Helmut Puff - Miniature monuments : modeling German history

ISBN 978-3-11-030385-8
e-ISBN 978-3-11-030409-1
ISSN 1613-8961
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-110368-34-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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Epub-production: Jouve, www.jouve.com

Some years ago I stepped into the local museum of a mid-sized German town. At the entrance to the museums exhibition rooms filled with traces of urban life from the citys medieval and early modern past visitors were greeted with a large relief model of the nineteenth-century city. This comprehensive urban sculpture, an exuberant overture to the museums galleries, sat in conversation with a smaller counterpart across the aisle; the citys cathedral district, at the end of World War II, in a state of destruction. The model was sterile and grey, with neatly caved-in roofs and clean ground. It was, in other words, a figment of the historical imagination. The sanitized display of war left me wanting, if not bewildered: dereliction that had been rid of dust, rubble, pain, and death: war as an architectural abstraction. What is more, aside from a short caption that explained what there was to see (Cathedral District during the Winter of 1944), no information on what had happened, who had caused the war, and the destruction, and who died.

That urban model, war on tidy display, along with my inability to comprehend it, led me to embark on this book. I stared at this vehicle of the historical imagination, a tool seemingly for our edification that nonetheless was unable to function as a conduit between a painful past and our own present. I was baffled and fascinated. I went on a quest for models of urban destruction; I sought to comprehend the political aesthetics behind these objects. The 2001-model I have mentioned above is, as I came to realize, a latecomer to a series of similar objects that have been exhibited all over Germany since 1946. These images of urban destruction model the devastating effects of the air raids on German cities during World War II in modeled form. The oldest one is of Frankfurt am Main and came into being not long after the citys destruction (1946). The most recent one is a meticulous reconstruction of a devastated Pforzheim shortly after the attacks that razed the city in February of 1945. It is finished only in parts; one can make a donation to help its completion. Overall, I identified ten such models currently on display in German city halls, memorials, and local history museums. Like the one that puzzled me initially, some feel bewilderingly, disturbingly banal; others are far more affecting, and even in their miniaturized form hint at the enormity of wars destruction. Like in the aforementioned museum, however, they are often exhibited together with counterparts that show the city before or after destruction.