| The interest of this dissertation lies in exploring how the rebuilding of the memory of the Holocaust frames the reinstitution of Berlin as the capital of Germany. The prominence of memorial structures built after the fall of the Wall in 1989 differ not only in quality from conventional monuments designed to celebrate or honour heroic deeds of the past, but as monuments to a shameful history, they expose an ethics of remembrance that begins to address the vicissitudes of the moral agencies of perpetrators, victims and bystanders. Through case studies of The Neue Wache, Peter Eisenman's Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, youth programs at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and Stih and Schnock's Places of Remembrance, I address the particular representational debates concerning the politics of commemoration and the way in which the built environment itself is an imagined agent, repeatedly employed in order to engage a version of liberal citizenship in the present. Within a rhetoric of architectonics and the chronotope of the city, I examine the implications the practice of commemoration has for grasping the phenomenological dynamism of "place making". |
