1.

The Collective

Berlin. Surrounded by a halo of light, a brown pantsuit, circa 1973, hangs stiy within the museum vitrine. This is a relic of East German popular history, put on view for a demanding public. The garment is fashioned out of an easy-care fabric called Present 20, a one-hundred-percent synthetic textile developed by industrial engineers as part of an initiative to better provide for the consumers of the former German Democratic Republic, an initiative issued from the highest echelons of the Socialist Unity Party. First introduced in 1969, the fabric was so named to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the GDR. At that point, few would have imagined that the Party and the constellation of other Eastern European socialist governments would survive only another twenty years of planned production, limited expression, and compromised desires. Fewer still would have anticipated that the polyester fabric of this pantsuit would outlive the industrial collectives that, in part, brought it into existence. This artifact of the failed utopian project of Marxism-Leninism is one of thousands that are currently being displayed in museums throughout the eastern half of Germany, now called the new federal states. Museum directors there have entered a race to curate the communist past. In recent years at

24

least six separate exhibitions of GDR everyday life and popular culture have opened. The show that featured the Present 20 suit was installed in the galleries of the Offenes Depot (Open Depot) at the newly established Center for Documentation of Everyday Culture in the GDR. Together with other museums; which have held exhibitions such as Eastern Mix and Commodities for Daily Use: Four Decades of Products Made in the GDR, the Open Depot participates in an emerging trend of recalling life as it was lived under socialism. Artists, too, have entered into this new scene of visual culture. They have taken up the shards of communism and incorporated them into their works as found objects. For example, Rafael Rheinsberg, a West Berliner, has used the rusted parts of GDR hoardings as readymades in his work. Like the assemblages of the historical avant-garde, Rheinsbergs works are shot through with a subversive charge. This time it is not a sexual convulsion that goes through them (as was the case in the work of Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst), but rather the distant frisson of revolutionary hope. As the peoples own industries of Eastern Europe cease to function, and as Easterners replace their old belongings with new, Western-made goods, the material culture of the GDR is vanishing. For those who have experienced the new Germany less as a unication and more as an annexation, this disappearance is a cause of anxiety. Without the material eects of the GDR, they ask, how can we remember the gains and losses of the socialist collective? Sophie Calle, a French photographer and conceptual artist, has tried to record the dematerialized traces of this culture. In 1995 she began a work which seeks out vestiges of the second world in the sites of East Berlin where postcommunist urban transformation was rst implemented. She went looking for a socialist alternative that seemed to have passed, as political theorist Franois Furet put it, like an illusion.1 What she found were the empty pedestals and stricken street signs that remained after the removal of socialist realist objects and architecture. With little to photograph, Calle turned to passersby and asked them to recall the way it used to be in the Eastern times. Their responses, more than the photo documents, tell the story. Out of these conversations came Die Entfernung (The Detachment; 1996), a would-be travel guide of the former East Berlin, which aims to reconstitute a sense of the collective in the aftermath of real existing socialism. Both the Open Depot and The Detachment trace the ongoing shift from a society that was once emphatically collective to one that centers itself around the act of collecting. Whereas Calle mediates the voids of Berlin, the Open Depot tracks the displacement of objects from the working collective to the museum collec-

