History You Can Touch: Mapping Memory and Space at the Former Stasi Prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen

• In Event: 365 - Section on Sociology of Culture Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 14. Trauma, Memory, Belonging

Abstract

This paper presents new data from an ongoing ethnography of social memory in the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). In the present contribution, the focus is on a form of retrospective practice that can be described as spatial memory mapping, in which biographically relevant physical environments serve as settings for autobiographical exposition and reflection. Examples of memory mapping will illustrate the distinctiveness of memory work that is undertaken in a naturalistic environment, in contrast to, for example, life-history interviews conducted in an arbitrary setting such as a home, workplace, or “third space” (e.g. café, restaurant, etc.). Contrasted with each other, the examples also highlight distinctions between private and authorized mnemonic discourses. In the former case, an ethnographic contact revisits the East Berlin neighborhood of his childhood and adolescence for highly personal reasons—in order to tour a former interrogation prison of the East German secret police (now a museum) that had stood near his home but which had remained inaccessible and mysterious while the GDR existed. The second example comprises guided tours by two staff members of the museum who had themselves been an inmates of the prison.

Author

• Jeremy Brooke Straughn, Westminster College