ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Red Granite: History, Geology, and Socialist Monuments in East Berlin

• In Event: Stratigraphy, Deep Time, and the Making of Geological Knowledge 3

English Abstract

In hist last years, Karl Marx studied geology extensively; the geological upheavals reflected in his late scientific work promised a rich metaphorical resource for the theory of social revolution. Building on this observation, this paper examines the specific negotiation of history and geology in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Starting from the notes of Marx's geological readings, it first explores the dialectical tension between historical and geological materialism. On this basis, using archival material from the "Geotectonic Institute" of the German Academy of Sciences, later the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, the analysis traces how East German geoscience positioned itself in relation to the ideological legacy of Marxism. The focus lies on the intradisciplinary efforts of the 1970s to write an official history of GDR geology. These endeavors at self-historicization are contrasted with the practical use of red granite as the preferred building material for socialist representative architecture in East Berlin. The paper argues that a central paradox is revealed in both the historiographical and the material appropriation of the stone: the attempt to construct socialist continuity and permanence relied on a geological materialism whose deep-time dimensions simultaneously relativized all human history, including that of the GDR.

Author

• Leander Basil Diener, University of Zurich