25

tion. The artist and the curator work with dierent materials; their practices are informed by dierent concerns. But The Detachment and the Open Depot intersect over the grounds of collective memory, and so merit consideration under this single scope. Each project registers a central component of collective memory: the text-based artwork reveals the social construction of memory; the museum exhibition exposes the gap between collective memory and the archive. In turn, each project discloses the critical position of Germanys second world within twentieth-century Europe. The matter of the collective reaches back through the caustic compromises of the State Security, or Stasi, to the dark decades of Nazi and Stalinist violence. The memory of the collective, meanwhile, remains in question. As unied Europe enters the new millennium, curators and artists both contend with this past imperfect and seek to salvage something of value from the socialist crisis. The residues of the second world as well as the empty spaces they once occupied have become the departure point of their enterprise. As The Detachment and the Open Depot suggest, collective memory does not dwell in objects and architecture aloneit consists in the transfer from person to person. The GDR maintained its fair share of museums and monuments before the Wall came down. Policy makers recognized the imperative to discern a heritage separate from that of West Germany, and so generously directed funds toward memorials that would legitimate the new socialist nation. Exhibitions that highlighted the antifascist resistance movement, the Soviet liberation, and the life of the proletariat lled both museums of ne art and the galleries of historical societies. But since unication, much of this has changed, as many institutions of visual culture have been put under Western direction. Years before the Open Depot was established, Westerners had anticipated the impact that an exhibition of second world material culture would have. Already in August of 1989, West German curators had organized the rst such exhibition at the Habernoll Gallery near Frankfurt am Main. But this show, SED: Stunning Eastern Design, merely lampooned the pallid universe of dmod East German consumer goods.2 The selection of GDR products depicted in the exhibition cataloguefrom faded packets of vulcanized rubber condoms to cartons of Speechless cigarsappears aimed to prove by object lesson the superior tastes of sophisticated Westerners. Later, in the early nineties, the Museum of German History on East Berlins Unter den Linden underwent a massive overhaul that entailed the closeting of displays such as one that juxtaposed Hegels spectacles with the rst television set manufactured in the GDR. In 1996 the Museum of Working-Class Life

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packed up and relocated from the center of East Berlin to the peripheral district of Marzahn. To this day, most of its collection languishes in deep storage. Many Germans remain skeptical about the continuing desire to organize exhibitions about GDR life. Some critics dismiss this focus on the Eastern times as overly sentimental, attributing it to a dysfunctional vanguard that has languished too long in its leftist delusion. Others seek to rescue from opprobrium the right to wax nostalgic. They argue for the importance of cultural memory at this time of transition. Institutions of visual culture are now among the main sites upon which the battle over German-German identity is being waged. Museums and galleries have become places of reckoning in which viewers might work through the complexities and contradictions of Germanys divided history and collective memories. When Maurice Halbwachs rst used the expression collective memory in his studies The Collective Memory (1922) and The Social Frameworks of Memory (1925), he understood memory to be dependent upon the spatial environment of a given group.3 Any material loss sustained by the group would translate into a mnemonic aporia. In contradistinction to the eetingness and immateriality of our remembered impressions, space, Halbwachs argues, is a reality that endures. Indeed we can only recapture the past by understanding how it is preserved in our physical surroundings (Halbwachs 140). Place and group mutually constitute one another: the collectives understanding of both its present and its past materializes in the spaces it inhabits. The spatial dimension of collective memory does not limit itself to the larger structures of the urban environment such as streets, squares, and bridges; it also continues along to the other end of the spectrum. It includes what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge call the smaller Zeithof of the collective workspace as well as small-scale objects, such as the kind of wares collected by the Open Depot.4 Small things circulate within the collective and bind it together just as eectively as a stone wall that encloses a village or a factory gate. In many ways the Open Depot cooperates in this tracking of communal property, even if it establishes itself at the terminus of the line. A collective denes its reactions to the outside world in relation to a specic conguration of the physical environment, Halbwachs argues. It can sustain only light injuries to the material skeleton that denes and delimits it. If a community were to lose its location in the pocket of a certain street, or in the shadow of some wall or church, he insists, they would then lose the tradition that grounds their existence (Halbwachs 135, 137). According to Halbwachss early propositions, the no-places of Calles Detachment could hardly nourish

mnemonic faculties. Rather, these empty sites would only set o collective amnesia. Halbwachss initial conjecture oers a useful perspective from which to compare and critique the Open Depot and The Detachment as works of collective memory. The question, then, is this: what memory without material?

