Literary Voices I: The Built Environment and Memoryscapes in Brigitte Reimann and Uwe Tellkamp

Abstract

The debate about Dresden’s Altmarkt in the early 1950s, as analysed in the previous chapter, highlights the high stakes in the sculpting of a new face for the GDR. The political occupancy of the centre, one of the main aims of the early rebuilding programme in the GDR, was the outcome of a process that underscores the symbolic organisation of public space. While the SED leadership wanted to rebuild the city centre from the perspective of a carefully orchestrated political scenography that served to legitimise the new state, many citizens favoured the preservation of as much of the old Dresden as possible. A media campaign in the Sächsische Zeitung moved from offering an initially discursive, albeit biased forum for different points of view to increasingly shrill exhortations to the public. The re-definition of the debate in terms of the intensifying class struggle in 1953 suggests that the gap between planners and preservationists could only be managed by way of a strategy of intimidation. The conflict over Dresden’s centre thus illustrates the contested nature of the social construction of space, profiling competing social, political and cultural visions. The point here is not just that social space can no longer be viewed as a mere container for objects and people, an observation which is a commonplace in much of the current debate on the spatial turn.¹ Rather, the example underlines the resilience of cultural memory, a factor that had been underestimated by those who pushed for a radical break with the past.