«Gedächtniskirche à la carte». Notes on the Political Fortunes of a «Pile of Stones»

Abstract

The life-cycle of an ordinary building typically begins with a plan and ends with a quiet process of decay. Not so, when national interests are at stake, as is the case with Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial church, consecrated in 1895). In such cases, a building’s collapse, especially if caused by deliberate ruination, tends to entail either a radical damnatio memoriae or a second life in the form of its physical reconstruction (a process ominously demonstrated in the demolition and subsequent reconstruction of the Berliner Schloss 1951- 2023). In the present case, what happened was the monumentalization of the remains that document its downfall. The essay tries to highlight some moments in that process. That the Gedächtniskirche’s long history roughly coincides with the growth and decline of the illustrated postcard as a means of mass communication is perhaps a coincidence. Yet if what one may call the political symbolism of a building is the result of complex dynamics of production and reception, then the magnitude of the visual archive left behind by postcards, “the first world-wide social network” (Lydia Pyne, 2021), turns out to be a stunningly vivid visual record of such processes. Especially so in the case of the Memorial Church, given its key position in Germany’s troubled history of imperial ambitions and subsequent self-awakening as a modern Western democracy.