Political Implications of Preservation and Planning in East Germany

This study documents the ideological instability brought forth in the search for stability through architecture and historic preservation.Following World War II, Germany became divided physically, ideologically, and emotionally into two separate countries. Despite the mounting instability in the region as a result of Cold War tensions, the architectural ghosts of a pre-war Germany proved to be most haunting following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent German reunification. Here, we can explore the hauntological aspects of architecture and its preservation, or demolition. This hauntology provides the fulcrum on which present ideological tendencies balance. I argue that, in East Germany, the post-reunification rise of far-right politics is ideologically scripted into the architecture. Cultural values, such as Heimat, viewed through the prism of the Lacanian Theory of Desire pour light on the management of German architecture that continues to haunt the present.