In-Visible Palimpsest: Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai 3034316992, 9783034316996

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In-Visible Palimpsest Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai Lu Pan

euro-sinica

Frank Kraushaar • Irmy Schweiger (editors)

PETER LANG

In the early 1990s, Berlin and Shanghai witnessed the dramatic social changes in both national and global contexts. While in 1991 Berlin became the new capital of the reunified Germany, from 1992 Shanghai began to once again play its role as the most powerful engine of economic development in the post-1989 China. This critical moment of history has fundamentally transformed the later development of both cities, above all in terms of urban spatial order. The construction mania in Shanghai and Berlin shares the similar aspiration of “re-modernizing” themselves. In this sense, the current experience of Shanghai and Berlin informs many of the features of urban modernity in the post-Cold-War era. The book unfolds the complexity of the urban space per se as highly revealing cultural texts. Also this project doesn’t examine the spatial changes in chronological terms, but rather takes the present moment as the temporal standing point of this research. By comparing the memory discourse related to these spatial changes, the book poses the question of how modernity is understood in the matrix of local, national and global power struggles.

Lu Pan received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Hong Kong. Her current research interests include visual culture, urban space, war memory, and theories of aesthetics. She is author of Aestheticizing Public Space: Street Visual Politics in East Asian Cities. She is Assistant Professor at the Department of Chinese Culture, Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

In-Visible Palimpsest

Euro-sinica is a monography series jointly edited by Baltic Research Center for East Asian Studies (AsiaRes) at the University of Latvia

and Taipei Mission in Latvia (TMIL) and Department of Oriental Languages at Stockholm University

Editors: Frank Kraushaar (Riga/Tallinn), Irmy Schweiger (Stockholm) Editorial board: Lucie Bernier (Macao), Rossella Ferrari (London), Mark Gamsa (Tel Aviv), Chengzhou He (Nanjing), Shu-ching Ho (Düsseldorf), Sher-shiueh Li (Taipei)

euro-sinica

Band 15

Lu Pan

In-Visible Palimpsest Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai

PETER LANG

Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Oxford • Wien

Bibliographic information published by die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.d-nb.de›. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain Library of Congress Control Number: 2015953956

Images that are not indicated with source or providers are all taken by the author. The book is financed by Baltic Center for East Asian Studies, AsiaRes and Stockholm University. ISSN 0176-7399 pb. ISBN 978-3-0343-1699-6 pb.

ISSN 2235-6258 eBook ISBN 978-3-0351-0911-5 eBook

This publication has been peer reviewed. © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2016 Hochfeldstrasse 32, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

Contents

List of Figures ...............................................................................................7 Introduction ...........................................................................................9 Part I Contested National Memories: Monument, Myth-Making, and Modernity ..........................................37 Chapter One The Berlin Republic: Re-invoked Memories ......................................41 Chapter Two Monuments in Shanghai: The Invisible Turn ......................................83 Part II The Politics of Nostalgia: Memory, Space, and Competing Modernities ...................................139 Chapter Three City of Divided Memories: Two Kinds of Berlin Nostalgia .............141 Chapter Four Revisiting Shanghai Nostalgia: Local Memory as Resistance .........175 Part III Forgetting Modern Space? – Amnesia and the “Obsolescent” Modernities ...................................215 Chapter Five The Disappearing Berlin: Can the Wrongs be Undone? ..................217

Chapter Six Other Shanghais: Missing Narratives of Urban Space .....................233 Conclusion ........................................................................................265 Bibliography......................................................................................275

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List of Figures

Figure 1: Figure 2: Figure 3: Figure 4: Figure 5: Figure 6: Figure 7: Figure 8: Figure 9: Figure 10: Figure 11: Figure 12: Figure 13: Figure 14: Figure 15: Figure 16: Figure 17: Figure 18: Figure 19: Figure 20: Figure 21: Figure 22: Figure 23: Figure 24: Figure 25: Figure 26: Figure 27: Figure 28: Figure 29:

Shanghai Concessions.....................................................27 Berlin during the Cold War .............................................28 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe ....................45 Topography of Terror ........................................................ 50 Kaiser William Memorial Church ...................................54 Stasi Museum exterior and interior .................................56 Berlin Wall Museum .......................................................58 The New Chapel of Reconciliation .................................60 The Brandenburg Gate ....................................................64 The Victory Column ......................................................... 65 Palace of the Republic in Demolition .............................68 The Reichstag Building...................................................70 The Jewish Museum, Berlin............................................74 The “Axis” in the Jewish Museum ..................................75 Plaque of Memory on Innsbruck Street ..........................77 “The Stumbling Stones”..................................................77 The Memorial House of the First National Congress of the CCP .......................................................94 Tower to the People’s Heroes ..........................................98 Memorial to the May Thirtieth Movement....................101 The World War I Memorial on the Bund (Demolished).................................................................107 Sihang Warehouse .........................................................109 Exhibition Room in Memory of the “Battle of Sihang Warehouse”.......................................112 Former Site of Korean Provisional Government ...........121 The Museum of Jewish Refugees .................................124 Sculputre in Longhua Martyrs Cemetery .....................131 East Berlin Mural Painting at Leipzig Square ..............132 Treptow Park Statute .....................................................133 Hotel Adlon Today ........................................................147 The Model of Humboldt Forum a la Stadtschloss ........150

Figure 30: Figure 31: Figure 32: Figure 33: Figure 34: Figure 35: Figure 36: Figure 37: Figure 38: Figure 39: Figure 40: Figure 41: Figure 42: Figure 43: Figure 44: Figure 45: Figure 46: Figure 47: Figure 48: Figure 49: Figure 50: Figure 51: Figure 52: Figure 53:

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The New Potsdamer Platz.............................................155 Remains of “Kaisersaal” in Hotel Esplanade ..............156 “Ampelmännchen”.........................................................166 Hackesche Höfe .............................................................171 The Mural Painting in the HSBC Building ...................178 The Teahouse in the Yu Garden .....................................184 The Schereschewsky Hall in the Former St. John’s University......................................................187 Shikumen Houses Today................................................202 The Gentrified Shikumen – Xintiandi............................203 Friedrich the Great Statue on Unter den Linden ...........220 Stalin Alley....................................................................222 The Palace of the Republic in 1977 ..............................224 Nikolaiviertel (Nicolas Quarter) ...................................228 Buildings in the Greater Shanghai Plan: the Mayor’s Building .....................................................237 The Municipal Museum ................................................238 The Municipal Library ..................................................238 Bank of China Building, Shanghai ...............................241 Park Hotel, Shanghai ....................................................241 Caoyang New Village in 1959.......................................245 Caoyang New Village Today .........................................246 Bird Head’s New Village ...............................................249 Bird Head’s New Village ...............................................250 Ramshackle Area, Hongkou District, Shanghai ............255 Cucumber Lane, Shanghai ............................................259

Introduction

Modern City: A Spatial Perspective This book provides a comparison of the memory discourses related to contemporary spatial changes between Berlin and Shanghai. It investigates how the various actors of history view the idea of modernity in both specific and broad cultural contexts. The argument on the representation of modernity in urban spaces in the two metropolises embodies the increasingly complex matrix of local, national, and global power struggles today. The main objective of this book is to provide a new paradigm for understanding the contemporary city culture, questioning the facile folding of intriguing cultural manifestations into easy relativist dichotomies based on nation-state or other essentializing grand narratives. Juxtaposing two geographically and historically discrete yet interrelated cities of Berlin and Shanghai, this book problematizes such troubling dichotomies and grand narratives. This work does not deny what we refer to today as urban studies that are predominantly derived from the western or European traditions, in particular the Enlightenment and its consequent aestheticization of city form. To consolidate the absolute power of rationality, urban spaces were constructed in Europe during the 19th century as embodiments of order and discipline. Urban spaces were the locus where disciplined and educated individuals could relate their identity to the utopian vision of a good public life. According to Michel Foucault, the 19th-century European city planning aimed at demonstrating the art of governance. In this manner, “To ensure acts of self-governance, citizens were presented with visual models to internalize, remember, and apply” (Boyer 13). If this is the beginning of the “modern city,” which is marked by a progressive vision full of optimism, urban modernity can be understood as a revolutionary force that departs from a stale past and promises a desirable future. Nevertheless, the rapid urbanization

of European cities in the early 20th century resulted in unprecedented social problems: increasing class difference, environmental crisis, and an enormous transformation of human psychical perception. In the first half of the 20th century, the application of the modernist utopian visions includes the rise of totalitarian states, political persecutions, homicides, wars, and economic downfall. European cities became sites of destruction. Burdened with the formidable consequences of the Second World War, the reconstructions of the postwar Western cities began to seek new ways of relating space to modern societal relations. Debates on urban spaces in the past decades concentrated on, for example, the use, function, and ownership of public vis-à-vis private spaces, cities, and communities; commercialization and preservation of historic sites; restoration of post-industrial urban spaces; and production of urban cultural capital. These debates attempt to find the balance between the key values of western deliberative democracy, ideals of freedom, maintenance of social justice, and realities of capitalism. The postmodern approach to understanding Western cities tries to liberate such issues from the all-consuming white, male, and middle-class view, giving more voice to those who are underprivileged in gender, ethnicity, class, and generation relations. These developments have yielded massive influences on policymaking, social actions/reactions, and theory production in debates and studies on Western urban culture. Meanwhile, another trend in western urban studies calls for the need to look outward. The postmodern/postcolonial urban studies go beyond the internal changing situations within the western context. The concerns of such studies are in “other” cities in “other” worlds. These studies pose questions that call for a reexamination of the following: to what extent, for example, in the non-Western cities, where no such trajectory of social changes starting from the Enlightenment and the secularization of Christianity existed, can one apply the current standard of making and judging a good city from a western point of view? Can the conceptualizations of civil society, the public and private spheres, and the sense of community in those places be based on the same historical tensions and anxieties in the Western cities? Moreover, the more recent the time period is, the more problems and crises overlap in cities worldwide. If we focus on regional problems by clinging to a separate view (be it west-dominant or regionally 10

interested only), the neat binary thinking of the East–West dichotomy today may prove to be increasingly inadequate in understanding the desires and dilemmas of cities all round the world. The key to understanding cities at a global level lies in the idea of modernity. The ultimate theoretical question is whether the idea of a modern city and urban modernity possesses the same definition. Historically, the definition of modernity has become highly contested and unstable. The blending effects of colonial occupation, industrialization, the birth of modern nation-state, communist revolutions, the two World Wars, the Cold War, and the current globalization have all been influencing the idea of the modern. In this book, the arguments concentrate on space (in both physical and theoretical terms) instead of on time as a major way of perceiving modernity, taking Berlin and Shanghai as parallel case studies. An exploration of the real external space and the space of the embedded structure of knowledge, which combines both visible visual layers of spatiality and invisible layers of discourses, is conducted. Here, by using the term “modern” or “modernity,” I do not refer to a static enclave, which is considered as the result of temporal progression. The spatial view on modernity proffers a discursive constellation of its contested meanings, which are used and mobilized in different contexts for different purposes. Therefore, the focus of this book is not on determining the exact definition of modernity but on understanding the idea of modernity as legitimation for certain historical contingencies and emergences. This spatial perspective echoes the increasing dissatisfaction with the Eurocentric view of history against an unprecedentedly complicated background of cultural encounters. The major problem with the temporal view of modernity lies in its implication of progressiveness and shadowing backwardness. The moral connotation of modernity is supported by a utopian vision of the future, which considers the past and the present as the means to reaching a final end. This linear process of achieving modernity presupposes a unidirectional criterion that judges the current social changes. In the early 20th century, both German and Chinese philosophers criticized such formation of modernity. Zhang Binglin (1868–1936) emphasized the lack of religious basis on the progressive thought of the Chinese in his analysis of the ancient Chinese thoughts and Buddhist philosophy. The Chinese idea 11

of “managing disorder” (zhiluan) in history has always focused on the present, without telos (or ends). Historical studies on Chinese tradition concentrate on a concrete event or happening than on a metaphysical conceptualization of a historical process (Chen 89). Progressiveness is bilateral at various levels: “In terms of morality, good is progressive, so is evil; in terms of life, happiness is progressive, so is bitterness. Both move forward together, shadow each other…” (Zhang 1985, 386). The idea of “progression” no longer stands on an absolute value but exists simultaneously with regression (Chen 96). Furthermore, Zhang views “progression” or the awareness of making progress as an illusion stemming from subjectivity: “What we know as progression is a result of disorientation of knowledge, where there is no actual evolvement” (Zhang 1985, 449). In the European context, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) questions the moral order established by the progressive view of modernity despite his highly theological implications in the view of history. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (Benjamin1968, 256). To refute that history lies unequivocally in quiet completion, he contends that history becomes a battlefield where disputations of different explanations fight against each other. This perspective leads to a renewed temporal view of history: to take the present as a vantage point. Benjamin keenly posited that time and history are nonlinear and discontinuous; revolutionary moments that blast open the continuum are hidden and ridden at any “now time” (jetztzeit) (Benjamin 1968). His time concept shows strong implications of spatiality. Profoundly influenced by the Jewish insight of Messianic redemption, the allusion to Messianism pervades his critiques on history. In contrast to the optimistic view of historicism that believes in a linear or spiral progress of human society, Benjamin’s historical materialism insists on an eternal downfall of the profane, even in the form of happiness. Thus, the Messianic Age, which is the ultimate peaceful and harmonious state of the earth, is not or cannot be regarded as the goal of historical movements but as the critical end of history instead. In other words, this Messianic end of history is not the completion of historical development but a series of negations of the progresses or the affirmations of the heterogenic factors that are excluded from the “time of

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now.”1 Such redemptive moments are the standstills in the topography of history, also known as the “Messianic Nature,” in which rhythm constitutes happiness (Benjamin 1979, 312). In such arrests, every jetztzeit is sanctified and empowered to blast open the continuum of history. It salvages the lost or the inconspicuous fragments of human experience in the “empty, homogeneous time” in the ocean of history. While searching for these fragments, the eternal image of history held high by historicism is destroyed by a constantly retroactive force of questioning “every victory, past and present, of the rulers” (Benjamin 1968, 255). These fragments are exactly the sources of Marxist revolutionary potentials. Through this assertion, Benjamin negated the possibility of recognizing history, as Leopold von Ranke brought back history in “the way it really was” (255). Thus, Benjamin went on in a Messianic way, the approach to history that “means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (255). In this manner, the meaning of exploring spatial memory resembles that of the fragments of Messiah time: repression, redemption, and commemoration can explode in any jetztzeit. Benjamin transformed theological motives into profane contexts not by negotiating between religion and modernity but by turning them into configurations that are full of tension. In comparison, Michel Foucault’s idea of “archeology of knowledge” (1969) poses a challenge to the totality of the Hegelian grand narrative of history, which aims to explore the power relations of the different historical renditions in the “discourse.” Therefore, “discourse” is the object of archeology instead of the representation of historical texts: “(i)t is rather an enquiry whose aim is to rediscover on what basis knowledge and theory became possible; within what space of order knowledge is consisted…such an enterprise is not so much a history, 1

“Only the Messiah himself consummates all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the Messianic” (Benjamin 1979 “Theological-Political Fragment”, 312). For him, the Messianic power directs itself towards the opposite direction for which profane historical movements are headed. Nevertheless, this dialectic tension between the holy order (the Messianic order) and the secular historical order as its counterforce impels the fall of the Messianic Age. This book not only focuses on the dialectic between historical time and messianic time but also on the relation between now and then. At the moment when the present, as a Messianic model of time, redeems the oppressed past, human kind is blessed with hope.

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in the traditional meaning of the word, as an ‘archaeology’” (Foucault 1994, xxi–xxii). According to Foucault, commentary, author, and discipline constitute what we usually understand as the discourse of truthfulness that appears to occupy our collective consciousness (Foucault 1972, 220–223). He casts doubts on the writing of historical documents, saying, “The history of a concept is not wholly and entirely that of its progressive refinement, its continuation and validity, that of its successive rules of use, that of the many theoretical contexts in which it developed and matured” (Foucault 1972, 4). Without selecting and formulating a coherent expression of the historical paradigm, his methodology refuses to monumentalize history. Foucault argues, “The document is not the fortunate tool of a history that is primarily and fundamentally memory…in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments. In that area where, in the past, history deciphered the traces left by men, it now deploys a mass of elements that have to be grouped, made relevant, placed in relation to one another to form totalities…” in this sense “in our time history aspires to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the documents” (Foucault 1972, 7). However, his question on the continuity of historiography does not mean a total negation of the continuity of time. He tried to criticize the oversimplification of “the same” in the past temporality, whereas the synchronic Otherness in the present was neglected. In this discourse, the ruptures within “the same” and “the other” were cast aside. Archeology aims to retrieve the ruptures despite the risk of the subject being destabilized. In this vein, the study of memory tries to problematize and diversify the discourse of the historical subject, which exposes the formation of various historical discourses. Several recent theories that continue to criticize the temporal trajectory of modernity were developed with the postmodern goal of cultural multiplicity and the politics of recognition. The traditional definition of Western modernity already tends to ignore the possible differentiated modernity development and the uneven distribution within the domestic milieu. To understand modernity from a space-oriented perspective prompts the inclusion of sights of the history of other countries and their ethnicities, races, and citizens. Signs of modernity vary in spatial and cultural contexts. In his “Two Theories of Modernity,” Charles Taylor suggests that more attention should be 14

paid to other spaces of modernities that are colonial and non-western, and have no history of the Enlightenment or rationalization (Taylor 1999). If, for example, the discourse on the progressiveness of modernity is deeply rooted in the eschatology of Christianity, this view on the end of the world will not be shared by the non-Christian cultures. The setting of the finis and telos promises a future that can overcome the fear of fatum and fortuna (Taylor 1999). In non-Christian civilizations, the secularization of the religious doctrines of the cosmos either takes another form or does not exist. According to Homi K. Bhabha, “Each repetition of the sign of modernity is different, specific to its historical and cultural conditions of enunciation” (King 113). Bhabha refuted the existence of a “‘real’ modern in itself as ‘modernity’ comes out of a temporarily continuous and spatially comparative relational perspective” (King 113). As an indispensable aspect of modernity, modernization has a close affinity with the emergence of the existing system of the world and globalization. Thus, the influences of modernization are difficult to be fathomed diachronically because the process itself takes paths of geographical circulation at a global scale. To reiterate this argument, the configuration of modernity by Mark Elvin proves to be pertinent to the redefinition of a modern city. First, modernity “is not based on chronology, and so escapes the confusion caused by continuous updating.” Second, modernity is characterized by “varying combinations of modern and non-modern elements, sometimes mutually indifferent, sometimes mutually supportive, and sometimes mutually hostile” (King 112–113). The abovementioned views not only provide a theoretical option to the modernity theory but also outline the troubled situation of contemporary cities. On one hand, contemporary cities frequently struggle between the continuous lure of modernism and the urge to recognize the existing multi-layered postmodern cityscapes. On the other hand, contemporary cities are torn between the influences of other cities as well as of global capitalism (still primarily Western-oriented though) and their own distinctive perception of landscape and history. The spatial views of history and modernity by Zhang, Benjamin, and Foucault do not relieve the reality from being disturbed by the discourse of progressiveness but add to the complexity and tension of reality. The anxieties caused by the ideas of modernity are seen throughout 15

the past one hundred years in the two regional focuses of this book: China and Germany.

Germany and China: Modernity Experiences in the 20th Century Throughout the 20th century, Germany and China experienced a similarly laborious relation with modernity in their own regional contexts. The precarious experiences of Germany and China surprisingly have much in common: the harsh consequences and humiliation imposed on China and Germany after the war, the disillusionment of a modern nation-state as a prosperous new form of community caused by the actual inequality between nations, the (partial) turn to socialism and its suppression by the conservatives, the short-lived boom in the cultural and intellectual fields in the interwar period, the overshadowing darkness of totalitarianism and the devastating results of the Second World War, the divided land and ideologies during the Cold War under the threat of both red and white terrors, the genocide and political persecutions, the economic recovery and reform, and the continuous identity crisis in cultural and political aspects. In sum, China and Germany may have suffered some of the most acute paradoxes of modernity and its discourses against the following background. First, the mainstream ideological sphere in both countries was permeated with the progressive view of modernity, which entails the separation between humans as subject and the world as object. In Germany, until recent times, historicism was the mainstream of German conception of history beginning at the time of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Leopold von Ranke (Iggers 4). The German word Weltanschauung, or world view, indicates the gazing position of human vis-à-vis the outside world. This tradition of historical philosophy recognizes humans’ conscious purpose as the driving force of history, whereas the Natural Law lacks this consciousness. Therefore, the human status is highly amplified as the ultimate force to change the world and to develop the course of history. By contrast, the theory of Natural Law uses reason to analyze the human nature and the universal truths over moral rules stipulated by human beings. In China, the belief in Scientism (not the results of scientific application per se) and rationalization prevailed in prompting 16

new concepts for nation building and culture building. Many leaders of the New Culture Movement in China in the early 20th century, such as Liang Qichao, Wu Zhihui, Hu Shi, Chen Duxiu, Guo Moruo, and Fu Sinian, expressed the need for revitalizing China by destroying the old and establishing the new.2 In this logic, the hopes and the categorization of the binary between what is desired and what is backward are pinned on the antagonism between the “old” and the “new”, which implies a sense of moral hierarchy. This logic becomes a typical reflection of the temporal narrative of modernity even in today’s China. Second, the renewed concepts of time and history are significant for both German and Chinese nationalism. Placed in a disadvantaged position in the fierce competition with the leading powers in Western Europe, the strong nationalistic sentiment in Germany was stimulated by its lagging status in the wrestling ring of international politics. Since the Wars of Liberation, the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War, Germany experienced the agony caused by its cultural and political backwardness, subsequent rise at a rapid pace, eventual defeat, and harsh punishment imposed on it. China, the once highly self-sufficient empire that posited itself as always being at the center of the world, had to confront its inevitable downfall under the new game rule determined by the once “barbarian” European powers. Along with the establishment of the first Republic in East Asia, the political modernization of China was accompanied by a series of radical transformations that accelerated the formation of the nationalistic discourse: the Boxer Rebellion, the downfall of Qing Dynasty, the Xinhai Revolution, and the feeble Republican regime. The political reforms of China remained at the elitist level, whereas the seed of participatory democracy hardly found its philosophical and social basis. The state was unshakably considered as the embodiment of the highest morality and virtuous spirit. Therefore, individual freedom can be achieved through sacrificing for the nationstate instead of through mass participation in political life. In contrast to the German nationalism that endeavored to revive the “authentic” Germanness by learning from France, narratives of Chinese nationalism resolutely discarded its cultural tradition, which was regarded as the major obstacle for the continuous progress of China. Thus, third, 2

See Chen Yun’s ljഠຳѝⲴѝഭ⧠ԓᙗ᜿䇶NJ (Chinese Consciousness of Modernity in Crisis). Shanghai: Huadong shi fan da xue chu ban she, 2005, pp. 1–45.

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both countries maintained an ambivalent relation with “the West,” typified by the British and the French tradition. In Germany, as a latecomer in the European capitalistic development and industrialization, the experience of the ferocity and dark sides of western modernity has been proved to be more acute. On one hand, the traditional romanticism of Germany has always refused to embrace the secular material world and utilitarianism as its guiding ideology. On the other hand, in the eyes of a typical Prussian, including Bismarck, the French liberalism may lead to disasters because of its endlessly revolutionary, chaotic, and unstable nature. Since the late 19th century, Germany has been criticizing the West and nurturing an ambition to reform the Western mode of political, cultural, and societal configurations (Shan 20). In China, the efforts of the westernization was accompanied by a deep distrust in its own roots of cultural and philosophical traditions. Western-educated intellectuals and political elites keenly embraced the Marxist historical view and the evolutionary vision of the world. For a nation that is eager to revive its past glory, the lure of the modernity of breaking up with the past and embracing a better future utopia is enormous. Both German and Chinese elites showed great interest in “catching up” with the pace of modernity, but the tension between the innate ephemerality and eternity in the idea of modernity resulted in various forms of nihilism. Moreover, the conflict in the ideas of intellectuals was also apparent in Germany and China at the turn of the 20th century. Both rightists and leftists were involved in fierce attacks towards each other. In Germany, the Marxists, liberalists, and Jews were on one side and the anti-semantics, nihilists, conservatives, nationalists, and religious groups on the other. (Shan 44) In China, although nationalistic sentiments were espoused by both sides, the Marxists and revolutionaries still held different views against the traditionalists and those who criticized the fallacies of Western modernity by contrasting them with the rich thought resources of ancient Chinese philosophy. Xu Fuguan, Zhang Binglin, Liang Shuming, Xiong Shili, and Wu Mi were among the philosophers who were skeptical on the rosy promises of the total acceptance of the progressive view of modernity. Again use Zhang Binglin as an example: he argues that the progressive view of modernity ultimately establishes an arena for competition for strength. Chinese traditions of thought do not worship strength; instead, the Chinese 18

largely place high values on “soft” strength, which maintains the pursuit of cultural and moral accomplishments.3 The worship of strength ultimately leads to war and colonization, in which both the “superior” and the “inferior” reducing their selfness in such power structure. These perspectives on historical consciousness further complicated the dramatic political and social changes in Germany and China in the early 20th century. In 1933, Germany finally succumbed to the ultra rightist rein over the Fatherland under Adolf Hitler. Nationalism and anti-Semitism were on the rapid rise. After the Second World War, the devastative consequences of the modern wars and the frantic thought controls in totalitarianism bore witness to the bankruptcy of the ambition of Germany to change the world. Moreover, postwar Germany suddenly found itself simultaneously as an unhallowed perpetrator and as one of the greatest victims of the failed effort to lead the world. The division of Germany during the Cold War period continued the schizophrenia of German history, forced or willingly. In East Asia, the young Republican China that was established in 1911 also did not become a new China equipped with science and democracy, as depicted in the claims of revolutionaries. The subsequent Anti-Japanese War, the Civil War between the Nationalists and the Communists, and the long unstable transitions of regimes exhausted the vigor of the Kingdom of the Middle by 1949. In Mao’s China, continuous and ferocious political campaigns dragged the country into a deeper abyss, which was more or less created by a distorted belief in the progressive view of history. The radical revolutionary discourse inherited the spirit of modernity to create the new, regardless if it is good or evil, suitable or unsuitable, or true or false. The “new” attained a paramount and indisputable holy status. This absolute worship of the “new” was inevitably accompanied by nihilism. At its craziest moment, the Cultural Revolution evolved into a nationwide political liquidation that combined mass movement, witch-hunting, and the continuation of the thousand-year-long tradition of Chinese court strife.

3

See more analysis of Zhang’s deconstruction on the progressive view on modernity and the “ancient-modern” binary in Chen, 2005, pp. 87–123.

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The contemporary China and Germany are still burdened with the great legacies from the 20th century, and the reunification of Germany and the opening up of China further complicated their respective situations. In the post-WWII years, Germany was left in a speechlessness in writing its modern history after the craze of the National Socialism. The subsequent division of Germany further delayed the normalization of Germany as an integral subject of historical consciousness. Nationalism was taboo in West Germany, whereas authoritarianism continued in East Germany. In the reunified Germany, the question of how people of the two Germanys could be united in economic, ideological, and social terms is as difficult as how to keep the potential revival of German nationalism in check. People, home and abroad, still have great concern about the extent to which the ongoing historical and political repression of a strong German national identity can occur alongside its actual leading position in the European Union. Despite the enduring conflicts and controversies in internal and international relations, the base of a unified Germany lies in the remembrance of and confrontation with the nation’s past failures and mistakes, and in the resistance in forgetting the painful consequences of modernity. The Chinese situation is no less intricate. Taiwanese scholar Chang Hao summarized the two aspects of the crucial Zeitgeist in the modern Chinese context: zhishi˄ᘇ༛ ˅ and kanshi˄ᡑц˅ . The spirit of zhishi, which means men of high aspiration, conveys the idea that human life should be dedicated to, and when necessary, sacrificed for realizing lofty moral goals by participating in politics. By contrast, the spirit of kanshi contends that human beings have the capability to be the master of the world and are thus able to create a new world according to their own ideals (Chang 248). If during the revolutionary period (1949–1978) both spirits were implemented in the Communist ideological agenda, post-Mao China gradually weakened the emphasis on the zhishi spirit. Rather, after the disasters of the Cultural Revolution, the zhishi spirit could no longer provide sufficient legitimacy for the making of the Chinese national myth under the Communist regime. Conversely, with the opening-up and the introduction of the “socialist

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market economy” in China, the kanshi spirit was enhanced not only for the sake of the actual growth of material life but also for the sake of maintaining the continuity of the incomplete modernity project. This aspect induced a series of contradictions in the social consciousness concerning modernization in the contemporary Chinese context. On the surface, although the destruction of the Chinese cultural traditions seems to have become less radical, the renewed ideology continued to construct and reconstruct a world with a completely different appearance of modernity. One keyword for understanding the status quo of contemporary Chinese cities is chai ˄᣶˅or demolition. This word paradoxically serves as compensation for loss of lagging modernization that endangers state legitimacy and as an intensification of the same crisis. The still valid ideology of the kanshi spirit of modern China combines with the deep roots of the Chinese pragmatism, inducing a new round of nihilism and cynicism on the collective level of social consciousness. The power of morality, a core ideology in the Confucian tradition on which the legitimate behaviors of authorities and plebeians are based, is seriously jeopardized. In contrast to Germany, the base of normalization of history in the postMao China lies in amnesia and forgetting.

Contested Realm of History and Memory Alain Badiou suggests a la Jacques Lacan’s three orders of the Subject: the truth procedure is the Real, the History is the Symbolic, and the Subject is the Imaginary. (Badiou 1) In this sense, memory can be considered as a floating mediation between the three orders: it is simultaneously real, symbolic and imaginary. In this vein, memory problematizes the linear trajectory of the progressive conception of history through its unpredictable interruptions and continuities. It further evolves into fluid formations and expressions of the individual, the collective, the cultural, the communicative, the unconscious, the conscious, the traumatic and the everyday. Therefore, memory is less stable but more diverse than historical rendition. In “Between Memory

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and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Pierre Nora argues that memory has long been impoverished and eradicated by history, which is realized long before caused by what he calls “the acceleration of history” (Nora 7). He distinguishes history from memory through their different forms of function and expression. History is always conceived of as a continuous representation of the past in an integrated manner, and memory is fragmented and personal but all-embracing. He points out, “(T)here are as many memories as there are groups” and quotes Maurice Halbwachs: “That memory is by nature multiple and yet specific; collective, plural and yet individual. History, on the other hand, belongs to everyone and to no one” (Nora 9). Taking this idea as a starting point, Nora contends the significance of lieux de memoire, which he describes as the places where memory crystallizes and secretes itself has occurred at a particular historical moment, a turning point where consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn – but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de memoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer milieux de memoire, real environments of memory (Nora 7).

The nation-state supposedly has made historiography a substitute for history so that a certain national myth is made authoritative and reliable. This making of a historical narrative is largely a process of institutionalization and self-justification, which is realized with the assistance of texts and propagandas from national archives, textbooks, monuments, museums, everyday historical discourses (including popular beliefs and collective memory narratives), and so on. While history may be romanticized only as a progressive force of liberation, revolution, and self-awakening, memory may also waver between being critical and subordinate to history. The relationship between history and memory can thus be articulated through the question of the subject of the narrative. If the major subject of a nation’s history writing is only restricted to the political elites or representative authorities, the spectrum of the subject of memory is much broader, more complicated, and hybrid. Memory can be associated with one particular group in the society (i.e., gender, age/generation, class, region, and cultural identity), which may or may not be mutually exclusive with the national memory. Memory

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can also be individual or multiple and even unreliable, which makes it a less verifiable source in comparison with history-writing. In fact, none of the subjects of memory is able to claim its straight neutrality and objectivity. This is partly because all of them are indispensible parts of history and are shaping each other in one way or another. Therefore, the time and space of memory position it neither in equivalence nor in opposition to history. Memory discourse is not a realm of contested authenticity per se but is more of human faith and courage to confront the past and the present self. Marita Sturken also proposes her idea of “cultural memory” that “can be distinct from history yet…is essential in its construction” (Sturken 4). She reminds us that history making per se is not a homogenized process even though history is largely institutionalized: “One cannot say that history comprises a single narrative; many histories are constantly under debate and in conflict with each other…history making adheres to specific codes about the nature of shared reality and the communicability of experience” (Sturken 5). She considers “cultural memory and history as entangled rather than oppositional. Indeed, there is so much traffic across the borders of cultural memory and history that in many cases it may be futile to maintain a distinction between them” (Sturken 5).4 Arguably, personal memory is usually involved with the most vivid and intelligible form of historical accounts for human perceptions, as is 4

She also elaborates on the relationship between memory, amnesia, and nationstate. This tension presents itself not only in the course of how domestic national mythology has been constructed but also in the process of globalization when the memory of the national or regional culture provides a new arena for combat against homogenization. The politics of memory manifests itself conspicuously when it comes to the question of forgetting. In her accounts on memory and the American nation-state, Sturken emphasizes that “(c)ultural memory reveals the demand for a less monolithic, more inclusive image of America. For this reason, it has often intersected with contemporary battles over identity politics and political correctness. Questions of who is sanctioned to speak of particular memories are often raised, and issues of difference and exclusion from the ‘imagined community’ of the nation come to the fore” (Sturken, 13). Amnesia speaks directly to the national myth-making, ideological manipulation, and human desires. Sturken suggests that “all cultural memory and all history are forged in a context in which details, voices, and impressions of the past are forgotten. The writing of a historical narrative necessarily involves the elimination of certain elements” (Sturken, 7–8).

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shown perfectly in oral history and literature. An absolute privatization of memory is extremely difficult because the subjects of individual, group, and national memories cannot be neatly separated from one another. On the contrary, one kind of memory can provide criticism and doubts towards other memory narratives and historiography. Alternatively, memory narratives render infinite possibilities for rewriting historical narratives even if no such thing as a completely restored history exists. At least memory can be one of the precious fragments of the massive puzzle. Chinese philosophers also articulated the possibility of the interflux between history and memory in the early 20th century. Again, Zhang Binglin emphasizes that the traditional Chinese view of history differs radically from that of the West in the sense that the Chinese tradition emphasizes on the living world of history rather than the transcendental meditation and metaphysical reasoning. In the tradition of Chinese history writing, history is not waiting for being proved to be truth but a way of life for both the individual and the collective. Life is history, and individual lives converge as the elements of history. Therefore, Chinese historical consciousness constantly shows its interest in everyday life and its relations to universality. In other words, the Chinese nation has been a “historical nation” rather than a “theoretical” nation based on the secular determinism of category or “religious” nation based on eschatology (Chen 2005, 112–123). If the realm of memory largely falls in that of human lifeworld (Lebenswelt), the Chinese philosophical tradition also accepts the intersections between history and memory. However, with the seclusion of the spirit of the “historical nation” in modern China, the current consciousness of both history and memory falls into a deep epistemological crisis, which Chen Yun describes as “a world view that does without the world; a historical view that banishes history” (Chen 2005, 8). In sum, what I mean by “memory” in this book belongs to a “twilight” zone between historiography and individual memory (Friedlaender 1993, Young 1997, Huyssen 1995). It unfolds the complicated relations the two realms have. When commenting on how studies on both history and memory are interrelated, James E. Young refers to Patrick Hutton: “What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history” (Young 1997, 49). 24

He argues that memory, although silenced, can enter the historical consciousness when historians try to listen to the voice of silence. Memory, although mistaken, can also become precious data of historical knowledge if one examines how and why mistakes happen (Young 1997, 54). In this book, memory discourse is considered as a cultural actor and not only a reflection or representation of culture. Memory itself becomes a space of representation in which the levels of non-hierarchical practices and the representations of space are in constant tension with each other. The fluidity of this discourse resists an essentialized concept of memory, which is seen as the path of individual or collective reliance to retrieve or represent authenticity. Andreas Huyssen emphasizes, “the mode of memory is recherché rather than recuperation” (Huyssen 1995, 3). Therefore, memory studies should be given more freedom in terms of the search for its subject, be it nation, individual, community, or class. This ambiguity has made it an extremely powerful manifestation of the human self. According to Huyssen, memories have a twilight status not only because of the temporal effect on the generational gap or the speed of forgetting along with technological modernization. It is also because memories “reflect the twilight status of memory itself ” (Huyssen 1995, 3).

Tale of Two Cities: Berlin and Shanghai As the most important metropolis in their respective national contexts, Berlin and Shanghai may best embody the sufferings of Germany and China, respectively, since the end of the First World War. However, how can Berlin and Shanghai be paired as objects of urban studies in any sense? Historically, Berlin has always been a capital city of politics and military importance in central Europe. Being the cradle of German modernization, Berlin is also easily associated with the core of a continental European idea of a modern city despite its relative lack of Western liberalism vis-à-vis Paris and London. In comparison, Shanghai has never been the capital of China and this city can rarely evoke an impression of political involvement compared with Beijing. Shanghai is a metropolis of commercial interest. The colonial past of Shanghai represents all its legends that can catch the attention of 25

the world not only because of its crucial role in economics in the Far East but also because of its exotic nature that tends to marginalize it in the discourse of understanding Chineseness. In this manner, how does the comparison of these two cities become firstly possible, then significant? A simple reality of both cities can be used as the starting point to explain the common grounds of comparing the cities: the construction sites found in Berlin and Shanghai today. In Berlin, the new capital hosts a series of mega-projects that refurnished the historical city into a hub of transportation and the most up-to-date look of a reunified Germany. Skyscrapers were erected on the former centers of Berlin: the Potzdamer Platz of the prewar Berlin, Breitscheidplatz of the former West Berlin, and Alexanderplatz of the former East Berlin. The new main railway station (Hauptbahnhof ), the new subway line 55 that connects the main railway station, the Brandenburg Gate, and the Berlin-Brandenburg International Airport are infrastructural constructions that cannot be found in other parts of Germany or even in Europe in terms of scale and cost. In Shanghai, the reform period also witnessed the city’s incredibly fast development. Since the early 1990s, reconstructions have been conducted in the old city quarters, and the former suburban areas have been largely extended to new urban settlements. In the Lujiazui area, which used to be a vast farmland of the eastern bank of the main waterway of Shanghai (i.e., the Huangpu River or Pudong), several skyscrapers that are among the tallest in the world have emerged within a short period of time: Oriental Pearl TV Tower (1994), Jin Mao Tower (1998), and Shanghai World Financial Center (2008). All these skyscrapers reach above 400 meters. If, according to Berliners, “Berlin doesn’t lie on the bank of River Spree but on construction sites”, the same situation applies in Shanghai: the city does not lie on the bank of Huangpu River but on construction sites. The pervasive image of “being constructed” suggests how dramatically and intensively the changes and reforms both cities have undergone. If Shanghai, with its construction mania, is only one among many other Asian cities that desire to grow in modernization, Berlin is a “non-typical” European city that shares Shanghai’s aspiration of “remodernizing” itself. The increasing number of constructions in Berlin and Shanghai actively speak 26

of the various histories of “being modern.” However, the transformations of the spatial configurations are not only about the present and the future of the cities but fundamentally also about their pasts. Therefore, the transformations of spatial order in both cities have a profound temporal meaning. What is the purpose of occupying the space? What are the current changes (i.e., demolition, renovation, and change of function)? What is expected for the future? Spatial changes reveal the issues in the definition of the kind of urban modernity, that is, of what should be remembered or forgotten. Therefore, the dynamics between time, space, and the quest for modernity along with the tension in Berlin and Shanghai form significant comparing points in various ways. I put forward the following four major points.

Figure 1: Shanghai Concessions.

First, both cities were once divided by powers in constant rivalry. Between 1845 and 1932, Shanghai possessed simultaneously two heterogeneous spaces during its semi-colonized days. The first space is the old Shanghai town with a 700-year history, and the other is the colonial Shanghai of modern space with a 150-year history (Liu 2–3). This dichotomy can be further broken down into four spaces: the International 27

Settlement, the French Concession, the American Concession (with a predominant population of Japanese inhabitants), and the native Chinese territory (Figure 1 Outline Plan of the Foreign Settlements at Shanghai, 1907).5 Each space manifested its distinctive character and function in the organism of the city, forming what Chinese–Japanese scholar Liu Jianhui calls “a mosaic city” (Liu 7). Although the socialist urban narrative intends to forget such division, the actual transformative power of this spatial order remains influential. The physical and ideological separation of Berlin was marked by the existence of the Berlin Wall from 1961 to 1989. Furthermore, Berlin was divided between the British, American, French, and the Soviet powers (Figure 2 Sectors in Berlin in the 1950s).6 In this manner, the urban spaces of Shanghai and Berlin are different in terms of power distribution and cultural characteristics.

Figure 2: Berlin during the Cold War.

5

6

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Original image from Imperial Outposts, from a Strategical and Commercial Aspect, with Special Reference to the Japanese Alliance, by Colonel A. M. Murray; published by John Murray, London 1907. Source: University of Texas at Austin. From  The Official Army Information Digest, U.S. Army Magazine, May 1959. Source: T.H.E. Hill, Voices Under Berlin, . Accessed on 4 Aug., 2014.

Second, both cities experienced severe destructions caused by warfare that left a strong impact on the later formation of their respective urban forms and identities. Berlin, as the capital of Nazi Germany, was heavily attacked by the allied air raids between 1940 and 1945. These attacks resulted in an extensive damage on the residential areas and transportation systems of Berlin. Shanghai became the bloodiest battlefield twice in the Sino-Japanese War. After the “January 28 Incident” in 1932, the fierce fighting between the Japanese and Chinese army largely destroyed the Chinese territory, including thousands of commercial tenants, residential areas, as well as higher educational institutes.7 The destruction escalated to a higher extent during the “Battle of Shanghai” in 1937.8 The Japanese army’s bombing of the Chinese and American settlements caused a devastating aftermath. The Zhabei District, the land and water transportation hub of Shanghai at that time, was totally flattened. The imprints of war on Berlin and Shanghai, both visible and invisible, still significantly affect the physical space of both cities. Third, Berlin and Shanghai reached their peak as world-famous metropolises almost at the same interwar period, that is, from the 1920s to the 1930s. Specifically, both Berlin and Shanghai underwent rapid urbanization and radical modernization in all aspects during this period. Both cities enjoyed in a short-lived state of success despite the domestic unrest on the national level. Moreover, the cosmopolitanness 7

8

“The January 28 Incident” (January 28 to March 3, 1932) refers to the one-month war instigated by the Japanese army in Shanghai. This incident marked Japan’s operational policy of the war from north-southwards to east-westwards before their all-out attack in China in 1937. See more in Jordan Donald. China’s Trial by Fire: The Shanghai War of 1932. University of Michigan Press, 2001. “The Battle of Shanghai” (August 13 to November 12, 1937), also known as “The August 13 Battle of Shanghai”. This battle was the first of the most important battles between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan during the Sino-Japanese War. This battle is considered the largest and bloodiest battle of the entire war, which is lasted for three months. In this battle, 70,000 casualties were recorded for Japan and 150,000 for China. The battle ended with Shanghai’s occupation on November 12. Although the Chinese Nationalist Army lost the battle, Japan’s plan to destroy China within three months was also crushed. See more in Hsu Long-hsuen and Chang Ming-kai, History of The Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) 2nd Ed., 1971. Translated by Wen Ha-hsiung, Chung Wu Publishing; 33, 140th Lane, Tung-hwa Street, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China.

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of both cities presented an antagonistic status vis-à-vis the national culture. For both cities, “the local” rose beyond “the national”. This “deterritorialization” of localness made the local memory a highly complex part of the national memory. The emblematic urban decadence of both Shanghai and Berlin distinguished themselves from their respective national traditions. A new style of modern living rapidly destabilized the former idea of everyday life, making both cities heavily criticized objects from both the leftist and the rightist. Their fragile prosperity entailed a more insurgent cry for restoring order under stark collectivism and conservative morality. The days of glory were similarly transient for the two cities. Soon later they began to lose the grandeur they once had due to a series of wars and later domestic upheavals. Fourth, Berlin and Shanghai both experienced that critical “sudden” turn which restored their central position in their respective nations during the period between 1989 and 1992. They underwent a series of ideological reconfigurations of spatial meanings, particularly those under the socialist ideals. Today’s globalization enables them to discard their previous ideological rivalries in the reawakening of their lost dreams and ambitions. This shift in the two cities’ narratives largely determines their current projects of urban development and renewals. In a word, from a diachronic view, Shanghai and Berlin share the experiences of division, war, and undulation of their current status in the respective national context. As modernization remains a key concept in the writing and rewriting of the texts of spatial memories in contemporary Berlin and Shanghai, the difficulty in understanding what Shanghai modern or Berlin modern means constitutes the main gist of this book. By examining the dynamics between memory and space, the book unfolds the entanglement among modernity, space, and human experience in both Chinese and German contexts. In this work, Berlin and Shanghai serve as references to each other. Both cities are discussed as each other’s interrelated and comparable counterparts. Although the individual cases in each city illustrate their respective features, the similar conflicts implied in these cases will also be examined. The book tends to be more critical and reflective in discussing Shanghai in comparison with Berlin not only because my Chinese background, but also 30

because, in reality, China’s idiosyncratic political and historical position in the early 21st century reveals more uncertainties and anxieties in the making of its urban landscapes than that of Berlin. Therefore, Berlin serves as an important referential point of contrast and criticism in this book.

Palimpsest: Texts of Spatial Memory The “spatial turn” in urban studies in humanities is presented here through the creation of a global urban space by individual, social, and historical subjectivities. Similarities between Berlin and Shanghai’s urban development history have given both cities great diversity in architectural style, rivalry identities, and competing memories in their own contexts. Therefore, the current experiences of Shanghai and Berlin exhibit many of the features of modernity in the post-Cold War era beyond the East–West nexus. To present these features, the book is positioned in an unconventional tempo-spatial setting. Temporally, this book does not examine the spatial changes in chronological terms but instead takes the present as the starting point. This “realtime” perspective recognizes the coevalness of realities, perceptions, and representations of history and memory in the urban environment. It endeavors to resist falling into the clichés of social progression. Whereas the comparative literature/cultural studies on urban memory focus on the textual analysis of the representations of physical space in visual culture, literature, and art, this book attempts to unfold the complex associations between history, memory, and urban environment per se. The two cityscapes are investigated as extremely interesting cases of palimpsests, considering the cities as space that is “textured and animated by layers of history and memory” (Donald 182). As Berlin and Shanghai incessantly change their appearance by building new landmarks and rehabilitating or demolishing the old ones, loss and recollection as well as nostalgia and amnesia exist. In contemporary Berlin and Shanghai, countless fragments and debris of the past, present, and future accumulate. Although the physical spaces and architecture remain intact, the rupture between the sign and the meaning proves inevitable along with 31

the occurrence of human events. Therefore, according to Svetlana Boym, urban “places are contexts for remembrances and debates about the future, not symbols of memory or nostalgia,” and they “are not merely architectural metaphors; they are also screen memories for urban dwellers, projections of contested remembrances” (Boym 77). Aldo Rossi also links memory to urban artifacts by highlighting the interdependence between memory, history, and urban space: “(H)istory speak(s) through art ‘primarily through architectural monuments, which are the willed expression of power, whether in the name of the State or of religion….Thus the character of whole nations, cultures, and epochs speaks through the totality of architecture, which is the outward shell of their being.’” (Rossi 173) Therefore, spatial memory is defined here as the simultaneous processes in which the production of memory narratives parallels the production of space in terms of its existence, appearance, use, and function. In this book, spatial memory is manifested in various forms of texts on monument, square, individual architecture, community, style of construction, and urban planning schemes. Therefore, the spatial memories that are considered as palimpsest include architectural visuality, narratives on space, visual images, artistic works, and practices in everyday life. The study of spatial memories, not only as a representation of these powers and their relations but also as a constitutive force of forming power, provides a valuable hermeneutic tool of understanding urban changes. The significance of this approach also lies in the innate gaps between representation, perception, and reality. These gaps are particularly observable in contemporary China, where political taboos limit the public in openly and publicly discussing certain particularly sensitive moments in history. Moments such as the nationwide 1989 student movements and the June Fourth Incident are not necessarily “forgotten” by individual Chinese citizens, but there is an absence of an overall picture of the people’s perception of the past when individual memory has to be largely repressed in public discourse. Through the case studies of Berlin and Shanghai, the book examines the urban space of both cities vertically and horizontally. Vertically, each city focuses on the spatial memory and narratives. It explores how the memories of certain urban space relate to the national 32

ideology, consumerism, visual image, academic research, and the mass media. The book studies how these memories are represented, accepted, used, and repressed by the changing historical narratives of both cities. Horizontally, the comparison between Berlin and Shanghai constitutes the global dynamics of world cities. Whereas Berlin embodies the arduous journey of Western modernity and highly concentrates on the euphoria, contradictions, illusions, and disillusions in its spatial representation, Shanghai echoes similar, if not more, complicated inner conflicts of modern experience in cultural, historical, colonial, national, and ideological terms. Modernity discourse, especially in urban studies, has made the dialogical distance between the two cities closer than ever. Despite their distinctive histories and strong structures of knowledge, Berlin and Shanghai both experienced and are confronted with incessant questions about the definition of modernity. Nevertheless, the study will not try to establish a paradigm of the so-called “alternative modernity” that implies a hierarchy of importance or succession in the modern experience. The present state of Shanghai and Berlin illustrates the similarities and (inter)referentiality of cities in the era of globalization.

