Miniature monuments : modeling German history / Helmut Puff.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Puff, Helmut, author.

Series:

Media and cultural memory ; Volume 17.

Media and cultural memory = Medien und kulturelle erinnerung, 1613-8961 ; Volume 17

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Historiography--Germany.

Historiography.

Historical models.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (310 p.)

Place of Publication:

Berlin, [Germany] ; Boston, [Massachusetts] : De Gruyter, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History offers a series of essays on small-scale models of bombed out cities. Created between 1946 and the present, these plastic renderings of places provide eerie glimpses of destruction and devastation resulting of the air war. This study thus permits fresh angles on post-war responses to the compounded losses of WW II, and it does so through considering these "miniature monuments" (of, among others, Frankfurt, Munich, Schwetzingen, Heilbronn and Hiroshima) in a deep cultural history that interlaces the sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries. Three-dimensional renderings in diminutive size have rarely been subjected to rigorous theoretical reflection. Conventionally, models, whether of ruins or intact spaces, have been assumed to be "easily legible"; that is, they have been assumed to be vehicles of the authentic. Yet rubble and other models should be theorized as complex simulacra of abstract realities and catalysts of memories. Miniature Monuments thus tackles a haunting paradox: building ruins. The book elucidates how utterly contingent processes of crumbling and collapse (the English words for the Latin ruina) came to command such great interest in modern Europe that tremendous efforts were taken to uncover, render, and, most of all, recreate ruins.

Contents:

Front matter

Acknowledgments

Contents

List of Illustrations

Chapter One

Introduction

Chapter Two

Rubble City, Frankfurt

Chapter Three

Cities as Models in Munich

Chapter Four

Schwetzingen's Built Ruins

Chapter Five

From Rubble to Ruins in Heilbronn and Elsewhere

Epilogue

Scaling Hiroshima

In Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9783110368345

311036834X

9783110304091

3110304090

OCLC:

890070942