The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe : Re-imagining Space, History, and Memory

Focusing on Central Europe, the volume proposes a new paradigm of how culture works, based on a model of "inhabited ruins" as a space where contradictory elements come together into continually renewed and frequently paradoxical configurations. Examines art, architecture, literature and music. The eleven essays in this volume explore the surprising resilience of productive instabilities enclosed in historical asymmetries, cultural paradoxes, and misplaced topographies. The recent history of Central Europe - a history that vividly blurs the line between imagination and reality - is a particularly vibrant case study of such dynamics, the same dynamics that lie at the heart of modern perception. It investigates how varied and opposing tendencies co-exist and are transposed from one cultural and temporal register to another; how they emerge and are maintained in constantly renewed, productive tensions - what we call 'inhabited ruins.' Along the way the reader will encounter music from the Terezin concentration camp as a reversed Potemkin village, the BMW as an itinerant lieu de memoire, Mies van der Rohe's architecture as spaces belonging nowhere, anxious geographies, extra-territorial sounds, misremembered avant-gardes, and post-apocalyptic identities that fell out of time Front Matter....Pages i-xi Prologue: The Day the Wall Came Down (American Surreal)....Pages 1-8 Introduction: Delicate Empiricism....Pages 9-15 Ruins and Representations of 1989: Exception, Normality, Revolution....Pages 16-39 The Ruins of a Myth or a Myth in Ruins? Freedom and Cohabitation in Central Europe....Pages 40-54 Democracy in Ruins: The Case of the Hungarian Parliament....Pages 55-78 Itinerant Memory Places: The Baader-Meinhof-Wagen....Pages 79-101 Edith Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: A Story of Farnsworth House....Pages 102-133 Fake Fragments, Fake Ruins, and Genuine Paper Ruination....Pages 134-147 How We Remember and What We Forget: Art History and the Czech Avant-garde....Pages 148-177 Anxious Geographies — Inhabited Traditions....Pages 178-193 Terezín as Reverse Potemkin Ruin, in Five Movements and an Epilogue....Pages 194-204 Desert Europa and the Sea of Ruins: The Post-Apocalyptic Imagination in Egon Bondy’s Afghanistan....Pages 205-226 History’s Loose Ends: Imagining the Velvet Revolution....Pages 227-245 Back Matter....Pages 247-252 "The eleven essays in this volume explore the surprising resilience of productive instabilities enclosed in historical asymmetries, cultural paradoxes, and misplaced topographies. The recent history of Central Europe - a history that vividly blurs the line between imagination and reality - is a particularly vibrant case study of such dynamics, the same dynamics that lie at the heart of modern perception. It investigates how varied and opposing tendencies co-exist and are transposed from one cultural and temporal register to another; how they emerge and are maintained in constantly renewed, productive tensions - what we call 'inhabited ruins.' Along the way the reader will encounter music from the Terezin concentration camp as a reversed Potemkin village, the BMW as an itinerant lieu de memoire, Mies van der Rohe's architecture as spaces belonging nowhere, anxious geographies, extra-territorial sounds, misremembered avant-gardes, and post-apocalyptic identities that fell out of time"-- Provided by publisher