Chapters Sun Shaoyi argues in his Imagined City – Literature, Film, and Visual Shanghai (1927–1937) that the city and space do not speak for themselves; the narrative and the imagination of the people give the power of narration to space in a cycle of forgetting, remembering, and production (Sun 201). Therefore, the challenge in imagining the city is the extent to which its memory can be activated to reestablish the forgotten identities (Sun 203). In this sense, I focus on three forms of memory in urban public space: public commemoration (e.g., monument and museum), nostalgia, and amnesia. By examining the power dynamics in the local, national, and global in these three memory discourses, the book presents an understanding of the concept of “modern” in the political,

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ideological, socioeconomic, and cultural aspects. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, “Contested National Memories: Monument, Myth-making, and Modernity”, explores the tension in national myth-making through the institutionalization of commemorative space, plural narratives of history, and nationalism. Modern nationalism, war memory, and national history are deemed here as core paths of claiming modernity. Unlike the case in the former Eastern European countries, commemorative spaces in Berlin and Shanghai today transverse the supposed “the-end-of-history” discourse. This part addresses the issue of public commemoration, which requires that the urgent involvement of national discourses. It illustrates the complex thread of public and private, hegemonic and subversive, and national and global meanings attached to several well-chosen sites. I discuss the Holocaust Memorial and the Reichstag building in Berlin in Chapter One along with the Memorial to the First Congress Meeting of the Chinese Communist Party, the Memorial to the May Thirtieth Movement, and the Museum of Jewish Refugees in Shanghai in Chapter Two. The readings of spatial memories in this part offer interpretations of how these sites transform through their connection to specific parts of history. The comparison here is not simply a heuristic device that juxtaposes sameness and difference. Instead, it is a framework for the understanding of globally interconnected, occasionally shared, and more often divergent histories manifested in material form as well as in collective memory. Part II “The Politics of Nostalgia: Memory, Space, and the Competing Modernities” centers on both cities’ nostalgia for their faded urbanity and on the local consumption of nostalgia as resistance. It consists of Chapter Three “City of Divided Memories: Two Kinds of Berlin Nostalgia” and Chapter Four “Revisiting Shanghai Nostalgia: Local Memory as Resistance”. Although analysis of nostalgia is usually related to the local’s subordinate role in the face of manipulations of the past by the more powerful national or global forces, nostalgia can also be understood as a form of resistance to the once repressed kind of modernity. Nostalgia, as a complex and puzzling phenomenon, is understood in the context of the two cities as a phenomenon that exists in the cracks, as it were, of temporal ruptures and spatial bids in their own national context. The nostalgia 34

discourses are embedded in their contradictory nature, which is caused by tensions among the competing narratives of their urban pasts. My analysis on nostalgia neither succumbs to the temptation of trying to identify the “correct” or “authentic” versions of the past, nor does it endorse memory narratives that present selective views. Here, the mediation of memory and its representation in the materiality of urban form or public architecture play a significant role. This part strives to give a spatially informed understanding of how selection processes of spatial memories has possibly caused nostalgia. My interpretations in general terms (e.g., glorification of the Weimar Republic’s version of modernity or the East German culture in nostalgia) and those in concrete forms of urban morphology (e.g. Hackesche Höfe or Shikumen/Xintiandi) both contribute clarity and specificity to the justification of my argument. Part III “Forgetting Modern Space? Amnesia and the ‘Obsolescent’ Modernities” examines the power relations behind the spatial visibility of the cityscapes. Demolition, change in function, and reconstruction in Berlin and Shanghai question the discursive hierarchy of modernism in relation to ideological changes in their own context. The focus of this part is on the spaces that are normally excluded from the predominant images of the city. In contrast to the urban artifacts in the first two parts, which are highly conspicuous in the city, these spaces are largely “invisible”. Therefore, amnesia is understood here as the marginalization of certain public memories of the existing spaces in the major representation of the city’s past, present, and future. This part first draws attention to the amnesia and feeble attempts to recuperate the forgotten modernist architectural projects from their own Socialist period, namely, the Palace of the Republic in Berlin and the Workers’ New Village in Shanghai. It also discusses the narratives of alternative modernities in the reconstruction projects in the 1970s’ East Berlin and Greater Shanghai Plan in the 1930s. The comparability of the two cities is based on their common experience of the ideological change. They both transform from a city with a capitalist legacy first to that recreated under socialist planning ideals, and then to that eager to abandon the traces of socialism. Nevertheless, I argue that the supposed ideological shift should not be regarded as a convenient marker for periodizing memory shifts. Overemphasis on the discursive discussion on the decisiveness 35

of ideological power in the creation of spatial memory tends to pose a pseudo opposition between “the good modern” under a better ideology and “the bad modern” under a bad one. Instead, my analysis intends to place amnesia in a larger context of the vicissitudes of urban development towards the idea of “modern city”. As actual spatial practices do not necessarily correspond to, if not oppose, the ideological guidelines, rhetoric antagonism is questioned here. I illustrate in this part that modernity is a conflict-ridden project in which various approaches to it negotiate, repress, and transform one another.

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Part I Contested National Memories: Monument, Myth-Making, and Modernity

Representing the essence of the national myth, the official commemorative constructions (i.e., monuments, memorials, archives, museums, etc.) of today are erected primarily by main political powers in a nationstate to assert national identity. As Eric Hobsbawm (1990) and Benedict Anderson (1991) contend, the nation-state is a relatively recent invention in human history and is deeply connected with the discourse on modernity (Hobsbawm 14). Three points can illustrate the interrelations between monuments and modernity. First, monuments play an important role in establishing, sustaining, consolidating, and legitimatizing the creation of the national narrative. Nations are made up, though not necessarily completely falsified, by the common imagination of the collective and continuous existence of a geographical territory. “The material existence of “certain artifacts and events – such as dead bodies, gravesites, and burial ceremonies – have unique symbolic power because they invoke a sense of timelessness, awe, fear, and uncertainty” (Verdery 23–53). And in turn, “The power to transcend time, to bring historical events and personalities into the present, makes such objects especially effective in mobilizing national movements” (Forest and Johnson 526). Second, as spatial representation in memory of a historical happening, a monument invokes the core contradiction between modernity and its temporality. Modern monuments belong to the “intentional commemorative value” according to Alois Riegl’s categorization (Riegl 38). Unlike age-value and historical value that enable time work on spatial meaning, “(i)ntentional commemorative value aims to preserve a moment in the consciousness of later generations, and therefore to remain alive and present in perpetuity. This third class of commemorative values forms the obvious transition to present-day values” (Riegl 38). Monuments generally endeavor to consolidate a particular belief of the present by overtly commemorating a completed past, which is meant to be something of timeless and sublime

value. However, history and memory constantly challenge or negate such desired stability. If monuments try to speak to the public through their symbolic power that suggests immortality of a specific value, the question remains whether the validity of this value can survive the mortality of the nation-state, its culture, and the related historical narrative. Moreover, monuments are always a part of the public art discourse and thus involve discussions on its aesthetic value and style, another realm of contestation highly conditioned by periodic perceptions. Third, urban space and monuments create symbolic meanings for each other. Space is not an empty, homogenous container of the events but produces and reproduces meaning along with the historical, mnemonic, political, and ideological transformations. Therefore, the process in which monuments are constructed, reconstructed, restored, or removed is a constant questioning of how certain modernity is redefined. Moreover, a study on monuments is impossible if we only consider the top-down will and not look at the “hopes, needs, longings, and interests of ordinary people” (Hobsbawm 10). Monuments, as public spatial representations, are closely connected with the (re)interpretation and memory of the diverse publics. Discourses on different kinds of memory, as Marita Sturken indicates in her book on American cultural memory, “reveal the demand for a less monolithic, more inclusive image” of a nation-state (Sturken 13). Therefore, “(q)uestions of who is sanctioned to speak of particular memories are often raised, and issues of difference and exclusion from the ‘imagined community’ of the nation come to the fore” (Sturken 13). The distinction between Pierre Nora’s lieux de memoire and milieu de memoire directly addresses this tension. However, I agree with Sturken that, although memory (both remembering and forgetting) and history are distinct from each other, they are “entangled rather than oppositional” (Sturken 5). I contend that history and memory are not necessarily mutual adversaries, as it is often difficult to draw a distinct boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness as well as between memory and imagination. Monuments in Berlin and Shanghai present some highly intriguing issues about (post)modern commemorative spaces. Commemorative spaces in Berlin and Shanghai transcend the ostensible “the-endof-history” discourse, which is not exactly suitable to the cases in the former Eastern European countries such as in Russia. In Berlin, the 38

most eye-catching monuments are either the ones built right after the reunification or the restored national symbols before the Nazi regime. Forming an interesting contrast and tension in both visuality and meaning, many of the monuments in Berlin cannot be classified under any one of the three categories. The representation and expression of national identity in the case of Berlin’s monuments suggest strong ambivalence and conservation towards modernity and nationalism. In the case of Shanghai, the “critical juncture” is invisible in the official narratives of the monuments. Under some circumstances, the constructions of new places of memory seem to fulfill the old task of glorifying a certain past, but in effect, they lead the places to become self-enclosed venues that shield the rest of the city from an ideological burden. In other cases, some monuments of the seemingly core nationalistic narratives are marginalized in a twilight memory. Towards the end of this part, I will also examine the memorials that represent cosmopolitan facades of the nation.

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Chapter One The Berlin Republic: Re-invoked Memories

The German reunification in 1990 ended the division between the former West Germany and East Germany for almost thirty years. With their respective national narrative in the Cold War period, the reunification marked the turn of Germany’s commemorative culture. This change is particularly noticeable in Berlin, the new capital of the new Germany. As the capital of the kingdom of Prussia (1701–1918), the German Empire (1871–1918), the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), the Third Reich (1933–1945), the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (1949– 1990), and now the Federal Republic of Germany, Berlin epitomizes the arduous journey of Germany’s modernization. Karl Scheffler’s pre-First World War characterization of Berlin as “always to be in the process of becoming and never to be” is still valid (Scheffler 1989). Today, the reunified geopolitical condition poses at least two questions of immediate exigency in Berlin: first, how today’s German national identity is defined through the image of Berlin, and second, how Berlin (re)finds its niche in the global mapping of a metropolises . Berlin is still struggling with its new identities that are transforming the city into a site of new urban experiments, where various powers and interests constantly compete, negotiate, compromise, and annihilate one another. The urban formation of Berlin, under such circumstances, stands again on a kind of “ground zero” immediately after the “Wende,” or the turn after the reunification, which has left the city in the memories of deep discrepancies. The discordance of the Berlin architectural style is obvious, as both the 19th-century symbolism and avant-garde postmodernism can be found easily in the city. The Prussian Brandenburg Gate stands in proximity to the Memorial for the Murdered Jews, which is made up of a wave-like land of gray, untarnished cement stones. The new, zigzag-shaped Jewish Museum is annexed to the old Baroque building. Atop the bulk of the neo-classical Reichstag Building designed by Paul Wallot glitters the glass dome created by Sir Norman Forster. However,

these constructions are juxtapositions that are not necessarily of contradictory nature. Ruptures constitute the premises of Germany’s national self-understanding after the reunification. Many memories that once faded are now re-invoked. Debates in the past 20 years center on whether it is legitimate to “normalize” German history by making historical spaces, such as the construction of monuments on the “land of perpetrators” and through “critical reconstruction” (which I will elaborate later). This chapter elaborates on the conflicts of Berlin architectural aesthetics driven by what Michael Wise calls “an almost obsessive degree of caution amid a struggle to moderate gestures of national aggrandizement” (Wise 155). The most visible national monuments in Berlin are manifestations of a vacillation between the results of the conservative re-ritualization of less controversial national symbols and abstract signs subject to multiple interpretations. As Peter Carrier suggests, the key issue of Berlin’s monuments lies in “an ideal holistic notion of nationhood which cannot accommodate the historical complexity of its theme…an essential incongruity between history and its medium, between the facts of historical experience and the ideal, ideological function imposed on this single, allegedly national monument” (Carrier 147). Monumental desires test modernity’s dilemma of being for and against the search for origins.

I. Memory of Warning: Architectural Legacies of German National Memories Representing the Holocaust Memory: The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe The relation between the Holocaust memory and the German national identity is not a post-reunification issue despite its increasing significance in the reunified Germany. Historian Jeffrey Herf scrutinizes in his Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys the development and centrality of the Jewish problem and the memory of the Holocaust in between 1945 and 1989 in both Germanys. According to Herf, the postwar years witnessed the great contrast between the views 42

of democratic right and democratic left in West Germany in understanding memory as a means towards Westernization (Herf 267). The representative of the democratic right, Konrad Adenauer, who was also the first Chancellor of West Germany, insisted on “the Federal Republic” being firmly embedded in a Western alliance. Such an alliance would end the anti-Western Sonderweg and help to prevent a Nazi or nationalist revival…” (Herf 267). He showed remarkable willingness to embrace the democratization mainly understood in American ideology and to downplay the direct confrontation with the Nazi past. Adversely, the politicians of the democratic left, such as Kurt Schumacher, Theodor Heuss, Richard von Weizsäcker, and Ernst Reuter, questioned whether the effort to “cleanse” German history by deliberate amnesia and indifference towards the past traumas was possible for democratization (Herf 228). By emphasizing the “multiple currents within the German past,” the first federal president Theodor Heuss insists that only by facing the fact that Germany had “lack of history of freedom” and was “oftdefeated” could a more democratic national narrative be established (Herf 236,237). The remembrance of the Nazi past, particularly the Holocaust, was reaffirmed then as the main component of postwar West Germany politics. The admittance of the discontinuity of German history caused by the Nazi regime has thus become the precondition for its further continuity. Heuss, Schuhmacher, and Weizsäcker all expressed their resistance to forgetting: “Heuss affirmed that he….would remember what many postwar Germans would rather forget.” Furthermore, “For Kurt Schumacher, frank discussion of the Nazi past was a moral and political necessity” (Herf 239). “Like Heuss, Weizsäcker presented a most un-Hegelian narrative of unredeemed suffering and tragedy … There can be no reconciliation without remembrance” (Herf 358). Herf discusses an equally, if not more, problematic ideological scenario in the former East Germany on the issues of the Holocaust, Jewish memory, and war responsibility. I will not reiterate his observations in great detail, as the reunification of the two Germanys ended the national narrative of the former East side. Today’s Germany maintains the guiding ideology of West Germany. Moreover, this ideology is now set in a more extensive dynamics between the national and the global memories of the Holocaust.

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The remembrance of the upsetting past has no fewer problems when it is concretized into spatial representations. The resolution of Germany to show its clear-cut break with anti-Semitism, intolerance towards foreign cultures, and the totalitarianism of Hitler’s National Socialism can be found in prominent architectural projects such as Peter Eisenman’s Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. The highly abstract architectural language of these projects endeavors to minimize a holistic interpretation of a national memory and aspires to convey a stronger impact on the emotions and intuition of the visitors. Berlin, as the new capital of a reunified Germany, is obligated to become a powerful milieu of the commemoration of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Monuments and museums are the two most commonly accepted means of commemorative actions. In 1989, journalist Lea Rosh launched a campaign that proposed the construction of a “high-profile” monument for the Holocaust, and it was endorsed by key cultural and political figures in Germany such as Willy Brandt, Günter Grass, and Christa Wolf (Foundation for the murdered Jews of Europe, 2008). After a long-running period of debates and selection of design plans from 1994 and 1999, a final resolution was made by the German Bundestag to build the memorial, later known as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (the Holocaust Memorial in short). Designed by world-famous architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold, the memorial, which consists of 2711 stelae made of high-quality concrete, each measuring 0.95 m in width and 2.38 m in length, occupies the heart of Berlin in a total area of 19,073 m2 (Figure 3 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe). This memorial, being in the vicinity of major political, cultural, and business areas such as the embassy district, the Tiergarten, and Pariser Platz, tends to display its highly public and civil society-oriented nature (Foundation for the murdered Jews of Europe, 2008). It was opened to the public in 2005, with an estimated number of 3.5 million visitors in the first year. The German Bundestag paid around EUR25 million, which is 1000 times more than the initial budget, to complete this national project.

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Figure 3: Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

The case of the Holocaust Memorial, which shows a democratic stance that is directed both to Germany’s domestic discourse and to the global society, reveals how “post-Wall” Berlin urban space is made. First, the immediate proposal for the erection of a Holocaust memorial in the same year when the Berlin Wall fell shows a close connection between the Holocaust memory and a renewed German national identity. According to Carrier, “Holocaust Monument in Berlin is primarily an expression of the search for a normalization of national self-understanding on the basis of Holocaust remembrance and only secondarily an appeal to remember and thereby attempt to understand the historical, ethical, and political consequences of the persecution and genocide of the Second World War for the life of both Jews and non-Jews in the present” (Carrier 27–28). Second, the longterm debates on the various aspects (i.e., moral concerns, political tension, choice of location and form, etc.) of the construction of such a memorial demonstrates Germany’s tolerance and patience in soliciting opinions from different interests in its commemorative culture. In 45

fact, the debates on the construction of the monument became a monument to Germany’s democratization. Third, the high costs involved in building the Memorial subtly imply the contrast between the modesty of national stance in taking up historical responsibility and the powerful economic capacity of Germany. Fourth, the Memorial, as suggested by its name, was not only dedicated to the Jewish victims in Germany but also to the victims throughout Europe. The Memorial does not fail to convey the message that Germany is Europe’s Germany and that it is ready to take the lead towards the future of a more unified European Union as one of the greatest regional powers in globalization. The Holocaust Memorial speaks of nationhood to a global audience. The passion of its visitors and its highly visible location both enhance the new image of Berlin and the new Germany. Neither satisfied with its provinciality of the Bonn Republic nor half-hidden behind the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Republic is open, civilized, cosmopolitan, and modern. Therefore, the discourse on the Holocaust Memorial reaches out to the self-definition of national identity, on which the assessment of the historical legacy and the prospect of German modernization is based. The memory of German Nazism and its aftermath, especially the Holocaust, is consolidated in the 2711 stelae to stir the globalized consciousness of the failure and the devastating results of the Enlightenment modernity. However, the spatial relationship the memorial establishes with its environment also provides visitors with an opportunity to experience a better version of the modern, the democratic modern, with strong resolution and confidence. This representation of today’s German modernity differs little from the Cold War Western ideology in which the Holocaust stood for the task of the democratic West of protecting “the good and innocent and fight against ‘evil’ (regimes that perpetrate crimes against humanity) to prevent such a rupture from happening again” (Till 161). According to Karen Till, the Holocaust Memorial is a “memory-work” (Erinnerungsarbeit), which can be defined as a place reserved for the imagination of a better future after past national traumatic events. Moreover, “it is a powerful, albeit difficult, way to live with the ongoing presence of modernity’s ghosts” (Till 18).

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Nevertheless, this dichotomy of good and evil requires further clarification, as the constitution of today’s western society is still under the project of modernity in the package of Enlightenment, rationality, bureaucracy, and social exclusion. In his popular book Modernity and the Holocaust, Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman denies the fact that the genocide was a break or special case in modern civilization or that the mass destruction of human beings was a recession to the pre-modern barbarism. Instead, the Holocaust was a result of the modern rational society at its peak stage. It was the modern ideals of bureaucracy, the “matter-of-fact efficiency,” the “rational criteria of choice,” and “its tendency to subordinate thought and action to the pragmatics of economy and effectiveness” that made the Holocaust conceivable (Bauman 13). Perhaps the recognition of this ambivalent legacy of modernity can explain the difficulty in deciding upon the shape of the memorial. On one hand, a well-ciphered representation of the national consensus is avoided, as the modernist grand narrative of history and its associations with a monolithically imagined nation-state are controversial. On the other hand, the design of the memorial cannot be too radical so as to shatter the central national symbols such as the Brandenburg Gate.1 Therefore, the reason why the finalized form of the Holocaust Memorial designed by Eisenman expresses a strong postmodern intention free from any hermeneutic representation is not difficult to understand. He used abstraction, not highly suggestive signs, as an escape from any hegemonic interpretation. As the official introductory pamphlet of the Holocaust Memorial explains, This design represents a radical approach to the traditional concept of a memorial, partly because he (Eisenman) does not use any symbolism. The grid pattern, consisting of 2,711 concrete stelae, which can be walked through from all sides, leaves it up to visitors to find their own way in and out of the complex. (Foundation of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 2008)

1

According to Jordan, “Many proposals were rejected in part because they might be too disruptive to daily life or to central national symbols. A prime example was a suggestion for the central Holocaust Memorial that required grinding up the Brandenburg Gate” (Jordan 124).

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The Holocaust Memorial does not completely fail to achieve its original goal with the help of the underground information center that offers detailed historical materials for visitors’ reference. A memorial of abstract signs still calls for the elucidation with language, the fundamental system of signs, even for a local audience. Although the nonfigurative representation of historical trauma maximizes the possibility of multiple interpretations, it is arguably less easy to identify emotionally with, especially for the young visitors and tourists, as they are often seen running around the stelae to play hide-and-seek. The distancing effect of a memorial dedicated to a national memory is not exclusive to the case of the Holocaust Memorial. The visibility of a monument does not guarantee its visual centrality. The intensity of the commemoration in one centralized place in the city highlights the symbolic meaning of the monument. However, it also runs the danger of shedding the responsibility to a ritualized space of anonymity. This situation does not improve itself even if one considers the appeal of the Holocaust Memorial to global community. It is easier for the tourists to detach themselves from the local and national discourse, taking the historical event as a special case that occurs only in another place and at another time that do not disturb their own memory. As Huyssen points out, “while the comparison with the Holocaust may rhetorically energize some discourses of traumatic memory, it may also serve as a screen memory or simply block insight into specific local histories” (Huyssen 2003, 14). After all, tourism is about experiencing the other and the different. The experience of a new locality ceases when tourists enter Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts near the memorial. Global capitalism further boosts the indifferent sense to a localized time and space. In this way, a monument may accelerate forgetting by blocking the continuum of history with a fake sense of finality. Therefore, the aspect of the “present” in understanding Jewish memory or memory elsewhere is particularly worth observing in terms of the post-unification commemoration of the Holocaust. Traditional monuments and museums that serve to present past experience are easily institutionalized as places that exclude the on-going status quo. Re-invoking Jewish memory, in particular, is based on the fact that the Jewish community and culture are no longer alive in today’s Berlin 48

because of the mass deportation and genocide. “Living Jews are not seen because they are not understood to be present, even while their presence is the means by which other groups are constructed” (Carrier 27–28). The memory of the Jewish culture, of its great contribution to German culture, which was annihilated together with Jewish lives, is not included much on the national commemorative agenda. There is a risk that the more the Jewish memory is emphasized as a specific category in the commemorative culture, the more the Jews are considered the other in the current German society. The high-profile of the projects may only verge on symbolic level, rather than becoming true driving forces that promote the livelihood of a Jewish community in Berlin. Paradoxically, although the attack on cleansing German history aims at forgetting its Nazi past, the construction of memorials for the remembrance of the genocide can be doubted for the same reason of its potential history-purifying effect.

Memory of the Nazi State Machine and National Atrocity: Topography of Terrors The Holocaust and the devastation of Germany seem to prove Zygmunt Bauman’s argument that disasters are consequences instead of exceptions of modernity. Immediately after the Second World War, Germany experienced a long-term standstill in terms of understanding the question of what being German really is. History itself has blocked the way for Germans to identify with their past, as the past was an unimaginable trauma. The succeeding Cold War and the erection of the Berlin Wall further plunged Berlin into the abyss of the confrontation between two major modern ideologies: capitalism and communism. In the former West Berlin, discussions and debates on the memorials for war memories were staged alongside the democratization of West Germany. The fall of the Berlin Wall perpetrated the unfolding of the old and the new, and the East and the West sites of memory for both WWII and the Cold War, which ironically remind Berliners of the memory of the suspension of memory. The refusal to resolving history by leaving the “open wounds” and sites of the perpetrators in Berlin’s urban space is seen in different locations such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church 49

(Gedächtnisskirche), the exhibition terrain “Topography of Terror,” the Stasi Museum, and Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Street, among others. These are the sites of memory for warning and reminding significant periods of German modern and contemporary history and its consequences.

Figure 4: Topography of Terror.

Berlin has many deep wounds in its urban tissues. Known as “Topography of Terror,” the previous administrative center of National Socialism from 1933 to 1945 was re-exposed to daylight and was used as a temporary exhibition space for the crimes and operations of Nazi political organizations (Figure 4 Topography of Terror). In response to the proposal of a memorial to the victims of Fascism by historian Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm, a competition eliciting designs for the memorial was announced in 1983 and was endorsed by Richard von Weizsaecker, the Berlin mayor at that time. However, due to various reasons, no memorial was built on the site, and a new competition was initiated in 1992 under the title “Topography of Terrors.” 50

Alongside the former site of the Berlin Wall, south of Potsdamerand Leipziger Platz, the site is considered the headquarter of terrors of the Third Reich: the Gestapo (German for the Secret State Police), the SS, and the Reich Security main office.2 It is described as a hellish historical site where “the genocide of German and European Jews was planned,” “the SS command centre for all occupied territories was situated,” and “in the Gestapo prison at 8 Prinz-Albrecht Street, the opponents of National Socialism were detained, tortured, and killed” (Balfour 64). Before a new building, the Documentation Center for the NS crimes, was completed, an open-air exhibition with a large number of photographs and texts was held along the now Niederkirchner Street. The open-air atmosphere of the exhibition, in which everyone could stop to read and contemplate the visual materials, seemed to echo the core idea of the to-be-finished building: “Kommunikation und Transparenz” (communication and transparency). In accordance with the mission of the Topography of Terror Foundation, the site was intended to “provide historical information about National Socialism and its crimes as well as to stimulate active confrontation with this history and its impact since 1945.”3 Refusal to forget and repress the memory is clearly stated as the aim of the memorial. It tries to invoke the Foucaultian “subjugated knowledge” of the past in the sense that no original experience of trauma is retrievable so that the past can only be traced through the remains of memory: images, objects, texts, stories, and other spatial and temporal representations (Sturken 9). According to James E. Young, “Left unresolved, the memorial project at the Gestapo-Gelände flourished precisely because it contests memory – because it continues to challenge, exasperate, edify, and invite visitors into a dialogue between themselves and their past” (Carrier 216).

2

3

Schutzstaffel (German for “Protective Squadron”) is the security service for the Reichsfuehrer, an organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party responsible for some of the major crimes of the Hitler regime such as the Holocaust. See under Topography of Terror Foundation .

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Therefore, what is being negotiated and what memory is being invoked? Perhaps because of the authenticity of the site of history in this case, a striking contrast exists between the shock effect of the terrifying memories and the banality of the site itself. One of the darkest human crimes that took place in the venue left nothing of the actual horrible visibility. For most visitors, only their imagination of the terrors, with the help of texts, images, and the walking experience, can make chills run up their spine. What is more frightening is to realize the similarity of the entire Nazi political system to any of the modern bureaucratic system that is still valid today. The “Schreibtischtäter,” or the “working desk perpetrators,” are fundamental embodiments of a power structure of a modern nation-state.4 In the GDR, for example, their counterparts were people who were responsible for the “Schießbefehle” (firing order) that aimed at intimidating East Germans from fleeing to the West, which also happened in the same site. Then, the Topography of Terror can be understood not only as a warning to the fading past but more to a tangible present that still has contested meanings of modernity. The preserved terrains, like the Berlin Wall, Hiroshima, and Auswitz, are all part of the legacies of modern times. They are symbols of “the problems of the nation and of the crisis of Western modernity” (Till 134). As a common crisis for human beings, the role of Topography of Terror as an international piece of memory work also comes into play. Many experts consider it an important site where a more humanitarian future can be prompted by exchanges among various cultures at a global level (Till 136). The global culture of memory appears to encourage the confrontation with and interaction between past and present by “discussions about how to remember the past have morphed into an international debate about human rights, restitution, and justice, replete with NGOs …human rights activism in the world today depends very much on the depth and breadth of memory discourse in the public media” (Huyssen 2003, 95–96.) However, the

4

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This term refers to the high-ranking officials (e.g., Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Müller) that ordered the planned massacres committed by the Nazi regime. They were never involved in the actual slaughtering but were people who were authorized and decided upon the crime of killing. They were the perpetrators at the working desks.

paradoxical process of differentiating modernity from barbarism is not unique to the history of Germany.

Scar of the City: War Memory and the Kaiser William Memorial Church The remains of the Kaiser William Memorial Church in the business center of West Berlin, Kufürstendamm, are undoubtedly a memorial to the city of Berlin as a victim of the Second World War. (Figure. 5 Kaiser William Memorial Church) Dedicated to the grandfather of Kaiser William II of Prussia, Kaiser William I, the Church was opened to the public in 1906. The neo-Romanesque architecture with splendid mosaic decorations on the interior walls and a 133-meter high spire became the landmark of Berlin, a portal of the inner city. Huge congregations and grand weddings took place in the church, with a capacity of around 2,000 persons. The prominent position of the church determined its fate in the Second Word War air raid in Berlin in November 1943: the church was severely damaged by the bombing and was left in ruins, with deformed fragments of the mosaic and half a spire remnant. After the war, entries for project designs for its reconstruction were requested for a competition. Egon Eiermann’s plan, which intends to preserve the original war ruins of the church and at the same time build two additional buildings as the new functional chapel and a foyer on both sides of the old architecture, won. The complete new complex of the church was built in 1963, and since then, it has become another iconic image of Berlin. During the Cold War, the Memorial Church and the Berlin Wall were the deepest scars visible on the body of Berlin. In Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), the opening scene shows the church against a gray sky from the eyes of children on the street. An angel is standing on the edge of the broken spire, looking down upon Berlin that appears to be banal and anonymous. The enormous remains dwarf the pedestrians coming and going; nobody notices the church except the children with their innocent eyes. However, Berliners are aware of the scar, as the film later poetically suggests, which seems to be in the heart of each Berliner.

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Figure 5: Kaiser William Memorial Church.

Despite the fact that other significant landmarks such as the Holocaust Memorial, Brandenburg Gate, and the Reichstag Building are under more spotlight in today’s Berlin, the Memorial Church remains one of the most unique war monuments in the city where more fragments than intactness are found. The ruined church, not the reconstruction of it, speaks for its meaning, as the introductory text of the church reads as follows: You are kindly asked to remember that the former vestibule of the old church is not a museum, but a place of remembrance, contemplation, and exhortation. On this side you see not only pictures from peaceful times, but also from an epoch of brutal dictatorship which led to the destruction of war, and further scenes that depict people’s urge to rebuild. They are a challenge to us all to constantly resist the solution of political problems by means of war. On the opposite side, the damaged statue of Christ from the altar of the old church and the Cross of Nails from the Coventry call us to reconciliation and understanding – the basis of peaceful relationships between peoples and nations. (Status 2008)

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The fragmented edifice defies the myth of modernity that is characterized by progressiveness. One finds that the church was not only literally devastated by the consequence of modern war but was also threatened by the formation of a modern society. In 1933, demands were expressed to demolish the symbol of monarchy. The disfavor was fueled by the expansion of the metropolitan traffic. In the middle of the Breitscheidplatz and adjacent to the Berlin Zoo area, which is one of the busiest nodes of Berlin traffic where railways, buses, trams, cars, and subways intersected, the church was regarded as an obstruction to the hectic crossroads.5 However, the church survived. After the air raid, it remained standing, increasing its local significance. Now, the Memorial Church receives hundreds of visitors every day to be appalled by the ruins of the altar and mosaic wall that are still visible. Bearing the warning of the destructive power of wars and the necessity of peace and reconciliation, the still standing ruins of the church defamiliarize the urban landscape by leaving the scar open to the city’s visuality; it has become the Benjaminian allegory of modernism that casts doubt on coherent symbolism and integrity. Nevertheless, the preservation of the ruins of modernity has become a work of modernity itself.

Remembering the Cold War and the Other Half of Berlin: Stasi Museum and Berlin Wall Museum Although not as popular as other museums in Berlin, Stasi Museum casts similar doubt on modern barbarism in the original site of the perpetrators’ desks. Situated in an offbeat area in Berlin-Lichtenberg, the museum that was restored in the complex building of the former East German Ministry of State security not only uncovered the mysterious mask of the headquarter of the once most effective secret police in the world but also showed a variety of technological gadgets they used (Figure. 6 Stasi Museum exterior (right) and interior (left)). The well-manipulated web of information control system of stasi (German abbreviation for: Staatssicherheit, or, State Security) and its aftermaths had undoubtedly left an incurable wound for a large number of East 5

Explanatory texts in the church: Status 2008.

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Berliners. Stasi members, who could be any ordinary citizen of the GDR, were actually on the verge of betraying anyone, no matter how intimate they were with that person, by reporting his/her thoughts that could obviously or potentially be anti-government. The betrayed were tortured and intimidated to achieve total control of public opinions. The way it functioned is an example par excellence that represents the superimposition of state interest over individual interest, even at the cost of damaging basic familial or interpersonal networks of trust. It also illustrates how the political system can invoke one of the ugliest sides of humanity. However, the exhibition in the museum, similar to that of the Topography of Terror, reveals no trace of sensational crimes. What can be seen today are the original look of the offices with desks, sofas, beds, and photos of leading officials in the Stasi on the wall. No sign of violence and mass destruction exists, only equally banal bureaucratic settings and neutral images of the bureaucrats. The exhibition of security gargets for eavesdropping information is similar to a show on the technological inventions of the GDR with a touch of irony. Technological modernity, as the exhibits suggested, was utilized by the ideology to facilitate the affirmation of its state interests. Interestingly, the only violence visible is in the photos of the demonstration and the occupation of East Berliners in 1990. In these images, they expressed in their effort to express their rage against the long-term oppression and to prevent the Stasi members from destroying the files that would prove them guilty.

Figure 6: Stasi Museum exterior and interior.

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Good reasons exist for the limited popularity of the museum, although it claims to be a memorial of the victims of the past authoritarian regime and of the victory of democracy and freedom in its introduction. Studies show that visitors from the former West Germany are more interested in visiting the once mysterious sectors of their neighboring state machines than the former East citizens (“Mauergedenken mit Ost-Quote” 19). Compared with that on the Nazi perpetrations, the story of the Stasi seems to be part of history that is harder to face. This situation may be a result of its close proximity to the present, as for a large number of the East Berliners, the memories of the past are still fresh and vivid. The public’s reluctance and ambivalence in confronting their past and their present that they struggle to live in are difficult. The ongoing effects of the previous regime are a reminder of the psychological division of Berlin after the reunification. Reports about the ignorance of the knowledge of the GDR among the young people across Germany are said to be combined with the sophisticated nostalgia of the older generation of East Germany (Wolz 6). Thus, reunification is not solely perceived as an end but a beginning of another ordeal. It seems too early to claim the victory of a single kind of ideology, as what modern society brings always proves to be a dual legacy of both progress and destruction. Another important site that commemorates the Cold War Berlin in its divided status is the Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Street. The museum focuses on how fatal the Cold War was for East Berliners and the whole Berlin City (Figure 7 Berlin Walled Museum). The surrounding area, which is not painted so flamboyantly as the part of the Wall that is now turned into an “East Side Gallery,” is the original site of one of the most well-known points of the artificial fortification that divided the city. The memorial, or the Gedenkstätte, consists of a 70 meter-long segment of the original border corridor, the Documentation Center, and a rebuilt Chapel of Reconciliation.6 The ensemble mainly provides historical information about the history of the Berlin Wall and commemorating its victims: the people who were shot dead 6

The original piece of wall corridor is “inaccessible now as it was then. It comprises the border wall and the hinterland wall, the death strip, a sentry path, gooseneck street lamps, and a transformer for the electricified fence.” Description taken from Information Board on the Potsdamer Platz: Status: June, 2008.

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during their unsuccessful escape from the East and the city that was divested of a whole piece of a once thriving neighborhood.7 The inscription on the Memorial plaque reads: “In memory of the division of the city from August 13, 1961 to November 9, 1989 and of the victims of Communist Tyranny”.

Figure 7: Berlin Wall Museum.

The exhibition in the Documentation Center on display since 2001 entitled “Berlin, August 13, 1961” shows the historical moment of the construction of the Wall before a multitude of observers and media attention. Using audio, archival documents, photos taken by the Allied photographers, and two film clips shot by British and American reporters, the exhibition tries to offer well-rounded and factual information about this central moment of German postwar history. Seminars and 7

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“Rows of houses, a church, a train station and even parts of the graveyard were destroyed to give way to the erection of the Wall.” Description taken from Information Board on the Potsdamer Platz: Status: June, 2008.

talks on the Berlin Wall history and relevant topics are constantly held in the center. On the viewing platform erected in 2003, one can have a broad view of this still prominent scar in the urban landscape. Efforts to remember the Wall are obvious and staunch, but they are also accompanied by equally strong efforts to forget it. Before the actual building of the Memorial, the vast open land was suggested to be another site for new urban housing projects or a traffic transit center. Other oppositions came from the neighboring health center because of the Wall’s depressing effects on their patients. A more thorny resistance was caused by the confusion of property rights due to the changes in political situations. After 1989, the nearby St. Sophia Parish claimed that they owned the part of site where the memorial would be built (Ladd 33). Perhaps the memorial itself also implies a certain degree of distance from the arduous searching of a lucid definition of the historical events, but it rather expresses a yearning to return to the original nature of human space and architecture. The modestly shaped new Chapel of the Reconciliation (Figure 8 The New Chapel of Reconciliation) is a unique reconstruction of the large Church of the Reconciliation, which was destroyed by the East German Government in 1985 because of “security reasons.” The original large Church of the Reconciliation was constructed in 1894 when Berlin was flourishing as Europe’s largest industrial city. As in many other metropolises, a large number of immigrant workers from the countryside swarmed into Berlin to work under miserable living conditions. The decision to construct the church was based on this social environment (Shen 295). The Evangelical Reconciliation Parish offered help and psychological comfort to the labor forces during the boom of capitalism in the city. The communist regime disliked the bulky construction, which survived the air raid in the Second World War, standing on the border between the two fighting camps, constantly reminding it of the division of the city. It was the desire to ignore the Wall, not to remember it, similar to what the memorial tries to do, that destroyed the church. The young chapel, despite its being a part of the memorial, also seems to convey a message of a neutral attitude towards all past memories. Two Berlin local architects, Peter Sassenroth and Rudolf Reitermann, won the first prize in the competition initiated by the parish to which the ownership 59

of the land, where the original church stood, belonged. In place of the original church’s Gothic revival style, the chapel is simply an oval structure made of rammed earth and encased in wooden framework. The use of ancient constructing materials, the extraordinarily low cost of construction (EUR950,000; constructed by volunteer construction workers from 14 European countries, assistance from Technical University Berlin, and generous donations), and the concise and moderate designs of both exterior and interior made the church an easily overlooked point of dialogue between the past and the present (Shen 297). Its ready-to-be-forgottenness is simultaneously modern and anti-modern by alienating history from the current visual and spatial experiences. The place that witnessed all the stormy changes in the modern and contemporary Berlin history leaves the choice to remember and to forget open to all possibilities.

Figure 8: The New Chapel of Reconciliation.

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II. The Restoration of National Symbols: Political Landmarks in Berlin In the new capital of Berlin, parallel to the efforts in bringing memories of the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the Cold War into the cognition of public historical consciousness, there is a need to build up the historically meaningful awareness of Germany as a unified modern nation. In contrast to the abovementioned narratives that are largely linked to the memory of the wartime traumas, the renewed awareness of German unity seems only to include reminders of Germany’s pre-modern identity. The nineteenth-century symbolism proves that it still has not lost all its validity. Some of the most significant spatial representations of today’s Berlin are architectural relics from that period of time, specifically, Brandenburg Gate, the Victory Column, and the Reichstag building. The imagery of Germany’s unity is, in some respects, accessible only by circumventing the memories of two world wars and the division of Germany. Moreover, the urban architectural style of present-day Berlin has also witnessed a surge of a nostalgically retrospective way of change. In the heart of the New Berlin, efforts have been made in retrieving the lost glories and traditions in the name of the criticism on late modern urban planning. Debates on these symbolic sites and the restored Berlin landmarks clearly mirror the dilemma in understanding Berlin modernity. The memories and the history of the two world wars and their aftermath have to be the fundamental components of national rebuilding, but they are not yet sufficiently integrated into what defines today’s German identity. Architectural symbolism has a central position in understanding the cultural identity of a community. To identify with a landmark of a certain architectural style is to identify the group’s vision of self-understanding. This connection between spatial symbolism and community’s identity is particularly evident in contemporary cities, where the construction of modern architecture and the preservation of historical architectural relics are constantly at odds. Berlin demonstrates such tension in a more sophisticated way. They city underwent

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not only a long-term partition of space and ideology but also several dramatic changes in status: from a historical capital to an oddly marginal half-capital, half political island, and back to the new capital of a new nation-state. I mentioned previously that the commemorative landmarks committed to the Holocaust memory actually play an important role in the normalization of German history. Interestingly, the mainstream political desire to unify German identity is simultaneously realized by the re-imaging of Berlin’s own grandeur. However, this grandeur of the new capital has to be extracted from traditions with no direct allusion to the traumatic national memories. Cases of the reestablishment of national identity by restoring past splendors of national cultural heritages have already been observed in German cities in both former West and East Germany. Among the most well-known examples are the Frauenkirche in Dresden (Vees-Gulani 143) and the Braunschweig Palace in Lower Saxony. In Berlin, symbolic landmarks that promote renewed imagination of national identity are regarded as the more significant indicators of Germany’s self-positioning of its international image. The fear of the return of a repressed and fading nationalistic mania puts Berlin’s symbolism under great suspicion. Jürgen Habermas warns that such effort of normalizing German history by reconnecting the present with the prewar Berlin poses a great threat to Germany in its hope of becoming an open and plural society (Cochrane 7). However, Helmut Kohl, the Chancellor of German unification, does not see the restoration of a healthy national consciousness and facing historical traumas as mutually exclusive, “saying that Germany ‘needs to stand before our entire history,’ rather than demonize its past, a statement indicating impatience with those the chancellor saw as focusing too much attention on the twelve years of Nazi rule” (Wise 116). Clearly, he was not satisfied with the provinciality of the Bonn government architectures that do not show self-confidence but instead highly controlled images of the Cold War West Germany (Koepnick 2001a, 2001b). The self-imagery of Berlin is also closely connected with symbolic economy, the image-based strategy of a contemporary city in

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upholding cultural attraction for more investments and more flows of elite groups (Binder 21). “The symbolic economy,” Binder quotes Sharon Zukin, “features two parallel production systems that are crucial to a city’s economic growth: the production of space with its synergy of capital investment and cultural meanings, and the production of symbols, which construct both a currency of commercial exchange and a language of social identity (Zukin 2000, 82)” (Binder 21). Berlin, like other major European cities, is primarily producing and reproducing images of historical heritages “with its specific notions of ‘urbanity,’ historical ‘depth,’ and continuity” (Binder 21). Berlin does not lack (on the contrary has too many) places that are able to generate reservoir of historical meanings. The relatively bleak economic situation in the reunified capital also requires an immediate capitalization on its abundant resources of historical images to guarantee its power in marketing itself at all levels: the national, the regional, and the global. Thus, Berlin becomes a site of mass consumption of spectacles and the center of symbolic politics (Koepnick 2001b, 303).

Brandenburg Gate and Victory Column: Symbols of Prussian Militarism Today, the world’s largest New Year’s Eve open-air party is held yearly in Berlin; taking the Brandenburg Gate (Figure 9 Brandenburg Gate), the Victory Column (Figure 10 Victory Column), and the Street of 17th June as spaces for the so-called open-end discotheque in the open sky. Since 1995, the carnival celebration has advertised itself as taking place between two of the most well-accepted national symbols in Berlin. Both memorials, although hardly invoking memories of the violent warfare, are originally monuments in remembrance of the military strength of Prussia. Again, in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, the angelic view from the top of the Victory Column where the Goddess of Germania stands, implies the incompleteness of the city: the angel Damiel hurriedly turns his head after a quick glance at the seemingly impenetrable East

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Berlin. As the film was shot two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Victory Column was taken as a significant national symbol, as only very few monumental structures could be found in West Berlin. The panoramic view from the forgotten Berlin landmark suggests the desire to overcome opposition and division; however, just like Benjamin’s angel, the strong wind of progress seems to prevent Damiel from looking back and forward, entrapping him in the present violence, in a tension between the modern sense of belonging and the postmodern sense of fragmentation. Noticeably, Damiel is an angel who is fascinated by the trivial existence in the human world. His desire to turn himself into a flesh-and-blood human being resembles the nation’s desire for normalization – even if this metamorphosis is against the sublimity of his being.

Figure 9: The Brandenburg Gate.

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Figure 10: The Victory Column.

Originally created for the successive military victories of Prussia, the 220-foot Victory Column now appears on postcards and travel guides as one of the least controversial symbols of Berlin. It survived the post-reunification debate on its destruction because of its image as a “symbol of German national self-importance, claims to imperial power, and the glorification of militarism and war” (Ladd 199–200). Aside from surviving, it has also successfully transformed itself into the center of the Love Parade, one of the largest street festivals in Europe that has its roots in the political demonstrations and parades celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall. Originating from the liberal air in 1989, the annual parade moved from its original venue Kufuerstendamm, the commercial center of West Berlin, to the “Straße des 17. Juni” (the Street of 17th June), where the Victory Column serves as the gathering point for the 65

crowd attending the carnival. The flamboyant festivalization of Berlin featuring techno music, alternative culture, and youth culture has been gaining a great deal of cultural capital for the New Berlin. Fitting into this background, the golden Goddess of Germania has shed away its image of a melancholic national allegory of the invincible division. Instead, it has turned into a symbol of an open Germany of plurality. Barrack Obama, a candidate for the US presidency at that time and was later elected US president, delivered his 2008 speech in the backdrop of the Column. Partly, the choice of the location was based on the convenient, enormous space of the surrounding area for the massive crowd. Moreover, it was because he was still not the US president then. Only the Brandenburg Gate, upon whose setting Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton gave their speeches, has enough political significance in providing its highest symbolism of German identity for the world stage. The Brandenburg Gate, which is found on the flipside of the German version of the one euro coin, is the most important national emblem of the reunified Germany. One of the reasons may lie in its close relation with the German history of national resistance, establishment, and division. After Napoleon won the war over Prussia in 1806, the quadriga on top of the Gate was taken down as his war booty and transported to France by the order of Napoleon. The indignity left the Gate as a symbol of Prussian and later German resistance (Ladd 74). In 1814, the defeat of Napoleon was entailed by the triumphant return of the quadriga, integrated with the famous Iron Cross and Prussian eagle designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel into today’s German’s national icon. A military parade through the Brandenburg Gate has also become a sign of the conquering of the capital Berlin and in turn, the German Empire since the time of Napoleon. The Brandenburg Gate witnessed the Prussian defeat of France and then the unification of Germany in 1871, the marching troops during World War I, and the long queue of Nazi soldiers holding torches and running through the Gate of Victory. Leni Liefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) documented the last grand occasion, which marks Hitler’s seizure of power when he was elected chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933 (Ladd 75).

