Entangling pasts: remembering the bombing of Berlin from the air through sites on the ground

This research examines the cultural memory of Allied bombing attacks on German cities during the Second World War that can be produced through tourism sites in contemporary Berlin. I argue that the entrenched cultural memory produced and reproduced in mainstream cultural texts such as film, television, literature, news media, family memories and storytelling, and historiography can be complicated by sensory encounters with material traces of the bombings in Berlin. This interdisciplinary research draws on theories and methodologies from memory studies, communication studies, cultural geography, and select elements of new materialism. In this research I conduct heuristic site-studies of four tourism sites in Berlin that have been marked by aerial bombing the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, the Topography of Terror, Anhalter Bahnhof, and Teufelsberg. I investigate the possibility of complicating established ways of telling and retelling the story of the war by entangling the normative memory cultures of Western tourism with the material traces of the war. Specifically, I investigate how these encounters might complicate the enduring narrative that the Allies' actions during the war were completely ethical. The site-studies allow us to see how cultural memory is produced through subjective, grounded, sensory readings of the impact of the bombs on the materiality of Berlin that is layered with the perspectives and frames that characterise dominant cultural memory discourses. As a researcher ingrained in these normative discourses, the participatory method ensures my own specific spatial and temporal perspectives remain an integral part of the analysis. My perspectives allow me to critically engage the material impacts of area bombing through the perspective of dominant cultural framings of the war. I use the textual forms of collection and collage to reflect the intersection of many narratives, perspectives, and experiences that I encounter at the sites simultaneously, representing the spatial and temporal palimpsests of the sites within the analysis. The strains of new materialism and vibrant materialism in the research also widen the scope of actions and actors that can be implicated in a more dispersed model of accountability for area bombing. This more complex cultural memory of the war allows space to consider the Allies as historically responsible for deaths and destruction of area bombing without alleviating German historical responsibility for other war atrocities, particularly the Holocaust. The site-studies thus have the potential to disrupt normative productions of cultural memory that continue to regulate who can be held historically responsible for mass civilian deaths and the destruction of urban centres during the war. The research not only has implications for how we can think about the past as it manifests in the present but also for ways of understanding theatres of contemporary aerial bombing.