Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History (Media and Cultural Memory / Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung Book 17)

Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History offers a series of essays on small-scale models of bombed out cities. Created between 1946 and the present, these plastic renderings of places provide eerie glimpses of destruction and devastation resulting of the air war. This study thus permits fresh angles on post-war responses to the compounded losses of WW II, and it does so through considering these “miniature monuments‎” (of, among others, Frankfurt, Munich, Schwetzingen, Heilbronn and Hiroshima) in a deep cultural history that interlaces the sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries. Three-dimensional renderings in diminutive size have rarely been subjected to rigorous theoretical reflection. Conventionally, models, whether of ruins or intact spaces, have been assumed to be “easily legible”; that is, they have been assumed to be vehicles of the authentic. Yet rubble and other models should be theorized as complex simulacra of abstract realities and catalysts of memories. Miniature Monuments thus tackles a haunting paradox: building ruins. The book elucidates how utterly contingent processes of crumbling and collapse (the English words for the Latin ruina) came to command such great interest in modern Europe that tremendous efforts were taken to uncover, render, and, most of all, recreate ruins.

Im Kontext der kulturwissenschaftlichen Gedächtnisforschung widmet sich diese interdisziplinär ausgerichtete Reihe dem Verhältnis von Medien und kultureller Erinnerung. Die hier vorgestellten Studien behandeln die ganze Bandbreite der durch Medien konstruierten, tradierten und verbreiteten Erinnerung. Schrift und Bild, das Kino und die ‘neuen’ digitalen Medien, Intermedialität, Transmedialität und Remediation sowie die sozialen, zunehmend transnationalen und transkulturellen, Kontexte der mediatisierten Erinnerung gehören zu den Forschungsinteressen der Reihe. Ziel ist es, eine internationale Plattform für die interdisziplinäre Medien- und Gedächtnisforschung zu schaffen. Eingereichte Manuskripte werden im peer review Verfahren durch externe Experten begutachtet.

Den Herausgebern, Astrid Erll (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main) und Ansgar Nünning (Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen) ist ein internationaler Beirat aus renommierten Wissenschaftlern assoziiert:

• Aleida Assmann (Universität Konstanz)
• Mieke Bal (University of Amsterdam)
• Vita Fortunati (University of Bologna)
• Richard Grusin (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
• Udo Hebel (Universität Regensburg)
• Andrew Hoskins (University of Glasgow)
• Wulf Kansteiner (Binghamton University)
• Alison Landsberg (George Mason University)
• Claus Leggewie (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen)
• Jeffrey Olick (University of Virginia)
• Susannah Radstone (University of South Australia)
• Ann Rigney (Utrecht University)
• Michael Rothberg (University of Illinois)
• Werner Sollors (Harvard University)
• Frederic Tygstrup (University of Copenhagen)
• Harald Welzer (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen)

Acknowledgments; Contents; List of Illustrations; Chapter One; Introduction; Air War and Representation; Rubble Models and the Ruins Code; This Book; Chapter Two; Rubble City, Frankfurt; The Memory of Material Loss; Modeling the Past, Present, and Future; Monumental Efforts; Chapter Three; Cities as Models in Munich; A Rare and Marvellous Object; Visual Technologies of Urban Space; Modeling Bavaria; Mastery through Models and the Lathe; The Politics of Urbanism; Chapter Four; Schwetzingen's Built Ruins; Fascination with Ruins; Arcadia on the Rhine; Miniature Ruins; Chapter Five "Offers a series of essays on small-scale models of bombed out cities. Created between 1946 and the present, these plastic renderings of places provide eerie glimpses of destruction and devastation resulting of the air war. This study thus permits fresh angles on post-war responses to the compounded losses of WW II, and it does so through considering these "miniature monuments?" (of, among others, Frankfurt, Munich, Schwetzingen, Heilbronn and Hiroshima) in a deep cultural history that interlaces the sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries."--Provided by publisher This study takes a material object as its starting point: small-scale models of bombed out cities. Created between 1946 and the present, these plastic renderings of places provide eerie glimpses of destruction and devastation resulting of war. This study considers these "miniature monuments" in a deep cultural history that interlaces the 16th, 18th, and 20th centuries. Miniature Monuments thus tackles a haunting paradox: building ruins From Rubble to Ruins in Heilbronn and ElsewhereModeling Urban Destruction; Shaping Public Commemoration; From Commemoration to Historicization; Epilogue; Scaling Hiroshima; In Conclusion; Bibliography; Archives; Periodicals; Print Publications; Movies; Online Sources; Index