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The construction of the Berlin wall, which ran behind the Brandenburg Gate, symbolized the nation and the city’s separation since 1961. Only partly visible from the West Side and with strictly restricted access, the Brandenburg Gate was in fact part of the Wall and made the Cold War tension highly conspicuous. Toward the end of the division of Germany, Ronald Reagan, who stood against the back of the quadriga, hailed the opening of the Wall. Five years later, it was, unexpectedly, actually opened. The Gate was unveiled again in the un-walled Berlin, despite many new problems. Its initial connotations of German nationalistic pride and Prussian military ambition were again debated. However, people from both West and East Berlin greatly welcomed the return of the Gate back to its place as the symbol of the Berlin Republic, as they had an unobstructed view of the quadriga facing the direction of Berlin’s inner town (Ladd 80). The narrative of the Brandenburg Gate began from the unified German identity that was marked by Germany’s defeat over France. It is now reborn with a victory over its own division.

Stadtschloss: Undoing Historical Mistakes Despite their changing situations, the Victory Column and the Brandenburg Gate were kept intact and less controversial than the other reclaimed symbol of Berlin after the reunification: the reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace (Berliner Stadtschloss). The complexity of this case is embedded first in the restoration of the demolished symbolic architecture, and second in the demolition of its preceding structure, the Palace of the Republic (Palast der Republik) (Figure 11 Palace of the Republic during demolition), on which I will elaborate more in the last part of the book.

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Figure 11: Palace of the Republic in Demolition.

The supporters of the restoration of the Stadtschloss see it as a crucial element in Berlin’s self-identity by claiming that “it isn’t that the Schloss was located in Berlin, rather Berlin is located in the Schloss” (Boym 181). The ruins of the heavily bombed Prussian royal palace, after its short-term use as venue for exhibitions, were demolished by the order of then GDR leader Walter Ulbricht in 1950. Thus, today’s determined reconstruction of the Palace is usually considered a refutation of the past political barbarism and an effort in undoing, if not taking revenge on, the previous mistake. The nostalgic return of Stadtschloss again proves Berlin’s fervor for the symbolism of classicalism. The memory of Berlin’s division as an aftermath of Germany’s defeat in the war it waged is not favored; neither is the uncivilized erasure of historical relics. Thus, the loss has to be compensated at best. A key figure on the side that insists on the reconstruction of Berlin in its prewar style was Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm. He regards the restored Stadtschloss as “a third city” where shared, instead of a divided, memory of East and West can be invoked (Boym 186). In this view, the division of Germany is seen as an interruption in German history and can be continued only through the restoration of the

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classical landmarks. Retrieving what was lost is a way of normalizing German history. Taken as an antithesis to the modern architecture in Berlin, the supporters underscore the dialogic nature of reconstructing the “memory of the lost” with the contemporary image of a young and aspiring Berlin. They argue that, contrary to the feared amnesia of the Nazi era and the division of Berlin, it is only through the reconstruction of the Palace that the memory of the war and the dictatorship can be relived (Siebeck 2007, 96). Svetlana Boym questions the validity of this manner of understanding history in terms of symbolic space: “Schloss should not be considered merely a symbol, but rather a site, a memorial topos, a place for critical and reflective memory: ‘The Schloss is needed to remind us of the unmastered history’” (Boym 184). The seemingly anti-modern stance of restoring the vanished royal landmark also reflects the dilemma in delineating the line between the early European urban modernity and late modern ideals of functionalism. While the former promotes a relatively peaceful civil society and national integrity through symbolism, aesthetics of the latter shows less interest in decorative symbolism.

Reichstag: Visualizing the Invisible The national parliament building Reichstag is undoubtedly among the most popular touristic attractions in today’s Berlin. Among all the other landmarks in Berlin, the Reichstag building with the glass cupola designed by Sir Norman Forster can be seen as an example that reflects all the problems I have discussed above: it is a national symbol, a reconstructed classical architecture, and a blend of different modernist styles (Fig. 12 Reichstag). As a symbol of the unity of the German Reich, the first parliament building of the Empire that opened in 1894 was burned down in 1933, an incidence that empowered the Nazis in their expunging of communist power in Germany and paved the way for Hitler’s coming into power. The building itself was underused during the Nazi era and was damaged further during the air raid in 1945. The Reichstag building lost most of its symbolic

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value for German national and political identity. Situated close to the Wall, the building was also not restored in proper order during the Cold War years. It was also not until the German reunification and the relocation of Berlin as Germany’s capital that the re-embellishment of Reichstag appeared on the agenda of Berlin’s urban renewal. In 1992, world-famous architect Sir Norman Forster won the contest that solicited a new cupola for then to-be-reconstructed Reichstag building. The iconic huge glass cupola tops the well-reconstructed main body of the neo-Baroque building, whose interior was restructured entirely into a modern style. Those who pass the strict security control are allowed to enter the building, climb up the spiral slanting ground to the top of the dome, and enjoy a 360° panoramic view at the heart of Berlin City.

Figure 12: The Reichstag Building.

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Sir Foster’s design seems to carry on the legacy of the building’s original designer –Paul Wallot (1841–1912)–and his understanding of how this building could stand for Germany’s political ideals. The original cupola of the 19th century was created with the same material Sir Foster used: glass. The symbolic connotation of this material arguably also remains the same, that is, to symbolize political transparency and German democracy. The dome’s open access, together with the unrestricted grassy ground in front of the Reichstag building, conveys the message of a reinvented German modernity: traditional and modern, monumental and transient. Like the Eiffel Tower for Roland Barthes, it became both the subject and object of tourists’ gaze. In post-Wall Berlin, the people craved for it because it offers the pleasure of a highly detached view to gain an intact knowledge of Berlin. The new Reichstag cupola could make Wenders’ angel’s view from the top of the Victory Column now unnecessary: ordinary people can look down upon a demystified or re-mystified mapping of the unified Berlin. Forster’s dome further legitimized the symbolic power of Berlin architecture by turning the view of the whole city into a representation of German national identity. Prior to the Reichstag’s reconstruction, Bulgarian artist Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude wrapped the building with white cloth in 1995. The performance attracted enormous public attention. Without any clear explanation from the artists themselves, the wrapping is considered an effort to unveil the invisible and thus make it visible (Cochrane 2006; Huyssen 2003; Hanssen 1998), that is, to re-invoke the memory of Reichstag as the departure point of a unified Germany. Thus, the wrapping is also understood as an action of whitewashing German history through ritual of purification of the blemishes in the national memory in Germany’s postnationalism (Hanssen 352). However, the temporality of the wrapping action also puts the historical “now” in exigency. The veiling suggests a strong denial of the monumentality of the national symbol. Although the unveiled and reconstructed building itself remains a modernist monument in its own right, the wrapping left in it a long-term legacy that is of a counter-monument nature by defamiliarizing it provisionally. In

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this sense, today’s image of Reichstag is an interesting blend of a concrete monument and a persisting memory of its anti-monumentality. A renewed national myth realized by the modern symbolism of glass exists alongside the postmodern counter-narrative of it. Parallel to this is the discrepancy between the global and local understandings of the Reichstag after the sensational wrapping incident: although tourists may think that the Reichstag building should be the most important national symbol of today’s Germany, local Berliners hardly identify themselves with it given its vague and relatively unimportant history in Berlin memory. Again, the Reichstag building embodies Berlin’s contradictory longing to both resurrect and forget modernism.

III. The Banality of Evil and Counter-Monuments Other than monuments that are largely proposed and financed by institutional forces in the “post-wall” Berlin, alternative forms of commemoration can also be found in the surge of creating “counter-monuments.” A term proposed by James Young, counter-monument refers to a commemorative culture of the Holocaust without forgetting, moving on, and closure or comfort zone (“Facing History and Ourselves”). Countermonuments resist the sense of everlasting monumentality and detachment from visitors conceptually or literally.

Berlin Jewish Museum As an equally prominent commemorative project for reinvoking Jewish and Holocaust memory in Berlin, Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum serves as an example par excellence of a counter-monument full of signs of void, emptiness, and absence (Figure 13 Berlin Jewish Museum). Known as the deconstructivist in the field of architectural practice, the Jewish-American designer shows his refusal to resolve historical suffering in his work. The museum is characterized 72

by the uneasiness of experiencing its spaces. Similar to those in Eisenman’s project, figurative images are barely found in Libeskind’s design. Using “between the lines” as motif, he uses basic geometrical shapes to constitute the main themes of the museum: two lines repeatedly represented in the spatial structure configure the layout of the spaces. “One” of the lines, according to the pamphlet available in the museum, “is straight, but broken into many fragments; the other is winding and open-ended. The intersection of these lines is marked by voids, empty spaces that cut through the entire museum” (Foundation Jewish Museum Berlin, 2008). The façade traverses the exterior and interior by the seemingly irregular narrow slits of windows, whose positioning strictly follows a map Libeskind drew for the design. He used lines to connect address points of renowned figures of both Jewish and German origins on a pre-war Berlin map to form an “irrational and invisible matrix” (“Jewish Museum Berlin”). The spaces that unite the Old Building and Libeskind’s new building are called “voids”. Libeskind indicates that a void is not a museum space (Libeskind 1999). Without any artificial lighting or air-conditioning, one of the five black-walled vertical spaces has its entire floor paved with numerous steel-made human faces, on which any visitor can walk while hearing the echoes of the clangs between the “faces.”8 Libeskind referred to the voids as “that which can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history: humanity reduced to ashes” (Libeskind 2000). The three intersecting axes in the underground passageway that symbolize the Jewish condition in Germany also require verbal explanation: the “Axis of Continuity,” “Axis of Emigration,” and “Axis of Holocaust” jointly address the relationship between German history and Jewish memory (Figure 14 The Axis in the Jewish Museum). At the end of the Axis of the Holocaust stands a huge, black steel door leading to the Holocaust Tower, another one of the five voids. The vacant space contains nothing, which somehow provides visitors with a strong feeling of imprisonment. Nothing but the gray high walls and other enclosed fellow visitors. People usually

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Known as “Shalechet,” meaning “fallen leaves” in Hebrew. The Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman impressively expressed the memory of the Holocaust in the sculpture.

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do not know what to do or see in the dim natural light and silent atmosphere can be seen. A similar effect is created by “the Garden of Exile” that deliberately attempts “to completely disorientate the visitor. It represents a shipwreck of history” (Libeskind, 1999). Again, highly resembling the Holocaust Memorial by Eisenman, the garden consists of 49 concrete stelae on a square “garden,” representing the deadlock situation of the Jewish community at the time of exile and persecution.

Figure 13: The Jewish Museum, Berlin.

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Figure 14: The “Axis” in the Jewish Museum.

Similar to Eisenman, Libeskind greatly stresses the impossibility of mediating the Holocaust memory in a figurative language system. Nevertheless, Libeskind’s Jewish Museum does not stop at the search for an interpretation of the event. It recreates an experience of it by trying to confuse and entrap its visitors in a spatial complex symbolizing the Jewish experience in German racism. His architectural language does not lead to a conclusion drawn from the lessons of the past but instead provokes further question, interaction, and reflection on the continuity of trauma by problematizing the present as a fluid signifier. It somehow puts an end to the modernist flanerie in a conventional museum culture and exposes history with dramatized gaps made by voids.

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Everyday Space and the Holocaust Memory: Installation Memorials In Berlin, more thought-provoking counter-monuments are installation memorials scattered in the everyday urban space. Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock are two of the most active artists engaged in alternative approaches to invoke Jewish memory. On the streets of Bayerisches Viertel, formerly a quarter dense with Jewish population, 80 double-sided signposts are fixed on the ground under the project called “Places of Memory: Exclusion and Disfranchisement, Displacement and Genocide of Berlin Jews between 1933 and 1945”.9 On one side, one can read a short excerpt of the texts on law and edict from the national socialist era, such as “Jews are not allowed to practice retail and mail-order business. 12.11.1938.” On the other side, a plainly drawn illustration of an everyday object related to the content of the text is painted.10 (Figure 15 Plaque of Memory on Innsbruck Street) Passersby, whether those who live in the area or those who happen to bump into the advertisement-like plates, encounter the banality of the historical evil without being forced to mourn or even to stop. Even more invisible traces of the living reality of Jewish community in Berlin are inscribed in a series of hundreds of golden “stumbling stones” on Berlin sidewalks (Figure 16 Stumbling Stone). The brief information carved onto the stones usually indicates a brief biography of the former house-dweller in the pattern of “Here once lived (name), born in (place), (year). Deported in (year); murdered in (Place).” The small size of the stones enables one to overlook them as ordinary pieces of sidewalk bricks. However, the effect of the discovery of what these stones are is overwhelming. These stones make Jewish memory alive not only through the intimacy of space but also through the continuum of time. The restoration of individual cases defies the blind points of the generalized collective memory of the Holocaust, enlivening the memory of a concrete city imagery that disappeared after only less than 70 years. 9

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“Ausgrenzung und Entrechtung, Vertreibung, Deportation und Ermordung von Berliner Juden in den Jahren 1933 bis 1945” is a memorial project assigned to the artists by the Berlin Senate in 1993. The local residents were anguished to see the signposts at first, mistaking them for anti-Semitic plaques made by Neo-Nazists. After being aware that their nature was memorial, the locals passionately embraced their idea and even served as guides in explaining to the stunned new passersby like me.

Figure 15: Plaque of Memory on Innsbruck Street.

Figure 16: “The Stumbling Stones”.

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These memorials aim at showing the daily awareness of present-day Berliners and even tourists. They are fragmented, weakly visible, non-explanatory, humble but show strong efforts in remembering the facts of the perpetration and conveying the discomfort of remembering them. Contrary to the grand memorial projects that amplify national trauma in specific symbolic spaces, these counter-monuments divide the angst among the real places of memories. Artists of counter-monuments realize clearly the crisis of iconographic image vis-à-vis its perception in a digital age of mass visual reproduction. Thus, they try to relate the shared collective understanding of a national narrative to personal memory. In the particular case of the Holocaust memory, a national narrative that one is hardly willing to be identified with, counter-monuments express the view of history that refuses to reside in the amnesiac pleasure of a flat and progressive experience of time.

IV. Berlin Monuments, Postnationalism, and Modernity The tensions among the three kinds of spatial representations of national memories are interwoven in Berlin. First, commemorations dedicated to warning the aftermath of the mania of ultra-nationalism and the consequent war experience interestingly contrasts those re-celebration of the reborn nation-state. Whereas the warning and the mourning of the atrocity of the Holocaust, Nazi state terror, war trauma, and memory of the Berlin Wall under the GDR totalitarianism try to dissolve the modernist symbolism, the reestablishment of national symbols contributes to the to-be-re-invoked national identity of a new Germany. Second, tension exists between both kinds of public commemorative sites in the form of monuments, symbolic or non-symbolic, and the third kind, the counter-monumental initiatives. They provide a departure rather than an end of contemplation on human experience or to present historical memory in the everyday space in the city. These tensions are embedded in the post-unification national discourse in Germany. In the first place, some of the monuments echo 78

with the need of normalizing German history after the reunification. One of the most disputable issues in post-Wall Berlin is how the political center of Germany can help the “normalization” of the narrative of the German nation-state which was cut short by both Hitler’s seizure of the power and the postwar split-up of the country. The sudden cease of the “abnormality” of the German historical narrative kindled the desire also for further validating the national identity of the new Federal Republic. Boym claims that normalization of the New Berlin is “a way of compromise, beyond the opposition of memory and forgetting, toward a ‘grown-up’ attitude about the past…” and “is supposed to be an antidote to both nostalgia and a historical critique” (Boym 216–17). The normalization of German historical narrative is not an easy task: 45 years of repression of nationalism in the Bonn Republic, the long-lasting effect of the Holocaust on German national history, and the reaction of the former GDR citizens who have been led into another version of German history, to name just a few. Therefore, the resurrection of Berlin is not merely about the self-understanding of the city per se, but also about the self-image-making of the German nation-state. In contrast, the decentralization of commemorative actions Berlin Republic has to reassure to serve as a counteraction to the possible rise of nationalism. As a result, Berlin, after the “Wende,” is mobilizing itself between the central and the counter-central, searching for a balance between the repressed nationalistic complex in the West and the overarching patriotism in the East. The new capital, which is under the spotlight of Cold War confrontations between antagonistic ideologies, somehow continues West Berlin’s uniqueness in the German cultural scene. The former West Berlin, a politically isolated island besieged in the communist zones, was imbued with an atmosphere that was not only more diverse than its eastern forbidden zones but also distinctive from the rest of the highly commercialized (if not Americanized) West Germany. The disappearance of the Wall further complicated the geo-psychological situation of Berlin’s public opinion. After the Wall collapsed, Berlin still needs to maintain its liberal outlook as a city of democracy, openness, and freedom. These most valued images of the New Berlin will in turn embody the new Germany. Consequently, unlike in many other cases of capital reconstruction Berlin’s reconstruction was 79

not predominantly planned by the state and other institutional powers. Spatial changes that have been happening in Berlin are motivated by diverse forces. American sociologist Jennifer Jordan agrees that Berlin enjoys the autonomy of a “bottom-up” commemoration in public spaces: “In the case of Berlin, many (although not all) suggestions for memorial sites come from private citizens and civic organizations, even if they are then put through the filter of official approval. A parliamentary democracy offers far greater responsiveness of government to pressures from constituents….” (Jordan 176). Although she points out right after, “In every sovereign country of the modern world, the workings of the state have set their mark upon the land, and Germany is no different” (Jordan 177). The commemorative spaces in today’s Berlin demonstrate that the assessment of Enlightenment modernity still renders the city in spatial heteroglossia and visual contradictions. The ambivalence towards “the modern” leaves traces and still causes escalating tensions in the realm of commemorative culture as well as the urban space related to it. The rationality of the modernization of society constantly encounters the discontent of cultural modernism towards the ennui of rationality. Romanticist modernity, which prioritizes individual liberation and freedom, rejects the technological modernity, which is largely crystalized in industrialized cities and its close relation to war, state mechanism, and nationalism. The confrontation between social modernity and cultural modernity seems to be irreconcilable: “the former optimistic and the latter pessimistic; the former progressive, the latter suspicious of progress; the former celebrates the grand accumulation of materials, the latter finds the accumulation decadent and grotesque” (Wang 2005, 134–135). The inseparable dual legacy of modernity as trauma and promise occupies the core of Berlin discourse that seems to sustain a perpetually transitional status of the city. In some sense, the ambiguity of a decentralized nation-rebuilding is not unique to Germany, even if it is still highly special, given that the memory of the whole Europe in the 20th-century Europe is overshadowed by a continuous disillusionment caused by the duality of modernity. Unprecedented progress is accompanied by darkness of the genocide and destruction of Western civilization. As German sociologist Ulrich Beck points out, “A multinational and ‘slow dissolving’ 80

population, and the traditions of colonialism and genocide are today core elements of European culture that render the conventional national contexts of memory cultures obsolete, and a cosmopolitan revision of memory cultures across national boundaries and open to minorities within these boundaries indispensable” (Carrier 154). German reunification, as a significant event that constitutes the end of the Cold War, echoes the call for a polycentric trend of German’s memory culture. This trend participates in the transnational imaginaries of coevalness of regional and even global history after 1989. Moreover, the modernity crisis does not arise in the West only. The regeneration of sites of history and memory realized by global capitalism, mass media, and cyber technology accompanied by a condensation of time, space, and place accelerates, although seemingly slows down, the span of memorization of the past. Germany is now frequently discussed with the concept of “post-nationalism.” Normally regarded as an increasing erosion of national identity entailed by globalization, post-nationalism in Germany gains its double meaning from both inwards and outwards. Thus, the question on the positioning of Berlin under the spotlight of the national, regional, and global arenas is: to what extent is Berlin able to present itself (again) as the capital of a modern nation when old myths of modern nation have become obsolete in many ways?

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Chapter Two Monuments in Shanghai: The Invisible Turn

Having experienced the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and the student movement in 1989, the Chinese commemorative spaces and monuments are not straightforward in producing their meanings. The national agenda of the People’s Republic of China has turned from a fierce political struggle to an economy-oriented open-door policy since the late 1970s and has been experiencing full-speed development since the early 1990s. The influences of similar social transformations can also be found in the commemorative cultures of Russia or the former Eastern European communist countries. Benjamin Forest and Juliet Johnson, for example, studied how Soviet-era monuments were renegotiated in the post-Soviet present and suggested three possible categories of the current treatment of monuments in Moscow: Co-opted/Glorified, Disavowed, and Contested.11 However, the fate of the post-Soviet “disgraced monuments,” which refer to the numerous destroyed memorial artifacts of the Communist era, such as the statues of Lenin and Stalin, has not befallen most of the Chinese monuments.12 Owing to the unshaken political rule of the Chinese Communist Party, the question that Chinese national monuments are confronted with is how they can be incorporated into a revised national ideology that is 11

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See more in Forest and Johnson. “The first category, Co-opted/Glorified, contains those sites which Russian political leaders have chosen to expend considerable resources on redefining and reincorporating into prominent public view since 1991. (530)… The second category, Contested, contains Soviet-era monuments that continued to be a source of major conflict among the various political groups in Moscow espousing contrasting ideas of national identity. (532)…The third category, Disavowed, encompasses those monuments that were removed, closed, or so changed that their original symbolism was eradicated” (534). Disgraced Monuments (1996) is a documentary film co-directed by Laura Mulvey and Mark Lewis. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the monuments that were dedicated to the communist ideological propaganda were largely demolished in the then widespread anticommunist commotion.

still deeply entangled in the continuities and discontinuities of its political vicissitudes. At first glance, the association between monumental significance and the city of Shanghai can easily be overlooked. As the most prominent national symbols of contemporary China, for example, the Tiananmen Square and the Monument to the People’s Heroes, are located in Beijing, Shanghai’s monuments represent a relatively less solid ideological discourse. The focus on Shanghai’s urban history diverges into two opposing tracks: endless nostalgia for the cosmopolitan prosperity, bourgeois culture, and urban modernity during its golden age in the 1930s and recovering the forgotten working class narrative of the pre-revolutionary years and the present (Cai 2003; Zhang 2005). The passion to understand Shanghai’s civil society (if there ever was one) always centers on the discourse of the city’s popular culture. This chapter suggests that Shanghai, because of its apolitical profile, provides us with an interesting perspective on understanding the post-revolutionary Chinese nation-state that is embedded in an equivocal articulation of its subjectivity. Through a study of the city’s commemorative spaces and their contested discourses on producing a Chinese national identity in public memory, this chapter shows how urban spaces can work as alternative “cue-ins” for rethinking the inconsistencies in the national historiographies that may otherwise have been seamlessly integrated. As Prasenjit Duara argues “new meanings are not simply exchanged for old meanings; they are also justified or understood in terms of old meanings” (Duara 1995: 234), I will illustrate three situations in which the national subject of history is transformed through different narratives of monuments and commemorative rituals. To begin with, the subject of the political party (here the CPC, i.e. the Communist Party of China) is emphasized and actually takes the place of the national subject in the historical narrative of nation building. In the case of The Memorial House of the First National Congress of the CPC, and two other monuments that are related to the history of the People’s Republic of China, the consistency of the representation of national history is achieved firstly by an articulation of the leading position of the CPC even before the establishment of the new nation-state. As a result, the histories and memories of the other practices in the space are largely repressed and appropriated. Particularly after the “critical juncture” at 84

the end of the Cultural Revolution (1978), an alteration of the meaning of the space that may contradict that of its original has been smoothed over in the renewed narrative. Secondly, the multiplicity of the national subject of history is denied, marginalized and forgotten in the service of current political agendas. The amnesia of the Sino-Japanese War experience and the downplaying of sites of its memory suggest that the national subject of history can be internally antagonistic. The repression of war memories is realized by marginalizing or blurring other historical subjects of the nation such as the Nationalist Government. The absence of WWII memorials allows the glossing over of the more complicated aspects of local history and the eagerness of today’s China to be recognized in the global gaze. Ideological shifts and pragmatic accommodations are all blurred under the name of the national subject. Thirdly, cosmopolitanism and universal humanitarianism are utilized as a means of blurring other national subjects as well as strengthening China’s current political agenda of prioritizing economic development. The image making of Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism in the commemoration of the Korean nationalist movement and the exile of Jewish refugees seems to go beyond the national subject in its articulation of local history. However, the top-down unilateral and politically motivated process of creating memorials tend to exclude local people and other multiple voices from participation. Consequently, commemorative initiatives end up in impoverishing memory.

I. Shanghai and Chinese National Discourse Before I examine the narratives that give rise to the monuments in today’s Shanghai, I will situate the historical position of urban Shanghai within the discourse on modern China to demystify the popular view that Shanghai is less significant in understanding Chinese national culture than its civic culture. First, generally, there exists an undeniable link between the rise of Chinese urban society and the appeal for a modern Chinese republican regime. The importance of Shanghai in the 85

1911 Xinhai Revolution is clear enough to help us understand why it has been conceived as a “bourgeois revolution” by the Chinese circle of post-1949 history studies and to differentiate it from the later “proletarian revolution.”13 Shanghai was not only a vital meeting point for different political forces, but it also provided a huge amount of financial capital for the revolution. Shanghai’s capacity to mobilize the masses deeply influenced the city itself as well as the Yangtze River Delta. French scholar Marie-Claire Bergère argues in her Shanghai: China’s Gateway to Modernity that the deep structural change in Chinese urban society (especially treaty port cities) is one of the key reasons why the Qing Government failed to mobilize the urban elite class, and the consequence of this failure can partly account for the demise of the Qing Dynasty (Bergère 2005). Chinese urban elites living in the treaty ports were the first ones whose nationalistic consciousness were aroused by coming into contact with the West. However, this nationalistic emotion of an urban society was a complicated one. The idea of modernity and the nationalism of Chinese treaty ports, which differed radically from the xenophobia present in the vast interior area, were adaptive but still strongly resistant. The West was considered a mode of development and a threatening power. Understandably, this realistic attitude was based on compromise and resistance and was first reflected in the world of commerce.14 This flexibility allowed Shanghai to possess multiple narratives and social class identities. Neither its “impurity” in nationalistic 13

14

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The Xinhai Revolution refers to the series of Chinese nationwide revolutions that overthrew the Qing Monarchy. As a result, the Chinese Republican regime was established in 1912. Sun Yan-sen was the first president of the provisional central government of the Republic of China. Rights to court laws, right to the administration of the concession, right to control railways, mine resources, and customs duty were matters of no triviality that were directly connected to national interest and sovereignty. From 1905 to 1911, each year witnessed large-scale mass protests of such kind in Shanghai. Urban elites, especially the bourgeois influence on Chinese politics, soared in the early 20th century. However, the gulf between the Chinese coastal cities and the interior areas, which always play a decisive role in the country’s fate, did not prevent China’s efforts from modernizing the regional areas (Bergère 1994, 52–53; 2005, 114). The process of revolution in Shanghai reveals its uniqueness as a modern city ahead of the rest of China. The short-lived modernization and local political autonomy set a role model for other parts of China. However, the central authority had to be restored when this local revolution became hopeless in the face of the

discourse nor its progressiveness in revolutionary discourse can be taken for granted as a single image of the sophisticated city. Shanghai, although reduced to being non-progressive in the post1949 national ideology because of its colonial and capitalistic characteristics, was the place where a series of influential left-wing political movements took place. The now official historical narrative of Shanghai’s “glorious revolutionary tradition” is consistently related to its numerous and influential labor movements, student protests, and the first congress meeting of the CPC. However, this tradition also relates to its colonial status and capitalistic development. The most active early communist groups in China were located in Shanghai mainly because the foreign concessions provided a relatively safe place for secret gatherings and an interim site for freedom of speech (Bergère 2005: 156). Moreover, as China’s largest commercial and industrial base, Shanghai became the center of the labor movement, one of the core projects of Chinese communism. Labor movements are inconceivable without a relatively developed industrial system, in which urban class struggles become a major social problem under capitalist conditions.15 In this sense, Shanghai’s urban condition significantly determined its subtle but crucial role in determining national political circumstances. Moreover, the position of Shanghai as the center of mass media and film culture helped to spread strong nationalistic emotions and imagination. Shun Pao (literally Shanghai Newspaper), for example,

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reality of China. Unlike the more outgoing Southern Canton, Shanghai’s fate has always been in pace with the nation (Bergère 2005, 124). Although the official rendition of the major labor movements such as the May Thirtieth Movement underlines the mobilization by the CPC as a leading figure that possesses earlier awareness of the need to stage a struggle for more rights and equality, other research findings, such as those by American historian Elisabeth Perry, show, in contrast, that the success to mobilize the workers is more geopolitically dependent and regionally culture based (Perry 2001). This research gives a more diverse picture of labor movement in Shanghai, which pays more attention to its metropolitan condition. Like other rapidly growing big cities, Shanghai at that time, was populated by migrant workers from different parts of the country. Thus, mass solidarity involved not only class but also issues on negotiating among strong regional identities, distinctive cultural differences, and conflicts. Other challenges to the CPC’s capacity to mobilize workers came from the Nationalist Party and the secret societies, another influential political force in Shanghai (Bergère 2005, 156–157).

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was the most influential newspaper in modern China. Established in 1872 and closed down in 1949, the first Chinese language newspaper in Shanghai traversed the most turbulent years of the formation of the modern Chinese nation-state. More significantly, Shun Pao played an important role in forming public opinion by covering debates about public issues. For instance, during the May Fourth Movement, Shun Pao refused to publish advertisements for Japanese products. Under the management of Shi Liangcai, Shun Pao provided a space for relatively free opinion and diverse information, which won the favor of a large audience. At the same time, the rapid development of the film industry in Shanghai gave rise to a nationalism buoyed by cinematic experience. Therefore, it is not surprising that even the national anthem of the PRC, “The March of the Volunteers,” became the theme song of a 1935 Shanghai film Children of Troubled Times, which depicts the deep national crisis of China under Japanese occupation. As the only place temporarily not reached by the occupation, the cinema in the Shanghai era of a “solitary island” (i.e., 1937–1941, when the still autonomous foreign concessions in Shanghai were besieged by Japanese control) was the only place where the production of films with subtle nationalistic motifs was possible. Carefully dealing with the Japanese pressure at the door, films such as Mulan Joins the Army (1939) and Confuses (1940) sent strong symbolic messages calling for national resistance that featured less provocative yet well-known figures in Chinese traditional culture. Thus, Shanghai’s highly mature mass media culture brought the city to the forefront of national discourse in the 1930s. In the post-1949 years, Shanghai experienced an understandable change in its urbanity: a new national narrative emerged, eager to rewrite its past. In his Shanghai Image: Critical Iconography, Minor Literature, and the Unmaking of a Modern Chinese Mythology, Zhang Xudong examines the self-imaging of Shanghai during the 10th anniversary of the National Day of the PRC through Zhang Chunqiao, a notorious member of the “Gang of Four.”16 In Zhang Chunqiao’s narrative 16

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The “Gang of Four” refers to four CCP officials that formed the leading political group during the Cultural Revolution in China (1966–1976). With enormous power wielded through the latter stages of this turbulent political movement, they are considered the major culprits who caused huge national political and human right

of Shanghai, the establishment of the new nation-state transformed the city into a monument to drastically break away from the historical past (Zhang 2002, 149). Shanghai was converted from hell for the working class, which was ruthlessly exploited by capitalists and imperialists, to a center of industry and culture in the new nation of the people. Shanghai was seen as depraved; therefore, it was satisfying to see the narrative shift and the city overcome its past. Noticeably, Shanghai later became the “city of the highest virtue” in the Cultural Revolution and the center for action of this extreme leftist political turbulence, which has an enduring influence on contemporary China. Therefore, Shanghai formed a site for a peculiar and dramatic juxtaposition between orthodox national ideology and a residual civil vibrancy. In his account of Chinese civil awareness, Shanghai scholar Zhu Xueqin mentions what he calls the “sandwich” feature of Shanghai. The Bund, Shanghai’s famous riverside promenade, with its large number of architectural legacies from the city’s semi-colonial past, is explored by Zhu as an example to illustrate this feature. Until the 1990s, architectural sites on the Bund, such as the hotels, clubs, bank buildings, and other spatial embodiments of colonial modernity, were functionally reformed for other uses. For example, the Shanghai Municipal Government, or the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, was located in the former HSBC building, the most magnificent architectural feature on the promenade. However, the Bund remained a public space for Shanghai’s everyday bourgeois life. At a time when public spaces for erotic encounters, such as cafés, cinema, discos, or pubs, were not widely available in the socialist Shanghai, the famous “lovers’ wall” on the Bund, a nickname given to the anti-flood wall by the Huangpu River, was where many young lovers and couples would have their romantic dates. By depicting the contrast between the stiff bodies of the guards in front of the government building and the kissing lovers along the wall of the river dyke, Zhu tries to draw our attention to “a very interesting feature” that Shanghai after 1949 manifested: The ‘left-leaning’ style of the upper political dictatorship of the proletariat was so overwhelming that the most of the Chinese political movements after 1949 originated violations. They were subsequently charged with treasonous crimes. The members consisted of Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen.

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from the city. At the same time, the grassroots of the city was permeated with an equally strong ‘right-leaning’ atmosphere that was tenacious and visible in civic life. … Solider and lover, the two oppositional colors could squeeze together, floating atop the life of the Chinese interior area like a giant urban sandwich… it’s important to remember the ‘sandwich’ characteristic of the city, which may be still valid even till today.17

In Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (1995), Indian-American historian Prasenjit Duara discusses the “bifurcated history” paradigm in his studies on Chinese nationalism. As the title of the book suggests, he argues that a linear presentation of history from a singular perspective of nation-state tends to exclude, forget, and repress the other narratives that are simultaneously existent. I will use several of his key arguments in this paradigm to illustrate the tensions within my own depiction of the commemorative culture in Shanghai. Duara’s approach to understanding history challenges the Hegelian Subject of history that privileges the self-awakening of a modern nation-state. For Duara, the Subject of history includes nation but transverses it. The Historical Subject, which unifies race, nation, and History, constitutes itself as “a homogenous community (race) within a territorial state (nation) that had evolved into the present so that it was now poised to launch into a modern future (History) of rationality and self-consciousness in which contingency or history itself would be eliminated (end of History)” (Duara 48–49). To focus history merely on the national Subject significantly simplifies the internal differences in a nationalism discourse. Duara suggests that national identity is one of the other social identities that simultaneously exist in the process of constituting historical experience. Furthermore, as far as historical development is concerned, Duara argues that an evolutionary concept of linear history progress creates a paradox in the claiming of nationalism as a characteristic of modernity. As a nation is characterized as “representing a radical discontinuity with the past” (Duara 51), “national history secures for the contested and contingent nation the false unity of a self-same, national subject

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Zhu 2006, 336, my own translation.

evolving through time. This reified history derives from the linear, teleological model of Enlightenment History …. It allows the nationstate to see itself as a unique form of community which finds its place in the oppositions between tradition and modernity, hierarchy and equality, empire and nation” (Duara 4). Therefore, the paradox lies in the nation-state’s claim to novelty and legitimacy that originates from an earlier tradition. The myth of eternal progression is achieved by the narrative “The subject of History is a metaphysical unity devised to address the aporias in the experience of linear time: the disjuncture between past and present as well as the non-meeting between time as flux and time as eternal” (Duara 29). Historical periodization, for example, is easily manipulated by a particular ideology through its own invented rhetoric to create objectivity. For Duara, the time concept of History is multilayered instead of linear. Moreover, Duara rejects the causal relation between historical logic and reasoning. In his conceptualization of the bifurcation of history, he argues that “(B)ifurcated history not only substitutes multiplicity for the evolution of the same, it denies that the movement of history is causally linear, that only antecedent causes produce effects within a cause-effect chain. It views history as transactional, where the present, by appropriating, repressing, and reconstituting dispersed meanings of the past, also reproduces the past. At the same time, in investigating the process of appropriation, bifurcated history seeks not only to evoke the dispersed meaning but to disclose the ways in which this past may have provided the cause, the conditions, or the affinities which enabled the transformation” (Duara 233–234). The repression of the other pasts is achieved by the writing of a historical narrative to produce a sense of stable relation between the past and the present. Therefore, the fourth argument centers on the discourse and narrative analysis of the hegemonic version of history. Deconstructing the process, in which “(a)n appropriation of the past often reveals traces or influences of this past for a while, but occasionally, a trace may be entirely erased or rewritten within an astonishingly short period of time for reasons that still need to be fully explored” (Duara 234), is important to help us understand the human experience (Wei 75–80). Duara calls the tensions and dynamics between narratives of the past and the present the “transaction”

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of history. One can “acquire the power of rhetorical persuasion even though they conceal, repress, and abstract from dispersed histories” by exploring these transactions (235). Duara tries to understand history by exposing the cleavage between the signifier and the signified in a discourse analysis; therefore, his focus is “less on the falsehoods of nationalist historical writing than on the narrative structure of this historiography shares several assumptions of a linear history with evolving subject or a causal model” (233). Duara’s idea of bifurcated history pushes me to take space, instead of time and a temporal subject of history, as the lens to understand nation-states, their different forms of identities, and their power relations. The city can provide an arena of the nation-state instead of the other way around. In the case of China, for a long period after 1949, urban history was generally seen on the periphery of Chinese studies. The central topics of Chinese modern history, such as the countryside and revolution, both fit in the larger global imagination mainly acquired in the atmosphere of the Cold War and were well utilized by the domestic ideological control (Bergère 1997, 309–328). The marginalization of Shanghai in Chinese national historical narrative reveals the inadequacy of a temporally singular Subject of History, which is unified under a nation as a whole and excludes other histories in local spaces. As a result, the difficulty in putting Shanghai in a consistent narrative of China’s national history has made Shanghai seem a less significant case in understanding Chinese identity. The recent revival of the interest in studying the depoliticized Shanghai cultural behavior, particularly in the Republican Era, tends to put Chinese urban studies under the category of civil society, which appears to be antagonistic to the state in the Habermasian idea of public sphere. However, this idealized Western dichotomy between society and state remains problematic. Not only because the experience of mass mobilization in a Chinese society differs from that of the West, but also because the validity of this dichotomy is also consequently questionable (Bergère 1997).

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II. A Contested Present: Sites of the National Memory of the PRC The relations between the national discourse and Shanghai urbanity illustrate their complexities mainly because both the forgetting and the affirmation of certain knowledge have been underscored to abandon the coevalness of histories. Monuments and memorials provide us with concrete representations of these complexities. By examining the best preserved and restored national commemorative places, the forgotten sites of national memory and newly “reinvoked” memory of others’ historic relics in Shanghai, I will present the tensions between these categories.

The Invisible Ideological Turn: The Memorial House of the First National Congress of the CPC In post-revolutionary China, the essential question to determine the historiography of the national myth is, as Kirk A. Denton poses, “How can revolutionary history, grounded in martyrdom and selfsacrifice, be made to relate to a globalizing market economy that has self-interest as its primary motivating force?” (Denton 581). The Memorial House renovation, where the first national congress of the CPC was held in June 1921, provides a possible answer. Probably no other official memorial place in Shanghai is as important as this venue (Figure 17 The Memorial House of the First National Congress of the CPC). In the first list of Preserved Cultural Relics of the People’s Republic of China, which includes the national historical sites and cultural entities of the highest level, the previously ordinary residential house (with the typical Shanghai Shikumen style, a form of local architecture) on Wantze Road (now Xingye Road) in the French Concession, became a sacred place for the city and the nation. It was not a coincidence that the secret gathering of the pioneering and progressive political activists at that time was held in the decadent but cosmopolitan Shanghai, where a multiplicity of political thoughts thrived during the city’s semi-colonial years. Thirteen party delegates from 93

all over China, including Mao Zedong and Chen Duxiu, attended the meeting in which the CPC was officially founded. It was not until 28 years later, when the PRC was established, that Chen Yi, the first mayor of post-1949 Shanghai, proposed the restoration of the place into a monument for the new nation in a new regime. In 1952, the Memorial House was opened to the public.

Figure 17: The Memorial House of the First National Congress of the CCP.

In 1996, the Shanghai Municipal Government decided to expand and renovate the Memorial House. Although part of the larger urban renewal project of Taipingqiao Area, the important national historical relics and basic structure of its adjacent area of Shikumen houses were under state protection. However, the Taipingqiao renewal project was a real-estate development project mainly supported by the investment of foreign capital that gave the whole project a combination of political and economic significance. In China, urban renewal projects such as this one are motivated not just by the need for urban regeneration per se but also by opportunities of the nation’s (re-)claiming 94

of self-identity in the global arena through international events; the APEC Conference in 2001 in Shanghai was such a motivation. The first large-scale downtown renovation project, which includes the site of the Memorial House, the well-known leisure quarter Xintiandi, and other commercial housing projects, constitutes a showcase of Shanghai’s image 10 years after Shanghai was “allowed” to retrieve its leading position in the national economy after Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour. The joint plan involving global capital and local governmental support changed the symbolic meaning of this site steeped in the memory of the revolution. Reemerging as part of a chic bar quarter in central Shanghai, the Memorial House was transformed into one of the most popular tourist attractions associated with the city’s modern history. Similar to other sites in China’s so-called “red tourism,” this memorial in Shanghai exemplifies how ideological pedagogy and leisure consumption can be fused into one project. Red tourism, which refers to trips (usually guided on group basis) to historical locations significant in the history of the CPC, represents the nation’s consciousness in rescuing and reinventing its withering communist myths. Inevitably, the sacredness of the Memorial House is enhanced again at the cost of going against its original ideal. The memorial now becomes a proof of the legitimacy of the CPC’s continuation in power. The new narrative of Shanghai under the leadership of the CPC can be seen in the Party’s capacity to modernize the country and the city through mass media: Shanghai was the birthplace of the Communist Party of China. The indomitable revolutionary spirit of the CPC inherited by the Shanghai people is being carried forward. A series of early reforms initiated the great development of Shanghai… Since more than ten years, the development of Pudong has been driving that of Shanghai, which moved its position from “the rear” to “the forward” in the national opening-up…Shanghai, previously a remote sea village living on fishing industry, is striding forward to a prosperous international metropolis. Under the leadership of the Communist Party, Shanghai is becoming the focus of the world. (Liu 2004, 6)

What Zhu Xueqin calls the city’s “sandwich” feature is obvious here, that is, the interplay between an orthodox ideological representation and the actual practice of a “designed” ideology with new (Chinese) characters (Zhu 2006, 336). The communist ideal that focuses on class struggle 95

and collectivization of property is weakened, and the more abstract spirit of the revolutionary avant-garde is stressed. This spirit is not a total break from the past but is more of a moderate “design” (Latour 2008). The communist project has not been diminished by its cooperation with capitalism but is further strengthened. At the same time, the narrative of Shanghai vis-à-vis the national development glides over key historical ruptures. The metaphor of “from the rear to the forward” addresses Shanghai’s position in national developmental by obscuring a more complicated political history. This change is naturalized simply as a strategic shift in the progression of time. By overlooking more controversial historical narratives in the semi-colonial era and the post1949 Shanghai, the myth of a sea village turning into a metropolis celebrates modernity in its most conservative sense of “progress.” The Party has grown out of its past uncertainty, naïveté, and mistakes, which are nevertheless not explicitly expressed here. Therefore, in the new spatial order, the memorial site is naturally converted into a tourist attraction that blends into the surrounding area as a distraction that blurs its original significance. In this sense, the glamorous commercial zone and the memorial site take advantage of each other, making both the break and the continuation of the historical subject possible.

Invisible Narratives: Memorial to the May Thirtieth Movement (1985) and Tower to the People’s Heroes (1987) On the surface, the Tower to the People’s Heroes on the Bund and the Memorial to the May Thirtieth Movement near the People’s Square, are less controversial in their position in constituting the main narrative of the national myth in the city. The highly symbolic space of the two monuments occupies the long-term city center of Shanghai. Their surroundings now form an interesting dialogue with the glamorously gentrified commercialization of the city, again adding to the ambiguity of its originally distinct ideological implications. However, unlike the Memorial House for the CCP’s first national congress, the construction of these two monuments is more closely related to the production of an ideological space. When they “accomplish” their task of the commemorative correctness in the city, parts and bits of records of memories on the 96

space reveal the controversial dimensions invisible to the ostensible coherent storyline. Memories of alternative understandings of the space are also traceable and not necessarily serving as a conspicuous resistance against the mainstream historical discourse. These fragments of memories as the visible and invisible spatial narratives of the two monuments that may emerge in today’s public realm and their relation vis-àvis a re-reading of urban history. Both monuments were erected in the mid-1980s, a time when the nation was gradually recovering from the traumas of the Cultural Revolution, and the Party was eager to re-legitimize its regime by reiterating the national narrative after 1949. Both monuments were built on a site whose previous symbolic meaning was entirely changed and erased by the new meaning in an oppositional way. The Tower to the People’s Heroes stands on the site of the public park, the first park in Shanghai that was built by the Municipal Committee of the Shanghai International Settlement in 1868. The park was not popular until today as the long-term image of Shanghai in its colonial time was associated with the widely circulated narrative of national humiliation “Chinese and dogs not admitted.” In the 1890s, the controversy over the exclusion of Chinese people from the right to use the Public Park was once a sensational topic in the public life in Shanghai. Resistant emotion was aroused among the middle- and upper-class Chinese towards the Municipal Committee; the influential Shun Pao further escalated the effects of the protests by publishing a series of reviews severely criticizing the racially discriminative segregation. Although many historical studies show that it is doubtful whether such a blunt statement like “Chinese and dogs not admitted” was actually posted, or rather the denial of the entrance of Chinese and dogs was separately listed in the general regulations, the memory of the symbolic meaning of the space and of the racial discrimination during Western colonization in Shanghai, has become deeply rooted in Chinese people in China and abroad. According to Chinese historian Xiong Yuezhi, this highly selective or possible rewriting of the facts is closely associated with the rise of Chinese nationalism in the turn of the 20th century (Xiong 2008, 17–31). The Tower to the People’s Heroes rests directly in the heart of the controversial park and its narrative. Three pieces of rifle-like granite constitute the main body of the tower, symbolizing the Opium War, the May Fourth Movement, and the Liberation War (Figure 18 97

Tower to the People’s Heroes). In memory of the martyrs who sacrificed for the liberation of the Chinese nation, the patriotic themes portray the overcoming of the nation’s (and the city’s) past humiliations, struggles, and retrieval of the national dignity in the previous 100 years. The storyline starts from the defeat of the corrupt feudal regime in the Opium War and the successive semi-colonization of Shanghai to the May Fourth Movement as the awakening moment of the Chinese nationalistic awareness, and it ends with the establishment of a new promising regime by the Communist Party.

Figure 18: Tower to the People’s Heroes.

While the official version of the spatial meaning seems to provide a smooth progression of historical evolution, memory narratives that reveal clues to unknown stories also come from various sources such as newspapers and popular readings for leisure. One such example can be found in a popular 98

column called “Moonlight Cup” (ye guang bei) in Shanghai’s largest city newspaper Xinmin Evening News (xin min wan bao), in which various kinds of prose solicited from ordinary readers as well as well-known writers or scholars are published. One of the sub-columns, “Precious Archives of Shanghai” (Shanghai zhen dang), focuses on the urban memory narratives that are not familiar to the public. One essay that appeared in 2007 explains why the construction of the Tower to the People’s Heroes was incredibly late in comparison with the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Beijing. Whereas the erection of the Beijing monument started in 1952 and was finished six years later, its Shanghai counterpart was not constructed until 1990. The essay begins with the announcement of the decision to build the Tower to the People’s Heroes through the proposal of the Shanghai People’s Congress in 1987. “However,” as the narrative went on, “this news was for people of older ages only a piece of renewed old ‘news’. As early as the first years after Shanghai’s liberation, the same news was already in their memories” (Xi 115–122).18 The original construction turned out to be planned in the early 1950s, suspended first by the financial crisis caused by the Nationalist Troop’s air raid in Shanghai in 1950, then by the endless polemics over political correctness of the aesthetic details, and finally by the accusation directed at designer Zhang Chongren, the world-famous Chinese artist and sculptor, with “his strong bourgeois influence.”19 In 1953, the project was completely halted because of the class struggle-oriented campaigns and the following political liquidation. Two years later, when Pan Hannian, the Shanghai deputy mayor at that time, had been sent to jail under suspicion of being a traitor to the state during the Sino-Japanese War time, his name that was inscribed on the founding stone of the monument was erased. The narrative ended ambiguously with ellipsis, making the whole essay appear to be purely reminiscent. Therefore, memory is merely categorized as a supplementary, trivial, and leisure reading of the history, although it divulges the actual unevenness of the spatial order, which is significantly not revealed to the public.

