The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape

Ladd (Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860-1914) cites one estimate that puts the number of unexploded bombs in Berlin at 15,000. But they aren't the only explosives on the landscape. In Berlin, monuments, buildings, piles of rubble and even empty lots are primed with symbolism and memory. For example, while few would argue for either the subject or the aesthetic value of Nikolai Tomsky's 63-foot-tall monument to Lenin, its proposed demolition in 1991 provoked complaints from former East Germans (""Ossis"") who felt the ""victorious"" West was trying to erase their history. Likewise, Berlin's Nazi past has become, if anything, more complicated. For many years, West Berlin memorialized victims and East Berlin, its anti-fascist heroes, while both either plowed under or assimilated remnants of the Reich. In the past decade, though, many Germans have argued that the country was not one of victims and resisters but of perpetrators, and that expunging the Nazi past is an attempt to forget a past that should serve as a lesson. In a book that weaves together German history, issues of public art and the nature of memory, Ladd makes a terribly complicated subject accessible. Not only is it comprehensibly written, but it is very well researched; Ladd flawlessly knits together primary and secondary sources, newspapers, interviews, and illuminating ephemera like jokes, T-shirt slogans and graffiti, which show the extent to which German guilt is still current and subject to, as Ladd says, ""agonized self-examination."" (May)