The Open Depot The Open Depot is located in the former model city of Eisenhttenstadt, close to the Polish border. After the founding of the GDR, Eisenhttenstadt was established as Stalinstadt, the rst German socialist city. It only reassumed the name Eisenhttenstadt, or literally Ironworks City, in the midfties, after Stalins death. Despite this name change, the city, with its grid of wide boulevards and great chunks of socialist realist multistory buildings, betrays its socialist past. Unlike many other Eastern European cities, Eisenhttenstadt has renamed few of its streets; many of its citizens reside at addresses named after communist revolutionaries, like Karl-LiebknechtStrae or Clara-Zetkin-Ring. In postwar reconstruction efforts, state socialist urban planners commissioned imposing architecture like East Berlins futuristic Television Tower and Warsaws bombastic wedding cake of a high-rise, the Palace of Culture. Visible from the furthest reaches of town, such structures aimed to unify urban life and consolidate the central power of the state administration.5 Provincial Eisenhttenstadt never had any towering buildings of this sort. The citys centrifugal force found its epicenter in the Living Complex (Wohnkomplex), which comprised trundling, uniform blocks of ats, shops, and schools. Originally erected to gird the workaday with freedom, equality, and unity, the Living Complex has been abandoned to those who cannot (or do not want to) meet the exigencies of market competition. The emptying of Eisenhttenstadts arcades prompts a series of questions about the citys socialist legacy and the uncertain future that awaits citizens of postcommunist Germany. With the reorientation of nancial resources toward new concerns such as service, tourist, and informational industries, operations such as Eisenhttenstadts ironworks, which once formed part of the industrial base of the GDRs economy, have been shut down. The dismantling of heavy industry in the new states brought on the attendant trend of massive unemployment. In an attempt to alleviate the present economic depression, the European Union plans to direct large sums toward the renovation of the Eisenhttenstadt factories. But some structures

27

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and programs, both commercial and social, are considered too outmoded, too inecient to be revitalized and fast-forwarded into the late capitalist cultural moment. Curator and cultural historian Andreas Ludwig, a citizen of Eisenhttenstadt, is one of many Eastern Germans trying to come to terms with the ongoing transitions.6 In the early 1990s he secured funds from the German Ministry of Culture to found the Open Depot. The museum takes up residence in the defunct nursery unit of Eisenhttenstadts Living Complex. Although most of the buildings original interior xtures have been removed, one can detect traces of the buildings childhood: safety guards on the windows, toddler-sized toilets in the restrooms. Until its reincarnation as a museum, the nursery had fallen into disuse and had become a ghost of its former self. The Open Depots objects range from paper products to heavy machinery. The lightest collectiblesbooks, food wrappers, and the like are of materials so fragile, so acidic, that they appear much older than their true fteen or twenty years. In contrast, the clumsy, leaden, but still functional oce equipment and household appliancesadding machines which weigh in at fteen pounds, blenders at twentyseem built to last an eternity, whether carefully curated in museums or wantonly abandoned to the rubbish bins of history. With the inux of Western consumer goods after the postcommunist turn, or Wende, many Eisenhttenstadters have chosen to upgrade their homes and workplaces. Now, on rubbish collection days, possessions that were cast o to make room for new furnishings and appliances litter the local sidewalks. For some Eisenhttenstadters, this gesture of jettisoning the outmoded seems arduous. Supplanting the trusty family radio with a Chinese-made stereo system is a freighted act for them. So, instead of leaving the radio, the face of which bears the names of satellite stations in distant Bucharest and Minsk, to wait for the sanitation workers, some opt to bequeath these artifacts to the Open Depot. In the acquisition process, a group of museum sta, trained by Ludwig in the methods of oral history, interviews the donors. They pose questions not only about the provenance of the objects but also about the owners memories of the way they once lived with them or among them. Although the interview records have not yet been made public, much of the collection is open to view, as are the densely inscribed guest books where visitors can record their responses and reect upon the thoughts of those who have come before them.7 The Open Depot sets memory work into play on a human scale by concentrating on household objects. Amassing and displaying these mundane artifacts, Ludwig creates a space where viewers not only can