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This is a book compiling 43 essays from “Moonlight Cup” from 2004 to 2005. Zhang Chongren, Chang Ch’ung-jen (1907–October 8, 1998), was a Chinese artist and sculptor best remembered in Europe  as the  friend  of  Hergé, the  Belgian comics writer and artist and the creator of Tintin. 

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If the Tower presents an overall narrative of how history is supposed to be understood, the Memorial to the May Thirtieth Movement focuses on one particular event that can be amplified to strengthen the narrative (Figure 19 The Memorial to the May Thirtieth Movement). The memorial pays homage to the victims who were killed in the 1925 anti-imperial labor movement that ignited the large-scale nationwide strikes. That year witnessed the nation permeated with an air of uncertainty in battling against various political forces. With the uncertainty of the nation’s fate accompanied by the death of “national father” Sun Yat-sen in March 1925, the first cooperation between KMT and the Communist Party formed against the military powers of the warlords and the rising grievance of the labor force in the face of exploitation by the foreign capitalist both contributed to the revolutionary motivation and energy of the political movement. The conflicts between the workers and the Japanese-run cotton mills resulted in large-scale strikes in which more than 40,000 workers attended in February that year. On May 15, the confrontation culminated when a young protester Gu Zhenghong was shot dead by a Japanese foreman. Extreme anger among the Chinese people exploded in reaction to the barbaric action. Shanghai labor unions and student groups regarded Gu as the hero in the fight for justice, which initiated more demonstrations and protests. On May 30, as a demonstration parade was ongoing on Nanking Road in the International Settlement governed mainly by the British, the tense situation worsened when the protesters and the municipal policemen became violent first in language and then in action. Thirteen Chinese were killed on the spot and many more were injured and arrested. The incident shocked the country and the world, incurring more strikes from all walks of life. Strong nationalistic and anti-imperialistic emotions quickly spread throughout the city and the country. The general consensus shared by the PRC academic circles takes the Boxer Rebellion, the May Fourth Movement, and the May Thirtieth Movement as the three most important mass nationalistic movements. Whereas the May Fourth Movement aimed at the resistance against the violation of the national sovereignty by imperialism, the other two fought against the economic and cultural aggression from foreign powers. More emphasis was also given to the significance of the communist party in their first great success in mobilizing workers on the Chinese political stage, which largely 100

quickened the growing strength of the CPC (Xiong and Zhou, 236–239). Moreover, whereas Beijing and the northern part of China were the center of the May Fourth movement and the Boxer Rebellion, the May Thirtieth Movement, as a labor movement, was based in Shanghai at the very beginning. Shanghai’s urban status, as already argued, rendered it with political significance in the vast China characterized by diverse economic and cultural realities.

Figure 19: Memorial to the May Thirtieth Movement.

Therefore, the choice of the location of the memorial shows an antagonistic historical narrative to create a new and predominant one. Similar to the case of the Tower of People’s Heroes, the May Thirtieth Movement Memorial was also constructed in the area that was administrated by the International Settlement. The site was used as horse racecourse between 1850 and 1946. Again, resembling the discourse on racial discrimination, the horse racecourse was another public space that denied the entrance of local Chinese. However, the memory of the horse racetrack was more complicated, as the space was related to several other 101

discourses that imprinted the city center with other significant meanings. First, the race course functioned as a center for public activities in the foreign concessions vis-à-vis the central plaza in most European cities (Xiong 2008, 32–43). Large celebrations and rituals, such as the National Day of the United States, coronation, birthday of the British Queen, and visits of political and military figures from the colonial home countries, were held in the racetracks. Serving as the center of the concession, the race course area also formed the urban hub of Shanghai into a Western-style civic center. Noticeably, the racetrack area was not detached from the everyday life of Chinese residents in Shanghai, as it even helped to form the city’s identity. From the 1850s to the 1860s, the racetrack represented a window for the Chinese to have a glimpse of the Western culture. Later, the opening of horse racing as a form of gambling from 1873 to 1875 had a significant social effect among the Shanghai residents (Xiong 2008, 34). More interestingly, the field, as the most conspicuous open space in the metropolitan center, became an experimental field where Western technology and modern science were introduced and shown on Chinese soil. The influential Dian-ShiZhai Pictorial (also released by Shun Pao and North China Daily News) presented information on new Western inventions and gadgets to the Shanghai public. For instance, the German bike race (1897), the launch of the hot air balloon and parachuting performance (1890s), and the demonstration flight by the French aviator Rene Vallon (1911) were all included in the pictorial as part of the horse racetrack spectacle (Xue 2007). The events and their dissemination (although not necessarily loyal to the fact) by the mass media constructed a common imagination of the Western civilization in the cultural memory of Shanghai. In this sense, the imagery of the racetrack also witnessed the growth of the Shanghai cosmopolitan urbanity under the semi-colonial circumstance. More nationalism-oriented discourses on the horse racetrack were established since the May Fourth Movement in 1919. Debates and appeals were made on the use of the horserace track when the concessions would finally disappear. Therefore, the track became a symbolic space whose ownership embodied the Chinese national sovereignty. This discourse was intensified towards the end of the Sino-Japanese War, when a dispute on which national flag, whether British, Japanese, or Chinese, should be raised in the realm of the Shanghai horserace track stirred a 102

great controversy among the public (Xiong 2008, 8). Immediately after the war in February 1946, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek returned to Shanghai to make a public speech in a welcome gathering before 200,000 Shanghai citizens in the horserace track. In his speech, the return of the property rights of the venue and the meaning of the gathering in the very place symbolized the Chinese national independence (Xiong 2008, 39). Nevertheless, although the symbolic meanings of the People’s Park and the Memorial of May Thirtieth Movement seem to remain in the nationalistic ideal of national independence and integral sovereignty, the regime that represents the nation-state has changed. Today, such memory of the race course only emerges in newspaper columns such as “Moonlight Cup” or in academic papers on Shanghai local history. With the growing ambiguity of the ideological focus of Chinese modernity after 1949, despite their favorable locations, the two monuments and the historical memory they embody fail to convey the more abundant layers of the space and their connection with the past and present situations of the city. Their discourse on the anamnesis that tries to unify the historical narratives of Shanghai turned them into invisible places of memory at the time of the city’s drastic change in appearance and self-identity. In 2006, the feature program shown on China Central Television provoked a controversy about the demolition of the monument of Gu Zhenghong in the original site of his working place because of a real estate developmental project. Public opinion criticized the act of pursuing economic interest at the cost of forgetting the nation’s history, but the developer explained that the local cultural bureau gave their permission to demolish the monument, as it was not under the protection of cultural relics (Zhou 2006). The comment of an internet user (or “netizen”) on the issue even associated the demolition with the reform of Shanghai school history textbooks, in which the early interpretations of historical happenings with strong leftist color were significantly weakened. Criticism on Shanghai as such was also intensive, focusing on its long-term image of being snobbish to non-Shanghai Chinese culture, money-oriented mentality, and lack of nationalistic sentiment.20

20

Seelj㖁৻䇞 ‘к⎧亮↓㓒㓚ᘥ⻁ケ❦㻛᣶ NJ(Netizens’ comments on the demolition of Gu Zhenghong Monument) (16 Nov., 2006) . Accessed on 13 Apr., 2010.

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The polemics well reflect the embarrassment of Chinese memory culture in which monuments have lost the validity of their permanence in reality, but their face value still resists such erosion of their symbolism. Therefore, such resistance to the “counter-value” also stems from the instability of the value itself, as the national history is understood in one single version. Shanghai’s urbanity, as it was unknown in post-1949 historicism, again became the target of condemnation for being oblivious about its own past sufferings and those of the nation. Channels for other texts and stories are already too limited to enlighten the public, not to mention exert influence on the discourse of Shanghai’s commemorative spaces. Nevertheless, multiple narratives on the May Thirtieth Movement, for example, are also included in academic readings such as Elisabeth Perry’s Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (1993), which was translated into Chinese in 2001. In this book, she contends that the success of the labor movement was based on a series of equally, if not more, significant reasons other than the leadership of the CCP members: the opposition aroused by the prevailing racism in the foreign factories, the support of the CCP by the secret society, the solidarity guaranteed not by ideology but by geopolitical relations, and other pragmatisms. The unrest of the young modern city is also represented in literature. Japanese writer Yokomitsu Riichi’s novel Shanghai (1931) portrays the far-eastern metropolis in the turmoil of the May Thirtieth Movement as a repulsive place. All human myths, such as nation-state, revolution, love, and death, amalgamate, take on a nihilistic hue. For Yokomitsu, Shanghai is a dirty, chaotic, and rootless city, Asia’s wasteland in the grand machine controlled by highly industrialized Western countries. The violence of Western colonialism and of the revolution in Russia provoked Yokomitsu to resort to the surge of Japanese nationalism based first on military modernization and then on militarism. Highly ambivalent about the rising but fragile union of social powers in changing the society for the better, as shown in the May Thirtieth Movement, labor movements, as Shanghai describes, are permeated with arbitrariness and vulnerability. As Nishibe Hitoshi suggests, the rupture between the two Shanghai spaces created by language and reality enables the fluid mobility of the spatial image of Shanghai, constituting an unpredictable urban image of Shanghai (8).The three women in the novel, a white Russian exile, a Chinese revolutionist, and a Japanese prostitute, symbolize the multiple 104

facets of Shanghai as simultaneously being a colonial city, a revolutionary city, and a pauper city (Nishibe 8). The absence of the native national sovereignty and the incompleteness of foreign settlements in their political power formed Shanghai in an unstable ground. No single community had complete power over the urban space, which made the perception of its reality fluid and unstable. According to Nishibe, “Shanghai, as ‘the West in China,’ had accumulated sufficient human and material resources in resisting colonial power. It had turned to the front edge where the great powers, Western Europe and Asia, liberalism and communism confronted each other in fierce conflicts” (8–9). The narrative of today’s May Thirtieth Movement Memorial denotes the open-endedness of the meaning of Shanghai’s urban grounds of power. Interestingly, the aesthetics of the May Thirtieth Memorial shows this disorder of the perception of modernity, making it different from the symbolic austerity other monuments of Chinese revolutionary motifs have. The monument displays itself to resemble burning flames or a pair of stretched wings of a giant bird. The stainless-steel, modernistic sculpture conveys an extraordinary lightness and indefinite character. The sculptor of the monument Yu Jiyong admitted that his work denotes Shanghai’s becoming a modernized city and how influential technological modernity has affected urban life (Li 1990). This abstraction of the image in memory of a particular historical and political event in China denotes other things aside from the revolution itself: the spinning and whirling shape of movement frozen in space indicates not only the chaos on the nearby Nanjing Road but also that of a city with an uncertain future.

III. A City without War? Shanghai War Memorials A war memory site, as another subcategory of modern national commemoration, follows a narrative that massive violence and fights among people should be regarded as part of the founding myth of a nation-state. As Nuala Johnson points out, “War memorials are of special significance because they offer insights into the ways in which national cultures conceive of their pasts and mourn the large-scale destruction of life” 105

(Johnson 51–65). In the previous discussion on Berlin, war memorials in the German context manifest in a way that is highly self-reflective on the aftermath of modern warfare and on the disasters of ultra-nationalism. Not only bordering on the general appeal for peace and love, war memories in Berlin’s commemorative space mainly also constitute a discourse in which trust in modernity is in a tangled dilemma. Many Berlin monuments warn constantly of the duality of modernity in the name of promoting the evolution of human society. In contrast with Berlin’s conspicuous awareness of the legacy of the war in its everyday space, in Shanghai, war memory and its spatial representation are almost invisible. This fact is surprising if one considers, first, how drastic the Second World War in Asia changed the city’s form, and also its spatial representation of Chinese modernity, and second, for people who consider patriotism as a core ideological project in the People’s Republic of China, how could the commemoration of the war, which can evoke a strong nationalistic sentiment, could be neglected. In Shanghai, only a very limited number of historic relics related to any war experience are listed under the Conservation Unit of Cultural Relics at any level in the Chinese preservation system for protecting the nation’s important cultural legacies. Several examples of war memory narratives in the Shanghai urban space will explain why war memory in Shanghai is vague.

Forgotten Sites of War Memories: The First World War Memorial and Sihang Warehouse In discussing the disappeared war monument and its relevant memories, one cannot skip the First World War Memorial on the Bund. In 1924, by far the largest public monument on the Bund was completed in memory of the deceased soldiers who embarked on the journey to the First World War battlefield from Shanghai. Constructed by the municipal council and the European society in Shanghai, the memorial was made of huge granite as the foundation stone and base, on top of which rose a giant copper statue of the Peace Goddess with two enormous stretched wings. (Figure 20 The World War I Memorial on the Bund (Demolished)) The Goddess’ right hand was reaching out to the heads of the two little peace angels sitting under her feet as if to soothe their pain. Around the cobber 106

statue were the national flags or emblems of allied countries, including China. The individual names of the soldiers were engraved at the base. A grand inauguration ceremony of the memorial took place on February 16 in 1924, and from then on, it became the symbol of the Bund and Shanghai. However, peace did not last long. The first Japanese aggression on Shanghai broke out eight years later in 1932. In 1941, the Japanese occupation caused the destruction of all major monuments and statues on the Bund. Ironically, the copper Goddess that embodied war trauma and hope for peace was forged into a new weapon by the Japanese in the following war.

Figure 20: The World War I Memorial on the Bund (Demolished)21.

The symbolic meaning of the memorial is manifold, may be too manifold to be recalled completely and clearly. The Shanghai Bund today, even with the Tower to the People’s Heroes and the Statue of Chen Yi, the first Shanghai mayor after 1949, seems unable to forget the memorial. It was a unique site of memory in urban history: it not only represented Shanghai and its existing cosmopolitan memory under 21

Accessed on 2nd August, 2014. Original image found in Shanghai of To-day. A Souvenir Album of Fifty Vandyke Gravure Prints of the ‘Model Settlement’. Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, (1930)

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colonialism but was also a nostalgic sentiment of the first half of the 20th century when the histories of the world’s modern nation-states were captured in the monument in a turbulent conjuncture. Shanghai, although in the remote East Asia, became the soldiers’ hometown, a place where they would be remembered and rest. More importantly, the memorial and its disappearance also denote Shanghai and its interlaced war memories. The memorial was built to mourn the human destruction during a war that happened and ended elsewhere, but its representation is commonly related to the Second World War that broke out in the city and the nation. From Fei Mu, Jacob and Luise Fleck’s Children of the World (1941) to Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987), Masahiro Shinoda’s Spy Sorge (2003) and numerous other films that try to depict wartime Shanghai, once the First World War memorial appears on the screen, the narrative tends to portray a time when Shanghai and China were in a crisis and in deep chaos. The turmoil of crowds that surround the monument foreshadows the end of an era and the beginning of an age of darkness in an unpredictably formidable way. In contrast with the world’s cinematic representations of the memorial, Shanghai people’s memory of it also faded away in the successive rounds of spatial alterations of the Bund. The memorial never returned to Shanghai after the Second World War for various reasons. The memory of a war overseas and the foreign victims slipped away naturally in the nation’s greater disasters that followed. Today’s Chinese audience may be sometimes surprised to see it in films and wonder what it was and whether it still exists. A fake substitute was produced for the convenience of filmmaking in a film studio in the outskirts of Shanghai. The public appeal for the return of the memorial and other monuments mainly comes from academia and artists. Urban planners from Shanghai Tongji University proposed the reconstruction of the memorial in a renewal project of “the East Bund” area in 2007.22 Sculptor Zhang Yonghao expressed his concern about the rupture between Shanghai urban sculpture and the spirit it owns and even proposed to re-erect the Sir Robert

22

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Seelj਼⍾ᨀࠪьཆ┙᭩䙐ᯩṸNJ(Tongji University Proposed Renewal Plan for the East Bund). Tongji Newspaper (30 Jun., 2005). . Accessed on 16 Jun., 2009.

Hart Statue that disappeared.23 This discussion intensifies when Haipai (i.e. Shanghai style) and its spirit of tolerance are considered to shed their reputation of betraying the national culture. It is accompanied by the search for the city’s identity after the “critical juncture.” Since 1992, Shanghai has to rebuild its self-image of being or having been cosmopolitan. Pragmatic as this stance sounds, such discussion may eventually lead to the questioning of the erasure of one version of history by another. The historical palimpsest of Shanghai war memories challenges the meaning of the space rewritten in favor of the current political situation. To overlook the pre-existing monuments and change in their narratives whitewashes the city’s memory into a depthless coherence ignorant of its fracture and necessity for self-reflection.

Figure 21: Sihang Warehouse.

23

SeeljĀᯠк⎧དྷāлⲴ෾䴅儈▞NJ(High Tide of Urban Sculpture in New Shanghai Dream Xin Min Evening News 16.4.2004, American Edition. Sir Robert Hart (1835–1911) arrived in Shanghai in 1863. He was the director of the Department of Tax Bureau in the Chinese Custom for more than 40 years. 

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If the amnesia of the First World War Memorial is relatively understandable as the context and place of memory have significantly altered or even disappeared, the forgetting of the still existing Second World War relics reveal contradiction and dilemma in modern Chinese national myth-making. By 2015, only Shanghai Prison Museum in Hongkou District and Shanghai Songhu Anti-Japanese War Memorial Hall in Baoshan District are included in the list of 80 national Anti-Japanese War memorial halls and former sites issued by the State Council of China. Shortly before the large-scale military parade on occasion of the 70th anniversary of Japan’s surrender, the war relic in question, i.e. Sihang Warehouse24 is finally included in the second batch national war memorial facilities published in August 201525. Sitting on the northern bank of Suzhou Creek. The architecture is a huge 20,000 square meter six-storey building of reinforced concrete (Figure 21 Sihang Warehouse). It was designed by the Hungarian architect Ladislans Edward Hudec (1893–1958), whose other works such as the Art-Deco Park Hotel and The Grand Theatre fundamentally formed the modern architecture scene in Shanghai. The building was the only European-style warehouse in Shanghai. It was built in 1931 and served at that time as the warehouse for five Chinese-owned private banks. The space for commercial use transformed into a historical architecture for the preservation not only of its aesthetic being and time value but also for its importance as a fortress where one of the most famous battles in the Sino-Japanese War occurred. The 8.13 Anti-Japanese War in Wusong and Linjiang broke out in Shanghai in 1937 when Japan invaded China one month earlier on a nationwide scale in the north. The gap between the two military strengths was huge, with the highly modernized armament and larger number of soldiers on the Japanese side in contrast with the weak equipment on the Chinese side. Along the edge of Shanghai, around 480 Chinese Republican soldiers, 24

25

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Si Hang, meaning “Four Banks” in Chinese, refers to Jincheng, Dalu, Yanye, and Zhongnan banks in the 1930s. The warehouse was located in the south of the Zhabei District and was once the largest and highest modern architecture in nearby areas. See ljഭ࣑䲒‫ޣ‬Ҿ‫ޜ‬ᐳㅜҼᢩഭᇦ㓗ᣇᡈ㓚ᘥ䇮ᯭǃ䚇൰਽ᖅⲴ䙊⸕NJ(The State Council Announced the 2nd Batch of National War Memorial Facilities and Relics). 24. Aug. 2015. . Accessed on 8. Sep., 2015.

who claimed to be 800 to deceive the enemy, was led by the famous patriotic general Xie Jinyuan in many battles against the attack of the Japanese Army for four days and nights. As is widely believe, they successfully covered for the principal force to withdraw westwards. Sihang Warehouse became the venue of the battle because of its solid structure and strategic location between the southern bank of Suzhou Creek and the international settlement, which was temporarily free from Japanese influence, under the protection of the Western powers. The location of the warehouse brought the battle to the world’s attention and significantly changed China’s international image in the warfare. More importantly, the strong resistance of the Chinese foiled the Japanese attempt to win over China in a blitzkrieg in three months. Also widely known is the action of Yang Huimin, a young girl scout who risked her life to transport a national flag to the warehouse to buoy up the morale of the troops and Shanghai City. Under continuous pressure from Japan, the international settlement finally forced the resistant division to disarm and detain the soldiers in an isolated force camp controlled by the Japanese for four years. General Xie was assassinated by four traitorous soldiers in 1941 in the camp. The rest of the surviving soldiers were sent to the labor camps in China and later to Papua New Guinea as coolies, many of whom led miserable lives. Although the Chinese eventually lost the battle, the warehouse became the symbol of the tenacious Chinese spirit of national resistance in the enemy-occupied Shanghai. Later, the warehouse also emerged in a highly mythologized narrative as a major theme in war propaganda during the Sino-Japanese War. In 1938, the silent movie Eight Hundred Heroes was filmed and won huge acclaim among KMT-ruled areas in China and Hong Kong, and in various Chinese societies in South East Asia. In 1977, Taiwanese director Ding Shanxi made his own version of Eight Hundred Heroes, which enjoys great fame among nationalistic Chinese films. Considering its key role of the battle in the war and its influence on the discourse of Chinese nationalism, the condition of Sihang Warehouse had been contrastingly dismal. Despite the fact that the historic relic was listed as memorial site of Anti-Japanese War by Shanghai Cultural Relics Preservation Committee in 1985, the bulky building served as an office casually shared by different work units. Before its full renovation into a museum in 2015, Sihang Warehouse was the seat of a namesake 111

logistic enterprise running a warehouse business. A large part of the surrounding area was Shanghai’s largest stationery wholesale market. Flows of various commercial activities have engulfed the site of memory in visual and mental oblivion. The only space that carries the reminder of its war history was an exhibition room no larger than 100 square meters. The exhibit was set up by the Sihang Warehouse Company for public visits. Located on the seventh floor in a temporary structure, the room contained a scant number of exhibits: a statue of the General Xie Jinyuan, a limited amount of visual materials, and an inexact model of the warehouse (Figure 22 Exhibition Room in Memory of the “Battle of Sihang Warehouse”). Owing to its low degree of recognition for a long period of time, it was only open to the public every Friday afternoon for a couple of hours. Moreover, not many visitors come to see the exhibit. Most of the people who were aware of its existence or significance and visit the warehouse were mainly tourists and veterans from Taiwan or local students searching for “educational bases for patriotism.”

Figure 22: Exhibition Room in Memory of the “Battle of Sihang Warehouse”.

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For a long time, media coverage of the battle in Sihang Warehouse and the lives of the veterans who fought in the battle was rare. It did emerge particularly on the 60th anniversary of China’s Second Word War victory over Japan in 2005. Chinese media such as Beijing TV Station and Shanghai Xin Min Evening News made feature documentaries and reports about few soldiers among the 800 heroes who were still alive (Zhao, Zhao, and Li).26 Members of the local committee of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference also strongly called for the establishment of a historical museum in Sihang Warehouse in memory of the war (Jiang 3). In the same year, an open letter was submitted by Li Jingfen, the president of the Alliance for Preserving the Truth of Sino-Japanese War at that time, to Shanghai mayor Han Zheng during his visit to San Francisco, appealing for the conservation of Sihang Warehouse relics and for the construction of a large-scale memorial hall. The letter requested the Shanghai government to take up the mission and duty of safeguarding the authenticity of the war history despite political conflicts. The other benefits of restoring the memorial includes the strengthening of national cohesion by promoting cross-strait relations, educational meaning to future generations, and the economic development of Shanghai as an investment to the “spiritual returns” of the city.27 In the past ten years, Sihang Warehouse took on a new fashionable label as one of the many “creative industry bases” in Shanghai.28 26 27

28

Also see Hu Ed. 2006, 66–67. See lj㖾ॾӪ㠤к⎧ᐲ䮯‫ޜ‬ᔰؑ ᨀ䇞‫؍‬ᣔഋ㹼ԃᓃ䚇൰NJ(Open Letter from Chinese Americans to Shanghai Mayor, Propose for Preservation of Sihang Warehouse Relics). Mar. 31, 2005 . Accessed on May 12, 2010. In 2015, on occasion of the 70th anniversary of the victory of Chinese People’s Anti-Japanese War and the world’s anti-fascism war, Shanghai Municipal Government finally decided to relocate the enterprises in the building and restore it into a commemorative space for the Sihang Battle. The total budget was said to be 1 billion RMB (ca. 144 million Euro). According to Ruan Zhongdao, a scholar whose expertise is the history of Nationalist-Communist Relations in the 1990s, former endeavors from the Mainland academia to collect materials on the battle and push forward the establishment of a museum commemorates the Battle of Shanghai was suspected as an act of being allied with the Nationalist Party. Scholars involved in such historical research were even under the threat of being arrested. See Yanqiao Chen, “da shou bi hua 10 yi, da lu chong xiu si hang cang ku”, United News Online (May 06, that 2015).

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The status quo of Sihang Warehouse is representative of many other anti-Japanese war relics in Shanghai and other Chinese cities. The sites of wartime memories in Shanghai are hardly known to the public mainly because of the lack of memorial objects and space. Among them, Tiantongan Road was originally the site of Tiantongan Station, where the first Battle of Shanghai in 1932 broke out. The nine original sites of Assembly Centers were Asia’s version of concentration camps, where Western emigrants in Shanghai were detained during the Japanese occupation. More than 140 sites were used as “comfort stations” (an euphemism for stations that accommodated forced military prostitutes for the Japanese soldiers during WWII in the occupied regions) all over Shanghai. At the original site of the Oriental Library affiliated with the Commercial Press, where a large number of rare Chinese book collections were destroyed by bombs during a Japanese air raid in 1932, now rises a modern vocational school. This area is mostly remembered only as the former address of the headquarters of a 1927 labor movement (Wei, Li, and Zhang, 12, 13, 15, 16). None of these sites of war trauma are properly commemorated. The only large-scale commemorative venue of the Sino-Japanese War in Shanghai is the Songhu Anti-Japanese War Museum, which was not complete until 2000. This museum is located in the remote Linjiang Park in Baoshan District. Compared with the other memories in the city centers previously mentioned, the memory of the Sino-Japanese War is highly inconspicuous in spatial representation. Chinese historian Su Zhiliang expressed his worries over the serious deficiency in Sino-Japanese war research and commemoration in China. In his article “Tomorrow, What’s still Left for us to Remember the War?” he brings up four main problems in present-day war memory preservation. First, WWII memorials around China are limited in number and scale. Most resources for war monuments go to the Liberation War, or the Civil War after 1945, and the victories of the Red Army. Second, China still lacks memorials that serve as warnings for future generations such as for example, the memorials for the Holocaust and the bombing of

Accessed on June 28, 2015.

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Hiroshima. War memory in China is only a salute to the victory of a “just war” against foreign violation or internal evil power. The lack of reflection on the disasters and trauma left by any war on the individual human psyche is noticeable. Third, rapid urban renewal in China has destroyed a considerable number of relics in urban everyday spaces. Fourth, China, as the country largely victimized by the Comfort Women System, is still reluctant to conserve any sites where comfort stations once stood, not to mention establish any formal kind of commemorative venues (Su 88). The downplaying of the Sino-Japanese War memory seems to contradict the international image of the PRC of being engaged in a strong nationalistic sentiment that manifested not only in the post-1949 years of insisting on self-sufficiency but also in the anti-Japan demonstrations participated by a large number of Chinese population across the country in the mid-2000s. These campaigns, more or less tolerated and sanctioned by the Chinese government resurged in the early 2010s due to the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands disputes between the two countries. The war narrative and its commemorative space find difficulty in emerging in the discourse on nationalism, as unavoidable friction still exists within the self-writing of the national history. The official treatment of the Sino-Japanese War memory in China is ultimately related to the constantly changing domestic and diplomatic political circumstances that began with the founding of the PRC. He Yinan contends that China’s postwar myth-making and the control of memory narrative in Sino-Japanese relations are products of the changing needs of Chinese domestic politics and ideological shifts (He 2007). She chronologically examined the endeavors of national political elites from 1950 to 2006 to establish a historical memory of the war among the public using institutionalized tools such as school textbooks and memorial rituals. From the 1950s to the 1970s, personal memory and public discussion on the war were marginalized and silenced in the face of an overwhelming consensus on the nation’s suffering and the invaders’ evil. An investigation into the trauma of human beings and the enormity of war crimes gave way to this collective memory and more turbulent internal political struggles. Above all, the memory of the Sino-Japanese War today is deeply related to the political tensions not only between China and Japan but also between the PRC and Taiwan.

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In the 1950s, the urgent need to assert a distinctive position in the following confrontation between the CPC and the KMT (Kuomingtang, or the Chinese Nationalist Party), in the 1950s led to the severe condemnation of both enemies in the official rendition of history in the PRC. Living in such ideological legacies, in most cases, the battlefield contributions of the Nationalist Army are blurred into those of the “Chinese troops,” glossing over the ruptures in the mainstream narrative in a way that propagates the major role of the Red Army in the war. This narrative served as an important base for the legitimacy of the Communist nation-state of China. The continuing trauma of the Cultural Revolution on Chinese people made the war memory of an earlier time more complicated. The end of the era witnessed the extreme leftist views that had overarched China began to decline. The communist regime was trying to sustain its authority in the face of both in-party conflicts and the distrust of the people. Therefore, He Yinan linked the Chinese dispute on the “history issue” in Japanese textbooks that glorified the war in 1982 as a means of strengthening domestic cohesion in times of internal uncertainty. Nationalistic discourse and war memory were again utilized by the political elites as a means of distracting the public’s attention and dissatisfaction, which could not be relieved domestically to the external other (He 51–54). Although the cross-strait relations have greatly improved in the past decades, the long-term demonization of the Republican Army and the government in Chinese communist history-writing remains a huge obstacle to a straightforward acknowledgement of the KMT’s contribution to Chinese nation-building. Second, the treatment of any memory involving organized violence during the early years of the People’s Republic demonstrates a consistent party-line propaganda strategy for internal ideological control featuring radical binary confrontation. The former, or possibly the still prevailing, binary ideology towards warfare hinders thorough reflection on the nation’s past traumas in the postwar years. Whereas wartime propaganda of resistance aims at cohesion against threats towards national survival, postwar representation and contemplation of war experience reflect how the nation integrates human violence against each other into its own project of modernity. In the case of Germany, the memory of the Holocaust and the Nazi’s atrocities in the Second Word War were also deliberately downplayed at first during the period of Germany’s 116

division. However, after the reunification, when a new German nationstate came into being, the commemoration of the war traumas Germany inflicted on other victim countries and itself immediately became the core of the German national narrative, whose spatial representation is seen above all in Berlin. In China, the post-1949 discussion on war still borders on the “us–them” binary confrontation to consolidate not only the sense of belonging in the newly born regime but also the eulogy to it. Through this logic, war is categorized into “just” and “evil,” and “violation” and “anti-violation.” In this manner, as Chinese scholar Meng Fahua argues, “Any war or struggle which is named under ‘just’ and ‘revolutionary’ is legal and legitimate no matter what kind of violence and human destruction is involved. Our memory of the Sino-Japanese War never go beyond either real historical events…or a collective hatred towards the enemy…while the misfortune and psychological trauma and grievance of ordinary individuals are not and cannot be abundantly shown in such narratives” (Meng 65–66). He Yinan similarly points out the risks a meticulous historical research into the war details need to take to shatter the streamlined version of historical imagination because “(w)artime history was far more complicated than black-and-white struggles between Japanese invaders and Chinese patriots; secret diplomacy, puppet governments and numerous petty Chinese collaborators had existed under the Japanese occupation” (He 59). Apart from the influence of national and international political agendas, the study of war memory in Asia also remains marginal in the obvious research hierarchy in the world academia regarding the Second World War, which largely privileges the European battlefield over that of Asia as the core project of the war progression. The aggression of Japan towards China has always been considered a regional conflict, and it was not until Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor that Asia and the Pacific Region were considered the Asian battleground of the Second World War. This consideration has to do with the still-overwhelming hegemony of Western academia in forming the main narrative of the world history and the global war experience. As research on the European part of the Second World War, particularly on the Holocaust, focuses not only the postwar world order largely controlled by the US but also on the most central part of the crisis of Western modernity, the 117

Asian war experience catches much less of the world’s attention. The Cold War re-shuffled the belligerent states into new antagonistic camps, where West Germany and Japan are both with the US on the Western side, and Communist China and the Soviet Union are on the Eastern side. It was a time when friends became enemies and enemies became friends. New ideological confrontations and moral hierarchy based on these positions submerged any interest in examining the previous war traumas in the rhetoric of the former alliance. Finally, the lack of a national motivation to re-examine its own past intensified the hierarchy. In the post-Cold War era, whereas Germany was eager to talk openly about the crimes its dead regime(s) have committed as a crucial precondition to the rebuilding of the Berlin Republic, the continuity of the regimes and their respective political interests in both China and Japan have made domestic discussions of the war experience a difficult and sensitive task. In short, war memories, especially those of the Sino-Japanese War, are hardly institutionalized in a more sophisticated light of careful scrutiny. Instead, they always require highly strategic handling according to the changing political circumstances. As spatial commemoration entails a significant change and symbolization of historical awareness and rituals, the construction of monuments, memorial sites, and museums concerning the war in China is particularly under tight control, which has led to the seemingly lack of conservation of specific war relics that I have attempted to describe.

IV. Cosmopolitan Memory: World History in the Shanghai Commemorative Culture In an interesting contrast to the amnesia on the war experience in the Shanghai commemorative culture, war memories in other national histories have been well preserved and memorialized in praise of the cosmopolitanness of Shanghai. Two cases are presented here to illustrate the situation. The more widely known of these two is the protection of the relics owned by exiled Jewish refugees who fled the pogroms of Nazism 118

to Shanghai in the 1930s. The establishment of the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, the erection of a related monument, and the renovation of the two synagogues in Shanghai seem to have received more media exposure and social recognition than any of the previously mentioned Sino-Japanese War memorials. Another interesting case is the Museum of the Former Korean Provisional Government. This museum is situated in the original site of the exile government in the 1920s to the 1930s, that is, an otherwise unnoticeable Shanghai Shikumen house. Located near Xintiandi and the site of the first National Congress of the CCP, this museum has not only received a large number of key political figures from South Korea but has also become a popular tourist attraction for Korean visitors in Shanghai. This reverse passion for the preservation of non-Chinese national sites of historical memory requires an understanding of how spaces of Shanghai modernity are conceived and imagined in the current political and economic contexts of China.

Museum of the Former Korean Provisional Government The rediscovery of the historical site of the former Korean Exile Government, which is now the Museum of the Former Korean Provisional Government, demonstrates Shanghai’s close connection with the modern history of Asian nationalism (Figure 23 Former Site of Korean Provisional Government). The site of the museum, which is located in a Shikumen house on Madang Road, served between 1926 and 1932 as the seat of the Korean government in exile. The exile government was organized in April 1919 by Korean patriots in Shanghai in reaction to the Japanese suppression of the March 1st Movement, the struggle for Korean independence from Japanese rule. Leading members of the Korean Provisional Government included national leaders such as Syngman Rhee, An Ch’ang-ho, and Kim Ku.29 This provisional government was well-known for carrying out

29

“Korean Provisional Government.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. . Accessed on 27 Jul. 2010.

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a successful assassination of Japanese political and military personages in Shanghai in 1932. Supported by the government, Korean independence activist Yun Bong-Gil mounted a bombing attack in Hongkew Park. He targeted important attendees in a gathering celebrating Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s birthday and the military success in the First Shanghai Incident. Two high-ranked Japanese officers were killed and three severely injured. The attack became a symbolic issue in the Korean narrative of ardent pursuit of national freedom and independence. Even Chiang Kaishek spoke highly of Yun’s braveness and nationalistic undertaking. Yun is still remembered in South Korea as a national hero, and a monument was also dedicated to him in Hongkew Park, today’s Luxun Park. Yun was executed in Kanazawa, Japan; his remains were transported back to Seoul in 1946 and reburied in the Korean National Cemetery.30 As a more systematic preservation of the memory of Korean national resistance, a huge amount of capital has been put into renovating the two-storey Shikumen house since 1994 to produce a well-maintained memorial site for those who want to pay homage. The museum now receives more than 600 Korean visitors per day and has been visited by three Korean presidents, other high-level politicians, and Korean celebrities such as movie stars. The museum is gloriously called the “Holy Palace of Korean Nationalist Independence Movement.” 31

30 31

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Surprisingly, a well-kept gravestone was also erected in Kanazawa in 1992 initiated by the Korean society in Japan. On 4. Sep., 2015, South Korean president Park Geun-hye attended a ceremony for the reopening of the museum after its further renovation right after her controversial appearance on the military parade the day before in Beijing. It shows a subtle consensus towards the memory of the anti-Japanese war in both China and South Korea.

Figure 23: Former Site of Korean Provisional Government.

Comparing the expenses incurred in renovating the museum and the records of China–South Korea diplomatic development, finding out the relations between the two is not difficult. In 1992, China finally established diplomatic relations with South Korea after more than 40 years of ideological antagonism during the Cold War Era. In 1994, the first RMB1 million was released to launch the museum renovation. The next three years saw an average of RMB600,000 per year put allocated for further maintenance. In 1998, former Korean President Kim Dae-jung made a state visit to China. Two years later, Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji visited South Korea. The largest expenditure for the restoration of the museum was made in the period of 2001–2002, costing a total of RMB65 million coinciding with Korean President Roh Moo-hyun’s state visit to China in 2003. Furthermore, this period also witnessed urban renewal in nearby areas, including the large-scale renovation of the relics at the site of the first national congress and the development of the Taipingqiao Project. The memorials denote the cosmopolitanness of Shanghai instead of the Chinese national discourse, not only in the need to build 121

up a new global image of the city by meticulously exploring its cultural and historical legacies. The marginalization of the narratives of China’s own resistance against Japanese aggression during the same period of time, for example, the anti-Japanese Salvation Movement from 1931 to 1932, is also thought-provoking. Again, in the explanatory texts shown in the museum, the ambiguous term “Chinese Government,” instead of Nationalist or Republican Government, appears throughout the narrative.

The Museum of Jewish Refugees If the cosmopolitan modernity of Shanghai is a matter of suturing the ruptures of time for the local and that of spaces for the global. Shanghai is not only involved in the important modern political movement of East Asia but is also an indispensable part of the righteous battlefield of an inhumane world war. The north Bund area in the now Hong Kou District (formerly Hongkew) is proud of its history of providing a safe shelter for the exiled Jews under the persecution of Nazi Germany during the Second World War.32 The exodus of the European Jews to Shanghai merits attention, as it represents a special chapter in the history of their exile during WWII. For the refugees, the journey to a country that was an unlikely choice of destination for European Jews was extraordinarily long. During this period, China was not well known among Europeans, and it was battling its own war against Japan. The waves of persecution of European Jews in Germany, Austria, Poland, and other countries were motivated by the frantic racial policies of the Nazis and further aggravated by the violence during the Kristallnacht in 1938 and later by the murderous “Final Solution.” Consequently, millions of German Jews and their families were forced to leave their “homeland.” The early refugees were lucky enough to find shelter in the US and in other European countries, such as Switzerland. Unfortunately, not all 32

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For more detailed discussion see my article “Remembering the Pain of ‘Others’: Reflections on the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum and Beyond”, in Writing the War in Asia – a Documentary History, An Online Archive founded by University of Essex, University of Hong Kong and University of Konstanz, , March, 2014.

German and Austrian Jews managed to find refuge abroad after several countries began to reject the immigration of the Jews who were fleeing Nazi Germany. Shanghai immediately offered a light of hope into this bleak “life or death” situation. The city held a special status at that time, as it was divided into different sectors under British-American, French and Chinese, and Japanese control. As the largest metropolis in East Asia, Shanghai was the only place in the world that did not require a visa to enter and stay for an indefinite period.33 Moreover, the cost of living in Shanghai was extremely low; an adult refugee could eat with only Sh.$ 20 per month (or approximately US$ 2.70 at the then-exchange rate). Subsequently, the Tilanqiao area in the old Shanghai Hongkew district became the only place in the world that offered a safe haven for approximately 30,000 Jews, who had come all the way from central Europe to East Asia. Many of the refugees were well educated and had proper and respectable occupations as craftsmen, lawyers, teachers, businessmen, technicians, doctors, and musicians. On top of their status as refugees and the ongoing war between China and Japan, the abrupt change in their living environment created a huge backlash in their lives in various ways. Nevertheless, most of these “Shanghailanders” not only survived the war but also built a thriving community of their own with a vibrant economic and cultural life. The children of the refugees were born in Shanghai, and some of them were receiving proper education prior to the Japanese takeover of Shanghai following the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941. After the fall of Shanghai, the Jewish refugees were unable to leave the Shanghai ghetto and were only able to do so when Japan surrendered in 1945. The Jewish community began to vanish rapidly when the Communists in China won the Civil War against the Nationalists in 1949. This period in history later came under a veil of silence that lasted for decades.

33

Of course, circumstances changed when the Pacific War broke out in 1941, as Japan began to fight directly with the US. The lives of the Jewish refugees were largely dependent on the Japanese policy. See more in David Kranzler Japanese, Nazis & Jews: the Jewish refugee community of Shanghai, 1938–1945 (New York: Yeshiva University Press; distributed by Sifria Distributors 1976). 

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Figure 24: The Museum of Jewish Refugees.

Despite the significant Jewish presence in Shanghai’s history, the interest in this part of local history only emerged in 1992 when China and Israel established diplomatic relations; in fact, “in the mid-1990s, the Shanghai authorities began to notice increasing pressure to recognize the Jewish history of the city.” (Jakubowicz 165) This emerging interest was illustrated by the decision of the municipal government of Shanghai in 1998 to extensively renovate and reopen the former Ohel Rachel Synagogue, the largest remaining synagogue in East Asia. Another synagogue in Shanghai, the Ohel Moshe Synagogue, was turned into the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (Figure 24 The Museum of Jewish Refugees Museum) after the Ohel Rachel Synagogue received honored guests, such as the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the former First Lady of the United States Hillary Clinton. Located at 62 Changyang Road, Hongkou District, the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum is now open to the public after it was fully repaired in 2007. It consists of three sections, namely, the renovated 124

site of the synagogue and two exhibition halls. The museum proudly displays the contributions of Shanghai and China to the anti-fascist movement in WWII even beyond the East Asian context. The People’s Government of Hongkou District allocated more than US$ 1 million in special funds to the full renovation of the synagogue in accordance with the original architectural drawings found in the city archives. Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum is an unusual war memorial in China when compared with others of its kind that continue to create popular memory through orthodox political education for the Chinese public, such as the Beijing War of Resistance Museum.34The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum is neither dedicated to overtly praising the Communist Party nor closely related to patriotism. The neutral and somehow detached point of view of the museum in narrating the war in Europe and the sufferings of the European Jews only vaguely corresponds to the long-term anti-fascist stance of communism and to abstract internationalism. The official commemoration of WWII in today’s China is deeply related to the political tensions not only between China and Japan but also between the PRC and the Republic of China on Taiwan. The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum addresses neither area. Two major conditions can account for the establishment of the museum and its current situation. The first condition is that this commemorative space was used, similar to the previous case, as a tool for making specific diplomatic profile for Shanghai and China. The principal part of cultural memory in China is still largely shaped by the state in a top- down manner. Thus, the memory discourse on “Jews in China” must be endorsed by the government. The early 1990s represent a turning point, as they gave rise to a growing interest of Chinese research institutions in Jewish studies in China; this interest is logically associated with the establishment of Sino–Israeli diplomatic relations in 1992 after the Cold War.35 As a result of mutual political recognition 34

35

See Rana Mitter, “Behind the Scenes at the Museum: Nationalism, History and Memory in the Beijing War of Resistance Museum, 1987–1997.”  The China Quarterly. Vol. 161 (2000), 279–293. The mutual recognition between the PRC and Israel was smooth between 1948 and 1949. However, the bilateral relations experienced a long deadlock after the Korean War broke out and froze in the Suez Crisis when the Cold War upgraded. Consequently, the gap between the PRC and the pro- US Israel deepened. China’s

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between China and Israel, the rise in the number of Jewish studies in China, especially in Shanghai, is understandable. The motivation to rediscover the Jewish history of Shanghai does not entirely reveal an interest in understanding the city’s multi-layered past as such. The salvation of the “memories” of Shanghai was prioritized for international diplomacy and not for the public participation of users in the city. As with other religious relics in China, the restoration of a physical structure does not result in the restoration of the events that were once held in the space. “Despite the narrative of an ab initio humanitarian impulse in China, being Jewish is not an acceptable ongoing identity for Chinese nationals. Judaism is not a recognized religion in China.” (Jakubowicz 165) In this manner, the museum becomes what I call an abstract “souvenir space” designed for international relations rather than for an engagement with the history and memory of the war. The final message that the museum tries to convey to its Chinese visitors might be crystallized in the following comment of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin about the museum during his visit to Shanghai: “To the people of Shanghai for unique humanitarian act of saving thousands of Jews during WWII, thanks in the name of the government of Israel.”36 Although it encourages local audiences to visit this commemorative space as a tourist spot that introduces the war experience of foreign communities in a “neutral” or even tenderhearted narrative, the museum is actually managed by the Foreign Affairs Office in Hongkou District; the primary target audience does not seem to be the local residential population. The entrance fee to the museum amounts to RMB 50, or approximately € 5, and is hence rather high for a visit to a museum of limited scale and may thwart a good many of local visitors.37

36

37

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own reform of the Middle East policy after the death of Mao largely set the future tone of the normalization of the Sino–Israel relations. Overview of the museum provided by the official website of the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, last modified in 2010, . New measures were taken to attract local visitors during the researcher’s last visit to the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum in May 2013; discounted entrance fee is provided to visitors who complete the visitor’s survey question form.

Meanwhile, Shanghai has its own good reason for exploring the precious memory that can easily draw attention from not only the local people but also the whole world. Being a symbolic space of the rapidly developing Chinese economy and a symbol of its fast- paced modernization, cultural memory narratives about the past of Shanghai have usually been characterized by their eagerness to connect with their cosmopolitan past. A persistent wave of old Shanghai nostalgia for the interwar years when it enjoyed its alleged golden time has had its long-lasting influence on the cultural scene of the city since the 1990s. The image of Shanghai as a showcase of the post-Mao economic achievement of China and its rising role in a globalizing world finds the most suitable soil in the history of the Jewish refugees. The generosity of the nation and the practice of international humanitarianism in the city and nation, despite the change in regime, continue and deserve the respect of the world, as the scholars of the Shanghai Social Science Academy have suggested. They argue that this part of Shanghai’s history can serve as “a unique ‘cultural name card’ for Shanghai in foreign communication and exchange,” thereby suggesting that the city can be a showcase for a global audience (Dai and Zhou 181). The following is the comment of a Chinese expert on Jewish studies, Prof. Xu Xin from Nanjing University, on the launch of the database of Jewish refugees: Academically speaking, the history of Shanghailanders is a part of the global research data on the Jewish diaspora around the world. It is therefore valuable to collect the data for the purpose of social statistics; in the meantime, most of the “Shanghailanders” have wonderful memories of China, their children would come to Shanghai for root seeking. This will increase their interest in and favorable impression of China, which will enhance mutual friendship and China’s soft power. This has been the first time for both China and Israel to collect and compile such data on a remarkable scale and in such an intensive collaboration. This project is valuable in multiple reasons: in consummating social statistics, rescuing historical materials and promoting diplomatic relations.38

For the creation of a cosmopolitan image of Shanghai (and thus of China) in the West, the unique Jewish experience during the Holocaust 38

Background information on the chronicle database of the refugees provided by the official website of the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, last modified in 2010, . Original text in Chinese; the quotation is my own translation.

