Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “Normalization”: Has Helmut Kohl's Vision Been Realized?
- 2 Coping with Disparity: Continuity and Discontinuity in Economic Policy since Unification
- 3 Understanding Germany: The Limits of “Normalization” and the Prevalence of Strategic Culture
- 4 “Normalization” through Europeanization: The Role of the Holocaust
- 5 “Representing Normality”: Architecture in Berlin
- 6 “Normalizing” the Past: East German Culture and Ostalgie
- 7 National Memory's Schlüsselkinder: Migration, Pedagogy, and German Remembrance Culture
- 8 The Return of “Undead” History: The West German Terrorist as Vampire and the Problem of “Normalizing” the Past in Margarethe von Trotta's Die bleierne Zeit (1981) and Christian Petzold's Die innere Sicherheit (2001)
- 9 “Normalizing” the “Old” Federal Republic? The FRG between 1949 and 1989 in Recent German Fiction
- 10 Reconciliation between the Generations: The Image of the Ordinary German Soldier in Dieter Wellershoff's Der Ernstfall and Ulla Hahn's Unscharfe Bilder
- 11 “(un)sägliche Vergleiche”: What Germans Remembered (and Forgot) in Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s
- 12 “Normal” as “Apolitical”: Uwe Timm's Rot and Thomas Brussig's Leben bis Männer
- 13 “Narrative Normalization” and Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang
- 14 From “Normalization” to Globalization. German Fiction into the New Millennium: Christian Kracht, Ingo Schulze, and Feridun Zaimoğlu
- 15 Abnormal Consensus? The New Internationalism of German Cinema
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
5 - “Representing Normality”: Architecture in Berlin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 “Normalization”: Has Helmut Kohl's Vision Been Realized?
- 2 Coping with Disparity: Continuity and Discontinuity in Economic Policy since Unification
- 3 Understanding Germany: The Limits of “Normalization” and the Prevalence of Strategic Culture
- 4 “Normalization” through Europeanization: The Role of the Holocaust
- 5 “Representing Normality”: Architecture in Berlin
- 6 “Normalizing” the Past: East German Culture and Ostalgie
- 7 National Memory's Schlüsselkinder: Migration, Pedagogy, and German Remembrance Culture
- 8 The Return of “Undead” History: The West German Terrorist as Vampire and the Problem of “Normalizing” the Past in Margarethe von Trotta's Die bleierne Zeit (1981) and Christian Petzold's Die innere Sicherheit (2001)
- 9 “Normalizing” the “Old” Federal Republic? The FRG between 1949 and 1989 in Recent German Fiction
- 10 Reconciliation between the Generations: The Image of the Ordinary German Soldier in Dieter Wellershoff's Der Ernstfall and Ulla Hahn's Unscharfe Bilder
- 11 “(un)sägliche Vergleiche”: What Germans Remembered (and Forgot) in Former Yugoslavia in the 1990s
- 12 “Normal” as “Apolitical”: Uwe Timm's Rot and Thomas Brussig's Leben bis Männer
- 13 “Narrative Normalization” and Günter Grass's Im Krebsgang
- 14 From “Normalization” to Globalization. German Fiction into the New Millennium: Christian Kracht, Ingo Schulze, and Feridun Zaimoğlu
- 15 Abnormal Consensus? The New Internationalism of German Cinema
- Notes on the Contributors
- Index
Summary
Writing in a 2004 special issue of the architecture journal DISP devoted to Berlin, Brian Ladd concluded his tour of the “ghosts on display” by suggesting that:
While there are sound [sic] reasons (economic and aesthetic, if not ideological) for banishing GDR buildings from many sites, the GDR's legacy has not entirely vanished. There is, likewise, no danger that the Third Reich will be forgotten in Berlin. And it is entirely reasonable to argue that the entire city should not remain as a memorial to the destruction wrought by the twentieth century. Berliners, like the rest of us, may need a refuge, however inauthentic, from modernity.
It is striking that a plea for the “normalization” of the urban environment should come from the author of The Ghosts of Berlin, a book that articulated, for an international audience, an explicitly critical and self-reflexive mode of thinking and writing about the German urban environment's relationship to the past. Ladd's conclusion has the tone of a moral imperative, calling for the rejection of the abnormality of the ambitious architectural projects of modernity in favor of the inauthentic postmodernity of the twenty-first century, and demanding that there should be an end to the neurotic engagement with Berlin's urban environment and the German past. At the same time, his conclusion draws attention to the way in which a “western” norm is often the hidden element in discourses on German normalization in a manner reminiscent of older historical debates about a German Sonderweg, that is, a peculiarly German path to modernity compared to the “healthier trajectories of the societies of the West.”
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- Information
- German Culture, Politics, and Literature into the Twenty-First CenturyBeyond Normalization, pp. 75 - 88Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006