1.1 Offenes Depot (Open Depot), Eisenhttenstadt, exterior (photo Alan Chin).

1.2 Offenes Depot (Open Depot), Eisenhttenstadt, record player (photo Alan Chin).

31

come together to debate their past and future, but where they can also identify and insert their private lives, their own memories of countless tiny details, into the larger body of German history. Yet the Open Depot leaves unresolved many of the diculties of historicizing the GDR, particularly with regard to its troubled national heritage, or Erbe. What were the continuities and breaks between the rst unication of German states in the nineteenth century, the Nazi legacy, and real existing socialism? The Open Depot does not directly address this question, but just outside Berlin in Oranienburg, at the recently established Kita-Museum der DDR (Kindergarten Museum of the GDR), these historical tensions erupt more forcefully into the curatorial agenda. Indeed they impinge upon the very future of the museum. Like the Open Depot, the Kindergarten Museum rechristens a municipal space that city planners had originally conceived as a nursery. Due to demographic changes in the postcommunist period, many such daycare facilities have closed down: since 1991 dozens of centers in Berlin and Brandenburg have ceased operation. Faced with an uncertain future in the unied Germany, many women of the new states have opted to forestall or forgo pregnancy. Eastern birthrates dropped by nearly half in the rst six years of unication.8 With the concomitant tendency for many women to be downshifted to parttime jobs or even to complete unemployment, many nurseries and kindergartens have been rendered superuous. Eectively, the programming of the GDR museums lls the vacuum of the vacant classrooms. The Kindergarten Museum was planned and is now directed by Heidemarie Waninger, an educator who lost her job in the Brandenburg school system. It draws more visitors with each month, many of whom worked as teachers in the former GDR. Like the Open Depot, the Kindergarten Museum is staed by docents who once would have left o their children at the school in the early morning hours before punching the clock at the ironworks. Instead of striving to meet the state goals of industrial production, today these women and men attend to the task of collecting the relics of the GDR past. Where the communal energies of East Germans were once directed toward the twin plans of heavy industry and the steady growth of the labor force, now, in the wake of state socialisms collapse, the emphasis has changed. Where once the goal was reproduction, both industrial and biological, today the raison dtre for many in Eisenhttenstadt and Oranienburg is one of remembering and recollecting. With the faltering of the Marxist grand narrative, citizens of the new states no longer heed the modernist battle cry to make it new. Instead they nd themselves stirred to action by a dierent

CHAPTER ONE THE COLLECTIVE

1.3 Kita-Museum (Kindergarten Museum), Oranienburg, table and chairs.

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aesthetic and political imperative: to research and conserve the past, recoding it in the interests of the new Germany. Although few non-Germans have had the opportunity to visit the little Kindergarten Museum, or for that matter even know that it exists, many are at least somewhat familiar with the history of the city which surrounds it, namely Oranienburg. For there loom the gates of Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp that was turned into a memorial site in 1961, the same year the Berlin Wall was erected. After the Wende, eorts have been made to renovate the memorial; architect Daniel Libeskinds plans are currently being realized there. Yet these steps have not been taken easily.9 Some Oranienburgers would prefer that the government apportion more of its limited funds to develop and maintain memorials to the history of the GDR. They fear that the Sachsenhausen museum will overshadow smaller projects such as the Kindergarten Museum, distilling the citys complex history down to a single, overdetermining historical moment: the Holocaust. Discord about the funding of the Sachsenhausen memorial is growing in Oranienburg, but to date no one has lodged a complaint about the establishment of the Kindergarten Museum. The dynamic of protest about the dierent Oranienburg museums discloses an economy of memory and historya circuit generated by the competing but not fully discrete histories of national and state socialism. In the essay Versuch, mir und anderen die ostdeutsche Moral zu erklren (An Attempt to Explain the East German Morality to Myself and to Others), social critic Annette Simon analyzes this dynamic within the unication process.10 Many Germans accepted the countrys division according to the London and Paris treaties of 1954 and 1955 as due punishment for the crimes committed under Hitler. They saw the Berlin Wall and the barriers that cleaved the country in two as concrete signs of collective guilt and atonement. Unication forces Germans to reconfront the legacy of fascism in a new geopolitical landscape. The current press to musealize German history, not only in the form of Holocaust monuments (and the heated, even theatrical debates which surround them) but also via the recent explosion of GDR exhibitions, can be seen as an attempt to ground German-German identities in the material objects and structures that remain behind. In the absence of the Cold War symbols of the nations punishment-by-division, Germans see these museums as the enduring stigmata of their violent history. Germans are not the only Europeans consumed with a kind of museum fever. Ministries of culture in other countries have also devoted ever greater

