The Ruin as Memorial – The Memorial as Ruin

Abstract

In his book In Ruins Christopher Woodward asks the provocative question ifHitler's admiration for ruins and the infamous notion of 'ruin value', favoured by Nazi architect Albert Speer, should somehow make readers suspicious of ruins' appeal and alert them to their potentially morally compromised aesthetic. But he reassures his readers:To Hitler the Colosseum was not a ruin but a monument, a bottle that was half-full rather than half-empty .… He was attracted to the endurance of the masonry and the physical survival of an emperor's ambitions; to the lover of the ruinous, by contrast, the attraction is in the sight of transience and vulnerability. Poets and painters like ruins, and dictators like monuments. (Woodward 2002: 30).In this juxtaposition between monument and memorial, Woodward seems to suggest that being compelled by something that signifies transience and vulnerability, rather than grandeur and the sublime, is somehow benign and therefore ethically superior. Is he saying that if the ruin gives rise to melancholy or even mourning, if it engages the imagination rather than the temptation to bask in the faded glory of ancient sites of power, it can be a force for good?The ruin as a memorial, as a way to lament rather than celebrate the past, has a long tradition, although we ought to be careful to distinguish the different kinds of losses that are mourned in the meditation of ruins. In classical funerary iconography the broken column signifies life being cut short by death. During the baroque, the ruin stands as a memento mori, a reminder of the vanity of all earthly things. Writing during the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), the German poet Andreas Gryphius painted the following scenario in his poem 'All is transient' (Es ist alles eitel) (1643):Wherever you look, you see nothing but transience on earth.

Entangled Memories: Complicating the Memory of Area Bombing Through the Haunted Ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof

“…The site is now a collection of fragments of pre-war architecture and the scars of modern war, time, explosives, inter-war industrial prowess, and Cold War spatial politics. Arnold-de Simine (2015) articulates this transient state of ruin well: “In the ruin, the past has not endured and yet it has not been eradicated either . .…”

“…Trigg (2009) argues that “sites of trauma articulate memory precisely through refusing a continuous temporal narrative” (p. 87) and Arnold-de Simine (2015) similarly points out that ruins “suspend time altogether, allowing us to step out of history and question the neat linear temporality of historical progress” (p. 95). The reassuring “pastness” of the Holocaust becomes tangled with more recent marks of history, the Cold War and industrial progress and collapse, but so too do the bombings.…”

“…Standing on the platforms of Anhalter therefore reveals how my own positioning within dominant articulations of cultural memory of area bombing relies on this conceptualization of time as the “neat linear temporality of historical progress” (Arnold-de Simine, 2015, p. 95). The common argument that the bombings were a direct response to the Holocaust and Nazi terror mentioned above relies on a linear model of history and cause-and-effect.…”

Performing walking sims: From Dear Esther to Inchcolm Project

“…Through storywalking we explored how we could apply some of the design lessons learned from Dear Esther in performance, particularly ambiguity in design and storytelling (Pinchbeck, 2012a), symbolic environment design, creating emotional landscapes through dramatic visual style, use of detail for sewing the narrative to the world, subliminal signposting (Briscoe, 2012a), embedded and emergent storytelling, non-linearity (see Rouse III, 2001), anticipatory and interpretive play (Upton, 2015), anticipatory design (Rouse III, 2001). At the same time, we were 'listening' to the site and exploring design strategies and techniques used in participatory and site-specific performance, namely responding to the site as 'host' by creating narrative and sensory 'see-through' overlays -work as 'ghost' (Pearson, 2010: 35), using site and work as co-creators which combine to create a palimpsestic aesthetic (Turner, 2004), engaging with walking as an aesthetic practice through walkscapes (Careri, 2017), smell-walks (Henshaw, 2014), smellscapes (Drobnick, 2002;Hill and Paris, 2014;Howes, 2005;Porteous, 1985), seascapes (Pungetti, 2012), using sound to augment/complement/highlight the site -soundscapes (Murray Schafer, 1994;Smalley, 2007;Voegelin, 2014), in-situ creative writing, sound and visual installation design, exploring the aesthetic and narrative potential of the 'ruin' (Arnold-De Simine, 2015;Beswick, 2015;Dillon, 2011;Edensor, 2008;Lorimer and Murray, 2015;Smith, 2015).…”

The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum

“…The monument represents 'innocent' Hungaryt hrough abronze statue of the Archangel Gabriel over whom ab ronze eagle (representing Nazi Germany)t owers. The memorial has triggered ap rotest movement,which has manifested itself in the hundreds of spontaneous remembrance notes and objects located oppositet he memorial (see also Arnold-de Simine 2015). The latter case demonstrates -similarlyt o the controversies around the Gdańsk Museum of the Second World Wari n 2016 -2017 (see particularlyMachcewicz 2019 [2017])⁹ -that the memory battles over the Second World Warand its interpretations in Europe todayhavebecome amirror for the tensions in some European countries between European-oriented democracies and authoritative nationalism.…”