In 2005 Durs Grünbein’s Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt (Porcelain: poem about the demise of my city) appeared. The renowned Dresden-born poet re imagined in this cycle of forty-nine poems the destruction of the city from the position of the postwar generations, who have no personal connection to the event but nevertheless have been exposed to an omnipresent murmur about cultural loss. Its publication coincided with the consecration of the famous Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), probably the single most potent architectural symbol of civic democracy, unification, and international reconciliation in the German cultural imagination. Originally designed by George Bähr and built in the mid-eighteenth century, the church collapsed on 15 Feb. 1945 after the firestorm of the previous day. The ruin was not rebuilt during GDR times because the state had no interest in church property and the Lutheran church in the GDR had other priorities, above all to stabilize its precarious position in relation to the state. In 1990 a group of dedicated Dresdners founded the Förderkreis zum Wiederaufbau der Frauenkirche Dresden e.V (Society to Support the Reconstruction of the Frauenkirche Dresden), which launched a very effective national and international campaign to rebuild the church by emphasizing, above all, the redemptive function of the project. Accordingly, the response was overwhelming, and donations began to flow in from all over the world. In contrast to other building projects in unified Germany, the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche was not steered by the city, the Lutheran Church, the state of Saxony, or the Federal parliament: while all these institutions eventually supported the reconstruction, it remained first and foremost a citizens’ initiative. Because of this, the rebuilt church is now widely recognized as a fitting symbol of the enactment of a civic democracy dedicated to a politics of national and international reconciliation. The opening of the church on 30 October 2005 was broadcast live on German TV and watched by millions of (mostly older) Germans, who perceived this event in terms of the symbolic recuperation of their fractured cultural identity. A dramaturgy of remembrance unfolded that aimed to reconcile the memory of a traumatic past with the exaltation of a new beginning.

The Fall Of The Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and German unification on 3 October of the following year were seismic historical moments. Although they appeared to heal the war-torn history of the twentieth century, unification posed the question of German cultural identity afresh. Politicians, historians, film-makers, architects, writers, and the wider public engaged in a “memory contest” that pitted alternative biographies against one another, prompting challenges to perceived West German hegemony, and posing questions about the possibility of normalizing German history. These dynamic debates are the topic of this book. By giving voice to multiple disciplinary as well as geographic and ethnic perspectives, this volume describes the continuing struggle to reimagine Germany as a unified, democratic, and capitalist country. The Berlin Wall may have been largely obliterated, but traces of the challenges to such a present remain inscribed on the physical fabric of the entire country as well as on the memories of many of its inhabitants. By mapping recent German cultural expression across a range of media, the contributions in this volume chart the multiple, and often conflicting, responses to the cataclysmic events of twenty years ago that have characterized the opening chapter of the history of the Berlin Republic.

The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall was accompanied by a public celebration at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on 9 November 2009. Entitled “Fest der Freiheit” (festival of freedom), it was broadcast across the world, emphasizing the global significance of the events of 1989. The presidents of Russia and France, Dimitry Medvedev and Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton represented the former Allied powers. Interviews with Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarity in the early 1980s and later President of Poland; Miklos Nemeth, the former Hungarian Prime Minister, who was the first to open his country’s borders with Austria; and ex-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged the massive contribution of eastern Europeans to the collapse of Communism. Berlin schoolchildren and grassroots activists from around the world participated in the celebration by painting one thousand giant dominos, which were placed on the route that the wall had sliced through the very heart of Berlin. These were then pushed over in a carnivalesque re-enactment.

Friedrich Christian Delius’s novel Mein Jahr als Mörder (My Year as a Murderer, 2004) is one of a number of post-1990 German-language narratives and films that deal with the question of German resistance to the Third Reich. The novel cross-stitches the reconstruction of the activities of a small and largely unknown resistance group which went by the name of the ‘European Union’ with a restrospective account of the student movement of 1968 and its attitude to the victims of National Socialism. Delius’s examination of 1968 as a significant lieu de mémoire in contemporary Germany is motivated, on the one hand, by his own generational affiliation and, on the other, by the debate about the contribution of 1968 to the liberalisation of West German society. The narrative therefore not only scrutinises various public expressions of the revolutionary zest of the student movement, but also homes in on the ’68ers’ personal sphere by relating the love story between the protagonist and Catherine. Their relationship is, as we will see, affected by the political debates and ideological battles of the time.

The story is told by a former member of the student movement who, after the acquittal of a former Nazi judge by a West German court, decides to take matters into his own hands and to assassinate the judge for his service on the infamous Volksgerichtshof (‘people’s court’), the judicial wing of the National Socialist state which sentenced thousands of resisters and ordinary Germans to death. By telescoping a forgotten story of left-wing resistance through the eyes of a former ’68er, the narrative examines the divided memory cultures in East and West Germany in the postwar period as well as the ideological myopia of the generation of ’68, which had little sympathy for or interest in the real victims of National Socialism because its members saw themselves as the primary victims of their parents’ guilt for the Third Reich. Before offering a reading of Delius’s Mein Jahr als Mörder, it is necessary to briefly discuss the divided memory cultures in the two Germanys through the lens of the historical debate on German resistance, as this issue features prominently in the novel.

Reading Dresden

LIKE NO OTHER GERMAN CITY, Dresden has become a symbolically laden placeholder for German collective and cultural memory since the end of the Second World War. Dresden’s status as a national and global memory space was underlined by the consecration of the rebuilt Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) in October 2005, a symbolic act of reconciliation that recognized the memory of the past while gesturing to a new beginning. Originally designed by George Bähr and built in the mid-eighteenth century, the church collapsed on 15 February 1945, when its supportive structure succumbed to extensive heat damage after the firestorm of the previous day. Contemporary eyewitnesses perceived its collapse as the traumatic signature of a completely wanton attack on one of Europe’s greatest cultural treasure troves. Sixty years after the war, the re-consecration of the Frauenkirche became the stage par excellence for the performance of a dramaturgy of remembrance that aims to reconcile the memory of a traumatic past with the exaltation of a new beginning.

The following chapter argues that Dresden’s iconicity as a city with a traumatic legacy that has managed to rebuild itself with a newly gained sense of pride is the product of a Dresden discourse that originated in the immediate postwar period. Although this narrative has subsequently been remolded and adapted through a range of genres and media, it never lost a hot narrative kernel that, as I argue, encapsulates the experience of historical excess. To understand the transmission and function of this impact narrative, the chapter discusses three responses to the bombing of Dresden: first, Gerhart Hauptmann’s famous lament at the end of his life (1945); second, Richard Peter’s photo book Eine Kamera klagt an (A Camera Accuses, 1949); and third, Dürs Grünbein’s poetic cycle Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt (Porcelain: Poem about the Demise of My City, 2005). However, before analyzing the representation of excess in these texts, it is necessary to reflect on the notion of cultural impact and its theoretical precursor, reception theory.

From Reception toward Impact

From a theoretical perspective, the idea of impact can be seen as a development of the notion of reception as it was debated by the Constance School from the 1970s onwards.