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resources to the project of historical commemoration. But the rapid proliferation of GDR exhibitions sets itself apart from this museal tendency in several ways. While most memorial projects tend toward the monumental, the Open Depot and the Kindergarten Museum focus on the miniature, the minor detail, the ephemeral. In the same vein as certain provincial museums of popular culture (such as a small host of French sites maintained by curators schooled in the Annales tradition), the shows in Eisenhttenstadt and Oranienburg make memory work life-sized. The Open Depot and the Kindergarten Museum concentrate on the private and the domestic, the realm of what East Germans called niche culture. Ludwig, in particular, asserts that private lives were led under communism, despite the states attempts to deny individualistic indulgences. But, signicantly, the emphasis on niche culture comes over and against the documentation of larger, state-sanctioned practices. Neither Ludwig nor Waninger discerns the patterns of identication that connected the private to the monumental, the personal to the political in the GDR past. Indeed, these collections of GDR material culture seem to oer refuge from some of the most dicult issues informing the Germans collective heritage. The Open Depot, for example, does not collect materials used in state-organized events, or represent many of the customs that once engaged citizens as a mass. Ludwig also employs dierent installation strategies for artifacts associated with private life and those associated with large institutions. Whereas some rooms of the Open Depot contain case after case of barely distinguishable appliances, stacked catacombs of the GDRs industrial and bureaucratic history, elsewhere Ludwig has staged the artifacts in panoramas of life as it was lived in the recent, but rapidly receding past. While objects used in the home tend to be propped up in lifelike settings, those from public ocestypewriters, telephones, binders for ling documents in triplicateare simply laid out on shelves, warehouse-style. This display technique suggests that Ludwig prefers to reanimate the moments that were lived behind closed doors, while allowing the remainders of public life to hibernate, albeit within view. East Germans were just as likely and just as entitled to be house-proud as people from any culture, but it should not be forgotten that the space of the domestic was the only place where any discontented resident of the GDR could imagine an internal emigration for himself or herself. The fact that the collected instruments of bureaucracy lie dormant within the galleries of the Open Depot suggests that Eastern Germans still want to distance themselves from the former state institutions. By

1.4 Offenes Depot (Open Depot), Eisenhttenstadt, medicine cabinet (photo Alan Chin).

placing these oce wares on shelves, Ludwig consigns them to a separate register of historical memory, one not unlike that of the archive.

The archive In the forty-year history of the GDR, the archive, as an institution of memory, played a role more central than that of the museum. The essential archive was that of the Stasi, but no vestiges of this surveillance system gure in the Open Depot. After the armed forces, the Stasi was East Germanys largest employer; its archives documented information on more than a quarter of its citizens. The key to the archives, a master repertoire containing a single index card for each Stasi sta member, informer, and object of surveillance, extends for more than a mile. Following government directives, Stasi informants compiled classied reports, which recorded in minute detail the lives of millions of individuals whose daily actions were considered to bear upon matters of national security interest. 22.31 Telephone rings. No answer. The object continues to read. 22.40 The object converses briey with spouse. 23.02 Objects spouse draws curtains in north-facing windows. 23.10 Lamps extinguished. Given that the Stasi was foundational to every aspect of GDR lifenot only the public sphere, but also the domestic onetheir archives continue to inform the collective memory that is unfolding after the Wende. A crucial distinction separates the archives from the ocial histories disseminated in the GDR. While academics, curators, and administrators of other state institutions presented armative accounts of the building of socialism, secret police les stored the largest records of actual politics and society. Despite the ideological censorship of Stasi data, it was (and remains) an accurate source of information about the times when things went out of order, or auer Betrieb. Such failures and factory secondsstrikes, missed production goals, and moments of general discontentwere kept secret from the public. The Stasi held tight rein over its information, allowing access only to the highest ranks of the nomenklatura. The Stasis existence was common knowledge, but its archives seemed to withhold mysteries. To read the contents of ones le, in those times, was to know ones status vis--vis the big Other. The archives belonged neither to the patently public domain of ocial history nor to the private sphere. Rather, they functioned as a covert supplement to statemandated discourse. These chronicles were recorded in an alienated, impersonal mode, yet they penetrated into the intimate recesses of private life. Since 1989, much of the archive has been opened to the public. As more

