, Dumbarton Oaks, 2003) for a discussion of three basic types of movement in gardens: the procession, the stroll and the ramble. See also B. Jacks, ‘Reimagining Walking: Four Practices’, JAE (2004), pp. 5–9 and M. Treib, ‘Moving the Eye’, in, D. Harris, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007) for other aspects of kinesthetic experience in gardens and urban space. For a discussion the idea of witnessing in relation to this film, see S. Felman, ‘Film as Witness: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah’, in, G. Hartman, ed., Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1994), pp. 90–103. M.Chevrie, H. le Roux, ‘Site and Speech: An Interview with Claude Lanzmann about Shoah’, in, S. Liebman, ed., Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007), p.38. Ibid., Liebman: G. Didi-Huberman, ‘The Site, Despite Everything’. In the film, Simon Srebnik, one of two sole survivors from Chelmno, revisits the site and tells us ‘I do not believe that I am here. No I can't believe that. It was always this peaceful here. Always. When they burned two thousand people—Jews—every day, it was just as peaceful. No one shouted. Everyone did his job. It was silent. Peaceful. Just as it is now.’ op.cit., p. 118. James Young describes this quality of indifference with regard to the work of the artist Shimon Attie in Berlin: ‘The memory of site's past does not emanate from within a place but is more like the projection of the mind's eye on to a given site…these sites remain essentially indifferent to their past, altogether amnesiac.’; J. Young, At Memory's Edge (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2000), p. 62. Ibid. p. 94. J. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993), p. 30. See also N. Lupu, ‘Memory Vanished, Absent and Confined: The Countermemorial Project in 1980s’ and 1990s' Germany', History and Memory, 15:2 (2003), pp. 130–164 for an extended discussion of the reception of the work in Harburg. Ibid., p, xi. Ibid., p. 28. See D. Apel, Memory Effects: The Holocaust has and the Art of Secondary Witnessing (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2002). pp. 5–6 for a detailed discussion of the agendas implicit in Holocaust memorials. See also D. Eng and D. Kazanjian, eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003). Ibid. p. ix. The problem of representing the Holocaust has been extensively debated. See S. Friedlander, ‘Trauma, Memory and Transference’, in, G. Hartman, ed., Holocaust Remembrance (London, Blackwell, 1994) and S. Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press [1992] 1996). For a discussion of commemorative landscapes and their design, see: J. Wolschke-Bulmahn, ed., Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design (Boston, Harvard University Press, 2001); J. Wasserman, ‘To trace the shifting sands: Community, ritual, and the memorial landscape’, Landscape Journal, 17 (1998), pp. 59–73; J. Wasserman, ‘Memory Embedded ’, Landscape Journal, 21(2002), pp. 42–61; L. Neckar, ‘Berlin: Topology of Contemplation’, in, R. Krinke, Contemporary Landscapes of Contemplation (London & New York, Routledge, 2005), pp. 139–173. Maya Lin wrote: ‘The memorial is composed not as an unchanging monument, but as a moving composition to be understood as we move into and out of it’: M. Lin, Grounds for Remembering: Monuments, Memorials, Texts (Berkeley, The Dorren B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, 1995), p. 11. D. Abramson, ‘Maya Lin and the 1960s: Monuments, Time Lines and Minimalism’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Summer, 1996), p. 707. The memorial was designed by the architect Georges-Henri Pingusson, 1962. For a discussion of this memorial and the cultural politics of its siting, see Shelley Hornstein's essay ‘Invisible Topographies: Looking for the Memorial de la Deportation in Paris’, in S. Hornstein, F. Jacobowitz, eds, Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2003). The city of Paris stipulated that ‘no part of the memorial be visible above ground’ (p. 312). By the Barcelona architect Beth Gali, 1984–6. E. Casey, Getting Back into Place (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 29. The rise of ‘pedestrianism’, or the ‘peripatetic’ as a literary idea, in the work of Wordsworth, Thoreau and others, associated long-distance rural walking with a heightened awareness of the natural world, knowledge and self-discovery. For the development of these ideas see A. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993); R. Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (London, Macmillan Press Ltd, 1997); R. Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York, Viking, 2000). Karavan wrote: ‘I believe I could express the tragedy that emanates from this great Jewish and German philosopher without symbolism, without even being tempted to create symbols, nothing but my relationship to this situation and this place.’ Quoted in I. and K. Scheurmann, Pour Walter Benjamin (Bonn, AsKI, 1994), p. 226 (translation from the French by the Author). M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trs., Steven Rendall (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984), p. 117. Ibid. Kaiser, quoted in M. Sinka ‘The “Different” Holocaust Memorial in Berlin's Bayerisches Viertel: Personal and Collective Remembrance Thematizing Perpetrator/Victim Relationships,’ in L. Cohen-Pfister and D. Wienroder-Skinner, eds., Victims and Perpetrators: 1933–1945 (Berlin, NYC: Walter de Gruyter, 2006), p. 204. Ibid., p. 207. Wilcke gathered this information from the property files maintained by the Nazis which he located in the Central Department of the Ministry of Finance. Wilcke's original files are now in the Berlin State Archive. The Art Council in Schöneberg prepared a memorial book of all the names of the deported collected by Wilcke. Ibid., p.208. The German terms are stolpersteine, or stein des Denk-Anstosses, quoted in C. Wiedmer, The Claims of Memory, op. cit., p. 106. This term was later used and adapted by the artist Gunter Demnig, whose project of small brass pavers inscribed with the names and dates of Holocaust victims has been installed in many German cities. See Sinka for a fuller discussion of the perpetrator–victim nexus in German memorials. See H. Pickford, ‘Conflict and Commemoration: Two Berlin Memorials’, MODERNISM/modernity, 12, no. 1 (2005), pp. 133–173. Sinka, p. 214. See C Wiedmer, The Claims of Memory, p. 110. Ibid., p. 109. H. Lefebvre, “The Everyday and Everydayness,” reprinted in S. Harris and D. Berke, eds., Architecture of the Everyday (Princeton, Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), p. 34. M. Kwon, ‘One Place after the Other: Notes on Site Specificity’, October, 80 (Spring, 1997), p. 87. Ibid., p. 92. See the Introduction to ‘Everyday Life: Yale French Studies’, [1987], A. Kaplan, K. Ross, in, B. Highmore, The Everyday Life Reader (London, Routledge, 2002) for a discussion of this aspect of the everyday. See Sinka for a detailed list of exhibitions, interviews and other materials collected as part of the memory work in the Bavarian Quarter as well as Katarina Kaiser's comments on the reactions of residents.