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becomes a highly valuable cultural capital for the global profile of the city. Jeffrey Sichel, one of the directors of the stage play “North Bank Suzhou Creek,” claimed that the experience of Shanghailanders is “the Chinese version of ‘Schindler’s List.’”39 Thus, the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum can be seen as a process with which Chinese authorities could present China as a mirror image of the West. The museum epitomizes a historical self that is eager to be affirmed in the eye of others, that is, by assertion from the West. In this sense, this endeavor to be in line with the West serves as a means of articulating the spectacle of China’s imagined modernity. The timing of the reemergence of rescued memories from the stories of Jewish refugees was highly orchestrated and attempted to smoothly suture the rupture between the past and the present. The neighborhood in which the Shanghailanders lived turned from a milieu de mémoire, the real environment of historical happenings, into a lieu de mémoire, or the Refugees Museum. This past “on arrival” inevitably trims down twigs and branches that obscure the picture of a self- sustainable present and can be illustrated by what has not been elaborated on in exhibition displays. First, any controversial historical situations remain invisible. Examples of such situations include the subtle relation between Japan and Germany and its influence on the decision of accommodating the Jewish refugees in Shanghai as well as the postwar conditions that the Jews faced and those that forced the Jews to leave China for further exile. In fact, the architectural design proposals of the museum that endeavored to explore the contested meanings of the historical period were all only partly successful. In “The Carved History”, foreign actors Choa and Bar-Galand emphasize that the design of memorials is a symbol of the relations between life in exile and memory. This notion largely echoes some of the ideas of the Holocaust memorials in Berlin. The Shanghai-Toronto-based corporation Living Bridge reestablished a communal environment, instead of only gentrifying an individual architecture, of several other historical sites and cultural facilities in Tilanqiao as part of the North Bund Project (Jakubowicz 167–170).

39

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See “Play about Holocaust Debuts in China.” Forward (23 Mar., 2012). . Accessed on 20 Mar., 2014.

However, both projects that were proposed between 2004 and 2005 are by now still suspended Moreover, the majority of the local Chinese, however, appear to be barely aware of in the official commemorative culture as prescribed by the Chinese government – a culture that is supposed to warn, and encourage reflection as well as contemplation. The museum can be an example of memorial site in contemporary China, where cultural remembrance is created for a specific non-Chinese community under the purview of the agents dominating China’s historiography. The aim of this site is not (necessarily) nation building but rather “destination branding” and fostering transnational partnership. The goal of monuments, in my view, is not only to remind people of the past or, in many cases, of the excluded narratives, but also to provide people with a space where they can observe and contemplate on their own reactions to the past. Reiterating the value of the anti-fascist spirit of China and the generosity of its people places the memory narrative of the genocide and of political persecutions in Europe during World War II at an observational distance. Despite its effective restoration of architectural relics and attempts to re-invoke public interest (at home and abroad) in this period of history, the museum provides the local public only with an opportunity to acquire factual information rather than an opportunity to contemplate on the relations between memory, history, and the present and the visitors’ personal place therein.

VI. Dilemma of Monument: Spaces of National Memory in Shanghai and Berlin Memory cultures in Berlin and Shanghai demonstrate thought-provoking conflicts and tensions of modernity’s dilemma in articulating national identities. As mentioned in the introduction, case studies of memorial sites in both cities show difficulty in categorizing them under the linear development of the perception of modernity after dramatic social changes. There are four aspects of comparable points in understanding

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the contestation and dilemmas that the commemorative cultures of both cities are experiencing. First, as far as aesthetics is concerned, monuments in both cities show contrasting natures in representing modernity. In Berlin, restoration and erection of large-scale, state-funded monuments in the central part of the city have been observed since the reunification in 1990. Highly symbolic urban monuments from pre-republican eras such as the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag Building became new icons of the German nation at home and abroad. The Victory Column has disposed of its original implication as a celebration of Prussian militarism and became the central plaza for huge public gatherings such as the “Love Parade”. Examples of non-symbolic and counter-monumental gestures can also be found in several Berlin monuments. The idea of a modern nation and history that produces a proud sense of the imagined community is challenged in monuments such as the Jewish Museum and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe. Confronting the guilt of the nation’s past atrocity becomes the core narrative of the rebuilding of the nation after the Cold War. Public installations such as the “memory plaques” and the “stumbling stones” reject the way a large-scale monument concentrates its symbolic meaning on a signified space. They use non-explanatory displays of factual details and fragments from the past to reinvoke memories of the banality of the evil in everyday space. In Shanghai, although monuments remain tools of political propaganda and ideological education, and therefore hardly appear postmodern, the aesthetic style of the monuments is not limited to the typical socialist realist modernism, in which the great leadership of the party or the moving narrative of the martyrdom is magnificently represented. The main body of the Tower to the People’s Heroes, by comparison, looks modest, concise, and abstract, although the meaning is still highly symbolic. The May Thirtieth Movement Monument, with its widely stretching steel parts that resemble the Chinese character of the number 30, displays more freedom in expressing the passion, instead of the sacrifice and heroism, of the urban labor movement. The aesthetics of another core site of memory in Shanghai, the Longhua Martyrs’ Memorial Park, as Kirk Denton suggests, “is a strange brew of modernist grandiosity with the socialist realist heroic” (Denton 565–586). (Figure 25 Sculpture in Longhua Martyrs Cemetery) With its mixed use of glass in the central exhibition hall and a larger-than-life 130

sculpture of a stone man with half of his body buried in the ground and one arm stretching up towards the sky, the overall image of the Memorial Park is rather impressionist and modern. All built in the mid-1980s, the monuments in Shanghai reveal an ambivalent attitude underneath the continuity of a national narrative that has experienced severe crises but has not yet seen their complete erosion.

Figure 25: Sculpture in Longhua Martyrs Cemetery.

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Figure 26: East Berlin Mural Painting at Leipzig Square.

Second, the ideological turns both cities experienced have left their memory cultures contested visibly and invisibly. Berlin exhibits a more democratic and comprehensive commemoration of Germany’s myths and traumas. Aside from the monuments I discussed previously, some of East Berlin’s monuments and traces of the GDR culture remain. One eye-catching example is the mural painting on the outer wall of the now Federal Ministry of Finance Building on Wilhelm Street near the Leipzig Square. (Figure 26 East Berlin Mural Painting at Leipzig Square) The painting was commissioned by the East German government for the programmatic purpose of representing the social ideal of the communist regime.”40 Ironically, beside the building is the monument that commemorates the anti-Soviet riot on June 17, 1953. The cornerstone of the unfinished memorial for Karl Liebknecht, one of the most famous leftist revolutionary figures, can also be found on the border of the Potsdam Square. The Soviet War Memorial in Treptow Park in Southeast Berlin, a piece of typical Stalinist monument work of solemn grandeur built after the Soviet occupation in 1945 in East 40

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The title of the mural painting is “The importance of peace in the cultural development of humanity and the necessity of struggle to achieve this goal.” Information is taken from the explanatory text of the 17 June monument.

Berlin, remains intact without any damage mainly because of its remote location. (Figure 27 Treptow Park Statute) However, the residue of the past has to be right both in place and quantity. The transformation and contestation of Berlin’s memory culture in relation to the political transformation from 1989 to 1990 are more extensive than they now show. In East Berlin, many street and square names with too obvious ideological overtones were immediately replaced by new ones. During this period, “a good deal of discussion focused on dealing with the leftover symbols of the SED regime – under consideration was the fate of more than 800 monuments in East Berlin alone”.41 Heated debates were ignited, particularly about the demolition of the Lenin Statue in Berlin-Friedrichsschain and the Palace of the Republic upon the River Spree. These confrontations over symbolic spaces between the East and the West Germans are now weakened in the wake of more realistic and long-lasting societal and psychological effects of the reunification.

Figure 27: Treptow Park Statute. 41

See “Protest against the Demolition of the Lenin Monument in Berlin (November 6, 1991).” German History in Documents and Images. . Accessed on 19 Oct., 2015.

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In Shanghai, in comparison, the “Wende” is trickier than that in Berlin, as the previous narrative of the communist-led history remains officially unshaken. However, the political agenda of the PRC have actually undergone equally dramatic changes since the end of the Cultural Revolution. In the first decade afterwards, the major state-funded monuments in Shanghai, like those in the other cities in China, were constructed in the early- to mid-1980s as a response to the healing period of national traumas. After 1989 (or 1992, a turning point that is arguably more important for Shanghai and particularly the Yangtze River Delta area), when the economic development began to dominate the main narrative of the country’s ideology in Deng’s era, national monuments and commemorative sites tried to integrate themselves into a newly invented narrative of the present, with a shift that seems not to contradict the past. We see how the narrative of the Memorial House of the First National Congress of the CPC as a tourist spot merged in the nearby Xintiandi Bar Quarter. Denton and Perry also mentioned Shanghai Municipal History Museum to emphasize the local history and the Republican civil life as the main line of historical narration, which demonstrates a radical departure from what most of the common history museums in the PRC do. (Denton 2005; Perry 2004) The balance is subtly kept between the still orthodox continuity with the past narrative and the silent adaptation of a new, self-contradictory parallel one, covering up much of the memory crisis. Such a narrative is latently influencing a radical or cynical attitude of the public towards a not yet fully discussed past, as evident in the case of the demolition of the Gu Zhenghong Statue, a heroic icon in the May Thirtieth Movement, by a real estate company. Third, the nationalism discourses in the commemorative spaces in Berlin and Shanghai also illustrate a dilemma between the smooth claiming of a national subject and the restrain from doing so for various reasons. The need of the Berlin Republic to normalize Germany’s national history by restoring a national symbol is straightforward. The end of the division made Germany’s reclaiming of its national identity possible. This possibility emerged after a period when it had been repressed in West Germany after the Second World War and became politically invalid after the collapse of the East Germany. However, the persistent need to prevent a revival of nationalism remains strong. This 134

need is not only embedded as a the political necessity in Germany’s foreign affairs, particularly in diplomatic relations with the West, but also in the memory structure of Germany’s mainstream society today. The strong redemptive gesture in the commemoration of the disastrous aftermaths of the Nazi regime and the war experience suggests the simultaneous distance and proximity of past traumas. In Germany, unlike in China, although national identity also finds difficulty in claiming itself, a clear demarcation from the past regime is relatively easier to draw because the old state per se no longer exists. The dilemma of commemorative space in Shanghai is exactly the opposite. The narrative of the sites of memory has to remain consistent, although its content has been reversed in meaning or has subverted the previous ideological stand. One interesting phenomenon is that the discourse on nationalism in Shanghai’s most significant sites of memory is understood in terms of patriotism. These sites are called the “patriotic education bases” (aiguo zhuyi jiaoyu jidi). The replacement of nationalism by patriotism not only aims at weakening the xenophobic overtone but also at constituting a relatively less defined national subject in an inconsistent nationalist narrative, especially in the Second World War discourse. Thus, this replacement becomes an institutional tool of domestic propaganda to divert the attention of the public from the national subject to the state/party subject. The marginalization of the Second World War memory of, for example, the Sihang Warehouse, shows the embarrassment of the PRC in the commemoration of a highly symbolic nationalist space when the Republican China and the KMT as national subjects are unavoidable. The passion of PRC to rearticulate the city’s Jewish memory and the enormous investment in the restoration of the relics of the Korean Exile Government attempts to mobilize Shanghai’s past cosmopolitanism by boosting its present cosmopolitan image as well as by substituting it for the national memory. Finally, commemorative spaces in Berlin and Shanghai exemplify the tension of the discourse between the city and the nation-state. Berlin carries the extremely heavy “duty” of symbolizing a new Germany after its unification and democratization nationwide. This duty has made Berlin a special (show)case of German national modernity and its self-reflection both domestically and internationally. As mockingly remarked by German essayist Wolf Jobst Siedler, “if the Germans 135

were once the greatest sinners, they now apparently want to be the greatest penitents” (Bornhöft 2007). The “overload” of commemorative spaces in Berlin reveals the city’s important position in the national image-making. However, the city’s comparatively bleak economic status has made it in many ways a marginal or provincial city in Germany. In contrast to the high-profile image of Berlin as a glorious capital embodying a promising new era for Germany, the actual economic situation and the motivation for the development of the city appear weak. “Poor but sexy” is how former Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit describes the city. The long-standing high unemployment rate in Berlin remains the capital city’s greatest social problem. In July 2009, the unemployment was 14.2%, which was in sharp contrast to the federal average of 8.2% (Henning 2009). Although some of the economic sectors in Berlin, such as the service sectors, innovative industry, manufacturing industry, construction, and infrastructural sectors, thrived significantly after the Wall fell, they are not sufficient in buoying up Berlin to be a financially strong city. A more profound disparity in social, economic, and political terms between Berlin and the other German metropolises, particularly those in the former FRG, remains evident. The case studies of Shanghai’s memorial sites reveal how difficult it is to neatly categorize them in a linear development of progressive modernity. They exemplify the tension between the different temporalities of Chinese national memories. Since the economic rise of Shanghai in the 1990s, the enthusiasm for new rounds of urban design and development for the most modern city in China has re-invoked the nostalgia for individual memories of the everyday bourgeois life style of old Shanghai. Nostalgia for old Shanghai seems to overshadow the memory of urban society’s role in national ideology and its transformations. The once rigid party line against urban capitalism, the demonization of the city’s decadence, and above all Shanghai’s (and city’s) long-term peripheral position in Chinese historical discourse appears to have been replaced by a new central position for the urban in post-reform economic development. Nevertheless, commemorative spaces in Shanghai still hold strong sway over the city’s major memory narrative, one that maintains its legitimacy based on a continuation of socialist orthodoxy. The narrative of the rapid modernization of the Shanghai cityscape leading to a bright future renders invisible the tension-ridden and still 136

unraveled discourse of the relations between Chinese modernity and its national identity. The constant shift in its ideological discourse is therefore at constant play with the actual production of commemorative spaces vis-à-vis the construction of national identity and awareness. In the next part, I will explore in detail how the politics of nostalgia in Berlin and Shanghai denotes the tensions between the national and the local in terms of urban modernity.

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Part II The Politics of Nostalgia: Memory, Space, and Competing Modernities

Connecting the past, present, and future, nostalgia plays a crucial role in understanding a city, particularly a cosmopolis where global, national, and local discourses are inextricably interwoven. Nostalgia involves the identification of home and ego, national and local. Nostalgia is derived from the Greek words nostos (homecoming) and algia (longing). Nostalgia, then, literally means a longing for a faraway home that no longer exists or has never existed. Thus, nostalgia, as a form of homesickness, involves the relation between home and self. Moreover, nostalgia has both temporal and spatial dimensions; it is a yearning for somewhere else and for another time. Nostalgia now becomes a collective symptom beyond the individual level. It is not a mere expression of local longing but is a result of a new understanding of time and space, creating a distinction between the local and the universal. In today’s context of globalization, as cyberspace and the global village rapidly develop, local consciousness becomes stronger. The epidemic of nostalgia takes place globally, marked by a longing for continuity in a fragmented world. The nostalgia for a cosmopolis deeply involves our perceptions of modernity because it is a crucial part of the collective imagination, as well as the semiological reading, of time and space. As Svetlana Boym suggests, Urban cosmopolitanism is not a feature of the present but rather an element of nostalgia, yet it serves to underscore both the global and national discourse…. the city becomes a global village unto itself: its own center of the world and its own periphery. The affective, imagined community is frequently identified with a nation, its biography, its blood and soil. Yet identification with a city….is no less strong through modern history. Urban identity appeals to common memory and a common past but is rooted in a man-made place, not in the soil: in urban coexistence at once alienating and exhilarating, not in the exclusivity of blood (76).

Boym’s distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia can help clarify what sets the enthusiasm for restoring national symbols

apart from the equally prevalent desire for the cult of a certain period of time. As Janelle L. Wilson observes, “Those who experience restorative nostalgia do not think of themselves as nostalgic. Rather, they believe that they are pursuing truth…[R]eflective nostalgia, on the other hand, dwells in the longing and loss” (31–32). In this Part, I will compare the discourses on nostalgia in terms of architectural space in Berlin and Shanghai. As far as city form is concerned, both Berlin, after the “Wende”, and Shanghai, after Deng’s southern tour, make a determined effort to reconstruct the urban style and spatial order that they once owned but later lost. In Berlin, “critical reconstruction” endeavors to invoke a vision of pre-war Berlin with an amiable urban scene by giving the old landmarks (most of which were on the East side) their original form, whether intact or partial. In Shanghai, spaces associated with the 1930s’ bourgeois life are popular among the locals: not only are cafes, bars, cultural relics, and bookshops in nostalgic styles favored, but houses and streets in the former concessions have also become urban sections of high symbolic and economic value. Instead of only considering the local–global dynamics of nostalgia, I will argue that nostalgia, even if by means of consumption, in both Berlin and Shanghai is related to the local resistance to the predominant national narrative. In Berlin, this tension manifests itself as a result of the spatial unification of a once-divided city whose memories cannot be so easily unified. On one hand, nostalgia for the Berlin of the Golden Twenties, which finds the most support from West Berliners, is on eye-catching display. On the other hand, Ostalgie, nostalgia associated with the consumption of space in East Berlin, seems to challenge the remembrance of 1920s’ Berlin. By comparison, Shanghai nostalgia is in the middle of an enduring confrontation between the local proponents of urbanity and the national anti-urban supporters. The present nostalgia is lured by the memory and imagination of pre-revolutionary urbanism as a way of articulating the long suppressed narrative of the city’s multiple facets. In both cases, nostalgia emerges as a form of power struggle, which exhibits competing understandings of modernity.

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Chapter Three City of Divided Memories: Two Kinds of Berlin Nostalgia

In Berlin, the memory narratives after the reunification are mainly torn between two kinds of nostalgias. On one hand, the urban planning policy full of nostalgic sentiment for the pre-war Berlin prevailed in today’s Berlin. Nostalgia for “the Golden Twenties”, which seems to mythologize the city’s transient period of glory into its model image for return, tries to revive the landmark of urban modernity. On the other hand, nostalgia for the former East Berlin architectural legacies are to be traced everywhere: the controversy over the demolition of the former GDR multi-functional complex, the Palace of the Republic (Palast der Republik), the popularity of the GDR Museum or the Museum based on the former border Check-point Charlie and the sentiment for the GDR spaces represented in the film “Goodbye Lenin” (Becker 2003). Ostalgie, which describes such disquiet, is derived from the German words ost (east) and nostalgie (nostalgia). This kind of nostalgia speaks of not only a response to global curiosity about a lost and failed regime but also of a sense of disillusionment with reality on both sides of the city, even though the Wall does not exist anymore. The two kinds of nostalgia are not rivals. Instead, by reviewing the differences between Berlin’s local tradition and the German national tradition since the pre-war years, when Berlin was at the peak of prosperity, this chapter divulges that contemporary memory discourse serves as an approach to questioning the local–national tension. In this sense, the competitive kinds of nostalgia prevailing in Berlin beg the question of what modernity is and where it leads Germany. Along with the two world wars and the two authoritarian regimes, reunification is only another chapter of modern German history. Berlin is an ever-changing totality of German and European modernities, which, according to Karen Till, traverse the “modernism of the Weimar period, the romantic and reactionary modernism of National Socialism, the socialist utopian modernism of

the GDR, the Cold War capitalist modernisms of the FRG, and now postmodern neo-traditionalism” (50–51). Indeed, the experience of modernity is far from the smooth progression of linear time and development. According to Rudy Koshar, it is “the experience of growing asymmetry between dominant hope and marginalized but still resonant memory” (Till 56). All involved parties–the state, municipality, architects, residents, and tourists–muster their enthusiasm for defining Berlin spaces in their own memory narratives. Berlin is a city of multiple pasts and rightfully so. The co-existing but dissimilar kinds of nostalgia are both reasonable in an ironic experience of the loss of paradise. Boym observes that Easterners are nostalgic “for the stability of old frameworks of the world; Westerners, for the ‘island Berlin’ with its experimental art and life and impressive state subsidies; conservatives, for a less chaotic life; leftists, for a more chaotic and politically engaged life. The immigrants who came to Germany a decade ago are nostalgic for their heroic pasts, when they had to struggle for survival, not like the immigrants of today” (17–18).

I. Turning Back the Clock: “Critical Reconstruction” and Nostalgia for Interwar Berlin The symbolic meaning of Berlin essentially lies not only in its significance as the representation of German political modernity but also in its cosmopolitan urbanity, which has diminished by degrees on both sides of the Berlin Wall. Therefore, the story of Berlin after its reinstatement as Germany’s capital is also a reclaiming of the lost urban prosperity since the end of the 19th century. War damages and artificial division dimmed the speed, diversity, openness, and capitalist commercial vigor of the metropolis. To shed the image of provincial Bonn as Germany’s political center, the new capital, Berlin, not without its own provinciality, has been reimaged as a new, fashionable metropolis of renewed temporality. Urban modernity is anything but untried in Berlin. Since the turn of the 20th century, until the Second World War, Berlin was one of the leading 142

world-class cities that represented the 20th century’s image of urban modernity: “crowds, lights, noise, machines, buildings, all on a scale that dwarfed the individual” (Ladd 115). Public transportation in Berlin, including steam railways, streetcars, and trolleys, developed rapidly since the 1870s (Large 84). Commercial space expanded quickly with the rise of capitalism. Department stores in Berlin, such as Wertheim in Leipziger Platz (opened in 1896) and Kaufhaus des Westens (opened in 1907) on Tauentzien Street, could rival those in London or Paris. As the center of communication and journalism, Berlin was a “word city” of flourishing modern print media (Richie 1998; Fritzsche 1996; MacDonogh 1998). The hub of transportation and industrialization magnetized immigrants from the hinterland, who eventually formed large areas of working-class slums, most notably the Berlin Mietskaserne.1 The experience of the metropolis stimulated and formed what Georg Simmel (1903) calls the “mentality of the metropolis,” which emerged as basic conceptions of most modern cities. Moreover, Berlin developed as an ideal place for cultural creations. The city excelled in film, theater, cabaret, fine art, and architecture. The city’s cosmopolitanism reached its peak during the Weimar era, when artists and creative thinkers enjoyed a free traffic of ideas across national borders. Weimar Berlin is remembered for its tolerant, liberal atmosphere that produced an astonishingly long list of important figures who changed the modern Western world, including the following: George Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz, Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, Mies van der Rohe, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Otto Klemperer, Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Leni Riefenstahl, Josef von Sternberg, Fritz Lang, Walter Ruttmann, and Albert Einstein. No wonder the Berlin Republic overtly placed the hope of reviving the tradition before 1933. As David Clay Large quotes the claim of the director of Berlin Festival in an interview conducted in 1990, “Berlin dreams the dreams of the Twenties” (Large xxvi). 1

Mietskasernen refers to large, multi-storied residences for rent by the lower working class people during the time of industrialization. These Mietskasernen were built by the rich people in such a way that many flats could be constructed on each floor to achieve maximal profits. The regulations for construction were usually ignored in the building process. In Germany, Mietskasernen are mostly found in large industrial cities such as Berlin and Hamburg.

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However, although cosmopolitanism is now brought back as a favorable merit for global cities, this feature of Berlin left Germans from other regions with an impression of alien restlessness and grotesque fantasies. Take Potsdamer Platz for example. The indispensable components of the Berlin myth of the Golden Twenties, such as the Kempinskis’ Haus Vaterland (with its dance cafe and restaurants), Universum Film AG (UFA) Palast, Europa Dance Pavilion, Meisel-Pschorr Brewery, Café Josty, and Weinhaus Huth (all located in the square), were easily associated with their uncomfortable lack of Germanness. The despicable Americanness and Jewishness of Weimar Berlin, to a large extent, represented decadence and chaos. The vulgar and low (commercial) cultural taste that accompanied the name of Berlin was barely positive, not only within Germany but also when it is compared with other metropolises in the world. Unlike Paris, early 20th-century Berlin was not a city of great capitalistic beauty but one of modern ugliness. Lothar Müller observes that Berlin was conceived as “a center of a technological, civilizing modernity” (Müller 38). In the 1900s Wilhelmine Berlin already developed an unmatched industrial modernity in Europe. “Berlin,” says Müller, “with its factories, its dense traffic, its advanced technology, its expansive dynamism, and its exemplary sewage system was regarded as the quintessence of a modern industrial metropolis” (Müller 38). Nevertheless, Berlin’s industrial modernity was criticized for its destruction of traditions. In an 1899 essay, Walther Rathenau, the foreign minister of Weimar Germany, ironically declared Berlin as “the most beautiful city in the world” (Müller 39). Rathenau mourned the loss of Prussian culture in the rapid growth of the Wilhelmine era. In architecture, the tradition of Karl Friedrich Schinkel was at risk of giving way to a nouveau riche American style of tasteless kitsch.2 “At the center of this argument, whose aesthetic standard is a classicism that anticipates modern functionalism, is the critique of the hypertrophic facades of the capital” (Müller  39). According to Karl Scheffler, Berlin was full of modern ugliness, 2

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One example is as follows: “The demolition of the old cathedral, designed by Schinkel, and its replacement by Raschdorff’s colossal “cathedral in World-Exposition style” becomes, in this topical polemic against the dominance of historicism and eclecticism in the buildings of the Wilhelmine era, a symbol for the alliance of bold parvenu gestures and the thoughtless destruction of tradition” (Müller 39).

and unlike Paris, Vienna, and London, it lacked the spirit that qualifies a real modern metropolis. He provided a critique against the city’s provincialism because of its over-acceleration of the city’s form and pace of life (41). Not surprisingly, the time of Berlin’s rapid industrialization was already a time of nostalgia for more tradition and order, hardly differing from modern-day Berlin’s desire to turn the clock back to retrieve a timeless state of stable power. The contradictory forces of progress and idleness entailed a change in social structure. Later on, this cosmopolitanism, together with the Jewish culture, was largely eradicated by Nazi ideology, the Second World War, and post-war division and urban planning on both sides of the Wall. Nevertheless, West Berlin, during the Cold War, remained politically and culturally unique in the larger national context of West Germany. On one hand, as an island besieged by Communist zones, West Berlin was imbued with an atmosphere that was not only more diverse than its eastern forbidden zones but also apparently distinct from the rest of the highly commercialized (if not Americanized) West Germany. On the other hand, the symbolic implications of Berlin associated with the nationalism of Nazi Germany were also deemed sensitive or unwelcome in the post-war West German structure of feeling, which was revealed in the controversial moving of the capital from Bonn to Berlin after the reunification. In such circumstances, the landmarks built directly by Cold War Potsdamer Platz were those represented in a highly concise and functionalistic modernism with not too many national characteristics: the buildings in the Kulturforum (Cultural Forum), such as the New National Gallery (designed by Mies van der Rohe), Berlin Philharmonic Hall, and Berlin State Library (the latter two designed by Hans Scharoun), formed an image of a modest but civilized and open cultural scene. On the East side, urban reconstruction also experienced a time of fluctuation. As a key word in the GDR architectural politics, reconstruction also stood for the demolition of an old quarter and the rebuilding into a more modern form as well as for renovation and restoration according to historical form (Urban 74). Most noticeable was the reconstruction of the old Berlin quarter Nikolaiviertel and of the historic Gendarmenmarkt. In the 1970s and 1980s, reconstruction began to

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be stably understood as a strikingly nostalgic retrospect and re-respect of the “historical character” of the Berlin urban form, which was no longer restrained by the communist narrative of urban image that was related to, for instance, the movements of workers (Urban 78, 84). The subtle changes in the late years of the GDR regime in spatial configuration illustrate the local crisis of urban identity that was at odds with the national ideology. Therefore, in the reunified Germany, the new capital was confronted with challenges of the heterogeneous architectural legacies from both sides of the Wall. The first kind of nostalgia focused on by debates is to what extent Berlin can and should revive its pre-war urbanity, regardless of the ruptures in Berlin architectural history. These ruptures include the Nazi presence, war damages, and construction and reconstruction of both Berlins during the Cold War. Probably no other urban planning policy can illustrate this nostalgic commitment as “critical reconstruction”. The core idea of “critical reconstruction” is to restore Berlin to its pre-war urban structure and appearance by setting rules to restrict the height, shape, and material of buildings constructed in the new capital. Its proponents try to preserve Berlin in its most idiosyncratic form, what Hans Stimmann, director of the Senate’s Construction Bureau, calls the “classical modern” (Wolf 1998). They try to preserve Berlin in its most idiosyncratic form under what the director of the Senate’s Construction Bureau Hans Stimmann calls the “classical modern” (Wolf 1998). The case of the rejuvenated buildings on the Potsdamer Platz, Hotel Adlon (Figure 28 Hotel Adlon) on the central boulevard Unter der Linden and last but not least the reconstruction of the Berlin Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace), for example, crystallize such endeavor. Nostalgia for “the Golden Twenties”, which seems to mythologize the city’s transient period of glory into its model image for return, tries to revive the landmark of urban modernity that turned desolate later.

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Figure 28: Hotel Adlon Today.

Interestingly coinciding with the retrospective trend of reconstruction in the East Berlin, “critical reconstruction” was, however, not formed after the reunification but had already been initiated in the International Construction Exhibition (Internationale Bauausstellung, or IBA) in 1984. The IBA is essentially a competitive arena for inviting new ideas and projects internationally for German urban planning and city construction. Firstly organised in 1913 in Leipzig, the IBA during the Cold War time can be seen as opportunities to search for new definitions of postwar West Berlin architectural modernism. The model residential housing project, the Hansaviertel, appeared in the IBA in 1957. Nevertheless, from 1979 to 1987, “critical reconstruction” was staged in the IBA (1984) as a predominant planning concept of the West Berlin Senate, voiced out firstly by the previous director of the Senate, Hans-Christian Müller. The reunification has witnessed a resurging of the concept to get the “good old” Berlin back. The major advocates of the idea, many of them being influential decision-makers,

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argue that the 19th century and prewar Berlin of great peace and virtue should be regained – or at least remade into a present-day equivalent (Wolf 1998). In this vein, the post-reunification theory of “critical reconstruction” actually echoes with the nostalgic desires on both sides of the Wall before it fell down. It represents a continuation of the nostalgia that already existed in both East and West Berlin in the late Cold War period. This nostalgia seems to express the discontents towards the postwar modernism, trying to liberate the repressed Berlin modernity under both Soviet and American (and in those cases, the national) influence. Continuing its resilient gesture towards Berlin’s fluctuating urban forms, the nostalgia of “critical reconstruction” in the post-1989 Berlin willfully refuses to admit the fact that Berlin has never been remaining in certain uniformity but is always “a fascinating montage of conflicting histories, scales, forms and spaces” (Ladd 233). “Critical reconstruction” is practiced in today’s Berlin largely as a mean to retrieve the “loss” and even to repair and undo the damaged urban texture that was caused by the political abnormalities including both WWII and the Cold War regimes (Stimmann 26–27). Above all, the architectural legacies in the former East Berlin are usually seen as the embodiments of the GDR modernism that more or less served as political propaganda and therefore essentially monotonous, untraditional and backward. One of the major reconstructions carried during the 1950s by the GDR was the demolition of Berliner Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace) under the order of the General Secretary of the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED in German), Walter Ulbricht. It was razed from the landscape of Berlin as an unacceptable symbol of both Prussian militarism and capitalist power. On the same spot rose what was probably the “most modern” architectural accomplishment in the GDR, Palast der Republik, which in the post-wall years was a most controversial landmark in Berlin. Despite long-term polemics and debates on the use of Palast der Republik, it finally gave way to the still on-going reconstruction of the shell of the Stadtschloss with its real function as a cultural center, known as the Humboldt Forum featuring Germany’s interest and respect to foreign cultures (Figure 29 The Proposed Humboldt Forum a la Stadtschloss). The highly controversial resurrection project 148

aroused certain unease. Goertz and Kennedy indicate that “[T]he nostalgia for an architecturally coherent and less politically burdened city, epitomized by the ongoing initiative to rebuild the Stadtschloss, threatens to embalm the city” (Kennedy and Goertz 93–116). The decision seemed to convey the idea that “critical reconstruction” wishes to forget the trauma of modern city. The GDR urban modernism was considered as a more vulgar and kitschy form of modernism in comparison with, the urban modernity of West Berlin. When Berlin became the capital of a reunited Germany, the resistance of “critical reconstruction” acquired its legitimacy in reclaiming Berlinness as Germanness. It responded to the invoked national consciousness of German aesthetic traditions. Contrasted by a deliberate taboo on grand classical architecture and landmarks in Bonn, Berlin Republic embraces the conspicuous political symbolism in a smoother way. “Critical reconstruction” also points to the present and the future. It can be seen as an endeavor to resist the moderniziation of the new capital into an urban space similar to Tokyo or Hong Kong.3 The enemy is the high-profiled international star architects who scatter their works of rootless globalization on local soil. Stimmann and his followers have set up rules to defend their city. This anxiety about the loss of the “authenticity” of Berlin is similar to the nostalgia in the immediate postwar years. During the time when Berlin was still under the sway of four major foreign occupying powers, nostalgia for the golden 1920s and for a vibrant urban Berlin before the traumatic warfare emerged as a way of reclaiming its local identity as resistance to the influence of external powers (Ladd 395).

3

Large writes about Stimmann’s attitude towards the urban planning of Berlin: “Germany’s metropolis was special, Stimmann insisted, and it had to be treated as such. ‘Berlin was totally destroyed by the bombs and after the war it was totally destroyed by the planners,’ he declared. ‘Berlin is the only city in the world where the inner city is empty. We must bring this city back so that when we look in the mirror, we will know that it is our face. If we look like Hong Kong or Tokyo, nobody will come. Berlin must look like Berlin.” See Large 588.

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Figure 29: The Model of Humboldt Forum a la Stadtschloss.

The strong affirmation of the merit of a certain historic building typology can be regarded as a result of the deep distrust for modernization. Nevertheless, how critical and diverse can reconstruction be? For example, the neoclassicism of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the great architect of the Prussian Empire, which is considered by people like Stimmann as Berlin’s model of reconstruction against the later “bad” modernisms, remains controversial in many ways: First, Schinkel was a forerunner of Berlin modernism in the sense that “twentieth-century Berlin architects are all Schinkel’s heirs: Mies van der Rohe, Albert Speer, and the builders of Stalinallee. For better or worse, Schinkel’s protean architecture has inspired nearly everything that has come since” (Ladd 232). Second, against the backdrop of Schinkel’s time, his neoclassicism was radically opposite of the conservative norms of the 18th century. Tilmann Buddensieg concludes, “Schinkel’s genius thus can be seen as part of a Berlin tradition diametrically opposed to the spirit of critical reconstruction” (Ladd 233). In fact, today’s urban mutation of Berlin echoes that of the 1920s in denying the immediate past. Siegfried Kracauer observes the destruction Weimar Berlin did to Wilhemine Berlin in his 1932 essay “Straße ohne Erinnerung” (Street without Memory): “Many 150

traces of the not-so-distant Wilheminian past then were eliminated from the face of a street as a result of a continuous drive for renovation, modernization and, sometimes, mindless monumentalization of the city” (Ganeva 263–264). The idea of critical reconstruction seems to prove that, through the re-invoking of a familiar urban landscape, the memory of the lost (and, of course, better) Berlin can be regained. The connection between visual recognition and identity building is stressed and realized by the resurrection of a selected memory of local traditions. Nevertheless, history and memory are homogenized and to some extent erased in covering up their own history of being reconstructed (Heckner 310). According to Janet Ward, this “repair work” is one of eradication, not of recovery, seeking to combat and overcome planning and building alterations caused first by the air war and then by post-war modernism (deemed particularly egregious in the former Communist East) (Ward 247). Daniel Libeskind’s complaint about critical reconstruction reflects the tension between Berlin’s memory politics in terms of architectural style. The architect of the Jewish Museum sees no need to rebreed Berlin’s diversity by looking backward, as Berlin has never remained in any uniformity but has been “a fascinating montage of conflicting histories, scales, forms and spaces” (Ladd 233). He also provocatively points out that one cannot “restart history by pressing a button. It becomes a kitsch idea of history” (Koepnick 2001). To maintain present-day Berlin at its 19th-century pattern is romantically unviable because of its clash with the values of scale economy and the requirement of global market flows, from which Berlin cannot afford to exclude itself. The myth of the Weimar era also needs to be revisited. Right after his expression of doubt whether the nostalgia can be also amnesic, Large continues, “Of course, the dream process in question tends to be selective, filtering out the old nightmares of economic misery and political polarization that brought Weimar down” (Large xxvi). The memory of Weimar Berlin can be associated with many other currents other than its culmination of cultural achievements. Berlin is the city of transient realities, at an overwhelming speed at that, as depicted in Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927). It is also the city that inspired Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), in which the mechanic era witnesses the power of the working class to mobilize both 151

for greater economic productivity and for social movement. Berlin is a city full of dangerous seductions and decadent sexual immoralities, as Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930) suggests, and also the city where Leni Riefenstahl developed her cinematic aesthetics that were shown later in her Triumph of the Will (1934). The connection between the aestheticization of social problems in Weimar movies and the Nazi aestheticization of politics is apparent (Preuss 137–138).

Potsdam Square The image of an urban Berlin was idealized as a mythos of past splendor after years of desolation. The case of Potsdamer Platz (Potsdam Square) shows how modern-day Berlin positions itself in remembrance of its problematic past image. The memory and status quo of Potsdamer Platz in various representations of modern times show effort in reviving the landmark of its past urban modernity. Nostalgia for the Golden Twenties seems to mythologize the city’s transient period of glory as the model image to which to return. The memory of Potsdamer Platz in the 1900s is always associated to street life. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s oil painting, for example, sharply reveals the perplexed mental state of urbanites with the bold use of colors, suggesting the agitating and shocking effect of the urban environment on them. By 1900, the place became the commercial center of the city adjacent to the Tiergarten, “the lung of Berlin.” The hectic flux of traffic in the web-like space of intersections witnessed, above all, the speed of modernity: the first railway station, the Potsdam Station, and the Anhalt Station were both located in proximity to Potsdamer Platz. It was also where numerous bus lines, elevated rail lines (S-Bahn), subways (U-Bahn), and electric streetcars merged and competed with pedestrians. “They clattered, flashed their lights, shook the ground, and moved incessantly” (Ladd 116). The first traffic light in Europe appeared on the same crossroads. Hotels, cafes, restaurants, and department stores that sprung up in the area were the other reasons for the fame of the modern urban scenarios that were staged on Potsdamer Platz. The Gate Houses, designed by Schinkel in 1824, stood next to the modern Columbus 152

House built by Erich Mendelsohn between 1931 and 1932. Aside from grand hotels and the social life highlighted by balls and receptions, civil amusement also developed in Potsdamer Platz. The Kempinski’s Haus Vaterland (with its dance cafe and restaurants), UFA Palast, Europa Dance Pavilion, Meisel-Pschorr Brewery, Café Josty, and Weinhaus Huth were indispensable components of the Berlin myth of the Golden Twenties. For the Germans from other regions, Berlin was a city of unknown restlessness and grotesque fantasies. It was so un-German that its modernity was always understood in association with Americanness and Jewishness. Potsdamer Platz embodies the short-lived cosmopolitanism of Berlin modernity. However, Berlin then remained in constant motion that seemed to survive the First World War and the communist revolution. Light and noise drowned out the traces and foreshadowing of the upcoming political turmoil, as shown by the successive historical sequels that completely changed the fate of the metropolis in the early 20th century. The reconstruction of Potsdamer Platz began even prior to the Second World War, when Hitler was planning to restructure the layout of Berlin according to his own will. Years later, the air raid by the Allies ended the civil everydayness of Potsdamer Platz. Lying on the border between the Soviet and British sectors, Potsdamer Platz was the stage of the confrontation between capitalist and communist Berlin. In 1961, the erection of the Berlin Wall, which ran directly across Potsdamer Platz, literally turned the city center into a total tabula rasa. In the 1960s, a sharp “contrast between the memories (or, if you needed them, the pictures) of bustle and the utter desolation that had replaced it” (Ladd 118) was observed. Since then, Potsdamer Platz has been known as the “significant void” in Berlin. West Berlin deliberately endeavored to forget the empty lot by turning an adjacent area into a cultural landmark rather than a commercial one: Kulturforum (Cultural Forum) consists of buildings that are of modern conciseness in terms of style. Neither Mies van der Rohe's New National Gallery nor Hans Scharoun's Berlin Philharmonic Hall and the Berlin State Library can invoke memories of a landscape of technological modernity. Instead, they are more focused on building a modest but open image on the Western side. Again, Wenders’ celebrated work, Wings of Desire, somehow refuses to let the void pass into oblivion, as human memory does not 153

fade away as abruptly as the city’s physical structures. While walking on the ruined land, the old Homer’s endeavor to resurrect his milieu de memoire on the Platz by human memory proves difficult and incomplete. His mental retrieval of the place is constantly disrupted by the disappearance of the original spaces. In the end, cinematic reproduction and human memory become the substitutes to the real sites of memory and related events. The Wall not only made the Platz a vacant gap in the city but also left the whole city standing in a vacuum of memory and having a strong sense of an endless frozen present. Consequently, when the Wall was demolished, the history of Berlin seemed to flow again in different tenses of time. After the reunification, Potsdamer Platz encountered the question of what to do with a wasteland of a city center. According to Ladd, the erection of the Wall “increased the uncanny feeling: a void saturated with invisible history, with memories of architecture both built and unbuilt. It gave rise to the desire to leave it as it was, the memorial as empty page right in the center of the reunified city” (Huyssen 2003, 58). The forlorn status of Potsdamer Platz in the Cold War era was ultimately caused by the pre-war discontent with urban modernity (i.e., with American diversity and high commercialism), no matter how encouraging it may look now. Therefore, the void signified by the vacancy of Potsdamer Platz was not merely a memorial to the War but also a huge question mark at the heart of the city: What went wrong with German modernity? The reunification of Germany and the relocation of Berlin as its capital provide the opportunity to reconsider such a question from a brand-new perspective. The concept of critical reconstruction did not escape Potsdamer Platz. The retrospective enthusiasm to return the Platz to the way it was in the Golden Twenties can be considered a stance to symbolize the reunion of East and West Berlin. The reestablishment of the former center of the capital city embodies the homecoming of Berlin’s central status among first-rank German cities. The New Berlin, as argued several times before, urgently requires a departure from past memories of formidable realities. To achieve growing fame in attracting world capital flows that prioritize the visibility of a place, Berlin’s old-time image is undoubtedly an advantage to improve its post-Wall gloomy profile (Figure 30 The New Potsdamer Platz). Berlin, as a global city, cannot avoid forgetting this significant void, and 154

the Wall as the “major concern with developing and rebuilding key sites in the heart of Berlin seems to be image rather than usage, attractiveness for tourists and official visitors rather than heterogeneous living space for Berlin’s inhabitants, erasure of memory rather than its imaginative preservation” (Huyssen 2003, 60).

Figure 30: The New Potsdamer Platz.

The new image of Berlin requires an equally, or even more, active effort in being engaged in self-marketing. An effective way of selling Berlin is by drawing parallels between its present and past. Hotel Esplanade

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and the reconstruction of its post-war remnants illustrate how pieces of architectural debris succeeds in weathering time in space but fail to offer a complete and real face of Berlin modernity: the remains of the hotel’s lavishly decorated breakfast room, largely destroyed during the Second World War, are now displayed within a glass protection facing outside (Below: Figure. 31 Remains of “Kaisersaal” in Hotel Esplanade). Other historical rooms are accordingly moved, renovated, and now used for hosting chic cultural events. Kaisersaal, or the Emperor’s Hall, was transformed into a multi-functional cluster of elegant salons that serve the needs of new social gatherings. The introduction sign reads: “The Esplanade Residence apartments were built directly over the former Grand Hotel to represent a ‘bridge’ to the modern and rejuvenated spirit of Berlin today” (2008). The annex of the least modern facades in present-day Potsdamer Platz is explained as a “historical landmark for the future.” In commemoration of the lost hustle of turn-of-the-century Berlin, the renovation attempts to join the memories of Berlin despite temporal ruptures and spatial voids.

Figure 31: Remains of “Kaisersaal” in Hotel Esplanade.

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Today’s Potsdamer Platz still looks un-German and American in style with its new hypermodern landmarks. The Potsdamer Railway station has become a node of transportation and, more importantly, a tourist attraction. Cafes, restaurants, cinemas, and entertainment services head back to Potsdamer Platz. One of the bars has been named after world-famous director Billy Wilder. The old pastry shop, Café Josty, which disappeared from Potsdamer Platz for more than 50 years, has reopened 200 meters away from its original site. Under the larger-than-life white propeller-like roof, the Sony Center now functions as a forum that hosts various commercial and cultural activities, including art shows, art fairs, blockbuster film premiers, and World Cup broadcasting. According to journalist Gary Wolf, the Sony complex is the “only site in central Berlin to present the sort of spectacular architecture that the advocates of critical reconstruction abhor” (Wolf 1998). An interesting juxtaposition can be observed between the Sony Center and the Kulturforum, the West Berlin invention that attempted to turn its back on the lost urbanity of Berlin mere steps away from the Wall. Other international corporations and significant cultural centers divide Potsdamer Platz with their hyper-visible architectural bulks: DB (German Railway) Tower, Daimler-Benz, the German Film House, Berlinale Palast (venue for the Berlin Film Festival), and the shopping center the Potsdamer Platz Arcade. Grand hotels have also found a home here. Four world-class luxurious hotel groups, namely, the Grand Hyatt, Ritz-Carlton, Marriott, and Maritim, founded their alliance in Potsdamer Platz and are marketing themselves using Berlin’s unusual past. In their website, the introductory promotional text describes Potsdamer Platz as the center of the new Berlin: During the Second World War, Potsdamer Platz embodied both tradition and modernity. Totally destroyed during the war, and following the subsequent construction of the Berlin Wall, Potsdamer Platz became the symbol of the divided country. Nowadays, Potsdamer Platz represents a new, awakened Berlin. Following reconstruction, the vision of converting Potsdamer Platz into a new modern centre that carries on the glory of past years has been achieved. Potsdamer Platz is now a contemporary, cosmopolitan, yet historical meeting point right in the new heart of Berlin. Culture, art, hospitality, entertainment and business all meet in one unique place, Potsdamer Platz.4 4

More see under “Potsdamer Platz: The Centre of the New Berlin”. Ed. Berlin Hotel Alliance . Accessed on July 23, 2009.