36

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details surface, Eastern Germans work to gure these reports into their own memories of life in the industrial collective. The interest in the Open Depot and the Kindergarten Museum is a product of this struggle. At its founding, the Stasi archival system faced the future: the genesis of its protocols set the stage for the way life would be lived in the GDR. This repository of information would become an archive in the most literal sense: the roots of term archive reach back to the Greek verb arkhein, which carries two meanings at once: not only to begin but also to rule or to command.11 In contradistinction, the word museum, a cousin to mausoleum, looks back to the past. Gathering from the arguments Halbwachs makes in The Collective Memory, it seems that he would have been sensitive to the dierence between these two terms. For Halbwachs draws a dividing line between collective memory and history. He imagines these two mnemonic modes as split by an axis that opposes internal to external knowledge and experience. This same axis distinguishes the museum from the archive. Whereas memory, on the side of the internal, takes shape along the lines of a rich and continuous autobiographical portrait, history discloses only the condensed and schematic external hypercodes of a telegram (Halbwachs 7780). For Halbwachs, memory multiplies and disperses as it ows; it is part of a groups active life. Ephemeral, contingent, specular, memory could never be recollected and sedimented into a single unied story. Like a ghost, memory is summoned forth in collective conjuration. History, on the other hand, pretends that memory does lend itself to unication, that it could be delivered intact from period to period and from place to place. If history is a monument that calcies lived experience, memory is a condition. If history records, memory responds. Halbwachs imagines the museum as a place for cultures to die, more a cancer ward than an obstetrics unit. In The Collective Memory, Halbwachs refers to and then refutes the insights that Henri Bergson, his early mentor, presents in Matter and Memory. To read the two texts together is to gain a stronger grasp of Halbwachss distinction between history and memory. Bergson envisions memory as something with all the concreteness and repletion of a book, a bound volume in the library of the unconscious, in which vivid images of past events would lie like so many pages sewn into signatures. These leaves of memory would be kept neatly folded shut, waiting for an inquiring reader to open them. Bergson was convinced that human mnemonic faculties harbored the potential for total recall. Once an individual lived through a particular experience, an imprint would be indelibly inscribed into his or her internal template, where it would

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silently await retrieval. For Halbwachs, however, anamnesis only exists as a counterpart to amnesia. In order to be able to remember, one must also be able to forget. What remains in memory are not ready-made images in some subterranean gallery of thought; instead memory survives in the form of an uneven smattering of piecemeal impressions, whose meaning can be divined only through the lens of the social (Halbwachs 75). Whereas for Bergson, memory is a thing of specic character and dimension, an object which can be possessed and conserved by a single individual, for Halbwachs, memory is more a question of communicationit can only exist as a work-in-progress, which is kept in motion or held aloft within a plural collective. Historical memory starts only when a particular tradition ends or when collective memory withers away (Halbwachs 7780). As historian Pierre Nora, one of the main inheritors of Halbwachss thought, has put it more recently, collective memory and history, far from being synonymous, actually oppose each other. If memory is life, then history reconstructs what is no longer.12 Within Halbwachss paradigm, the Open Depot and the Kindergarten Museum align with the communicative attributes of collective memorys depository of traditions, while the Stasi archives fall under the rubric of the record of events that are inscribed into history (Halbwachs 7780). Ludwigs and Waningers curatorial practices depart from the systematization of the archive at both temporal and spatial junctures. When, for example, an Oranienburger donates an object to the Kindergarten Museum, he or she chooses to mark time, to bring a gment of the past into the present. Overall, the cultural moment of the contemporary GDR exhibition is a belated one. And it is precisely in this belatednessnot only in the individual bequest, but also in the curatorial gesture on the part of the museum administrationthat the Open Depot and the Kindergarten Museum dier from the archive. Whereas the order and structure of an archive determines and secures its future content, the GDR museums answer back to the past; they respond to a desire that certain aspects of GDR history not be forgotten.

