Urbanities,
Vol. 3
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No 2
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November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
76
post-socialist past is the way to self-identify in a globalising and amalgamated world’ (2010:
76). Indeed, some Berlin communist-theme bars could be compared with places ‘where
people engage in modes of expressivity that are alternatives to those imposed from above by
the dominant culture’ (Krase, quoting Joseph Sciorra 2012: 39).
Finally, if the urban space is a medium that enables the diffusion of ideals and visions
of the world, it is also the place in which the specificities of certain groups sharing an identity,
a history and cultural features can be observed. The interactionist perspective has shown ‘how
all sorts of people communicate through the built environment […]. Individuals and groups
interact with each other in the city through visual images that effect what people see on the
streets’ (Krase 2012, 5). This is also true of the objects and icons in use during the communist
period, as they are invested with new meaning while exerting a peculiar fascination over
tourists and certain categories of inhabitants. It seems that many entrepreneurs suggest other
readings of the city’s past, on which alternative visions of the local identity are based.
Moreover, it appears that some of them have gone beyond a simple evocation of the Berlin
communist past. They convey locally an imaginary vision of the East in its broadest sense,
thus constructing Berlin as a point of convergence between Central and Eastern Europe.
Conclusion
Berlin is a place where the effects of the revision of national imagination can be observed. By
looking at the changes in the capital, one is indeed able to examine the simultaneous creation
of official and alternative accounts about the same period in history. In the discussion given
here I have shown that the process of de-legitimisation of the East German past implemented
since the reunification have little by little contributed to the construction of the GDR as the
‘second German dictatorship’
11
and as the counter-model for a unified, free and democratic
Germany. These new readings of the past crystallised through the conversion of traces of the
GDR dictatorship into places which offer an emotional confrontation to these aspects of the
local communist past. According to Jürgen Habermas, the aim of these places of memory
consists in ‘fostering the diffusion of a political culture which stabilises the legitimate
democratic State’ (Habermas 2005: 93). Such an exploitation of the traces of the communist
past helps to transform the urban space into a ‘vast framework of reference, organising […]
beliefs [and] knowledge’ (Lynch 1999: 5). The same can be said, on a micro level, of the
games of reinterpretation, deviation or aestheticisation of objects and icons from the
communist period. These phenomena produce ‘a mosaic of images and meanings’ that tells us
about the ‘usages of the places in the city’ and the ‘values’ that are closely linked to the
‘aesthetic dimensions of the city’ (Rautenberg 2009: 21-22). In this plethora of confused
images, each individual makes up his or her own representation of the city by selecting and
reinterpreting patterns taken from the local past.
11
In the years after the reunification the similarities between the SED and the national socialist
regimes, as well as between the Stasi and the Gestapo, start to be pointed out repeatedly in public
discourses. This led to the condemnation of the East German regime as well as to the acceptance of its
title of ‘second German dictatorship’.