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If old Berlin is a model image of present-day Berlin, and if the tradition of urban modernity that once emerged and thrived in Berlin proves helpful for the development of today, the idealization seems to be amnesiac about many things. The Berlin that planners and politicians favor to replace the desolate urban desert is a homogenous and selective one. Only the technological and industrial modernities of prewar Berlin were remembered, although incompletely, at the same time. “It was,” Ladd contends, “a glossy modernity without the subversive sexuality of the 1920s or the political terror of the 1930s. That is, it was fundamentally a pre-1918 tradition” (Ladd 120). He goes on, “Could a 1990s city be built on a 1910 model? Indeed, did the idea of a retrospective modernity make any sense at all?” (Ladd 120) He doubts it. Moreover, he does not think that other narratives of the modernity of Potsdamer Platz (e.g., that of the Third Reich) would be totally forgotten even if the reconstruction has made it difficult to recognize topographical traces of the past. “The remnants of Hitler’s chancellery, Gestapo headquarters, and other centers of Nazi terror lie just a few steps away, and it is clear that not all of them will be forgotten. While Berlin is promoted as German capital, as business center, as city of modernity, it will also be commemorated as headquarters of the Third Reich” (Ladd 125). However, through this deliberate choice of memory of Berlin modernity that corresponds to the ever-changing states of Potsdamer Platz, Berlin can re-stabilize its “always-to-become” image (Ladd 125). Ladd is correct, but the selective nature of the represented memory of Potsdamer Platz is more than a selection of the time period. The idealized picture of 1900s Berlin omits Berlin’s problems of that time. All the criticisms on Berlin’s modern ugliness, which prevailed among cultural critics, disappear in today’s narrative. Berlin’s disregard of tradition is blurred by history as a new version of tradition. Moreover, as Peter Gay elaborates in his well-known Weimar Culture (1968), Berlin between the two world wars was characterized by an unsuccessful rebellion against authority when a mixed feeling of desire for and fear of modernity was observed. Democracy thrived alongside the rise of militarism after the First World War; rationality co-existed with irrationality; and the emphasis on German cultural tradition and romanticism became hardly detached from the 158

basic tone of a growing yearning for totalitarianism. In 1900, towards the Weimar era, German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies’ distinction between modern Gesellschaft (society) and pre-modern Gemeinschaft (community) began to exert enormous and meaningful influence on German society. It was a time when the Wesenwille (the essential will), the basis of the imagination of the Gemeinschaft, in which the collective will superimposes the individual will, juxtaposed with Kürwille (arbitrary will), in which the individual will capitalizes on the collective will.5 In other words, the picture of Berlin at the turn of the century that is riddled with contradictions and exigent doubts on modernity rather than a smoothed monolithic one only features the celebration of urban modernity. This already complex memory of the past is further complicated by today’s more tangible realities that made it almost impossible to restore Berlin to its old identity. Berlin’s cosmopolitanism, together with the Jewish culture, was largely eradicated by Nazism and the Second World War. According to Ladd, the “unbearable memory of the Holocaust, and of Berlin’s vanished Jews, casts its shadow across the golden 1920s too. The fate of the Jews reinforces an image of the 1920s as a time when Berliners threw off the shackles of tradition, with exhilarating but ultimately disastrous results…That, in any case, is the view from the 1990s, when a search for traditions, including Jewish ones, betrays a longing for order, limits, and rules. Berlin remains unsure how much modernity it wants” (Ladd 115). Adding to this uncertainty is the considerable transformation the division between West and East Berlin has done to Berlin’s overall as well as fragmented mentality. All these have contributed to a memory crisis that cannot be easily obscured by a nostalgic skip over to a commercially favored image of a Berlin that only partially existed. Currently, Potsdamer Platz is no longer a significant void in the Cold War except for one piece of the Berlin Wall that was riveted on the Platz as a tourist landmark. Seldom is the vacant lot conspicuously represented as a form of the negation, or at least a question, of urban and capitalist modernity. The modernity of Potsdamer Platz is narrowly understood in a way that excludes the possibility in which the existence 5

See Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Civil Society. Trans. Hollis, Jose Harris and Margaret. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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of the Wall itself was an internal tension between different approaches to modernity. In the next part, I will show how the hope of retrieving Berlin at its peak and the nostalgia for its glory pose a striking contrast to the reading and misreading of architectural modernity in the former East Berlin.

II. Consumption as Resistance: Nostalgia and the GDR/ Cold War Space The second kind of nostalgia can be said as a remediation of the crack between the still discrepant mentalities of the two Berlins. The euphoria upon the fall of the Wall once appeared to promise above all to the East part of Germany a more humanitarian, more democratic and better-off future. Reality fell short from such optimistic expectation. Former GDR citizens began to suffer a series of psychological drops from their previous national myths. Firstly, they had to realize that the leading position of the GDR state in modern technology and industry within the former Eastern communist bloc had vanished overnight. Secondly, the incorporation into West Germany placed the cousins from the East in a subordinate economic, cultural and ideological position. High rate of unemployment, lower wages, and social anomie pervaded East Berlin soon after the reunification. It outlasted the period of time that had been initially considered to reflect the normal transitional symptoms and “quickly became stubborn markers of eastern Germany’s relative position” (Bach 548). Feeling their second-class position and the disillusionment of a better future, the articulation of German national identity is for East Germans not a smooth process since their inferior status stands in the way to willingly integrate into the larger German consciousness. They are in fact in one way or another denied access to exert a dominant influence on it. Investigations into the various kinds of post-Wall visions of both parts of Germany illustrate not only the mental distinctions between the East and the West but also the discontent emerging from the former. As regards democracy, which was once the foremost political 160

appeal of East Germans towards reunification, survey results show their general distrust in democracy and their corresponding adherence to socialism. “From 1991 to 1994,” according to David P. Conradt, “over 70 percent of easterners agreed or strongly agreed that ‘socialism was basically a good idea that was just badly carried out,’ while about 60 percent of West Germans disagreed with this statement” (Conradt 85–86). Unlike their Western counterparts, “only 15 percent of East Germans committed to the socialist idea are satisfied with German democracy while the remainder are either dissatisfied (40 percent), or ambivalent (45 percent),” showing much less confidence in democratic institutions and policies (Conradt 86). The stubbornness of this East–West division is no less enduring than that caused by the physical existence of the Wall. Conradt continues to argue that the “psychological demands of unification, according to the two-culture approach, are different between the residents of the former GDR and the West Germans. The East Germans lost their state and with it at least part of their identity. Unlike West Germans, they must redefine themselves, abandon the old values, beliefs, and verities, and adapt to Western ways or become marginalized. Unlike West Germans, they have to confront and ‘overcome’ the past forty years in order to preserve some aspects of their own identity” (Conradt 86). However, the change in generation may help to improve the situation. According to a recent study, the current school curriculum on the GDR knowledge and history also differs in various parts of Germany because of their previous geo-political locations. Over 5,200 high school students in four federal states were asked through questionnaires about how much they know about the GDR. In the former East German states, more than half of the students did not specifically point out that East Germany was a state under dictatorship, whereas in the West, the percentage was one third. In Brandenburg and the East Berlin area, only around 38% (vs. 51% in the West) of the informants knew that there was no democratic election in the GDR. The impression on the Stasi, the former Ministry of State Security in East Germany, proves to be much more positive than that on federal states such as Bavaria. Only 45% of East German students denied the statement that a secret service political department of the same kind also exists in democratic states. The outcomes show an ironic increase in the positive evaluation of the 161

GDR among present-day Germans in the East than before the fall of the Berlin Wall (Wolz 2008). In such circumstance, there emerged among East Germans a form of “oppositional memory” that tends to resume their personal history with the nation’s abandoned past (Bach 546). The term Ostalgie properly describes one of the most representative characteristics of the culture of memory after the reunification. Provoked by the denial of the Eastern identity, which is overshadowed by both a more grand common German unity and the takeover of Western ideology, Ostalgie “represents part of a larger, post-Wende discursive battle to represent national identity after reunification” (Bach 546). As Daphne Berdahl similarly points out, Ostalgie “does not entail an identification with the former GDR state, but rather an identification with different forms of oppositional solidarity and collective memory” (Berdahl 56).

Ostalgie in Consumerism: Post-wall Representations of East Berlin Space It has been the rapid vanishing of East Berlin urbanism, probably more than anything else, which provokes the Ostalgie (combining “Ost / East” and “nostalgia”in German) among East Berliners as a way of absorbing shock. This response explains why the protagonist Alex in Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin (2003) understands well that such transformation poses a lethal shock to his sick mother. Thus, he decides to reconstitute a Berlin after the Wende with a fake semblance of the past in his own apartment. The opening scenes of the film scan through the landmarks of East Berlin that are either deprived of their significance or simply gone: the Television Tower that no longer stands for the technological modernity of a socialist nation-state, the Palace of the Republic that ceased to be “the People’s Palace,” the World Time Clock that once was the most popular public meeting point of East Berliners, the magnificent Karl-Marx-Allee that faded into an obsolete landscape of oblivion, and the demolished Lenin bronze Statue. Becker himself admits the impossibility of shooting

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the film in the original sites of East Berlin 12 years after the fall of the Wall (Kapczynski 87). Together with the disappearance of the Wall, the dramatic renewal of East Berlin cityscape profoundly signified the disappearance and destruction of the dwellers’ immediate identification with the place and in turn with themselves. Moreover, while public spaces were under reformation, private space, in particular home space, has also been experiencing sea changes by new furniture, new neighbors, even new family members from the West. The GDR residential units “Plattenbau” somehow remains, as the film “Goodbye Lenin” shows, but they could be covered with a huge banner of Coca-Cola advertisement and satellite TV receivers are planted in many of their balconies. The private space of East Berlin was further eroded to every corner of its existence with the flooding in of everyday commodity. As the voice-over of Alex narrates, the dim-lit stores turned overnight into a flamboyant and bright shopping paradise–and his role as a customer also changes to a king. The speed of the capitalizing transformation is so breathtaking that Alex has to think hard to remember probably the most ordinary brand names to sustain the pseudo-existence of the GDR. He has to search in dustbins and abandoned houses in the East part of the already reunified city, buy similar products from the West (even from abroad, e.g., Holland!), and pour them into cleaned bottles from the disappearing and forgotten land. Old East product names like “Spreewaldgurken”, “Mocca Fix” and “Filinchen”6 are to be recognized by their former consumers, for whom the “former socialist republic becomes an imagined consumer community, bound together by the goods that the culture once both produced and used” (Kapczynski 80). The originally “counter-trend” Ostalgie in the film which represents a refusal to the discontinuity of memory later on becomes a trend of its own. Martin Blum argues “the distinct ‘biographies’ of the GDR goods make them available as potential ‘sites of resistance,’

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All names of products from the GDR. “Spreewaldgurken” is a specialty sour cucumber from Brandenburg and is largely welcomed by East Berlin consumers. “Mocca Fix” is a brand of coffee powder, and “Filinchen” is a kind of wafer bread exclusively produced in the GDR. It was widely popular in the former East Germany.

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disrupting ‘the illusion of a united capitalist consumer society’” (Bach 546). In real life, the preference over Ostprodukte (Eastern products) does not aim at avoiding the discontinuity of life style but at highlighting it. In Jonathan Bach’s words, “It is in this context that consumption as production represents a strategy for easterners to not be speechless in a discursive field of cultural production that is dominated by the West” (Bach 554). By reproducing products of the GDR era and more significantly by choosing to consume them, Easterners get back at the arrogant confidence of Western products as well as at their previous idealized assumption that goods from the West are necessarily more authentic and real.7 However, Ostalgie, like other kinds of nostalgia today, may never mean “the will to literally turn back the clock and return to the ‘good old days’” (Bach 548). Ostalgie, according to Bach, is for most Easterners a “modernist nostalgia,” which represents a “longing for a mode of longing that is no longer possible” (Bach 548). By owning old GDR products, East consumers re-appropriate their past myth into the current consumerism discourse. Memories of the GDR are less valid without the act of consumption and therefore turn into fetishes. Public spaces, too, are incorporated into the same modernist imaginary of the resistance to the time-space ruptures. In Hans Stöhr’s film Berlin Is in Germany (2001), post-unification Berlin is depicted as an alien place for the hero Martin. He is imprisoned for 11 years after an accidental killing of a neighbor who intended to reveal to the Stasi Martin and his wife’s intention to flee the GDR. Martin is released after the Wende, and he is soon caught up in disorientation and faced with a loss of Heimat without moving away from it. In the hopes of making a living by driving a taxi, Martin, a former East Berliner, has to learn all the street names of Berlin from scratch. Not only are West Berlin street names new to him, but more painfully, almost all the East Berlin street names are changed to shed the ideological shadows of yesterday. In this sense, although the film itself does not convey any nostalgic yearning for the retrieval of the street names but instead enhances the otherness of Easterners in their own city, the delegitimizing of the epistemological knowledge of

7

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See Bach on the consumption of Eastern products, 550–551.

one’s hometown also intrigues thoughts on memory of places, which is at stake. What remains as East Berlin public and private spaces consist largely of images on postcards, photos in tourist guides, and popular films (now and then, and real and simulacra) that achieve the “kitschification of East German history,” as “so many other relics of the GDR life [that] have disappeared from production only to return to circulation as representations” (Blum 299–300). This reappearance explains the reproduction and sale of Ostalgie-Map in the market. Dirk Bloch, an architect from the former East, and Gerd Gauglitz, a publisher from the West, documented in their Berlin map many East Berlin landscapes that were hurriedly demolished, renamed, or used for other purposes after 1990. On their map, one can find the original sites of the GDR ministries, academies, and amusement facilities; disappeared buildings including the guest house Ahornblatt on the Fischerinsel; and hotels and shops once found in the GDR capital.8 More interestingly, the map of the invisible city appeals not only to the Easterners who try to get back even uselessly a sense of partial wholeness. The 2,95 Euro (stand 2009) map is an attractive object to curious consumers from the Western districts of Berlin, as the distance they are able to maintain from the once-real East Berlin guarantees the enjoyment of fantasizing a remote city at such close proximity. Berlin spaces, like GDR products on sale today, become the consumers’ “recollectibles,” whose origins are not inquired about. Consumption legitimizes and equalizes the division of mentality by sublimating the past and present into two versions of utopian milieu, where everyone can comfortably dwell in.

8

See “Alte DDR-Hauptstadt im neuen Format, Ostdeutscher Architekt und westdeutsche Verleger gestalten Ostalgie-Stadtplan“ in Neues Deutschland; No. 118, 22.05.2003, 18.

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Figure 32: “Ampelmännchen”.

The almost disappeared traffic light signal “Ampelmännchen”, which were a 100% invention of the GDR (Figure 32 “Ampelmännchen”) has become a most valuable Berlin icon in tourist consumption. The East German traffic psychologist Karl Peglau accepted at that time a mission to design a new representation of green-red traffic light signal in hope of reducing the increasing street accidents. The Ampelmännchen (traffic light man) was officially put into use in 1961 (noticeably the same year when the Berlin Wall was erected) and was since then well received in the GDR and thus became an iconic figure of the East Berlin (and later on East Germany) street scenes. After the reunification, despite other rapid transformations of East Berlin, the highly humanistic innovation

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of the GDR survived among the very few GDR legacies of the everyday life that has weathered an uprooted conversion of the East towards the standards of the West. The popularity of the Ampelmännchen has made a major content of the GDR Ostalgie. Not only the figures literally returned to the streets of both East and West Berlin in 2005, moreover, Markus Heckhausen, a West German graphic designer from the city of Tübingen, seized the huge souvenir market of selling Berlin mascots to tourists who are looking for something authentically” and “uniquely” associated to Berlin. It seems that the memory of the GDR can sometimes be genuinely benign in that the actually existing utopian culture of the GDR supplements the harsh reality of today’s Berlin under the new rules of the capitalistic jungle. Figures such as Ampelmännchen therefore prove to be appealing to both East and West Berlin. The consumption of GDR products (which are produced and sold by Western companies) by former GDR citizens illustrates the way the present is tactically and emotionally tangled with the past. As Bach argues, a second kind of Ostalgie exists, one that is shared even by communities with no experience of the GDR culture, including young generations of reunified Germany, and by Westerners: “nostalgia for style.” More and more young Westerners began to move to the East Berlin district not only because rent is more affordable but also because this very topography symbolizes their acquirement of a cynical stance toward the conservative Western bourgeois taste. “Ostmodern,” a pun on Eastmodern and postmodern, is the word these youths use to characterize the style they imagine to be nostalgic for and to give back its right name. By re-mythifying Eastern products and styles as modern and avant-garde, these youths “play the East against the West to achieve an Americanized, simulated hyperreality, a type of GDR-Disneyland” (Bach 553). This kind of Ostalgie is one without sufficient historical reference, let alone memory of the past, causing the “German–German binary” collapse. Consequently, “the specificity of the past detaches itself from the material signifiers to create a ‘free-floating past’ (Ivy 1995: 56) that can be reassembled and redeployed […] in the search for commodifiable hipness” (553). In Daphne Berdahl’s words, consumers of Ostalgie, who are not restricted to former Easterners, “may escape the dominant order without leaving it” (Bach 546).

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However, the preference for Ostprodukte (Eastern products) does not aim at avoiding the discontinuity of life style but at highlighting it. As Jonathan Bach argues, “it is in this context that consumption as production represents a strategy for easterners to not be speechless in a discursive field of cultural production that is dominated by the West” (Bach 554). By reproducing products of the GDR era and by choosing to consume them, the Easterners blow a reverse fight back at the arrogant confidence of Western products as well as at their previously idealized assumption that Western goods are necessarily more authentic and more real.9 The Westerners, on the other hand, may also participate in the consumption as a means to resist the inextricable present, which lacks the utopian color of Socialism, however wrecked and failed. The retrospective stance of Ostalgie is in this way firmly linked with its dual directional mode of desire that goes beyond simple mourning over the past. Consumerism and a chic fetishism of GDR commodity have been trying to reclaim the old values and identity by actively participating into it. Hereby one notices an interesting contrast between what Bach calls the “modernist nostalgia” and a tendency towards a postmodern blurring of historical and national boundaries (Bach 547). In this vein, Ostalgie turns in some sense into a simultaneous “Westalgie” in that the fall of the Wall marked for the East German residents the end of two utopias: not only the GDR is no longer a stable signifier of the Heimat but also the now accessible Bundes Republik (BDR) cannot promise a better world of wealth and freedom. Nostalgias of different kinds are, according to Julia Hell and Johannes von Moltke, projections of “a refusal to the present” and serve as site of resistance to the disappearance of the milieu of collective and private memories (87). The spatial representations in the memory narratives of today’s Berlin both in cinema and everyday consumption demonstrate the dynamics among the fragmented local memory, contested national awareness and booming global capitalization.

9

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See Bach on consumption of Eastern products in “The Taste Remains”, 550–551.

Hackesche Höfe As a well-known showcase of pre-war civil space at the center of Berlin, Hackesche Höfe has witnessed the rise-fall-rise of Berlin’s fluctuating urban modernity.10 In the 18th century, the area near what is now Scheunenviertel (Scheunen Quarter) was a marketplace called Hackesche Market. During the rapid industrialization of Berlin in the 19th century, the overpopulated Scheunenviertel was a slum area accommodating swarms of migrants from the countryside who wanted to make a living in the metropolis. Another important development in the same area was the growth of the Jewish community. By 1905, Berlin had already accommodated around two million residents, turning into the largest city with a working-class residential community – the Mietskaserne. The opening of Hackesche Höfe and market in 1906, after the reconstruction by Kurt Berndt, was in response to the proper time and conditions: it was designed as a complex for business, cultural facilities, and residence that combines the usages of human activity spaces to maximize the dynamics among different social functions and groups. The early establishment of the Hackesche Höfe is closely related to Berlin’s urban identity: First, the rise of the Hackesche Höfe largely benefited from the urbanization of the nearby Spandauer Vorstadt since the 18th century. By the 19th and 20th centuries, the Hackesche Höfe had become the center of the ready-made clothing industry and helped Berlin to become a metropolis of fashion. Also, the structural layout of the Höfe, which consists of eight self-enclosed units that form a series of communities of Höfe or courts organically linked to each other, provided a new solution to live with the problems of the city. The Höfe is situated near the boisterous streets, but it still achieves its relative independence away from the hustle and bustle outside. It was the largest residential and commercial estate area (known as Gewerbehof in German) designed according to the ideal of the Lebensform Bewegung (the movement of life form). The aim of the movement, which prevailed around 1900, was to conduct a regressive action towards modernity. Modern society arguably causes “harms of civilization” to the 10

In architecture, the word “Hof ” denotes an area that is surrounded by buildings or walls.

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individual; therefore, the movement promoted a campaign of returning to a natural lifestyle. What is interesting about the Hackesche Höfe is that its resonance to the movement is not a deconstructive one; instead, the Höfe echoes the movement by creating an innovative form of urban space capable of “natural unnaturalness”: it is modern but still shares the pre-modern archetype of a healthy living and working area. The decorative style of the Höfe façades, designed by Berlin architect and designer August Endell, was boldly hybridized. Endell did not choose to apply the popular art nouveau (Jugendstil in German), which was his consistent interest, to the modern architectural units. He decided to use Wilhelmine eclecticism, an excessive mixture of different styles and forms that combine a neo-baroque rooftop landscape, Egyptian obelisks, and antique sculptures.11 Since the 1910s, the Höfe has undergone severe decline because of the great economic depression after the First World War and thereafter. In the GDR era, although the whole community was in oblivion, the façade only sustained slight damage. In 1951, the Höfe was turned into the people’s property. In 1977, around the same period when other refurbishment projects were conducted in East Berlin, it was turned over to the protection of the memorial preservation policy. Only during the fall of the Berlin Wall was the Hackesche Höfe revived as a major public attraction. In 1993, the property rights of the Hackesche Höfe were returned to the previous private owners, and the units were subsequently sold to West German enterprises. Through the cooperation among the investors, the governmental preservation board, and the marketing and PR agencies such as New Roses Corporate Communications, the Höfe area transformed into one of the most expensive real estate projects in New Berlin. Similar to its early development, the renewed Hackesche Höfe thrived in the local economic boom after the reunification. The Hackesche Höfe is now being remodeled to showcase the Berlin fashion design industry as way of promoting it using innovative enterprises, bringing vibrancy to the tourist attraction (Figure 33 Hackesche Höfe). In addition, the form and function of the Höfe have been recovered. Endell’s eclecticism is returned to its former glory, and the Mischnutzung (mixed usage) of the spaces is resumed. 11

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See the time-line of the history of Hackesche Höfe under its official website . Accessed on 17 Sep., 2015.

Figure 33: Hackesche Höfe.

Another aspect of the Hackesche Höfe that stirs public attention and is particularly connected to the memory culture is the emergence and disappearance of the Hackesches Hoftheater.12 Founded in 1993 as a free artist initiative organization, the theater was committed to the revival of the Yiddish theater culture in the most famous civic space in Berlin. At that time, when commercial occupation had not reached every corner of the Höfe, the theater played a major role in the previous Jewish 12

See more in Heckner, 323–324.

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cultural center in Berlin and became almost synonymous to the Hackesche Höfe. However, the Jewish theater was not able to flourish alone without a Jewish population and with a long-term absence of everyday Jewish culture. Financial trauma added to the difficulty of running the theater. In the following years, with a sharp increase in the estate value of the Höfe, the theater was forced to face the fact that it could no longer sustain itself. The closing of the theater in 2006 was drowned in the rising fame of the Hackesche Höfe as “a center of public sociability that appears to rekindle Jewish culture through an array of cafes, movies and galleries” (Heckner 323). The existence of the theater was understood as a way to “resist the tendency to commodify Jewish local history in the service of global capitalism” (Heckner 323). The criticisms on the gentrification and commodification of the Hackesche Höfe fall again under the Disney metaphor of a fake representation of spectacles in which local nostalgia dissolves and is finally taken over by the grander plan of global marketing. The discussion on Hackesche Höfe here focuses more on a comparative angle on the understanding of the Hackesche Höfe between its earliest and current developments. The Höfe was a product of the rise of capitalism and commodification of space. In the golden age of Berlin, the Höfe met the needs and ideals of the bourgeoisie in using their urban spaces. The prosperity of the Jewish culture was the result of the urbanization and social changes in the course of capitalist development. Thus, the narrative on the Hackesche Höfe belongs not only to Berlin’s Jewish memory but also to a part of the larger local Berlin nostalgia for its cosmopolitanism. The Hackesche Höfe has been nostalgic from the very beginning in that its design manifests a yearning for a less stressful lifestyle untainted by the complication of modernity, albeit demonstrating modernization. The construction of the Hackesche Höfe can be regarded not necessarily as resistance but as an embrace of modernity, whereas the present-day reconstruction can also be a kind of nostalgia for the nostalgia of that time. Therefore, too much emphasis on the Jewish memory and the Disney metaphor may cause the failure to recognize the ambivalent nature of modern urban design. If the modern-day gentrification of the Hackesche Höfe takes advantage of its historical legacy and turns it into the simulacra of the milieu de memoire in spectacular reproduction, the 1900s’ eclecticism will prove 172

to be no less than a theatrical representation of the style of that time. This representation already made it a commodity by popular reception and violated its authenticity. This “authentic” and original nature of the Hackesche Höfe is deeply rooted in the modern ideals of urban form that does not promise the pureness of its auratic originality.

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Chapter Four Revisiting Shanghai Nostalgia: Local Memory as Resistance

When Berlin rose as a controversial modern city in the European continent, Shanghai, in the East Asian continent, also rapidly developed its own more complicated modernity. Both cities reached their peak between the two world wars, that is, between the 1920s and the 1930s. Shanghai became a divided city 100 years earlier than did Berlin. The Treaty of Nanking between the British and the Qing Empires in 1842 ended the First Opium War (1839–1842) and started the conspicuous division of Shanghai between the Chinese-governed zones and the colonial zones. The division of Shanghai is spatial. The spacious northwestern part of the city and the walled old city of Shanghai were still governed by the Chinese government. The foreign territories (mainly the French Concessions, and the International Settlement), which excluded local residents from the 1840s to the 1850s because of mutual fear between the Chinese and foreigners, occupied a large portion of the southeastern part of the city on the western bank of the Huangpu River after several rounds of expansion until 1915. Thus, the city center of Shanghai never went across to the eastern side of the river. The “mother river” of Shanghai is important in the sense that it connects the city not only to the vast Yangtze River basin and into inner China but also to the global water route of transportation. The other side of Shanghai across the river, known as Pudong, remained unknown until almost 150 years later. The division of Shanghai is also visual. With the booming economic development and a systematic organization of colonial concessions, the pace of urbanization of the colonized areas of Shanghai was even more rapid than many other places in the world in the early 1880s. The modernization of urban infrastructure, such as the installation of water, gas, and electric supply, and the construction of roads, sanitary systems, and the telecommunications industry, rapidly developed. By contrast, the Chinese districts remained backward and disorganized

in terms of infrastructural construction and living conditions. Dusty roads, smelly creeks, and dark alleys entailed numerous environmental perils and social security problems. However, at the same time, the actual space and population of the Chinese expanded because of an influx of refugees during the Taiping Rebellion and the interest in the city’s own development.13 With the increase in Chinese residents, a cohabitation of foreign settlers and Chinese could not be avoided. In 1912, the walls of the old city were torn down, and Shanghai became a spatially unified urban territory. However, Shanghai still existed in great multiplicities in terms of urban form and utility. According to Marie-Claire Bergère, at that time, Shanghai was still divided into three parts: In the International Settlement, there was a growing and apparently spontaneous segregation between residential, leisure, commercial and industrial spaces, as was generally the rule in contemporary European cities. In the Chinese parts of Shanghai, residential structures were much more mixed with those of commercial and industrial uses […] The Bund and the Central District (Zhongqu) of the International Settlement represented the business hub of foreign Shanghai and its symbolic heart (Bergère 2004, 39).

This state of diversity made the city a controversial but seductive place before the change in regime from the republican to the communist in 1949. After its 50-year retreat from the world arena as the largest and most modern metropolis in the East Asia, Shanghai is now revitalized by China’s opening up and rapid integration into globalization. Today, the city again has the legitimacy and capacity to show the pride of its glorious past, whose fascinating urban culture has made it frequently dubbed as the “oriental Paris.” It was not only the decadence of the capitalistic urban life but also the European

13

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The Taiping Rebellion (1851–1864) was a peasant rebellion in the late Qing Dynasty. Repressed by both the Qing Government and foreign powers, the shortlived peasant regime lasted only for 13 years. Based on pseudo-Christian dogmas and several groundbreaking yet never realized political outlines, the Rebellion is considered today by most historians as highly controversial. In fact, the violent nature of this regime largely reduced its positive effects, which tended to advocate social equality. Thus, the Taiping Tianguo Empire is mainly regarded as a dark period of political suppression.

appearance of certain areas of the city that have made Shanghai an exotic site of Chinese urban scene. The division of the city, having weathered all the later turmoil of history, largely continues, at least as far as the mapping of Shanghai nostalgia is concerned. Therefore, nostalgia in Shanghai in today’s cultural discourse largely means the rediscovery of the city’s pre-revolutionary golden times, metaphorically and literally. Similar to “critical reconstruction” in Berlin, the renovation of the colonial era buildings along the Bund tries to retrieve the past glamour. The nostalgia reached its peak when eight dazzling Italian-made mosaic murals in the ceilings of the former Hong Kong-Shanghai Bank Corporation (HSBC) building were rediscovered in 1997 after their white stucco covering was peeled off (Figure 34 Mural Painting on the HSBC Building). In 1955, when HSBC left the Bund and the Shanghai Municipal Government took over the building, reconstruction workers chose to cover the exquisite works of art rather than destroy them. The murals vividly brought back the memory of Shanghai as an old key player in the global economy: each mural depicts a city where an HSBC branch is located, namely, Shanghai, Hong Kong, London, Paris, New York, Tokyo, Bangkok, and Calcutta. The city’s symbolic landmarks and a goddess representing the city’s spirit constitute the main composition of the images. By 2002, the whole waterfront was rejuvenated and lit up at night in renewed glamor. Not only was the old Shanghai Jazz band playing again in the bar of the Peace Hotel, new capital also flooded in, creating the Bund into its present-day commercial landmark. Several old high-profile buildings on the Bund have become high-class commercial complexes that accommodate the flagship shops of the world’s top fashion brand names and luxurious restaurants.

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Figure 34: The Mural Painting in the HSBC Building.

In other parts of the city, mostly in the previous French concession, several dozen historic hotels, villas, and streets were also renovated to give them a quasi-1930s atmosphere. Parallel to the local official interest in restoring pre-1949 Shanghai buildings and sites, this initiative was carried out by Shanghai intellectuals and elites. According to Bergère, Various social groups took an active part in promoting the idea that the historical built-in heritage was a precious asset. Historians from Fudan University and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences launched research programs and organized a number of national and international conferences dealing with every aspect of Shanghai’s history in the modern period. Associations specializing in the collection of local historical data joined in and publications of scientific or popular books and articles proliferated. Architects from the Tongji University Institute of Architectural Design or from East China Normal University were invited as experts and advisers. (Bergère 2004, 47)

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The nostalgia for old Shanghai, its buildings and neighborhoods, also found a huge market among the majority of local Shanghai citizens, for whom the “surviving architectural relics of the colonial past became the privileged ‘sites of nostalgic consumption’” (Bergère 2004, 47). Old houses in the golden sections of the city are in great demand for sale or for lease by the local rich. Young white collars enjoy a flashback of time in cafes and restaurants decorated with old furniture and reproductions of calendars with Shanghai beauties of the 1930s.

I. Shanghai Nostalgia and Its Critical Discourse For most critics, Shanghai nostalgia is impossible without both local and global imaginations of the past as a form of “homecoming – imagined or real – of global capital and ideology in post-revolutionary China,” as Zhang Xudong argues in Shanghai Nostalgia: Postrevolutionary Allegories in Wang Anyi’s Literary Production in the 1990s (Zhang 2000, 355). Zhang considers nostalgia in Shanghai as a remedy for “a collective mental blackout, properly described as a post-revolutionary melancholy. Thus, nostalgia has become a way for Shanghai residents to absorb a socioeconomic shock, culturally, as the tidal wave of commodities and consumption is seen” (355). In Arif Dirlik’s Architectures of Global Modernity, Colonialism, and Places, Shanghai nostalgia is interpreted as the ambivalence formed by the “ongoing confrontation of the global and the local,” a by-product of present day globalization as well as a sophisticated legacy of the previous colonial globality realized by the joint force of national power (Dirlik 46). Ackbar Abbas suggests that Shanghai nostalgia, a “forward to the past”, is positioning the city among the top global competitors (Abbas 2000). In other words, nostalgia of a city like Shanghai is a pursuit of alternative modernity while still being constituted by the logic of capitalist globalism. Therefore, the image of Shanghai is now easily understood both locally and globally as a symbol of the innovative source fueling the vitality of the city: the meeting of the old and new, East and West, and past and future qualify Shanghai as a postmodern global 179

city where the boundaries between the abovementioned counterparts successfully blend with each other. Abbas uses the cinematic metaphor “city as remake, a shot-by-shot reworking of a classic” to define Shanghai as a city of its own double from another temporal dimension. It is a city that largely redevelops after the early 20th-century archetype of the prosperous, cosmopolitan, fashionable, and even grotesque landscape of modernity (Abbas 2000). Other critics focused more on the nostalgia of pre-revolutionary Shanghai as a counter-memory to the urban landscape associated directly with socialist ideology (Luo 2007). This focus again resembles the memory narrative in Berlin, where the topographical meanings in the former East Berlin are gradually stripped off or simply forgotten. Chinese critic Luo Gang considers contemporary “cultural studies” to have put too much emphasis on urban popular culture that the other “side” of modernity, that is, the mechanization and industrialization of the city as well as the people deeply involved in the process are largely overlooked (Luo 91). He gives the Caoyang Workers’ New Village as an example of how the rise and fall of the working class in the national ideology have resulted in the change in narrative of a certain cityscape. Just as the resistance of the GDR memory represents the tension between the local and national visions of modernity, Shanghai also exemplifies the local–national tension in the understanding of urbanity. The most appealing and shocking parts of Shanghai nostalgia for most critics seems to, despite the huge leap in-between, reconnect the local with the global. Nostalgia seems to be a soothing process of reclaiming the legitimacy of pre-revolutionary Shanghai, as if nothing in-between ever happened. The emphasis on the relation between local nostalgic mood and the globalizing trend with the facilitation of the national power is responsible for this. However, a possibility also exists that local nostalgia is not entirely induced by globalization or the mania of development but reveals an inner tension between the local and the national. According to Zhang Hongsheng, for a long time, Shanghai studies at home and abroad have been focusing on placing Shanghai in the national narrative of Chinese modernity in two major aspects. First, Shanghai’s decolonization embodies the establishment of China as an independent modern nationstate. Second, Shanghai is long considered the center of Chinese modernization and of modern China. The genealogy of the Shanghai image 180

has been oriented by the centralized and unified discourse of Chinese modernity, whereas the heterogeneity, contradiction, and lack of linearity of Shanghai specificity are marginalized or ignored (Zhang 2006). In fact, Shanghai’s diversity remains despite its various image makings based on the various needs of the national narratives. Nostalgia, whether as individual sensibility, social and cultural phenomena, or propaganda manipulated by national will, can be experienced by different groups differently. American scholar Shih Shu-mei identifies the disparity between colonialism in an ordinary sense and the colonial condition in China, which keeps a subtle distance from both nationalism and imperialism (Shih 2001). In what Shih calls “semicolonialism” in China, there is “the multiple, layered, intensified, as well as incomplete and fragmentary nature of China’s colonial structure. The ‘semi-’ here is not to denote ‘half ’ of something, but rather the fractured, informal, and indirect character of colonialism, as well as its multilayeredness” (Shih 34). Shanghai provides a perfect example of this complexity of Chinese semicolonialism. In reality, the actual production of identity has never been a holistic process of harmonization. Shanghai’s local narrative, once silenced by the national narrative, found more space in global discourse, which reemerged the local narrative. To consider local nostalgia as completely a result of the national intention in participating in the global game potentially overlooks the complexity of domestic power mapping. Rather than regarding nostalgia only as way of retrospection, I see it as more of a struggle and search for what the critical voice has been lacking in the national narrative of Chinese modernity. Considering present-day Shanghai as a palimpsest, or a cityscape of a spectrum of diverse values and elements, is a fundamental approach to understanding how nostalgia works in the fabric of Shanghai, which is done not only in complete homogeneity, as opposed to its own past or future, but also in the inner dynamics of its co-existing strata of various tenses. The local is not merely a single end of the power relations in globalization, which is usually conceived as a victim or a tool in either nationalism or global capitalism. Rather than directly elicit nostalgia as a form of commodity fetishism, globalization provides a lens under which we observe that the historical tension between local and national dichotomies, or more precisely, the

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rival understandings of Chinese modernity. This is the intrinsic cause of Shanghai nostalgia.

II. A History of Marginalization: Reading Shanghai Nostalgia through the Local/National Tension Shanghai as the Other: The Disdain of Haipai In a symposium called “Hai Shang, Shanghai – A Special Kind of Modernity” in the Shanghai Biennale 2000, American artist Britta Erickson characterized Shanghai as a uniquely dynamic city in which history, or in my understanding, the ruptures and discontinuity of history, is no burden at all. She attributed the vibrancy of the city to Shanghai’s long position as a commercial center, which propels and nurses creativity and hybridity.14 Indeed, modern-day Shanghai nostalgia celebrates the city’s exoticism, and its contrast to a more conventional culture of the rest of China is largely a local call for the return of its suppressed exceptionality, even if this uniqueness of Shanghai is not so unique now as it was before. Interestingly, globalization has made Shanghai a less exotic city in China but a more special city in the world. For a cosmopolis like Shanghai, globalization is, on one hand, transforming Shanghai into a more generic international city; on the other hand, it also gives voice to the local redefinition of its past and future. This local voice partly overlaps with the myth of China’s development and partly emerges as a critical reflection of the national narrative. The nostalgia for the modernity of pre-revolutionary Shanghai does not intend to retrace the global footstep because, even at that time, modernity in Shanghai was not as pure and straightforward as that in Paris or New York, another similarity it shares with Berlin. Shanghai’s modernity per se in the early 20th century was a plural form: it had the most complicated political structure (i.e., national regime and semi-colony) and multiple ideologies (i.e., communism, anarchism, petite 14

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Britta Erickson’s speech at the International Symposium “Hai Shang, Shanghai – A Special Kind of Modernity,” Shanghai Biennale 2000, Shanghai Art Museum.

bourgeois, labor movement, student movement, mafia, and colonialism). One aspect easily left out when examining Shanghai nostalgia is that this turning backward aims not only at the previously muted narrative of a glamorous global city of commercial success, consumerism, and bourgeois pleasure. More importantly, it reenacts a multilayered social reality of the old Shanghai, which was neither a presentation of false appearance of peace and prosperity nor an abyss of suffering. Shanghai was the most westernized, most capitalist, and most fashionable city in China, but it was also the center of the regional culture of the lower Yangtze River, Chinese traditional fine art, and the Peking Opera. One usual perspective in imagining Shanghai modernity is to associate the beginning of Shanghai’s prosperity with its opening up to foreign trade as one of the five treaty ports according to the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. This perspective tends to overlook the vital position in international trading Shanghai had already enjoyed before the settlement of western powers. Shanghai’s geographical position, which is in the middle of many key international and domestic shipping routes, made the mid-Ming Dynasty witness Shanghai’s emergence as the country’s largest cotton textile and shipping industry. Products from both northern and southern China were transferred overseas through Shanghai, while foreign goods such as spices, wood, and jewelry entered China in the same port (Luo 2004, 7). Direct commercial liaisons were established with Japan, Britain, and the US. In turn, foreign merchants also exported their products to other parts of the world. Since the early Qing Dynasty, Shanghai has become the center of sea shipping in China. The development of the Chinese financial system also thrived with the growing flow of commerce. Qianzhuang, a Chinese form of private bank, emerged during the Qing Qianlong era (1736–1795). By 1776, more than 25 qianzhuang were established in Shanghai. In 1797, the number increased to 124 (Luo 2004, 10). The Yu Garden, the top tourist attraction in Shanghai, was once a lively gathering place for local people in the bank industry (Figure 35 The Teahouse in the Yu Garden). Some powerful organizations of qianzhuang, such as the North District Money Union Guild Hall, also established a hospital for charity.15 Attracted by Shanghai’s 15

The North District Money Union Guild Hall was established in 1889 by Chen Shengjiao of Yankang Qianzhuang. Chen summoned the confraternity on Beishi Road (now North Fujian Road) to raise funding for the construction of the Guild Hall, which was located at the intersection of Wenjianshi Road (now Tanggu Road)

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promising development in commercial opportunities, businessmen from different trading professions all over China would gathered here. Large groups of merchants from Fujian, Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Shandong built their own guild halls (huiguan), which flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries. A huiguan may consist of an assembly hall and a lobby for various ceremonies and rituals, such as worship ceremonies, business meetings, local opera for entertainment, or even funeral rites (Luo 2004, 15–16). Huiguan played an important role as a public space for the Shanghai bourgeoisie, making Shanghai a vibrant commercial city.16 By then, Shanghai had not only blended various Chinese regional cultures but also bred a new custom of civil society culture that posed an alternative to the relatively conservative traditions of inland China.

Figure 35: The Teahouse in the Yu Garden.

16

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and Tiema Road (now North Henan Road). The construction took two years. It became an important gathering place for the organization and administration of routine matters. The worshipping ceremonies were usually conducted for the Emperor Guan, a historical figure worshipped in Southern China as the embodiment of loyalty and righteousness.

Therefore, the vigor of Shanghai as a modern cosmopolis of China was not merely a result of its colonial past. On the contrary, if Shanghai had not already been a city of rich resources of the development of Chinese capitalism, the colony and its later history would not have begun. This approach to Shanghai modernity is so largely neglected that the preservation of huiguan architecture, for example, has seldom been understood as part of the urban modernity discourse. Instead, it has been reduced to become a piece of antiquity of folk history. The former site of the Commercial Shipping Guild Hall in the heart of the Shanghai old town has long been in poor condition, which is caused not only by its ambiguous property right and the lack of financial means to fund its reconstruction (despite the fact that it has been listed under municipal protection since 1987). Ultimately, it is caused by the prevailing consensus that it is not part of “Shanghai modernity.” However, if Shanghai’s specialty lies in its flexible attitude towards different cultures, and if it is always tolerant to novelties, this uniqueness has not always been seen in a positive light. One such example is the pair of frequently discussed concepts: Jingpai (Beijing style) and Haipai (Shanghai style). Although, today, these two ideas are only neutral or even positive designations of two representative urban cultural characteristics in China, Haipai had not been an appealing signifier. It was originally “a negative characterization coined in the late 19th century by Chinese critics in the rival city of Beijing to pan the kind of opera and painting then being done in Shanghai” (Cody 137–138). In contrast to the now enthusiastically promoted Shanghai profile in the 1930s as “Paris of the Orient” or “the number one metropolis in the Far East,” Haipai was once almost an equivalent to negative labels such as unorthodox, business/money-oriented, hypocritical, opportunistic, and disloyal. In the early 20th century, the general atmosphere of the Shanghai literary circle, for example, was regarded as shallow, hedonistic, pretentiously knowledgeable, and full of scandals. According to Zhang Xudong, despite the momentous growth of the city in the decades that followed, the New Culture intellectuals in the 1920s and the 1930s held a largely negative view of Shanghai. One year after the May Fourth Movement in 1919, Fu Sinian, still a Peking University student running the radical magazine New Wave (xin chao), accused Shanghai of “stinking” because it lacked social organization and originality, and 185

its residents were capable of nothing more than imitation and bad taste. In his popular essay in 1926, Zhou Zuoren defines the Shanghai culture as “a culture of compradors, hooligans, and prostitutes,” whose superficiality, hastiness, and decadent excess constitute the polar opposite of a “rational and aesthetic” culture of an enlightened world of everyday life. Although Zhou attributes the tastelessness of Shanghai culture to its colonial origin and over-commercialized environment, he does not see it as anything new but instead an “exaggeration of what is inherently vulgar in Chinese culture” (Zhang 2002,147). In Chinese modern architecture, Haipai is more easily associated with the nationalistic discourse. The binarism of ti (essence, substance) and yong (form, function) was used as early as the late Qing Dynasty as a formula for balancing Chinese and Western elements in modernizing Chinese architecture. A long-cherished nationalistic ideal of the binarism insists “Chinese learning for the essence, Western learning for utility.” Haipai provides a reverse position of binarism: “Western learning for essence, Chinese learning for utility,” which is usually practiced by Western architects who try to localize Western architecture in a more domestically acceptable way.17 One example is the famous campus buildings of St. John’s University, particularly Schereschewsky Hall18 (Figure 36 Schereschewsky Hall in the Former St. John’s University). Buildings in Shanghai sometimes manifest themselves as unconscious products of cultural and business communication in the port-city rather than as intentional design. The vast area of Shikumen lilong, the most ordinary folk residential units in Shanghai, fits this case. The birth of Shikumen architecture in the metropolis of Shanghai tells a story of how a rapidly urbanized area tried to sustain its future. Catering to the actual need of both foreign settlers and Chinese inhabitants in semi-colonized Shanghai toward the end of the 19th century, Shikumen crystallizes an innovative way of reinventing modernity in a local context. However, 17 18

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In Chinese: zhong wei ti, xi wei yong (ᷕᷢỻ炻大ᷢ䓐). St. John’s University (Chinese: ⛋乎侘⣏⬎) was founded in 1879 by Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, Bishop of Shanghai an Anglican university located in Shanghai, China. Before the Chinese Civil War, it was regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in Shanghai and China. In 1952, the university was divided and its faculties were combined with similar faculties from other universities to create several specialist universities.

this innovative manner is not out of any ideological imperative but out of the mundane wisdom of everyday life. As Shih Shu-mei observes, “(f)or the eighty percent of the Chinese population in Shanghai who were immigrants from the vast Chinese interior, and whose identities were far from unified, the pressing issue was not anti-imperialism but rather economic livelihood” (Shih 236), the production of the Shanghai discourse has actually been imprinted with an excessive traces of political exigency.

Figure 36: The Schereschewsky Hall in the Former St. John’s University.

To a large extent, Haipai architecture suggests more than a reversed relation of the dichotomy between the West and the Chinese but rather produces a new way of dealing with the two beyond simple binarism. It 187

manifested itself in an art of relatively peaceful co-habitation of much diversified stratums of early modern Chinese society, which largely diminished under the political homogenization of social awareness after 1949. According to Cody, a hundred years ago, Nanjing Road, the most important commercial district in Shanghai, “became integrally associated with haipai,” which “Shanghainese seized upon…and applied it to themselves with positive connotations…Shanghainese gave meaning to the term haipai by imaginatively combining commerce and culture” (Cody 138). Bergère argues in her Histoire de Shanghai that the importance of Haipai culture, compared with other Chinese local cultures, is in its representation of a new way of identifying with the nation (Bergère 2002, 239). Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism keeps a subtle balance between proximity and distance with nationalism. When Haipai was condemned as inauthentic, commercial, superficial and vulgar, it could also hardly denied that Shanghai style was still deeply rooted in its Chineseness and particularly in the regional culture, without rendering its Non-Chineseness as the Other or vice versa. In fact, Chinese nationalism is inclined to marginalizing Shanghai as a tactic of political discourse due to the past fluctuation of the definition of national modernity. The impurity and “disloyalty” of Shanghai left by its semi-colonized regime and later by a self-ruling cosmopolitanism, both of which implied the non-integrality of state sovereignty, often became the accused target of Chinese nationalism. The national discourse aimed urgently to establish a newborn nation as a determinate separation from whatever the past could and could not give, good or bad. Shanghai scholar Sun Shaoyi elaborates on the image of Shanghai in left-wing literature in the 1920s to the 1930s, observing that Shanghai’s presence is both unnecessary and necessary in the configuration of the nation-state discourse. On one hand, Shanghai, as a semi-colonized city where national sovereignty was not intact, naturally aroused distaste among left-wing discourses, as what the left-wing cultural campaigns drove at was exactly the expulsion, or the “absence,” of Shanghai in their political and ideological appeal. On the other hand, Shanghai was also pictured as the ruins of Chineseness, where new social and cultural orders could be reconstructed. Shanghai, as Sun argues, is considered in this sense as “the evil of necessity.” The city’s challenge against Chineseness and tacit approval of economic control by foreign 188

powers legitimated the left wing’s call for a national revolution and salvation (Sun 35). Moreover, just as Berlin was despised as an unattractive industrial city of disorder and unevenness, Shanghai was no better a place as far as its space of capitalistic production was concerned. In his reportage “Indentured Laborer” (1936) (bao shen gong), Xia Yan exposed the inhuman working conditions in the Shanghai Cotton Mill that was run by Japanese capitalists. By revealing not only class suppression but also the evil of the capitalist city per se, Xia described a vicious picture of urban life under the sway of machine civilization and capitalistic logic.19 Thus, Haipai can be understood as a way the Chinese modern discourse relocates its position in relation to Western modernity–a simultaneous, cohabiting, and mutually assimilating one instead of its irreconcilable other. This tolerance of the heterogeneous influence from different cultures has become a virtue in today’s globalization discourse; however, glossing over the discursive shift of Haipai to question whether nostalgia implies a latent resistance to the mainstream narrative would be arbitrary. The contradiction of Shanghai lies intrinsically in how the modernity discourse negotiates its position in Chinese nationalism. Before the communist takeover, modernization was equivalent to urbanization, westernization, commercialization, and imperialist intrusion and an antithesis to national, traditional, and cultural integrity. However, it also served as the most crucial agent for strengthening the Chinese national power. In other words, Shanghai straddled between threatening and supporting Chinese nationalism. This embarrassing position of Shanghai is highly symbolic in the Chinese national 19

See Sun Shaoyi, Imagined City, “On the whole, not only Shanghai, regional or local identity had actually been at constant rivalry with that of the modern nationstate of China since the collapse of Qing Dynasty. The end of a thousand-year empire didn’t guarantee the advent of a homogenous nationalist discourse in China”. Sun quotes what American scholar Prasenjit Duara notices that “in the early republican years, before or at the same time when a kind of relatively stable and widely accepted national narrative came into being, Chinese provincial awareness also contributed to the formation of nation-state discourse. This awareness reached its culmination in the ‘Autonomy of Joint Provinces’ (lian sheng zi zhi) from 1920 to 1923. However, this ‘alternative discourse’ was soon marginalized by the central nation-state discourse, losing its possibility of playing a role in the formation of Chinese Nationalism”, 40–44; (My own translation).

