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About This Project

Inspired by the work of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Gaston Bachelard, Kevin Lynch, Michel de Certeau, Richard Sennett, Franco Moretti, J. Hillis Miller, Sigrid Weigel, Karl Schlögel, and others, "Berlin: Temporal Topographies" explores Berlin's cultural histories using the technologies of new media. Bringing together undergraduates, graduate students and academic scholars of German Studies, Slavic languages, Comparative Literature, Jewish Studies, History, Art history and Urban Studies, the participants address aspects of Berlin's past, present and future through "pathways" which lead the visitor through the city's history as well as its contemporary culture and concerns. Transgressing disciplinary boundaries and canonical approaches to history, the pathways offer a variety of intersecting tracks that reveal the temporal and topographical complexity of Berlin.

What are "Temporal Topographies"? First of all, the concept refers to the inscription of time in space, the simultaneous presence of different "time-layers," to use Reinhart Koselleck's term "Zeitschichten,"; in a given place. Take, for instance, Berlin's Wilhelmstrasse. For more than seventy years, the street was the central axis of the Wilhelmine, Weimar, and National Socialist states. In the course of Berlin's destruction at the end of WWII, most of the street was turned into rubble. Today, the history of Berlin from German Unification in 1871 to World War I, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich is presented on transparent panels along the street. Looking through the panels, one sees the present through the past as well as the past through the present. Here, one actually experiences what Ernst Bloch termed the "non-simultaneity of the simultaneous," that is, the presence and absence of the past in a given historical place, at a given historical moment. Today, the haunting presence of "grand history" is simultaneous with the banality of drab GDR apartment buildings, bistros, and electronic shops. The transparent panels are visual artifacts that enable the visitor to experience the space's multilayered time. [For more information on the project "Geschichtsmeile Wilhelmstraße" see http://www.dhm.de/museen/wilhelmstr/] Or take, for instance, the "advertising columns" commemorating the Rosenstrasse-Protest in which "Aryan" women married to Jewish men protested the arrest of their husbands. The memorial is integrated into the everyday life of the city as a seemingly ordinary advertising column. It thereby becomes an essential part of the city's topography. [For more information on the site and the Rosenstrasse protest visit http://www.topographie.de/e/rosen.htm and http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/timeline/rosenstr.htm] Berlin, as a historically-saturated city, is full of such sites: The remains of the Wall, the ruins of the Anhalter Bahnhof, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche.

Like the transparent panels on Wilhelmstrasse, the advertising column on Rosenstrasse, and the traces of the former path of the Berlin Wall scarred across Friedrichstrasse, our pathways enable a visitor to experience Berlin's multilayered, historical topographies using new media. The pathways which compose this project exhibit the multilayeredness of history inscribed in actual topographies, while also exploring the significance of spatial and temporal elements in works of literature and art: How do street names, buildings, train stations, airports, gardens, and so forth evoked in literary texts facilitate the production of meanings? What kinds of images of the city emerge out of these literary constructions of space? What is the relationship between the city's "body" and metaphors of the city? How does the present topography of Alexanderplatz relate to its past? How does Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz reflect social, economic, political, and cultural phenomena in the Berlin of the 1920s? How does our imagination of "Alexanderplatz" inform the urban planning of this space today?