Displacement and postcommunist space Although Halbwachs acknowledges the temporal dierence that distinguishes the museum from the archive, his main theoretical intervention lies in his elaboration of the spatial dimension of collective memory. In his initial propositions, he conjectured that no memory could thrive without some anchoring material referent. Yet, as Halbwachs developed his thought, he

39

began to complicate his thesis. Later he contradicted his claim that an absolute limit governs a collectives resilience to the destruction of its material world. By 1925 Halbwachs came to see that, although collective memory is rst programmed according to spatial constraints, once spatial memory instills itself into the individual mind, it need not remain tethered to concrete objects. Collective memory can sustain itself through communication. Indeed the links that attach the community to its physical locale, Halbwachs maintains, gain even greater clarity in the very moment of their destruction (Halbwachs 131). Spatial change, whether it be the dismantling of a wall or the disappearance of some valued object, prompts discussion and heightens the collectives awareness of its past. Halbwachss notion of the spatial dimension of collective memory oers a critical perspective on the recent debates about museums and urban planning in the new states. Consider the Berlin Wall. First some of its gates were opened in 1989 to accommodate the inux of Eastern Europeans holding newly acquired visitors permits for the West. Soon afterward, Berliners chiseled out spaces enabling passage from side to side. Eventually most of the Wall would be leveled, only to be reassembled at various points in the city (or even in museums far beyond the German border) in order to commemorate Germanys divided history. But of course the displacement of the Wall is only the most obvious sign of transition in the postcommunist years. Berliners have also witnessed the reintegration of the Eastern and Western public transportation systems, the demolition of certain municipal buildings, and other substantial transformations. These incisive changes to Berlins postWende urban fabric inspired Sophie Calle to realize The Detachment. Like the Open Depot, Calles project gathers its energy from the shifting and dismantling of ex-communist spaces and objects. Further, The Detachment is intricately informed by many of the same concerns about the spatial dimension of remembrance that spurred Halbwachs on to write The Collective Memory. The Detachment, simultaneously issued as a book and mounted as a gallery exhibition, functions as a travel guide of disappeared socialist realist objects and architecture in the Berlin area. Multiple elements constituted Calles work process: visiting the places from which symbols of GDR history had been eaced, asking Berliners to describe the objects which had once lled these empty spaces, and photographing the sites of disappearance. In the guidebook Calle compiles the photographs with maps and an assortment of statements from those who were able to remember something of the citys socialist history, a legacy that is rapidly being eaced in the eort to

CHAPTER ONE THE COLLECTIVE

1.5 Sophie Calle, Die Entfernung (The Detachment), 1996. 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Arndt and Partner, Berlin (photo Daniel Rckert).

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modernize and reinvent Berlin as the new capital. The memory samples which Calle selects for the guidebookfor instance, recollections of a towering Lenin statue that once stood in the center of a block of atsjoin together to tell a story about both the socialist collective and collective memory. Even though most of the Lenin gures and other signs of socialist state power had been detached and removed by the time Calle arrived, the afterimage of the second world lingered in the collective memory of East Berliners. The Detachment contrasts material absence with mnemonic presence. The text, which weaves together collected remembrances, contends with the missing symbols and monuments. When exhibited at the Galerie Arndt & Partner in 1996, multiple copies of The Detachment were opened and mounted onto the walls, where they hung below enlarged versions of the photographs featured in the guide. The books main body divides into chapters that treat a number of former sights in Berlin: monuments, plaques, and street signs, among others. In the center of the book are detachable postcards of the disappeared sights, anked on either side by full-spread photographs of the Berlin Wall. The chapter on the Lenin bust at the Russian Embassy on Unter den Linden reveals the tenacious stains of the second world in Berliners eld of vision. At the time when Calle was making The Detachment, and indeed for much of the early nineties, a protective wooden case, the sort that is customarily installed in the winter months, bedecked the Lenin bust. Some wondered whether embassy representatives had surreptitiously conscated the original statue. Whether or not this is true, the wooden case obscured the view and came to serve as a screen upon which viewers could project their memories of what was there before.13 One person tells Calle, I see the box, but I know hes under it, and I can imagine how he looks. Two more people make similar claims about the other eaced gures and symbols; one remarks, I dont remember what he looked like, but that fellow still lives here, and another, Theres a resistance in that hole. In my mind its still there. Like a ghost, I see it there. In The Detachment, individuals are bound into a collective not only by particular visual memories, but also by the act of conjuration. Calle participates in this cross-cultural sance, even assuming the role of spiritual medium. But the message is unclear. The Detachment could either reanimate the ailing patient of revolution or function as a requiem for communism, a death certicate of sorts. At its weakest points, Calles project disengages with the traditions of conceptual art and veers o into the venues of journalism. The Detachment neither matches the intensity of the bygone material world it