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discourse. Unsurprisingly, the socialist regime tried very hard to redefine the zeitgeist of the modern so that it became the one end of the binarism where the other end represents urban, western, commercial, imperialist, and capitalist.

Mao’s Shanghai: City under Anti-Urban Reconfiguration The revolutionary era witnessed Shanghai hated and criticized as the most rotten place in China, a “paradise for adventurers”, and hell for the majority of the working class while producing 95% of the revenue for the state wealth. The Soviet experts who came to China to impart one thing or two on socialist urban planning judged Shanghai architectures as the most “non-progressive”. Traditional Chinese architecture, such as the Confucian Temple and other Chinese religious venues, as well as Western churches and colonial-style buildings were destroyed. Unlike the mosaic murals of the HSBC building that were preserved, a stone carving portraying Confucius and 36 palace lanterns hanging in the main lobby of the Bank of China were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. We also see the fall of Shanghai as a modern city in whatever sense is accounted for the hostility of revolutionary discourse toward urbanity. While urbanity is inevitably involved with capitalist development and modernization, its advent in China, a huge agricultural country for thousands of years, has been confronting with challenges and resistance. Even since the May Fourth Movement the tradition in Chinese intellectual circle has always been insisting that it was the countryside and rural area, not the city was where the national consciousness originated. This weak urban awareness naturally had a tremendous impact on Shanghai, the most full-fledged city in China, molding a distinctive urban identity among Shanghai residents who felt very different from the rest of China. In the first half of the 20th century, political and cultural narratives rural and urban were in a state of rivalry. As mentioned previously, fear and distaste of the city from both conservatives of Chinese traditional culture and left-wing intellectuals combined with the nation’s reliance on its enormous economic 190

productivity. Occurring earlier than the proletariat revolution sweeping China, the contradiction remained, although it did not manifest itself overtly. Capitalist urbanity was purged in the first several decades of the new regime. Therefore, Shanghai became a key place to articulate the political doctrines. Lu Hanchao shows Shanghai’s embarrassing situation after 1949: As an essentially rural-based movement, the communist revolution inevitably inherited the ambivalence toward Shanghai. The city’s solid industrial and financial bases and excellent workforce that were established in the prerevolutionary period have been recognized to be invaluable national resources. For decades, the city’s contribution to China’s national revenue was incredibly high, far beyond any conceivable normal share of a single city in a country of China’s size. However, Shanghai’s economic contributions did not prevent the regime from maintaining its preconceived prejudice, which was based on an all-too-important ideology, that the city was “an evil bridgehead of foreign encroachment and the supreme headquarters of domestic reactionaries and therefore should be condemned” (13).

The deep bias against cities like Shanghai originated from their already achieved “wealth and fame as ‘treaty ports’ in which foreign imperialists reigned supreme” (Perry 2004, 104). The growth and stability of middle class in those cities had made the initial endeavor of The Chinese Communist Party, which was noticeably founded in Shanghai’s former French Concession, in mobilizing urban factory workers not very successful. The “brutal repression in Shanghai and other urban centers,” according to Elizabeth J. Perry, “soon forced the Communists to abandon the proletariat in favor of the peasantry. Over the subsequent two decades, the Chinese revolution developed as a rural movement whose leaders harbored understandable ambivalence, and even animosity, toward the cities that had proven so inhospitable to their overtures” (Perry 104). In a widely known 1960s’ film Sentinels Under Neon Lights (1964), Nanjing Road, the most prosperous commercial street in Shanghai, is described with a tone implying its dangerous seduction and its being an evil hotbed for bourgeois thoughts, which the encamping soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army from their rural base areas in the hinterland of China should spare no effort to discard away. “Unlike most campaigns,” as Yomi Braester observes, “this one focused on a specific city, and even on particular locales within it” 191

(Braester 432). “The Good Eighth Company on Nanjing Road” (nan jing lu shang hao ba lian) and the way they held fast to their positions were particularly difficult and therefore worth commendation. Their stories became the core of the political campaign in remolding the symbolic meanings of Shanghai urban spaces after 1949. The challenges of the urban lifestyle that was able to shatter the regime were so imminent that Chairman Mao Zedong had to warn “darkly that cities were ‘sugar-coated bullets’ capable of undoing even the most committed of cadres. Shanghai in particular was chided for its bourgeois attractions, likely to prove irresistibly seductive to unwary rubes fresh from the countryside” (Perry 104). Whereas propaganda films tried to mold Nanjing Road as a space of repression under capitalism and imperialism, historical materials show the other side of the story. The memory of Nanjing Road as a tourist attraction and a space of daily entertainment was overwritten by the revolutionary anti-urban narrative. Despite Shanghai’s semi-colonized status, foreign and Chinese cohabitation had been the reality since 1865. Western settlers, rich as they were, were only a small fraction of the city’s population. Before the Sino-Japanese War broke out, only 50,000 emigrants lived in the city of four million people (Lu 1996, 52). Therefore, their capacity of consumption could not rival that of the Chinese inhabitants. Nanjing Road was the center of Shanghai’s, if not China’s, commercial transactions. By the 1930s, one sixth of the country’s revenue was collected in Shanghai, most of which was attracted by the developed urban commerce (Lu 1996, 52). The great amount of revenue produced by commerce put in enormous vigor into the national economy. The specialty stores and department stores that clustered on Nanjing Road were all run by Chinese. Lu Xinglong points out that the prosperity of Nanjing Road not only depended on the developed material civilization in the concessions but was also a result of the excellent management of Chinese merchants. In terms of style, the architecture on Nanjing Road again revealed the essence of Haipai culture, demonstrating high flexibility in adapting the influences of diverse origins. The four big department stores, namely, Wing On, Sincere, Sun Sun, and the Sun, which were all run by Guangdong merchants, showed magnificent architectural styles that blended typical Roman classicism, 192

European or American modernism, and Chinese decorative traditions. Other stores were designed in a play between the lower Yangtze River regional folk style and Western influence (Lu 1996, 54). As far as function is concerned, the “big four” expanded their business beyond commodity retail to selling events in the space. As multifunctional complexes for public activities, department stores that offered affordable entrances to venues for regional opera, music, dancing, and entertainment made themselves the centers of urban civil culture. Department stores were also associated with the display space for new advances in science and technology such as the escalator, lift, cooling and heating system, and even a radio station. Thus, the memory of Nanjing Road constitutes a significant part of the formation of Shanghai’s urban civil culture and the Haipai culture (Lu 1996, 53). In an interesting contrast, Michelangelo Antonioni’s visual language provides us with a different view on the spatial configuration of revolutionary Shanghai. In his controversial documentary China (1972), “selected” spaces of Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution were allowed to be shot: street views near the Bund, Nanjing Road, the memorial site of the first national congress of the CCP, Workers’ New Village, Yu Garden, factory, and the Huangpu River. By moving his camera along the skylines of the Bund, Antonioni presented a bizarre inconsistency between the art-deco style architecture and the puritan life style, not to mention the revolutionary propaganda posters. The following is his voiceover characterized by a touch of nostalgia: One million residents, the second biggest city in the world, the name ‘Shanghai’ associated with crime, drug and decadence. (pause) If Beijing is revolutionary, the capital of purity, Shanghai is the city where reformation has taken place most obviously. Within only one generation’s time, Shanghai has totally changed its image.20

20

My own translation from the Chinese subtitles to English.

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Nanjing Road from Antonioni’s perspective was lively and noisy, although it seemed to have been deprived of colors, except for blue, white, and gray. The people, window display, newspaper stand, building of the former Sun Department Store, propaganda posts, police pavilion, and the soldiers in a truck constituted a picture of the most famous commercial centers of the city, even of the nation, without many traces of commerce. The voiceover again links the spatial vis-à-vis social changes from the past to the present: The empires of western economies had their concessions and headquarters in Shanghai. Their buildings are now the state’s office buildings. The people who were once slaves have become a huge class of labor. They were the main force of Chinese revolution in the past fifty years.21

If for Antonioni, the Bund and Nanjing Road had been purified by ideological transformations, the scenes of people in the well-known teahouse in the Yu Garden illustrate the persistent livelihood of Shanghai’s civil life. Here, the old people chat, smoke, and read newspaper; a child cries; a cat jumps down from a shelf with teapots. “Its atmosphere is nostalgia and happiness, the memory of the past and the loyalty to the present mix in a strange way,” describes the voiceover. The contrast between Nanjing Road and the Yu Garden teahouse seems to verify that everyday life per se can produce the space of nostalgia. It is also exactly where commercial activities, though carefully limited, were still to be tracked in the old town of Shanghai. Antonioni silently skimmed over the stores, a snack shop, a drug store, and even a bank, as if trying to restore the city to how it used to be. On the other side of the story, some space of miserable past is preserved to “recall the bitter and think of the sweet” (yi ku si tian). In the Workers’ new village constructed for the poorest working class, the advanced socialist space is put on a proud display in comparison with the ramshackle straw-shed houses from the years of colonialism. “Fan gua long”, or the Cucumber Alley, is seen in the film in ghostly austerity. In place of the chaotic sounds people’s activities made in the teahouse, the village looks empty and much less human. The camera eye moves around the shanty houses,

21

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My own translation from the Chinese subtitles to English.

which resounds with children’s impassioned, lusty singing in ode to the revolution and present life. The cinematic representations disclose the making of Shanghai urban space in the revolutionary years, which is characterized by a constant struggle between the resilient residue of the city’s past and the nation’s present. Although cinematic representations of spatial changes in Shanghai illustrate how urbanity was rewritten under the revolutionary ideology, the essential reasons for the adversity of urbanity in the context of Communism in China requires further explanation about the imagery of Chinese socialist modernity. In a talk entitled Two Modes of Space Production in Shanghai and Yan’an in the 1930s–1940s, Wang Min’an, a Tsinghua University scholar, differentiated the nature of space in Yan’an, the earliest, most important, and most mature origin of Chinese communism, from that of Shanghai. In Yan’an, spouses did not live together. The family was not a private unit consisting of social space; all aspects of private life were managed and controlled by social institutions. This typical communist mode of production generated an entirely public space, where any private space was eliminated. There were no market exchanges and no currency exchanges. All distributions of material and resources were organized and planned. Conversely, in Shanghai, space was completely private, as evident in Zhang Ailing’s works, in which everyday life, love affairs, clothes, food, the street, and each trivial corner of life are important.22 We also see here the tension between rural and urban modes of production in shaping the two kinds of modern spaces. Wang further contends that these two modes of space production constitute the earliest conflicts and resistance between two understandings of modernity. Simply put, Shanghai represented the liberalist, capitalist modernity, whereas Yan’an represented Mao Zedong’s modernity, a modernity that was anti-modern. For the entire 20th century, China struggled with fierce competition between these two modes of space production.23 For Wang, what is more significant is that many young urban people from Shanghai were attracted by revolutionary campaigns and volunteered to live in the communist lifestyle 22 23

My own translation of the speech by Wang, Min’an, Symposium in Shanghai Biennale 2000. Wang, Shanghai Biennale 2000.

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in Yan’an. In contrast to the stifling of private space after communism took over China, he argues that the current mode of space production in China is neither the pure capitalist modernity of Shanghai in the 1930s and the 1940s nor the communist modernity of Yan’an but is a result of the negotiation and penetration of them both.24 In this sense, we see in the nostalgia for old hotels and former bank buildings as well as Shikumen houses a kind of reminiscence for the once nationally undermined narrative that is urban. Mass urbanization took place in Shanghai predominantly from 1900 to 1937, when a large number of banks, commercial buildings, hotels, department stores, cinemas, theaters, entertainment parks, and apartments and lilong houses were constructed. As a result, the de-urbanization of Shanghai after 1949 was a process of change in function, de-commercialization, and de-privatization, including the shutting down of banks; gradual nationalization of industries, especially commerce; confiscation of private properties, particularly private housing; and redistribution of living spaces. Peter G. Rowe suggests the following: Under the subsequent communist doctrine of industrialization and simultaneous relegation of housing, municipal services, and urbanization into the lowly category of unproductive consumption, these circumstances did not improve appreciably. Residential work-unit districts were constructed, although they sprawled out on Shanghai’s periphery without much urban architectural distinction and often effectively segregated daily life between work units in contrast to the city’s earlier cosmopolitan atmosphere. Intense overcrowding also occurred in the face of urban disinvestment and mounting housing shortages, especially in well-established urban areas. There, the impact on the lilong and other housing was appalling, with livable space standards dropping to as low as 3.5 square meters per person, aside from the social discomfort caused by subdividing single residences for use by multiple families living in extremely close quarters (62).

This situation is not new in the Shikumen living history considering that some of the most classical early Chinese films use the little urbanites’ life in crowded Shanghai lilong houses as backdrop. In the cramped space of the Shikumen, which accommodates “72 tenants”, Crows and Sparrows (1949), Crossroads (1937), Angels in the Street (1937), and Myriads of Lights (1948) configure the tenacious spirit of the urban grassroots in struggling with the time, the city, and themselves. The 24

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Wang, Shanghai Biennale 2000.

overcrowded state of Shikumen in these films is far from comfortable, but the vivid depiction of its everydayness somehow implies the optimistic surviving wisdom of most ordinary Chinese people under the high pressure of modern life, even if it also implies a kind of resistance to the grander narrative of Shanghai’s decadence under capitalism. The post-1949 Shikumen lost this touch of Chineseness of urban existence. As the city was integrated into a larger national set of value system of ideological uniformity, the Shikumen was unsurprisingly reduced to deteriorating urban artifacts unworthy of care and attention.

The Stagnant 1980s: Shanghai in the Early Reform Years By the late 1970s, Shanghai’s economy had fallen into a pitiable abyss, suffering the aftermaths of both the pre-1949 destruction during the two war periods, the anti-Japanese War and the subsequent Civil War from 1937 to 1949, and the following communist era of planned economy, during which it became “just another ‘cog,’ so to speak–albeit an important one–in the “common wheel” of the socialist project” (Rowe 64). The construction of urban infrastructure was so minimal that people who revisited was astonished by how little the city had changed after all those years, as if it was frozen in time. As an inevitable result of the continuing downfall of the economic situation and the lack of any further infrastructural progress, Shanghai became “a dingy, overcrowded, and squalid place–a dreary and demoralized city by all accounts–especially in relationship to 1930s” (Rowe 54). Moreover, Shanghai remained the supporting pillar of vast China during the revolutionary era. According to Rowe, On a broader administrative level, income extraction from Shanghai continued and intensified. Long regarded, even under the Nationalists, as the “cash-cow” of China, between 1949 and 1984 fully 87 percent of the revenues produced locally were sent to the Central Government in Beijing to pay for other regional programs of industrialization and development. Put another way, during the Maoist period alone, Shanghai sent thirteen times more revenues out of the city than stayed, representing by far the highest relative contribution in China. Not surprisingly, the toll on the city’s productivity and morale was high. In addition to poor housing, factories and other industrial assets depreciated, urban infrastructure quickly

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became outdated and crumbled, and stagnant pay for workers provided less and less incentive to participate (54).

The end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 was followed by a series of social reforms in Chinese society at the national level. Two years after the political turmoil that held back China’s development towards modernization, the first round of economic reforms first took place in the rural areas, achieving immediate results. Based on the progress in the countryside, in 1984, urban economic reform began to take shape. However, urban reform in China encountered more difficulties and failures that were beyond governmental experience and imagination, reflecting the immaturity of the regime in dealing with urban issues. With the implementation of the market economy, the influx of foreign capital, the encouragement of privatized enterprises, and most influentially the dismantlement of state-owned enterprises, the majority of Chinese urbanites experienced a general unrest induced by the sudden ideological twist as well as mass unemployment. At the same time, corruption, inflation, and social injustice fueled the gradually emerging popular demand for democratization of the Chinese political system, especially in cities where students and intellectuals were mostly active. These difficulties were directly connected with the 1989 student movement. During this period, domestic tension between the people and the state was brought to an unprecedented climax. After the 1989 Tiananmen Incident, urban reform again slowed down and the ideological control again turned strict. China was once again standing at a critical crossroad, confronting with the question of what kind of modernity China is heading for. The aftermath was beyond a simple choice between total westernization and an undoing of the reform even if the agitation in 1989 did not shatter Socialism as the dominant ideology in China. The second round of urban reform was initiated in 1992 by Deng Xiaoping’s “Southern Tours” in Shanghai and Guangdong, in which he reasserted his economic agenda and his reformist platform and determined the basic policy of Chinese development in the framework of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”. A combination of socialist political system and capitalist economic system has been generating the rapid improvement of the nation’s international image based on stunning development of economy.

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Against this social background of China, one can underline another reason of Shanghai nostalgia that is very straightforward but has very seldom been noticed: the comparatively very stagnant pace of Shanghai’s development as the Number one city in China from 1978 to 1992. Parallel to the national reforms on urban economic structure, Shanghai had undergone spells of pain in the process of overwhelming social transformations. The former reputation as the national center of textile, light industry, especially manufacture industry was abundantly marred by the reorganization of Shanghai state-owned enterprises, followed by an extensive abolishment or dismantlement of factory units. Although the the “Scheme of Urban Master Plan for Shanghai Municipality” (1986) has settled several significant guidelines whose elaboration after 1992 chiefly shaped Shanghai’s urban planning before the “Southern Tour” of Deng Xiaoping that re-emphasized the importance of the Yangtze River Delta in propelling China’s economic development, the economic growth of Shanghai was not able to rival with Guangdong and the Pearl River Delta, the earliest policy-privileged area after the practice of China’s Opening-up policy. Bergère notices that Deng’s distrust in Shanghai before 1985 resulted directly from the negative impression the city left during the Cultural Revolution as Shanghai had been the headquarter of the “Gang of Four” and their adherents. Political marginalization was alleviated after Jiang Zemin was appointed by the Central Government as the mayor of Shanghai. However, Shanghai still could not enjoy the same developmental privileges as the southern provinces. Gradualism being the guideline of reform, Deng deliberately made a detour in his strategy by downplaying the position of Shanghai. As the seat of national economic lifeblood with a considerable number of state-owned enterprises, Shanghai was not listed as the first round of locations of radical change (Bergère 2003, 363–366). Both the lack of preferential policy and the highly cost consuming state-owned enterprises checked the catch-up of Shanghai’s development pace with the South before 1990s. Statistics show clearly that between 1978 and 1994, Shanghai lost its edge to Guangdong during the mid-1980s in various key fields of economic performance and dynamics. Guangdong exceeded Shanghai to a

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considerable degree in cargo transportation, share in China’s GDP, exports, utilized foreign capital and trade.25 During this time, Shanghai had lost much of its confidence and capacity in manufacturing the best-quality light industry products, such as watches and radio sets, or in leading the most cutting-edge fashion in the market competition because of the more open-minded and daring Cantonese. According to statistics, between 1978 and 1994, Shanghai lost its edge to Guangdong during the mid-1980s in various key fields of economic performance and dynamics. Guangdong exceeded Shanghai to a considerable degree in cargo transportation, share in China’s GDP, exports, utilized foreign capital, and trade.26 From a geo-economic view, scholars such as Sung Yun-wing consider Shanghai’s prospect as a leading figure in China’s economy to have dimmed. The marginalization of Shanghai during this period by the national narrative is no longer mentioned today. However, in reality, dramatic collisions were observed from the dreadful living conditions, congested traffic, and poverty on one hand and the sense of superiority the city’s residents always had on the other hand. If one asks why the nostalgic vogue began to form, it probably had to do with the chance to finally release the long-silted memory of this conflict. Nostalgia seeks the possibility of expressing local identity in the fluctuation of the nation’s development discourse. Nostalgia seems to succumb again to state-led consumerism, but it can also be examined as a form of resistance to subordination that is keen on compensative expression.

Shanghai Nostalgia Revisited: Case of Shikumen/Xintiandi Widely built in Shanghai, Shikumen became the skyline of Shanghai’s urban image as well as the major residential compound of city dwellers. (Figure 37 Shikumen Houses Today) Shikumen emerged as a specific folk housing form in Shanghai during the years of the rapid 25

26

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Source of statics from Sung, Yun-wing. “Dragon Head of China’s Economy.” Shanghai: Transformation and Modernization under China’s Open Policy. Eds. Yeung, Yue-man and Yun Wing Sung. (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1996), pp. 171–198. Source of statics from Sung, 171–198.

growth of a highly diverse population. Shikumen literally refers to the portal of each single residential unit. In terms of style, the façade of Shikumen is mostly characterized by a distinctive style that mixes Western and Chinese architectural elements. Two symmetrical black wooden gates with lion-shaped door knockers are the same as those in traditional Chinese folk residences. On top of these gates, Western classical-style pediment and pilaster form a pleasing contrast (Feng 2005). The successively constructed Shikumen houses created the lilong, a self-enclosed housing network surrounded by high brick walls. The exits to the outside streets are connected only to the main alleys. The manner in which the Shikumen lilong is constructed is similar to that of the European townhouse of the early 19th century. The unique design attains safety, tranquility, and privacy of the residential area. Moreover, it achieves economical land usage because of its densely allocated rows of houses (Qin 42). However, Shikumen’s inner structure remains the same as that of folk residences in the lower Yangtze River region, usually an independent unit consisting of both residential area and courtyard for indoor activities. Since the 1920s, the modernization of Shikumen in the lilong houses has entailed the improvement of sanitary equipment, heating system, ventilation, and lighting (Chu 118). Overall, Shikumen renders an ideal combination of a small version of the Chinese courtyard and the Western townhouse estate.

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Figure 37: Shikumen Houses Today.

However, Shikumen is showing signs of long-term ill-usage and underrated value. Originally oriented toward the market of the city’s middleclass with one-family unit use, the condition of Shikumen house worsened with the further increase in urban population. In the 1920s to the 1930s, many Shikumen houses were shared by many tenants, and they were subleased is most cases. In the socialist-planned economy, although the Workers’ New Villages became the epitome of the achievement of the socialist urban collectivity, the privacy of the Shikumen lifestyle depreciated; thus, Shikumen space was largely overpopulated and drastic changes happened to its function. Although apartment buildings and Shikumen lilong houses created new social boundaries and privatized spaces, de-urbanization again destroyed the living conditions of the local citizens, causing discontinuity and conflict between urban form and function. Many Shikumen houses were partly transformed into community factories for small-scale manufacturing. Lack of proper maintenance also directly led to the deterioration of Shikumen’s housing

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conditions. The ageing process of Shikumen hastened during the post1949 years. In this way, Shikumen has long been forgotten in the city’s narrative as an innovative invention for solving the problem of Shanghai’s acute spatial deficiency. In the 1990s, it became a burden in the new round of rapid urban renewal. Large areas of lilong were pulled down to make space for more urgent constructions of infrastructures. For Shanghai and most Chinese cities, the conflict between the old (usually Chinese) and the new (usually Western) seemed unsolvable. Meeting the needs of both modernization and the preservation of relics seemed equally impossible.

Figure 38: The Gentrified Shikumen – Xintiandi.

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Exceptions also exist. One of the most discussed spatial transformations of Shikumen is the Xintiandi project (Figure 38 Xintiandi). The case of Xintiandi (㕘⣑⛘), a project that tries to revitalize Shikumen architecture provides not only an alternative to the actual solution of urban renewal but also a start point of further contemplation on Shanghai nostalgia. The Xintiandi project is located in the central zone of the former French Concession, the total 30,000 square meters of commercial space with a nostalgic appearance was turned from the vaster alleys of dilapidated Shikumen houses. Similar to Berlin’s critical reconstruction, although it still maintained the outer form of Shikumen architecture, the inner spaces were demolished, emptied, and replaced by new structures and materials. Claiming itself as the living room of Shanghai where “yesterday meets tomorrow,” Xintiandi was developed by the Hong Kong-based Shui On Group in the early 2000s. The project of revitalizing a small fraction of Shikumen housing has received much attention among locals and non-locals since its opening to the public. The enormous change in the inner structure, function, and users of the space caused Xintiandi to receive constant criticisms for its Disneyfication of Shanghai culture, a simulacrum of an imagined civil society. According to architects Peng Nu and Xue Qiuli, the authenticity of the locals and the history of Shikumen are erased by the consumption of the visual image of the particular space. The place-making reflects the will of the capital behind the logic of global modernity, ultimately targeting only the needs of the global elite and entrepreneurs (Xue and Peng 2006, 129). Another criticism, such as Huang Zongyi’s The Production of Urban Spaces: Shanghai as a Global City in the Making, asserts that the preservation of historical and cultural values of this unique form of Shanghai folk residence is as important as, if not more important than, creating opportunities in globalizing Shanghai (Huang 61–83). Huang considers that the fact that the destruction of lilong has not encountered much resistance from locals demonstrates the strong national power in the course of globalization (Huang 76). She also argues that Xintiandi Plaza is “exactly an evidence of the capitalization of cultural heritage in Shanghai’s globalization, namely a representation of the globalization effect” (76). While most critics condemn the rejuvenated Haipai space as only a rosy fantasy that has been manipulated by the national and global 204

hegemonies, I see the rosiness is in the first place set off by the poor condition Shanghai once had. A research project conducted by Chinese architect Huang Ye on how consumers of Xintiandi and the local residents in that area perceive Xintiandi shows a more complicated picture. Among a small-scale survey of 35 consumers with regard to their views on Xintiandi, 76% agree that it represents the typical culture of Shanghai in various degrees, 83% like it or like it very much, and 80% like the northern part of the project, that is, the old Shikumen quarter. In contrast to the view of cultural critics, which tends to regard Xintiandi as a fake simulacrum, 50% of consumers in the survey consider it as real world. A survey of 34 residents shows a highly mixed or even contradictory attitude toward Xintiandi and the Shikumen housing. First, although 64% of the residents like living in a Shikumen lilong house and in the given area, an overwhelming 90% are unsatisfied with their living environment. Second, although the majority of these residents do not consume in Xintiandi or have never even been there, opinions are still divided between loving it and hating it. In the three groups of subjects that consider Xintiandi has bad, good, or no impact on their life, 55% and 60% of them in the latter two categories are in favor of the project (Huang 2004). According to Shanghai scholar Zhu Dake, the attractiveness of Xintiandi to the locals does not lie in its “localness” that non-local tourists expect to see but in the “Western imagery” that Xintiandi, as a cultural landmark, remolded as suggested by the global capital. Zhu suggests “their (the local’s) consumption intention comes from the alternative cultural memory of Shikumen. In the colonial time, it was a common sign of modernism, which links closely with the petite bourgeoisie narrative… a metaphor of the landing and expanding of the western modernity….It becomes the occidental myth for the local middle class and the oriental myth for the overseas tourists. They were double written in the same spot. This is why Xintiandi is widely welcomed by consumers” (Zhu 2005). If the passion of the consumers for Xintiandi reveals the popular desire for consuming the imaginary of Shanghai culture in light of the kind of modernity that embraces consumerism, Western lifestyle, old Shanghainess, and cosmopolitanism, the ambivalence of the residents, who might also be consumers of the space, shows that 205

the driving force of the nostalgia is based on a deep rupture between reality and memory. The nostalgia discourse of Xintiandi has to do with the imagination of the pre-revolutionary era; but more importantly, with the locals’ still vivid memory of the Shikumen life. Deurbanization in the past destroyed the living conditions of the pre-existing stratum of local citizens. Overpopulation and deplorable hygiene conditions have been a great social problem of the Shanghai lilong. If the Shikumen in Xintiandi is a fantasy, this fantasy is not only what the national and the global dictate to the local public but is also set off by the poor conditions the Shikumen had. The decline of Shikumen and the revival of its simulacra turn out to be more of a result of the tensions between the local and national discourses than under the total sway of global capital, which undeniably takes the chance to bloom. In the Foucaultian sense of heterotopia, the nostalgic spaces for Haipai architecture can also be created as a space of other, which is “not of illusion, but of compensation” (Foucault 27). Shikumen nostalgia gives an opportunity to the people who consume the commercialized Xintiandi space, both in a real and a symbolic sense, to enjoy a sense of freedom from the troublesome political discourse. On one hand, this freedom is considered a form of control, a way of depoliticization as politicization, not to mention the overwhelming criticism on the freedom of the capital at the cost of local residents’ interests and proper rights. Culturally, on the other hand, if we try to understand why Shikumen can be representative of Shanghai culture, it is not only because of its cosmopolitan aesthetics or the petite bourgeoisie it represents but also because Shikumen itself is, since the very beginning, a product of commercialization of space. As the earliest real estate product in China, Shanghai Shikumen neighborhoods also established a huge commercial market among the grassroots. The subleasing practices prevailing in developing Shanghai in its heyday involved a major part of the city’s business world, juxtaposing itself with the hustle and bustle of the international economic flows. The “second landlord” system even provided the spatial conditions for the “garret” (ting zi jian) culture in Shanghai, which is known as the symbolic space of the left-wing intellectuals such as Lu Xun. Moreover, the diversification of Shikumen is also not new in history: opium dens, mini stores, Western and Chinese banks, hotels, radio stations, public bathhouses, brothels, 206

tailor shops, clinics, and kindergartens have flourished in Shikumen neighborhoods since the late Qing Dynasty (Lu 2004, 184). As Lu Hanchao presents in his celebrated Beyond the Neon Lights – Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century, the “traditionalism” of the users of urban spaces has survived political and social turmoil and will continue to thrive once the conditions permit. Of course, the impact of both Western imperialism and socialist reconstruction influenced Shanghai. However, “In this process,” Lu argues, “ideology was often too luxurious for, if not irrelevant to, daily life. People stuck to some old ways of living not because of any serious concerns about keeping ‘tradition,’ and even less for the sake of patriotism, but because they felt comfortable with old ways or because it was economically beneficial to do so. And, whenever prudent or necessary, they would not hesitate to shun the old and take up the new–or more commonly, people happily adopted or absorbed whatever they felt was good for them in order to create multifaceted lifestyles, which cannot easily be framed by any dichotomy” (Lu 296). Based on his detailed description of the life of the rickshaw pullers, shantytown residents, and Shikumen “little urbanites” (xiao shi min), Lu concludes that indigenous traditions found in the everyday life of ordinary people were not completely assimilated by the predominant Western influence but instead co-existed or even tried to re-invent the city’s social ecology. “When the Communists came to power, they paid special attention to Shanghai: the city lay at the intersection of the past and the West; both were to be swept away by the revolution. But thirty years of Communist ‘ground cleaning’ did not completely uproot tradition. Rather, decades after the supposed break with the old world the past endures with remarkable tenacity” (Lu 310). Today, the layers are still to be discovered and scrutinized under new circumstances. The livelihood of this traditionalism reminds us to pay more attention to the spatial narratives and practices rather than the endeavor to homogenize a trajectory of development over time. Although the revolutionary era has gradually wiped out these traces of flexible, bottom-up forms of commerce, the traces were and are there to be seen. Today, Xintiandi capitalizes on the first layer of commercial value by adding a second layer on the space on top of what time has worked on it. Another most popular leisure quarter of today’s Shanghai, Tianzifang, somehow continues the tradition of Shikumen’s 207

multiple functions in the city’s commercial scene.27 Therefore, Xintiandi and Shikumen nostalgia can be on one hand motivated by the feeling of freshness brought by the revived imaginary of western modernity in the local context; on the other hand, it can also be a nostalgia for the vernacular modernity which largely relies on the city’s commercial vibrancy and elastic pragmatism. The huge commercial opportunity behind the desire for urban space did not escape Hong Kong developer Vincent H.S. Lo as he realized that to sell Xintiandi is to sell “the idea of Shanghai back to its own residents” (Cody 139). The viability of this idea is supported by the legitimacy of the locals’ repressed love for Shikumen as a basic form of urban dwelling community–at least Xintiandi gives back the ideal and comfortable form of Shikumen even in an over-gentrified way. The anti-urban discourse in China destroyed Shikumen prior to globalization. The local desire for consumption of the space targets the collective memory of urban Shanghai as a taboo. The nostalgia for spatial modernity turns out to be a compensative drive for articulation. Therefore, the appeal of Shikumen nostalgia epitomizes the constant rivalry between different understandings of modernity in Chinese urban construction. Xintiandi became popular with the help of the sophisticated spatial production by global capitalism and with the memory rupture between the locals’ past and present. In the early years of Shanghai’s large-scale housing construction, Shikumen as a townhouse project represented a vernacular variety in modern urban design. Later, in the socialist project of modernization, the long-term misuse of Shikumen denotes the marginalization of the living space of the bourgeoisie in the city. Today, when the idea of progressive modernization is prioritized in urban planning discourse in China, Shikumen is again disvalued. Any old buildings are usually regarded in antithesis to “the modern”–either as traditional, which should be preserved, or as outdated, which should be demolished. The newly built, the novel, and

27

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Tianzifang is the name of a leisure zone on Taikang Road in the former French Concession. The lanes of the old Shikumen alley-houses were developed from a local residence area into a new art and leisure area. See more here: (Chinese).

especially the Western, are easily accepted as the authentic “modern.” This understanding of modernity in temporal linearity is inclined to be a drawback of infinite binarism, resulting in the rupture of the memory and experience of the city. From a spatial perspective, the “now time” of the history of urban development proves the Shikumen architecture to be very modern. Shikumen’s value, concealed behind nostalgia and overshadowed by the change in urban narrative, should be revisited. Shikumen is old but not dated, historical but still modern. The birth of Shikumen suggests a way of understanding modernity that pays high respect to the sustainability of local cultural and living ecology. Instead of simply transplanting European townhouse, Shikumen maintains the diversity of the housing environment. The sustainable concept of Shikumen can still inspire today’s Chinese urban planning scheme in that it rationalizes urban space to the maximum by considering both emergent demand and continuity of existing circumstances. Embracing a characterless, copied, and non-localized space of Western modernity, the narrative where Shikumen is seen as an outdated tradition neglects the modernity it suggests. In general, as an addition to the discourse on urban sustainability that usually focuses on temporal transformation, the case of Shikumen illustrates that the understanding of a sustainable city propels the spatial perspective beyond the linear imagery of urban development.

III. Memory as Actor: Nostalgia in Berlin and Shanghai in a Comparative View The Berlin Wall seems to have fallen in both cities. Whereas Berlin is seen as a display window of the ideological triumph upon the end of the Cold War, Shanghai’s national and global images as an example of today’s Chinese modernization provides a perfect reference for the myth of a universal desire for capitalistic development. The previous discussion questions this prevailing imagination of the real situation. In this picture, the memory of Berlin and Shanghai as the national’s various “others” is overlooked. Nostalgia, on one hand, can be the desire 209

for remaining the same, but on the other hand, it can be a discourse that appeals to diversity or even resistance. Critical reconstruction, Ostalgie, and the old Shanghai nostalgia can all be considered an effort to resist the rupture in the national historical narrative. To take nostalgia as restorative sentimentality or as submission to the predominant power tends to reduce history to a simplified and linear narrative. The understanding of these ruptures requires scrutinized reflections on the complexity of nostalgia in both cities. This complexity occurs in multiple ways for it involves various kinds of rivalries and negotiations between the quests for different local memory narratives. These negotiations are results of the discontinuities between generation, space, and ideology, which manifest the innate tension and contradiction of modernity. In fact, no matter how much favor nostalgia has won in the two cities, and no matter what kind of nostalgia is in question, Shanghai and Berlin have not returned and could not possibly return to a unified style following any kind of nostalgic will. Both cities, despite their disparate backgrounds and future prospects, show ruptures in their urban textures. First, from the perspective of globalization, both cities try to regain their image of a metropolis to cater to the requirement of today’s global inter-city competitions. In this sense, the hyper-modern Potsdamer Platz and Shanghai’s new urban constructions demonstrate a kind of nostalgia for the lost urbanity. Paradoxically, both cities in history were objects of criticism in nationalistic discourse as were their relatively faster pace of modernization compared with the rest of the country. Berlin and Shanghai were as much the center as the periphery of their respective republics. On one hand, the focus of nostalgia for their central image is the re-articulation of the legitimacy of their modernity in today’s circumstances. On the other hand, it also reflects their less central status in reality (Berlin vis-à-vis former West German cities; Shanghai vis-à-vis Beijing) within the nation. Second, as far as the renovation and preservation of local architectural relics are concerned, by restoring the old city form, both cities find their way to combating the uncertainty and discontinuity left by the struggles between the modernities. Both Berlin and Shanghai experienced drastic reconstructions under the guidelines of strong ideological rationales, making what “modern” can mean for the city hard to reach. The nostalgia in both Berlin and Shanghai manifests itself as a response to the trauma of modernization, be it under revolutionary or 210

conservative ideologies, showing fear and doubt toward the writing of social/national history (Wang 2005, 11). For Berlin, the modernities that represented Nazi and Cold War Berlin were hardly trustworthy, whereas critical reconstruction turned its attention to the seemingly uncontroversial pre-war years. For Shanghai, the city under the urban policy of revolutionary China provides a poor example or even an antithesis to China’s current search for modernity in specific ways. Although the revival of its urban modernity seems to go back to being a major narrative of the local or even the national, urban discourse in China still remains ambiguous. In this case, realizing that the nostalgia for Shanghai’s old architecture still verges on the pure form level is not surprising. The preservation of urban structures (e.g. Shikumen architecture) is confronted with constant ambivalence towards its value for contemporary urban planning. Old architecture is either deemed un-modern or an object of museumization in which modernity is fathomed only in a linear framework of temporality, neglecting the modern meaning in terms of its “now time.” Akin to Schinkel’s turn to neo-Gothic architecture, which posed a challenge to the conventional French-style classicism and became a forerunner of what is later considered “modernist” in the beginning of the 20th century in Germany, Shikumen architecture is a product of modern urban development and deserves more attention from the current practice of urban planning. Moreover, rejecting any commercial effort of retrieving certain architectural styles can also be arbitrary even though such effort is utilized ultimately for producing profits. Nostalgia has to strike somewhere in the people’s memory to gain resonance. Understanding why this resonance has happened would be more revealing than only condemning the lack of authenticity in the course of commodification. Lutz Koepnick argues against the common Disneyfication metaphor used to criticize urban spatial changes in Berlin, that it “might gloss over the fact that one and the same object can mean very different things to different people and publics. Ignoring the productivity of individual appropriation, that is to say, the way in which vernacular uses of architectural sites might produce highly diverse, differentiated, and local memories and meanings?…Any assertive jargon of authenticity is simply not sufficient for challenging the ways in which architectural projects might push the buttons of history and thereby reduce, rather than enrich the 211

space of lived experience” (Koepnick 2001, 349–350). The consumption culture may serve as a way of disenchanting history (Wang 2005, 15) to overcome the wounds left by the repression of both the trauma and the right to tell it. In both cases, spatial consumption is related to a kind of counter-memory as the articulation of resistance, although not necessarily conscious or politically ambitious. Similarly, the censure on Xintiandi also requires further contemplation on the memories and responses of various quarters of the public and, more significantly, on the domestic tensions in terms of local memory politics. For Shanghai, the memory of the repression of its urbanity seems to be compensated by the newly booming narrative of the city’s revived consumerism. Nevertheless, the actual situation is much more complicated. Material compensation is ghettoized only within a certain class hierarchy despite the fact that its symbolic meaning can be shared by everyone. Meanwhile, the counter-memory of cosmopolitan Shanghai is not only the revolutionary memory but also a still repressed articulation of the cleavage between today’s and the past’s memories of urban/modern experience. This experience is still left opaque because of China’s current ideological paradox and the gap between reality and representation. Finally, considering the dynamics between the local and the national, nostalgic consumption for even a simulacrum of both prewar space and the former East Berlin space shows the confrontation between the restorative nostalgia of the more predominant narrative of the national and the reflective nostalgia of the local. The effort of critical reconstruction tries to revive Berlin’s past virtues while the national discourse outside Berlin fear to confront because of the traumatic memory of its disgraceful past. Ostalgie articulates the exigency of holding personal memory, imagined or real, of the suddenly ceased lifestyle of the GDR. In the case of Shanghai, the nostalgia of the socialist space as resistance to the predominant old Shanghai nostalgia also exists, which I will elaborate more in Part Three. However, my emphasis here is that, although criticism on maneuvers from consumption, market, capital, and the dominant social power in the discourse of globalization is important, it is also necessary to acknowledge the diverse reactions the local has when facing a predominant national narrative. Janelle Wilson contends “nostalgia can be resistant to outside manipulation, for nostalgia has to strike a chord somewhere. There is interplay between what 212

is available culturally and the individual’s own biography, memory, and emotions” (Wilson 2005, 30). The attention to the diversity in cultural and domestic discourses prompts us to understand memory and its related narratives as an active shaper instead of a mere representation of cultural phenomena.

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Part III Forgetting Modern Space? – Amnesia and the “Obsolescent” Modernities

This part addresses another dimension of memory culture that concerns urban spatial politics: forgetting. Memory is not only understood in terms of remembering. The creation of commemorative discourse and nostalgia also involves the screening of certain memories. The focus of this part is thus on spaces that are normally excluded from the official image of the city’s visualization in contrast to monuments and constructions imbued with nostalgic sentiments that are highly conspicuous in urban representation. Therefore, amnesia is understood here as marginalization of certain spaces in the major representation of the city’s past, present, and future. One of the most drastic changes that Berlin underwent after the unification in the narrative of its urban form is the demolition, forgetting, and conversion of former East Berlin’s architectural legacies. The disappearance of the totalitarian communist regime also put an end to the ideological legitimacy through the existence of constructions bearing its memories. Moreover, since the past authority was “defeated” by the victory of Western liberalism, undoing the wrongs done during the dark ages is necessary. Nonetheless, an in-depth reading of planning schemes of both sides of the wall and the reconstruction projects in the late 1970s in East Berlin reveals a scenario disproving the rigid imagination that cities under opposing ideologies are innately dissimilar. In Shanghai, spatial amnesia also partly echoes the ideological shifts and partly transverses them. The changes in spatial discourse, way of producing space, and identity politics are manifested in three examples, namely, the Greater Shanghai Plan, New Workers’ Villages, and the ramshackle area (peng hu qu). These examples exhibit the power struggles in a larger agenda of multiple discourses of urban modernity in China. Comparatively, Berlin and Shanghai, despite their disparate historical experience and status quo, show a deep connection in terms of reexamining local urban modernity beyond ideological oratory.

Chapter Five The Disappearing Berlin: Can the Wrongs be Undone?

I. Forgetting the East Berlin Architecture in Reunified Berlin In Part II, we see how one of the mainstream approaches to redefining architecture in New Berlin, the so-called “critical reconstruction”, has been reshaping Berlin’s urban space. This approach aims to rebuild a “European city” with its own urban architectural traditions. For Hans Stimmann and his advocates, Berlin should be reconstructed in a clearly defined concept of its urbanity that is characterized by “clearly defined streets, squares, and private buildings” (Binder 2007, 185) and a specific delineation of density, size, and diversity to achieve the effect of “functional and social mixture.”1 “Critical reconstruction” is practiced in today’s Berlin largely as a means to retrieve the “loss” (Stimmann, 26–27) and repair and undo the damaged urban texture that was caused by political abnormalities, including the Second World War and the GDR regime. Architectural legacies in the former East Berlin are usually seen as embodiments of the GDR ideologies that served as political propaganda and are therefore monotonous, nontraditional, and backward. One of the strongest disdains against the GDR crimes done to the Berlin cityscape is the demolition of the Berlin City Palace (Berliner Stadtschloss) under the order of the General Sectary of SED2 in East Germany Walter Ulbricht in 1950. The demolition destroyed the visuality of Berlin as an unacceptable symbol of Prussian militarism and capitalist power. On the same location rose probably the “most modern” architectural accomplishment in the GDR, the Palace of the Republic (Palast der Republik), also one of the most controversial landmarks in Berlin in the post-wall years. 1 2

C.f. Haeussermann and Siebel 1997, 293–307. Abbreviation of East German Socialist Unity Party in German.

Despite the long-term polemics and debates on its use, the Palace of the Republic finally gave way to becoming the shell of the Stadtschloss, which functions as a cultural center known as the Humboldt Forum that features Germany’s interest in and respect for foreign cultures. This reconstruction is still ongoing.3 The decision to conduct this reconstruction conveys the idea that even if “critical reconstruction” expresses a yearning to forget the trauma of a modern city, the GDR urban modernism is considered unqualified for the caliber of modernity or regarded as vulgar modernism compared with, for example, the urban modernity of Weimar Berlin. Its existence is unfit for the narrative of a restaged Berlin featuring its liberal and democratic attitude for the people celebrating the departure of Berlin because of the abolition of the GDR. Aside from the Palace of the Republic, other architectures from the GDR era were demolished (e.g., the grand public house Ahornblatt or the Maple Leaf), refunctioned (e.g., the Television Tower in the Alexander Square), marginalized in the public perspective (e.g., Plattenbau and Stalin Alley), and dissociated from the GDR culture (e.g., Gendarmenmarket and Friedrichstrasse).

II. GDR Architectural Modern in Flux What is the GDR modernity, if there ever was? Is the narrative of the GDR architectural modernity as uniform and homogenous as it is mostly imagined and represented? Interestingly, denying the fact that the core ideologies of the GDR communism belong to Western modernity is difficult. The self-definition of the GDR communism, which fundamentally embraces anti-cosmopolitanism and anti-capitalism as inevitable aftermaths of fascism, claims itself to be the authentic heir “to Enlightenment rationalism and universalism” (Herf 17). Socialism, which promises more equality and welfare of the people, is considered greater and consequently a more modern societal stage of human development over capitalism. A socialist society like the GDR was deliberate in breaking off with the past, as in the case of the demolition of the 3

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The scheduled opening of the Humboldt Forum is 2019.

Stadtschloss, in a daring move to show the advantage of communism. Innovation and modernization prevailed. This ideology also explains the GDR’s modernist formation of urban development and planning that prioritized socialist evolutionism with the Marxist “objective historical progress,” in which the city is interpreted as a human body, an organism that requires repetitive rounds of demolition of the old and construction of the new (Urban 45–46). Therefore, the imagination of the urban landscape in the GDR is hardly retrospective and never nostalgic because it perpetually anticipates a better future. Today’s “critical reconstruction” goes against the GDR ideology’s concept of modernization of urban spaces. However, recent studies show more and more facts about the changing historical narrative of the GDR since the 1970s, creating a more diversified and somewhat confusing image of GDR urban planning. Traces of the resurgence of the reinterpretation of the Prussian past were noticeable in late GDR years. Historical research renewed its interest in Prussian politicians Bismarck and Friedrich the Great.4 The 18th-century monarchy gained a benignly progressive and personalized image but not from a perspective that abided by communist methodologies such as class struggle. Friedrich the Great’s equestrian sculpture, which was removed in the 1950s due to political reasons, was relocated to its original place back in the boulevard Unter den Linden in 1980 (Urban 20). (Figure 39 Friedrich the Great Statue on Under den Linden) The memory of Schinkel and his architectural tradition was also not forgotten before the fall of the Wall. A large exhibition was organized in honor of the great neo-classical architect of Berlin in the Old Museum on the occasion of his 200th birthday in 1980, an event that proved to be a sensation in East Berlin. An estimated 200,000 visitors came to the event from October 1980 to March 1981 and queued for hours to get a ticket (Urban 20). According to Florian Urban, this exhibition was a point of transformation in East German architectural politics and signaled the beginning of the popularity of historical buildings among the leadership of the Party and the majority of the population.5 4

5

For example, Ingrid Mittenzwei’s book Friedrich II. von Preussen: Eine Biographie (Friedrich II. Of Prussia. A Biography) Berlin: Dt. Verl. der Wiss., 1980 was firstly released in 1980 in the GDR. See more in Florian Urban. Berlin, DDR-neo-historisch: Geschichte aus Fertigteilen. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2007.

