Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
70
entrepreneurs who mark their presence by transforming the urban landscape, thus making
their identity perceivable. Finally, through their daily practices in the urban space, users take
part in the interpretation of the landscape. This results in a palimpsestic city – a sedimentation
of meanings, signs, legends and facts linked to the urban landscape – which contributes to
mould our imagination and our urban practices. Moreover, this contributes to determine our
‘mentalities’ and ‘collective behaviour’ (Baczko 1984).
Considering the transformations that it has undergone since reunification, the East-
Berlin urban landscape is particularly interesting for us to understand how the approaches that
I have just mentioned interweave to produce the urban space, concretely and symbolically.
The end of the German Democratic Republic (from now on, GDR), the fall of the Wall and
the disintegration of the Soviet Union meant the victory of the ‘free world’ and the failure of
the communist ideological model. In this sense, the German reunification was an
unprecedented opportunity to make the Western ‘free world’ victorious in history, as well as
to demonstrate the political and economic viability of the democratic order and the capitalist
system. The political, economic, social and cultural changes that took place after the fall of
the Wall became tangible through the condemnation of the model of popular democracies. It
was necessary to convert the populations socialised under the GDR to democratic and liberal
ways. This conversion consisted, among other things, in making legible the changes that were
in progress, which was accomplished by exploiting some vestiges of the dictatorial past, of
the border regime and of the social control of the GDR State security system. Thus, public
memory policies tended to highlight a topography of ‘places of remembrance and learning’
which enabled the diffusion of educational messages on distinct aspects of the communist
past, each of these messages being clearly identifiable in the city space.
However, the fascination aroused by the history of communism among tourists in
search of exoticism has generated forms of exploitation of an imaginary vision of the East.
This is visible in the ‘re-use’ of old symbols, icons and objects specific to communist
societies, which involves a whole process of reinterpretation, diversion and aestheticisation.
On the individual level, consumption – including tourism – is a way of distinguishing oneself,
of displaying the values to which one adheres and of marking one’s social and cultural
belonging (Bourdieu 1979). On a collective level, it seems that tourism has been more and
more closely linked to the creation and promotion of identities in order to arouse the interest
of potential visitors. We can therefore say that the aforementioned process –which takes place
through the creation of alternative accounts of the communist past – can establish new
relations with the past which in themselves are bearers of new forms of identification.
In this article, I will show how official accounts of the ex-GDR have become visible in
the Berlin urban space through the construction of a negative heritage and through the
condemnation of the GDR system. I will also explore how the increase in historical tourism in
the capital has led to the emergence of tangible micro-accounts in the urban space which, in a
certain way, compete with the official interpretations of the communist past.
