Nationalist Memory Activism, 1989 and Now: The Continued Case of Dresden

• In Event: Memory Activism and the Berlin Wall before and after 1989

Abstract

This paper discusses the city of Dresden as a traumatized cultural memory site in turbulent flux. The methods of Dresden’s dissident peace movement during 1989 have been harnessed by the extreme right’s adaptation of that era’s progressive solidarity and resistance. The AfD (“Alternative for Germany”) and PEGIDA (“Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West”) have been successfully calling for a Wende 2.0, where in former East German cities like Dresden the desired revolution can occur to form a re-homogenized Europe. In Dresden this means a call for the preferred completion of the post-Wall transformation of society, one that blends perceptions of victimhood from two entirely different fallouts: the Allied firebombing of Dresden on February 13-14, 1945, and the experience of loss for former East Germans. Dresden’s key position as a performance battleground in German memory politics is further demonstrated by the rebuilt Frauenkirche (“Church of Our Lady,” 2005), the Syrian-German artist Manaf Halbouni’s “Monument” installation of three up-ended buses as an echo of an Aleppo barricade against sniper fire (2017), and the human chain formed annually by Dresdeners on February 14 in both air war commemoration and defense of migrants’ and refugees’ democratic rights in Germany. However, as scholars of memory activism have noted, Dresden’s multiple layers of traumatized memory have given rise to a myth-making power that continues to benefit the far-right’s re-established sedimentation within – and subversion of – national discourse.

Author

• Janet Ward, Stony Brook University