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traces, nor contributes anything new to the already massive proliferation of critical writing on the socialist crisis. What the work does oer, nonetheless, is a composite portrait of collective memory. As Halbwachs argues, it is the conversations and the exchange of personal narratives that keep memory present to the collectivethe work of memory consists in the reception of The Detachment. Calle reveals three identifying characteristics of collective memory: its compositeness, its spatial attenuation, and its mutability. The Open Depot and the Kindergarten Museum also activate collective remembrance, for they challenge the imperatives of archival history. If Ludwig and Waninger were to limit their responsibilities to the conservation and cataloguing of objects manufactured by the socialist industries, their museums would serve as tombsxtures on the order of Lenins and Stalins refrigerated mausolea. Even if Ludwig and Waninger do not directly confront the Stasi legacy, their exhibitions nonetheless initiate a more critical curatorial practice in Eastern Germany. (To wit, the Stasi Headquarters were converted into a museum, the Forschungs- und Gedenksttte Normannenstrae.) Ludwigs strategies of coupling objects with memory samples and using guest books both break from the forward drive of the Stasi les and make the museal space more public. Since the Open Depot and the Kindergarten Museum assist in the displacement of GDR objects, and since the curators emphasize the present and continuous labor of collective memory, the exhibits resist the archival imperatives that controlled the space of the GDR. Where the Stasi sought to secure the East German state, these museums expose the alterity of history. One could see the Open Depot and the Kindergarten Museum as an anaesthetic to the most painful symptoms of the GDRs absorption into a market economy, where rage and despair are conveniently encrypted, segregated from the rest of life, submerged into the unspeakable. But, on closer examination, these sites of reckoning appear to oer something more. For not only do Ludwig and Waninger commemorate Germanys divided history, but their exhibits also serve as touchstones in the transition to a single Europe and a single market. Instead of hoarding GDR wares or sentencing them to oblivion, Germans are setting them apart, laying them to rest by installing them in the museum environment. A kind of tender rejection, the desire to donate these relics and visit the Open Depot and Kindergarten Museum can be understood in contradistinction to a more saturnine kind of memory, the melancholy xation on the past.14 In these two museums, as in Calles book, collective memory emerges not as a thing, but as an act: the viewer of the

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Open Depot deposes; the viewer of The Detachment detaches. As works of memory, they serve a role that Negt and Kluge have identied as central to the democratic public sphere. As a supplement to the institutions of historical preservation, these projects protect that which is other than history. Whereas monuments and archives register specic historical situations and their attendant distortions, the open spaces of visual culture allow the public to deform, change, and improve collective memory.15 Germany needs both. Today cultural custodians direct the GDRs transit from the working collective to the museum collection, but they cannot foster memory without the collaboration and interest of the public. As the factories of the second world are shut down, it becomes even clearer that the shop oor cannot provide a truly public sphere. But the culture industry can play a central role in sustaining collective memory. Against the digital network, the museum and gallery have emerged as mass media that oer dynamic historical perspectives. Curators and artists draw viewers into common spaces, in real space and real time. But the objects they display therethe GDRs physical remains or the belated representations of themare only part of the work of memory. For it is not the securing of the material world that activates remembrance, but rather our collective displacement and reassessment of these things. It is the publics task to enact thisto shift from material to memory, from collective to collection, from site to sight.

CHAPTER ONE THE COLLECTIVE