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Figure 39: Friedrich the Great Statue on Unter den Linden.

Therefore, reconstruction can be understood before and after the Wende as a key word in GDR architectural politics. Reconstruction can stand for the demolition of an old quarter and rebuilding into a more modern form as well as for the renovation and restoration according to the historical form (Urban 74). In the 1960s, the formerly unaccepted architectural representation of technological modernity was endorsed by the Politburo and Hermann Henselmann’s design. The still high-standing Berlin Television Tower was finally constructed in a significant location despite previous plans of building more politically meaningful monuments that aim to enhance centrality (Ladd 190). In the 1970s and 1980s, “reconstruction” began to be understood as a nostalgic retrospect and respect of the “historical character” of the urban form of

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Berlin, which was no longer restrained by the communist narrative of the urban image that had been related to, for instance, the movements of workers (Urban 78, 84). Not only are GDR modernization and its ideological fluctuation usually forgotten, repressed, and displaced in the reunified Berlin story, but there is also a lack of the summary of a detailed comparison between West and East Berlin in their respective developments in urban planning (Urban 37–38). Indeed, the result of the comparison can be surprising because similarities in the architecture between 1960s and 1970s in both Berlins were no less, if not more, than their dissimilarities. Urban architectural forms of representation on both sides of the Wall after the reunification were anything but an “hour zero” (Urban 12). One example mentioned by Ladd is the pair of massive squares, namely, ErnstReuter-Platz in the West and Alexanderplatz in the East (Ladd 189). The two symbolically formed spaces at the center of the two Berlins are “both dominated by undistinguished high-rise steel-and-glass buildings” and “both vast squares seem windswept and desolate in a way that makes pedestrians want to hunch over and hurry across to their destinations” (Ladd 189–190). Even if the core ideologies and styles of both Berlins showed distinct and opposite telos, the East and West parts of the city were correspondingly engaged in inventing a new city free from any legacy from their common Nazi past. West and East Berlin were in fierce competition in architectural modernism with each other along with their mutual ideological polemics. Pride-ridden building projects, namely, Hansaviertel (Hansa Quarter) in the West and Stalinallee (Stalin Alley) in the East (Figure 40 Stalin Alley) became objects of attacks from the two rivals, as both accused each other of inheriting a fascist ideology in their own formulated arguments. The intersections of urban modernism are obvious in the two examples. On one hand, obviously influenced by Le Corbusier’s modern city image, Hansaviertel suggests a highly functionalistic and geometric characteristic that can be easily traced in the typical GDR residential architecture Plattenbau. On the other hand, the buildings in Stalinallee built in 1949 to 1950 were designed in a way that favored by the “German modernist tradition of the 1920s” (Ladd 182).

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Figure 40: Stalin Alley.

The present architectural memory of Berlin that focuses on “critical reconstruction” and the advocacy of the capitalist modernity of Berlin in the 1900s distract public attention from reconsidering GDR modernism and its influence on the architectural characteristics of Berlin. Urban reconstruction under the GDR system is largely understood as unsuccessful projects excluded from Berlin’s current urban narrative of localness and modernity. In the case of Stalinallee, rarely is the boulevard remembered as a work of neoclassical style but as a spatial symbol during the Stalinist days of East Berlin in the 1950s. Little attention was paid to East Berlin’s own assertion of its design of “classical Greek proportions” and “local architectural traditions,” claiming that neoclassicism is “an appropriate model for GDR because of its ‘origins’ in the French Revolution” (Till 42). Therefore, regarding the GDR architectures as opposed to modernism, cosmopolitanism, and liberalism, whose definitions all require further explanation and constant reworking, might be too one-dimensional. The risk of generalizing the more diverse reality of Berlin’s past and its modernity to equalize the GDR’s 222

spatial language with its ideology exists. Forgetting the GDR history of construction may mean a huge loss for Germany’s search and comprehension of, after such a long temporal contour, what German and Berlin modernity can mean today and in the future. Berlin’s openness does not lie only in its transparent glass cupola or a ready-made diversity reinvented by the construction of museums that feature foreign cultures; it also lies in its tolerance and remembrance of its different pasts, with which the reunified city still has to deal and live.

Palace of the Republic (Palast der Republik) Debates on the demolition of the Palace of the Republic best demonstrate how the symbolic power of architecture centers on the memory politics of the new Berlin. The ruins of the former Berlin Stadtschloss (Berlin City Palace) of the royal families of Brandenburg and later Prussia were leveled by the young communist regime with dynamites in 1950, a modern way of eradicating the memory of space and in turn its power. The name of the place where the Palace stood, the Schlossplatz (Palace Square), was renamed to Marx-Engels-Platz, in which different grand building plans were intended but not realized because of financial stigma and ideological confusion in the GDR. In 1976, the Palace of the Republic, a new “palace” with both political and cultural functions, was opened to the people partly as a public house for cultural events, entertainment, and catering services and partly as the seat of SED’s Volkskammer (People’s Chamber), the parliament of the GDR. (Figure 41 Palace of the Republic in 1977)6 However, for most citizens of East Berlin, visiting the Palace was mainly an extraordinary experience of the modern. They were amazed at its 6

Image source: “Palast der Republik DDR 1977”, by Istvan at Creative Commons in Flickr. . Accessed on August 4, 2014.

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dazzling magnificence of cutting-edge design incomparable with any other architecture in the GDR. They also enjoyed its warm atmosphere and reasonably priced “high-quality” services that they never encountered in other places in their country. Therefore, the Palace of the Republic was inseparable from the psychological influence and memory of the escape from, rather than the intensification of, the everyday reality of the GDR life.

Figure 41: The Palace of the Republic in 1977.

As a result, the after-wall resolution and the final decision of demolishing the Palace of the Republic and rebuilding the Stadtschloss, which are mainly and understandably supported by the West side of opinions, have been facing long-term controversies. For the advocates of the second demolition of the Palace and the reconstruction of the old, the space on Spree Island, which is the origin of Berlin City, is too crucial a place for Berlin’s identity to be occupied by an architecture that symbolizes an ill-favored past political regime. Other arguments on the reconstruction of the castle focus on the pure aesthetic dimensions of urban visuality. As Elke Heckner suggests, supporters of the reconstruction “cite art historians from the 1950s who argued that the GDR’s demolition of the war-damaged Stadtschloss would leave a ‘gap never to be filled’ that ‘disturbed the order of the whole [town] (‘Berlin’)” in the hope of initiating a renewed post-reunification Berlin identity (Heckner 320). Disregarding the GDR history, these 224

arguments ignore the importance of the discontinuity of Berlin history regardless of the mark left by the Second World War or the 50-year GDR regime. The Palace of the Republic is also considered a symbol of the division of Germany and of the discontinuity of German history. For the adversaries of the demolition, the Palace of the Republic “was presented as a Palace of Memory and a Palace of the People, not the symbol of the GDR” (Boym 189). The resolute demolition seems to deprive East Berliners of their personal memories under the more powerful Western will of history, making the reunification of Germany for the Easterners, in this way, gradually a new kind of trauma after the beginning of euphoria. The Palace of the Republic becomes a major memory carrier (Erinnerungsträger) for the GDR citizens, especially East Berliners (Mürbe 114), with which they would rather identify more emotionally than politically. Consequently, those memories may not be related to nostalgia for the state of the GDR. In a 1993 poll on the issue of the Palace, only 9.8% of East Berliners expressed their hope to retrieve the GDR as a state (Mürbe 115). The way East Berliners memorize the city’s topographical history manifests the fact that the West-defined assumption of a singular memory of the GDR generalized by ideological stereotypes may not be valid. Another controversial issue that casts doubt on expunging the Palace of the Republic is to what extent the political and cultural signifier is architecturally desirable. The danger caused by the toxic asbestos in the building materials, interestingly, was the only officially legitimate reason for the demolition of the Palace. In fact, the Palace of the Republic was disliked apparently because of its inconsistence with the surrounding style of the idealized Berlin center characterized by neo-classical traditions of Schinkel. Modernism, especially one that is associated with the communist past of Berlin, is unbearable for the site as well as the city. The conspicuous GDR legacy in the form of architecture is detested because it “too vividly and too conspicuously symbolizes the evil that was the East and its Stalinist orientation” (Marcuse 335). However, it is not totally the case because the Palace is actually remembered by East Berliners as a place where more attractive public life with relatively liberal atmosphere could be experienced. The fact that it combined an easily accessible public space for the mass and the seat of political organisms was not only unique in the GDR but also, 225

as Marcuse points out, could have been “the exact opposite of what is being developed in the new West Berlin government center, with its fortress-like concept and its careful attention to controlling access and use: not that there were not similar concerns in the GDR, but even so, the form of the Palace of the Republic was designed to demonstrate openness rather than control” (335). Moreover, the form of the Palace surprisingly suggested a certain degree of cosmopolitanness, which was made possible, as explained later by an East German architect Wolf Eisentraut, by the actual officially legitimated sources of foreign, largely Western architectural models for their reference.7 Therefore, hostility towards the Palace is first caused by the fear of the afterlife of the GDR culture and second by the distrust of architectural modernism itself. A logical contradiction exists in the argument. On one hand, the GDR and, in turn, the image of the Palace is taken as the opposite side of modernization and civilization (and the destruction of the Stadtschloss is an ignorant and barbaric action of the communists). On the other hand, the Palace is hated for its architectural modernism, although hardly any emphasis on it can be heard. The final and accepted way out from the impasse is the reconstruction of the old Stadtschloss to please a large majority of politicians and the general public that do 7

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See Wise 51–52 on architectural details of the Palace of the Republic: “Aligned on axis between the Television Tower and the Brandenburg Gate, the building was encased in copper-tinted reflective glass and white marble. Its oblong form equally recalled the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. and filled roughly the footprint previously covered by a central courtyard of the City Palace leveled in 1950. The design of this people’s palace strove for what its chief architect Heinz Graffunder called a ‘bright, festive elegance’, and it did succeed in bringing unaccustomed glitz to the dreary East Berlin center. The colored façade mirrored sunlight during the day and shone by night from inner illumination, giving the city a new focal point at the eastern terminus of Unter den Linden.” “Its interiors were lavish and fanciful; some looked as if created by the American resort designer Morris Lapidus. Decorative elements included myriad chandeliers of dangling glass globes, a black and white marble floor in a black in a swirling psychedelic pattern, and curved banquettes of plush tufted velvet in a series of theme restaurants whose styles ranged from Western architectural models. Although most East German architects were barred from traveling to the West, Wolf Eisentraut, the architect who designed its large entrance foyer, said he and his colleagues were given access to and “devoured” foreign architectural journals.”

not want to confront the too complicated memories of modern Berlin. The desire to have the old royal palace back to its original place is not only a kind of nostalgia for the past but also a kind of amnesia of the sufferings brought by modernity. Therefore, the deep distrust for the modern intensifies the troublesome nature of the symbolic power and visual modernity in Berlin, and the Cold War dichotomy still persists in the logic of the debates on the two Palaces. The equalization between ideological modernity and architectural or symbolic modernity inherits the binarism in which East and West Berlin had no intersection in any case. The ambivalence towards modernity poses the ultimate challenge to a smooth acquisition of the Berlin identity and results in its ongoing discontinuity between the past and present.

Nicolai Quarter (Nikolaiviertel) On the bank of the Spree River between the Television Tower and the renamed Schlossplatz, Nikolaiviertel or the Nikolai Quarter has been marketing itself as a tourist zone for consumerism and free time where people can experience the authentic Altstadt (Old Town) of historical Berlin (Figure 42 Nikolaiviertel). In Nikolaiviertel, Berlin is staged in its 18th century look with a simple atmosphere of civil urbanity. The museums are full of historic meanings. The Nikolai Church, the supposed oldest parish church in Berlin, was built from the 13th to the 15th century. The church now serves as a museum with a permanent exhibition of the history of the church and its meaning to the urban history of Berlin. Altogether, 22 cafes and restaurants in the peaceful area offer visitors an alternative to the experience of Berlin: a historical European town of early urbaneness instead of a divisive capital city. The Knoblauchhaus (the House of Knoblauch Family) showcases a well-preserved 18th-century Berlin civic residence. The Rococo-style Ephraim Palace, once owned by a Jewish Banker in the 18th century, holds an exhibit of Berlin art and cultural history. As the center of medieval Berlin, Nikolaiviertel holds a special appeal to tourists from home and abroad, as it turns nostalgia into an attractive capital for tourism without the controversial past simulacra.

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Figure 42: Nikolaiviertel (Nicolas Quarter).

However, not much attention has been given to the fact that the reconstruction of Nikolaiviertel into its current form began and was completed during the GDR Era. Nikolaiviertel was actually considered one of the largest-scale and most systematic reconstruction projects initiated in East Berlin since the 1970s. Florian Urban’s Berlin/DDR-neo-historisch discusses in great detail the six major urban renewal projects in GDR, some of which are less-known residential areas, such as the Arnimplatz (Arnim Square) and Spandauer Vorstadt (Spandau suburbia), and the others are commercial areas, cultural landmarks, and popular tourist attractions such as the Nikolaiviertel, Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichstrasse (Friedrich Street), and Platz der Akademie (currently known as Gendarmenmarkt). All projects are marked by a strong inclination to return to a more local and less modern form and style, if not by a faint but noticeable implication towards an envisage of Berlin in the form 228

of a capitalist and civil society. They defy the singular imagery of the inflexibility of the architectural ideology of the GDR. Urban case studies and analyses illustrate a more diverse understanding of what GDR architectural modernity actually was. However, the current attention to the abovementioned urban spaces is not implicitly associated any more with the GDR culture but is instead neutrally associated with urban gentrification, with the historical founding of the city in the 13th century with new Berlin’s brand-name shopping and consumerism and with the “European” urban tradition of cathedrals and squares. There are many reasons for the retrospective reconstruction of the GDR. First, the reconstructed areas were shown in contrast to the modernization projects being promoted at the same time to visitors from the West to show the characteristic face of East Germany, reiterating the GDR uniqueness that was equal to, if not better than, the West.8 The diversity of the East Berlin architectural forms that feature both

8

See Urban 106–107, the original text: “Erstens schien Honecker dem Argument gegenüber aufgeschlossen, dass ein sichtbar historisches Berliner Stadtzentrum eine Starke Ausstrahlungskraft auf Besucher aus dem Westen habe und letztendlich dem Anspruch der DDR auf Eignestaatlichkeit und eigene Geschichtsschreibung nütze. Zweitens wurden die historisierenden Fassaden des Nikolaiviertels nicht als Widerspruch zu den benachbarten modernnen Gebaeuden gesehen, weder zu den Wohnbloecken und dem Fernsehturm, die in den 1960er Jahren errichtet wurden, noch zum Palast der Republik von 1973. Schliesslich resultierten beide aus allumfassenden Planungen, beide sollten die Ueberlegenheit der DDR gegenüber dem Westen demonstrieren, und beide waren eine Antwort auf die Besonderheit des Ortes: der Fernsehturm und die Hochhaeuser als spektakulaere Markierung der Stadtmitte und das Nikolaiviertel als Erbanspruch an eine 800-jaehrige Tradition. „ (My own translation: First, it seemed that Honecker was open-minded about the argument that a conspicuous historic Berlin City center would have a strong attraction to Western visitors and eventually utilize it as a way of claiming the GDR’s statehood and its self-writing of history. Second, the historic facades of the Nicolas Quarter were not seen as an antagonism to the adjacent modern architecture, for example, neither to the apartment buildings and the Television Tower, which was erected in the 1960s, nor to the Palace of the Republic built in 1973. Finally, both were the result of the overarching plan. Both should demonstrate the superiority the GDR had to the West. Both were the answer to the uniqueness of the place: the TV Tower and its high rise as the spectacular landmarks of the city center and the Nicolas Quarter as the entitlement of inheriting an 800-year-old tradition.)

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modernism and neo-historicism was invented by the GDR to rival the ideological rebukes from the other side. However, the GDR underwent a phase of inner transformation in understanding Berlin, Germany, and the GDR through the lens of urban history and Berlin urbanity. As early as 1968, two groups of young architects proposed the reconstruction of a museum on Berlin history either based on the ruins of Nikolai Church or on the rebuilding of a new one in a vast parking lot (Urban 102). A desire for the “Old Berlin” emerged in the mid-1970s, as seen from the public and official sentiments (Urban 103). The nostalgia for German architectural tradition crystallizes more profound spatial relations between the two Berlins in the Cold War period. One crucial occasion that pushed the GDR’s nostalgia for the de-ideologized understanding to a climax was Berlin’s 750th City Anniversary in 1987 (Thijs 2008). This occasion is often regarded as a competition between West Berlin and East Berlin in legitimating itself as the authentic representative of Berlin and the German culture. The two Berlins present themselves with distinct focuses on the representation of the current Berlin, the master narrative of German history, and the archetypal Berlin historical period with which today’s Berlin should be identified (Thijs 2008). If it not had been for the West’s campaign for recapitulating its previous status, East Germany would have undoubtedly experienced a more reflective destruction of its singular approach to history in the communist ideology by revisiting Berlin’s history and studies on East Berlin’s historical relics. It was an initial response of the whole GDR society to decades of monotonic urban life experience. The renovation of the new–old Nikolai Quarter was completed in 1987 in time for the anniversary celebration. History was as if rediscovered in East Germany in its representation of “neighborhood of merchants testified to the vigor of the new middle class at the end of the Middle Ages” even though it illustrates “(in the most basic Marxist theory) the bourgeois revolution that was the prerequisite for the proletarian revolution that the Red Army brought to Germany in 1945” (Ladd 46). The lure of past civility was not only from itself but also from the discontent of the peeled-off urban history replaced by a highly modern and rationalized ideology like communism. Therefore, linking this inner anxiety and expression of rising queries on self-identity to the fall of the Berlin Wall in two years’ time is reasonable. It was also a manifestation of the 230

GDR’s own distrust in architectural modernism in the late years of the regime, one thing more in common with the West’s ambivalence towards modernity, as the East was and is still chided as both enemy and advocate of modernity in its self-asserted definition. Here, we come across an interesting resemblance between the architectural politics in the late GDR years’ and the current “critical reconstruction,” which ironically suggests its clear intention to annihilate the GDR legacies remaining in the Berlin city form. This embarrassment results in the demolition of the Palace of the Republic and the forgotten narrative of the Nikolai Quarter. According to Urban, both East and West Berlin aspired for the utopian ideals of modernism that was once promised, but both were disappointed at the damages that the modernist style and urban planning have done to the city structure (Urban 220). Both reconstructions resorted to the revoking of the vague memories of an image of the pre-modern Berlin to circumvent a controversial picture of the present. Here, the past is neither taken as an eternal value nor the referential point of less development. Instead, the past is presented as ambiguous and free from recent experience, which makes Berlin a historical city without history. The remoteness and absence of authentic sites of history help rather than hinder identifying with them. Erlebnis, which emphasizes the lived experience of emotions and feelings, takes priority over Erfahrung, which denotes factual and acquired perceptions, in the process of gaining knowledge of history in both cases (Urban 184, 221). Reconstructed city spaces become carriers of fantasy and imagined authenticity of the milieu de memoire to be sympathized and consumed. In this sense, the changing narratives of the GDR urban construction are not unique at all. Everywhere, including Paris, Budapest, Moscow, and Shanghai and today’s Berlin, we see the nostalgic desire for a time when the functionalistic and profit-maximizing design of modern architecture did not prevail. Modernization becomes an amnesiac process that people love to hate but still hate to leave. This is how nostalgia goes global and becomes commoditized. In sum, ideology is by no means a “critical reconstruction”. It is a sufficient condition for a city to come into its form. The GDR architectural historiographies are plural and part of converting the narratives of any modern city into a global discourse. The selective urban memory of Berlin’s spaces as the unifying signifier for the new 231

Berlin presents intriguing contrasts in rivalry nostalgia and amnesia in today’s Berlin. While, the amnesia of East Berlin modernism is clear, the nostalgia for the urban modernism of Berlin in the 1900s to the 1920s also integrates the GDR architectural legacies by dissociating it from the connection to their East Berlin past. Even the nostalgia for the GDR is well integrated into the commercial discourse that enhances the sense of Erlebnis in an emotionally detached and politically unimportant manner. Berlin has long been an obvious duality in modernity and modernization. It is true that the turn-of-the-century Berlin and Weimar Berlin vigorously engaged in the progress of modern urbanization. However, the increasing fear of modernity gradually took over the liberal and cosmopolitan social atmosphere. In the divided Berlin, the West and East sides both hoped to embrace architectural modernism in their own approaches and began to lose confidence in the fact that modernism could bring a better prospect for the city. Today, the reunified Berlin still shows ambivalence towards modernity. On one hand, the discontent for the modern leads to “critical reconstruction” and the repression of GDR modernism. On the other hand, this discontent is accompanied by a longing for Berlin modernity in its Golden Twenties, showing desire for the return of the previous world-class city position through its largely self-referential boosterism. Today, each and every city mirrors or is haunted by its own past, as Ladd contends, and by other cities. The transnational comparative culture of urban memory politics and the more attention to global urban history now take part in a competitive urban scenario of the future development, from which Berlin cannot escape. However, it is difficult for Berlin to present a coherent image of its modernity as it has no black and white picture of the past with a seamless continuity. To confine Berlin in a singular imagery ignores the constant struggles the city has with its pasts. Against the grain of the innate unevenness of its topographical memories, the dichotomous Cold War logic and amnesic nostalgia would only reduce Berlin's potential to benefit from its diverse urban history, which serves as a valuable lesson of what modernity may mean.

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Chapter Six Other Shanghais: Missing Narratives of Urban Space

I. Invisible Shanghai: Three Cases Similar to the case of Berlin, the amnesia of the socialist architectural legacies is easily juxtaposed as the counter-memory with the prevailing nostalgia for the prerevolutionary Shanghai urban landscape (Luo 2007, Zhang 2006). Critics use binary oppositions between pre-socialist and socialist and between socialist and post-socialist memories to unveil the oversimplified topography of the city in popular imagination. This chapter, however, deals with the topic of amnesia by avoiding using these binaries. The following three cases of Shanghai’s spatial amnesia transverse, though are highly pertinent to, ideological mutations that are significant indicators of spatial changes in both physical and symbolic terms. The Greater Shanghai Plan (1927–1937), probably the most ambitious urban planning project in Republican China, is hardly known in today’s common knowledge of Shanghai for both local and non-local residents. The invisible city slums in Shanghai, namely, the large ramshackle area, actually have existed throughout the pre-revolutionary, revolutionary and post-revolutionary period even though their narrative and actual condition fluctuated in different times. The once highly privileged Workers’ New Villages, which were products of the socialist ideology and political propaganda, also disappeared from the public awareness. The end of its superior position in the urban texture corresponds to the fall of the social class it embodied after the ideological turn in the post-Mao period. However, this turn requires more discussion on the changing understanding of urban modernity. In the following, I will show how ruptures between past and present discourses, the way of spatial production, and the identity politics contribute to the amnesia of spaces in today’s urban narrative of Shanghai.

The Forgetting of a Chinese Urban Modernism: The Greater Shanghai Plan The Greater Shanghai Plan was the first comprehensive urban planning scheme that used the first most systematic and complete blueprint for a metropolis in China. It was proposed against the city’s division in a semi-colonized condition. Urban planning in this case was more of a political reaction and strategy. They were intended for a contest with the hegemonic power of foreign settlements and thus tried to establish their own control over the city. As a semi-colonized metropolis, the negotiations and conflicts in Shanghai between the Chinese government and the colonial powers went on despite the overall booming economy. In 1854, Shanghai was divided into three administrative zones under the respective control of the International Settlement, which was mainly a British–American amalgamation of settlements governed by the Shanghai Municipal Council, the French Concession, which was an exclusive region administrated by the French’s own municipal council, and the local Chinese authority initially made up of Qing Dynasty officials such as daotai and zhishi. In 1905, the Shanghai City Council, a more unified Chinese counterpart of the foreign influence, was formed (Kuan 87). The significance of Shanghai as the largest commercial and economic center in the Yang-tze River Delta was increasing in the 1920s. The resettlement of Nanjing as the capital city of the Republican China under Chiang Kai-shek in 1928 entailed Shanghai’s escalated position. It was then upgraded from a city affiliated to the Jiangsu Province to a “Special Municipality (tebieshi)” under the direct authority of the central government. “The ambitious new government sought for nothing less than the full recovery of direct administration of all of Shanghai and an end to extraterritoriality” (Kuan 87). Furthermore, the segregated administrative bodies within one city were an obvious obstacle for the long-term development of a modern metropolis like Shanghai. “The complexities of different units of measure, traffic rules, legal codes, taxation, infrastructure investments, and planning were hindering the viability of Shanghai. In fact, the new Chinese government pointedly accused the inadequacies of the foreign settlements for holding back the city’s growth” (Kuan 88). The Nationalist Government was urged to express its own competency in modernization and cultural essence of the nation in its own legitimacy to stand as an equal to the 234

dominance of foreign powers in the conspicuous space of Shanghai. In the northeastern suburbs of Shanghai, locally known as the Jiangwan Pentagon Field, the Great Shanghai Plan was located in Jiangwan, part of the Yangpu District, the industrial base of Shanghai at that time. The construction of a new urban center in this particular space came not only out of the consideration of its state of tabula rasa. This piece of land enjoyed huge geographical conveniences. It reached the northern end to the Wusong Port, the southern end proximal to the International Settlement, and the east side close to the upper stream of the Huangpu River. Implemented in 1929, this great mission was conducted by the City Planning Commission made up of a group of architectural experts home and abroad. Therefore, the space, which largely represented nationalism of the young Republic, was mainly conducted under the management of the Chinese architect Dong Dayou. Like many social elites at that time who received both strict traditional Chinese education and the most updated Western knowledge during their study abroad, Dong understood both Chinese and Western architecture well. Graduating in 1922 in Beijing Tsinghua College, now Tsinghua University, Dong was later trained in the University of Minnesota and Columbia University. The core of the Great Shanghai Plan was the civic center, whose design by Dong reflects his “strain of Beaux-Art planning that can be traced through his education in the United States, where architectural training was still imbued in the French Academic tradition” (Kuan 89). Based on the remaining relics of the plan, the Mayor’s Building (Fig. 39), Municipal Library, Municipal Museum, Jiangwan Stadium, and the China Aviation Exhibition Hall, we see the overt attempt to combine the Chinese traditional architectural form and style with modern functions. Constructed with concrete and cement, the elementary structure of pillars and columns in conventional Chinese timber-framed architecture was preserved. The neo-classical Forbidden City-like aura of the political center was supposed to form an overall shape of a Latin cross. Seng Kuan elaborates its design as follows: The nave….begins with a ceremonial gateway, the pailou. In the middle of the nave and running its entire length is a large reflecting pool, flanked by large lawns on both sides and defined by public programs such as a library, a museum, and a concert hall along the edges. The transept is the administrative zone. The Mayor’s Building sits on the axis and is flanked by the various government bureaus, each housed in a pavilion and arranged to form two symmetrical open quadrangles (89).

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The design of the Civic Center’s grand axis and symmetry emphasized the authoritarian rule of the regime as the true representative of the national sovereignty. Most of the street names were derived from the political philosophies of Sun Yat-sen such as “the Three Principles of the People” and “the Great Harmony of the World.” By naming the everyday space of the area, the planning tried to reestablish the political order and perception of hierarchy among users of the space, particularly the ordinary residents of the city. Aside from the municipal government building, the construction of the library, museum, and sports stadium as components of the Civic Center on one hand embodies Shanghai’s will of modernizing urban function by producing a space for public welfare. Moreover, it reinforces new forms of civic identity through public space events. The first western-style collective wedding ceremony in China, for example, was held in the Civic Center on April 3, 1935. The space changed the way urban life was understood in the new urban political center, which to some extent displayed the Nationalist Government’s determination to declare the birth of a new China in its modernized, open, and civil urban space. Therefore, the uniqueness of the Greater Shanghai Plan lies in its effort in localizing Western urban planning and creates space as a path to the revival of national confidence. The very early, although unsuccessful, endeavor of Chinese urban modernization was different from the more predominant perception of modernity in China. For a long time, modernization has largely been regarded in China either as a purely technological progression of productivity and accumulation of wealth, or as an ideological threat to the integrity of the nature of being Chinese and the national identity. This grand scheme in the full spirit of the Chinese version of a modernist city center was only short lived. First disrupted by the Japanese invasion in 1932, some of the already completed buildings were largely damaged. The nationalistic dream-filled space was then abandoned by the Republican regime after the surrender of the Japanese and full evacuation of the colonial power from China in 1945. “What were on the agenda were the integration of the former concessions into a new Chinese order and the redefinition of Shanghai’s political space…. Shanghai was still a cosmopolitan metropolis, but it had broken free from its semi-colonial status. In 1946 and 1948, Chinese experts were working on urban development 236

schemes integrating the colonial heritage and taking into account the whole urban and suburban territory of the city” (Bergère 2004, 43). The subsequent communist regime understandably erased further the memory of the space that is so easily associated with the Republican China under the rule of the Nationalist Party. As a result, the entire civic space was segmented into different parts. The Mayor’s Building, Municipal Library, and Municipal Museum were respectively redistributed into three different enclosed institutions. Thus, they are hardly remembered as a complete scheme of urban planning. The Mayor’s Building, the most completely preserved among the rest, is used as the main convention hall of the Shanghai Institute of Physical Education. (Figure 43 The Mayor’s Building) Almost blockaded in the campus of Tongji Middle School, the Municipal Library is in a decaying condition and obviously lacks proper renovation. (Figure 44 The Municipal Library) The Municipal Museum was transformed into the building for the radiological treatment of the Army-affiliated Changhai Hospital. (Figure 45 The Municipal Museum)

Figure 43: Buildings in the Greater Shanghai Plan: the Mayor’s Building.

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Figure 44: The Municipal Museum.

Figure 45: The Municipal Library.

Jiangwan became a military district after the encamping of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in Shanghai in 1950. The socialist urban planning also focused on this relatively barren land by developing residential grids such as the “Workers’ New Village” in the same region. For the longest time, Jiangwan, which is far from the city center, was predominantly a place where a cluster of the best higher educational institutions in Shanghai, such as Fudan University and Tongji University among others, is located. The most recent large-scale transformation of the Jiangwan Pentagon Field was in 2005 when it was transformed into another Xujiahui commercial zone. Seemingly, the glory and dream inspired by “the Great Shanghai Plan” have long been forgotten. According to Kerrie L. MacPherson, the rare efforts modern China made since 1949 to plan its metropolis “have been ignored in the literature or dismissed as aberrant” (MacPherson 39). The discourse on the Shanghai nostalgia also never reached this part of the same “1930s,” which is the magic word for Shanghai today in terms of its capacity to invoke imagination and mania in consuming this imagination. The selectivity of the Shanghai memory of the prerevolutionary era skillfully capitalizes on the ambiguity of phrasing a

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historical period. The general impression of Shanghai before 1949 is a darkly portrayed chaos due to the impotence or tyranny of the Kuomintang Government and the waning of the exploiting Western powers. The public attention on the Republican era or colonialism was distracted by the neutral signifier “1930s” in light of the lost prosperity as a model to be proud of. However, the new developments in Shanghai are considered as a rebirth of the commercial and cosmopolitan tradition that flourished in the pre-revolutionary era they are usually, if not solely, seen as a result of colonialism and its consequent globality rather than a continuity of the project of Chinese modernization. The only clue we have is that the development of Pudong was mentioned by Sun Yat-Sen in his The Guidelines for Constructing the Republic as early as in 1919. Ironically, the colonial urban structure was visibly revived in post-revolutionary Shanghai. The opening up of China embraced another memory narrative about the city that surreptitiously turned its back on itself. Public attention to the Republican Shanghai restrained the “old Shanghai” in light of the unprecedented prosperity. In the new round of rapid modernization of China, the modernity that Shanghai represents refers predominantly to a rationalized, commercial, and vaguely defined cosmopolitan tradition in the pre-revolutionary era vis-à-vis its abandonment in the revolutionary period. The rapid creation of Shanghai’s hypermodern outline in the Lujiazui, Pudong (i.e., the eastern part of the Huangpu River of Shanghai) area today aims to prove China’s ability to create modernity, at least visually. Visual modernity, as Christian Henriot suggests, generates an effect of “patching together of disparate albeit ‘modern’ elements (such as large, elevated boulevards, crossings on the Huangpu, and a tunnel under the Bund) without much thought to the structure and functions of the city. These elements could well result in destroying the city’s heritage without meeting the needs of modernization” (Henriot 184). In comparison with Berlin’s disdain with modernism, the undoing of the “wrongs” of the revolutionary period in contemporary Shanghai exemplifies the effort to reconfigure Chinese urban modernity. If this effort is considered in relation to the Greater Shanghai Plan, both continuity and discontinuity can be observed. Spatial configuration is still regarded as a means to revive Chinese national confidence. Yet it has discontinued the contemplation on the possibility of having a solely visual modernization of Chinese cities. 239

Therefore, the neglect of the achievements and significance of the Greater Shanghai Civic Center is not only a result of ideological consideration. In comparison with the 1920s’ effort of the new regime in modernizing Chinese cities, which demonstrated “Shanghai’s, therefore China’s, determination to challenge and exceed urban standards (and the national power and ‘Big Business’ prosperity that they symbolized) daily presented to the City by the Foreign Settlements” (MacPherson 54). In comparison, today’s Westernized planning of Shanghai’s urban space as a way of catching up with the pace of global modernization reveals the predominant imagination that modernization is less developed in China. The forgetting of the Plan in any aspect suggests a regression, instead of a boosting, of the city’s and in turn of the nation’s confidence in “the stability of their power, not only to the Chinese, but also to the world” (MacPherson 58). An underlying logic behind the prevailing belief of both the public and the specialists that modernism has long been absent or regressed in the Chinese architectural discourse is rooted in the mindset that the binarism of the West and that of China are two competing forces whose balance and blending are always difficult to reconcile. The view that highlights on the space, rather than time, of modern Chinese cultural and architectural history has a different interpretation. In his “Reconstructing Modernism: “The Shifting Narratives of Chinese Modernist Architecture”, Shi Yaohua argues that “rather than an enervated offshoot of Western modernism, Chinese modernism should be viewed as an important part of the twentieth-century Chinese cultural history, one that responded to local conditions and took on local characteristics. Instead of faulting Chinese modernism for failing to reach the heights of its European exemplar, such critics argue, we should view Chinese modernism on its own terms” (Shi 34). Shi’s observation warns us that Shanghai’s history and its urban form have focused too much on its Western and cosmopolitan influence. History and urban form should be re-approached beyond the understanding of Chinese modernity from a Eurocentric perspective. We can easily acknowledge that the municipal institutions in Jiangwan, the Bank of China on the Bund, and the YMCA Building on Xi Zang Road South are perfect examples of Chinese modernism because they show both the Chinese style and Western structure. (Figure 46 Bank of China Building on the Bund) Meanwhile, we need to note that the numerous 240

architectural structures in Shanghai designed by the Hungarian Architect László Hudec (e.g., the modernist Grand Theater, the art-deco Park Hotel (right: Figure 47 Park Hotel), the eclectic Xinxin Department Store, etc.) are also a part of Chinese modernism. The case is the same with many other western-style buildings designed by Chinese architects (e.g., the art-deco Paramount Hall by Yang Ximiao and the neo-classical Nanking Theatre by Fan Wenzhao and Zhao Shen). The parallel development of modernist architecture by both Western and Chinese professionals in China proves the time-embedded notion of modernity as inadequate. From this perspective, modernity is no longer understood in temporal or chronological progress but more in spatial practice. Shi observes the following:

Figure 46: Bank of China Building, Shanghai.

Figure 47: Park Hotel, Shanghai.

Significantly, all of Hudec’s modern-style, if not full-fledged high modernist, works….were designed after he opened his own office for Chinese clients, who were less wedded to Western historicist styles. Thus, the Chinese (outdated, traditional)/Western (modern, progressive) binary collapses. A case could be made that in Shanghai, Chinese capitalists, “belated” by virtue of their nationality, were far more ready to accept modernism than at least some supposedly “advanced”

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Westerners. Western clients in Shanghai could not claim to have a lock on “modernity;” nor Hudec or other foreign architects working in Shanghai claim to be more progressive than their Chinese colleagues…. (48)

Therefore, the Greater Shanghai Plan should be considered a typical Chinese approach to understand modernism, in which the role of the Chinese government and social elites tried to challenge hegemonic standards of Western urban planning against the colonial space. Ostensibly, the underestimation and deliberate disregard of the Plan were largely caused by the alteration of regimes. However, more will be revealed if we consider the persisting and prevailing perceptions of Chinese modernity. These perceptions include the dichotomy between Shanghai and the rest of China in the modernity discourse, between the West and China, and between the victimized past and promising future. The spatial view calls for a reinterpretation of the experience of modernity in China as one of the global modernity experiences. It strives to look for continuity rather than a rupture in history to generate the new possibilities of understanding China. Apparently, the communist regime was not willing to resume the uncompleted dream of the Nationalist Government by continuing the Greater Shanghai Plan. Urban development is not a priority of the socialist national construction in the first place. Moreover, new urban planning projects had to serve the ideological purpose and policies that prioritize the interests of the working class. The amnesia of the Jiangwan Civic Center is not surprising, but note that in Shanghai, political centers persistently remained in the former foreign concessions, whereas the construction of the Workers’ New Villages that personified the Socialist urban accomplishments were all built in the outskirts of the city center. Thus, efforts of both Nationalist and Communist regimes failed to transform the original spatial power structure. Next, I will discuss other marginalized spaces in the current Shanghai spatial image, namely, the New Workers’ Village and the ramshackle area.

Workers’ New Village: The Invisible Wasteland of Everydayness As urban discourse in Shanghai is usually understood within a bourgeois culture, consumption, and cosmopolitanism, socialist urban planning 242

and spatial legacies are in contrast widely ignored or excluded from the discussion of Shanghai urbanity. Shanghai memory is not associated with other important phases in Shanghai’s urban history. An example is the time when a massive construction of a socialist grid of “new villages” for the working class people in the relatively peripheral industrial areas of the city took place in the 1950s. The concept of a “New Village” was forged initially by the utopian socialism tradition of the 19th century by thinkers such as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. The “New Village culture,” as an influential wave of thought, came to China in the early 20th century from Japan, particularly as the idea of “Atarashiki-mura” (New Village) established by writer Mushanokoji Saneatsu (1885–1976) and his literary magazine “Atarashiki-mura” released in 1918. As active members of the May Fourth “New Youth,” Mao Zedong and other leaders of the forthcoming political revolutions were deeply impressed by these socialistic ideals, which significantly influenced the ideology of urban planning in revolutionary China. Mao himself even drafted a plan of a new village in which a “public daycare center, public nursing home, public school, public library, public bank, public farm, public factory, public Commune of consuming, public theatre, public hospital, park, museum, and autonomy organization” could be found (Zhang 2005, 42). The new socialist regime of China imported the already existing model of an urban commune residential area from the former Soviet Union. The Caoyang New Village of Shanghai, the first Workers’ New Village in Shanghai, was a typical model of a residential compound built according to the Soviet collective village. (Figure 48: Caoyang New Village in 1959)9 Similar to the Caoyang new village, most of the new villages were located in the peripheral areas of the city, mostly near industrial zones in the Yangpu, Putuo, and Changning Districts for the convenience of the workers. From 1951 to 1952, only nine residential construction bases were built. In the following year, 25 more such bases were constructed in greater areas of the city margin including Pudong. By the end of 1958, the number of the Workers’ New Villages reached 201, with almost 600,000 workers and their families moving from decrepit houses

9

Image Source: Jiefang Daily September 29, 2009.

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to brand new concrete buildings.10 After 1949, the socialist urbanization in Shanghai centered on the transformation of a city of consumption to that of manufacturing. It has dramatically changed the original function of urban space and therefore the spatial order of the city. Large factory premises had to be built in the outskirts of the city where the farmlands outside the urban discourse could provide relief from the burden of the limited inner city space. New Villages were built for the welfare of workers working in factories. Although the New Villages could barely meet the needs of a modern life according to today’s criteria, with the living area being on the same level as the kitchen and bathroom, inadequate community facilities for public life, and a monotonous environment, this enthusiastic round of construction of New Village residential areas corresponds to the prevalent ideology of prioritizing the working class people and the commitment to the improvement of their living condition at that time. The change in urban form largely functioned as an important part of the formation of a socialist national identity and the representation of the understanding of modernity at that time. Zhang Hong observes the following:

10

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See “New Residential Constructions.” The History of Shanghai Residential Constructions: Department of Shanghai Local History, 2008. . Accessed on May 12, 2010.

Figure 48: Caoyang New Village in 1959.

‘New Village’ has become a unique form of modern urban space. The workers’ new villages not only instilled the utopian passion into the imaginary of urban modernity but also embodied the way of spatializing and incarnating the political utopia. The whole new village is like a micro-society, which consists of the basic mechanism and function of a society and was managed in a highly sound and ordered manner. According to the social value at that time, people who were entitled to live in Caoyang Village were authentic factory workers. They had to pass a strict round of selection, in which it must be confirmed that all family members within three generation must all be proletariat workers so that the political purity of a proletariat new village can be assured. These people represented therefore the leading class of the society at that time, having a high politically symbolic meaning…For a whole 30 years’ time, it (new village) is the predominant architectural form of everyday environment of residence. (Zhang 2005, 42–43)

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Figure 49: Caoyang New Village Today.

However, in the past 30 years, Shanghai people have been confronted with a new round of erasure of the revolutionary memory in their everyday life. The new rupture in Shanghai’s memory is a result of the transformation of class hierarchies. The symbolic meaning of the triumph of the working class’s political privilege in the state is lost. Its outdated structure no longer fits the contemporary living standard. The population structure also has been undergoing tremendous changes. The remote location and low degree of livability have turned the New Villages into low-rent housing intended for the working class, which is no longer on the top of the societal hierarchy, and poor migrant workers from the countryside. (Figure 49 Caoyang New Village Today) Safety conditions have largely deteriorated, and illegal add-on constructions are common in the community. As most of the capital for the real estate development in Shanghai has been allotted to either the downtown area or the empty suburbs where a high cost of demolishing the old housing can be spared, the New Villages have been disregarded. Furthermore, as the official ideology remains that of socialism, the Villages are not “forgotten” in the political memory discourse. In 2004, the Shanghai Government listed the Caoyang New Village as one of the Shanghai

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Historical Architectures under protection from demolition or largescale reconstruction. The symbolic and cultural status it enjoys ironically creates an obstacle to its renovation and redevelopment, which becomes one of the reasons why the Village and others have turned to new urban clusters for housing low-class citizens. Unlike the Greater Shanghai Plan, which is overlooked in history, the Workers’ New Village cannot be separated from the everyday discourse of Shanghai’s local people. According to Zhang Hong, “Well-organized residential committee had made New Village highly ordered. We used to see such scenarios: residents were grouped according to blocks and buildings, sitting on footstools, and listening to newspapers read aloud by special newspaper reader. At weekend, when bell rings as a reminder, residents would willingly begin to clean the public area of new villages. ….This purity and loyalty of New Village narrative was the personification of urban political imagination. It epitomizes an era, an image of a cultural belief, a form of spatialization of ideology” (Zhang 2005, 43). This memory of spatial everydayness in Shanghai is overshadowed both by nostalgic Shanghai images for mass consumption and by the amnesia of the discontinuity of these images. Workers’ New Villages, as the main body of Shanghai’s form of residence for 30 years, are stepping out of the center stage of Shanghai’s urban landscape. Their destruction is more legitimate and less controversial than that of the old Shikumen. The former is not only of less artistic and historical value but also lies outside the desire of all parties: global, national, and local. To some extent, the Workers’ New Villages are well-concealed scars on Shanghai’s face that do not fit the narrative of the cosmopolitan city. Gone together with the concrete buildings of the New Villages are the organizational form of ordinary people and their perception of living as a social being, which is not only different from that of today but also from that of other Shanghai people living in the traditional Shikumen houses. Therefore, the amnesia of this face of Shanghai has stirred controversies in the alternative scenes of Shanghai memory culture, especially in artistic representation and cultural criticism. Next, I will use a photography collection called  New Village  (2006), containing more than five hundred pictures by a Shanghai-based independent art group called “Bird Head” (niaotou) to illustrate the different memory narratives 247

of New Villages through the texts and contexts of photographic visualization. Taken by the group’s two young members, Song Tao (b. 1979) and Ji Weiyu (b. 1980), this collection shows the everyday life of the neighborhood where the two artists grew up: Xueye New Villages in Shanghai’s Pudong New District. In this case, the space is not only the representation/carrier of memory’s message but also participates actively in the making of memory.  As one of the leading figures in Chinese new photography, Bird Head’s works are considered typical “Private Photographs”, which seem to focus solely on limited themes of everyday trivialities situated in the city of Shanghai. They include images of a tree, a messy room, an ATM, a door, a statue on the street, wrecked houses, a bridge, a dusted bike, a lift, a dog, a fountain, and the neighborhood they live in are mundane, unspectacular, banal, and to good effect. (Figure 50 and Figure 51 Bird Head’s New Village) As part of the so-called “post-eighties generation,” (ba ling hou) Bird Head and other young Chinese photographers show a kind of nostalgic cynicism: their lives, although still less than 30 years, have experienced an extraordinary transformation. This transformation may have driven them away from capturing images that have either a coherent narrative or a documentary mission full of social meaning. Instead, they are fetishistic about their own seemingly de-contextualized and yet realistic life and environment to express their own feelings of “happiness, sadness, and pride.”11

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Song, Tao, Ji Weiyu, “Birdheadworld” blog, Jan. 27, 2007, .

Figure 50: Bird Head’s New Village.12

In contrast to the iconographical images of Shanghai that only present the futuristic Pudong Lujiazui and the elegant pre-1949 western-style houses, Bird Head’s New Villages in Pudong are mostly unfamiliar to both local and non-local Shanghai image consumers. New estate? Looking back in our childhood, they were truly new buildings as if just digged out from construction wastes and overwhelming dust, no street lamps or virescence around but only trucks from moving companies. Those new 6-storeyed buildings stood silently in hot summer night, hovered around by frog noise and a strange smell of fresh cement. But things have changed today. Everything turns to a green peace, only the word “new estate” is kept. There are street lamps now, below with cheap food vendors and pirate dvd stalls. The frog noise is so further away from us, and we can not even hear it any more. It’s just u! Our 6-storeyed buildings and ur fresh cement smell! u r the objects of our camera lens! we r u, our fast built and fast destroyed 6-storeyed buildings! we laughed and cried right beside ur cold cement wall, we kissed and hugged each other here, we shouted abuse, we had bicycle ride and jaw dislocation right beside u, we stood by u proudly, shoulder to shoulder.13 12 13

Photo Courtesy of Birdhead. Ibid, no modification, Feb. 07, 2007, “New estate” is the original term they use in their blog. November 4, 2009.

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Figure 51: Bird Head’s New Village.14

In their images, the body and space mutually shape each other with their own transformative power. In the images, both space and bodies refuse to be diminished to empty, homogenous, and abstract signs of a pre-designed knowledge structure. The space is seen to be as alive as the body in forming memory, identity, and emotions. These manifesto-like claims explain why the collection of photography 14

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Photo Courtesy of Birdhead.

entitled “New Village” actually “features the artists photographing each other and various street-level detritus in dozens of deliberately un-picturesque urban locations … [T]he photographic medium allows them to express a unique dual identity and the work almost assumes the status of a performance documented” (Millichap 16). Taking the living bodies as an inseparable part of the space, Bird Head’s images respond to the imposed denial of this liaison. In 2007, demolition of the Xueye New Villages began to make space for the constructions of the pavilions for the Shanghai World Expo 2010. The physical destruction of the New Villages seems to wrap up its historical mission and intensifies the legitimacy of its death and the amnesia of its existence. However, for the two young artists, the New Villages are a part of their body, the Shanghai that they have known since childhood, in all four seasons, beautiful and ugly. Their claims do not aim to beautify their memory of the all too familiar city space, but still refuse to yield to the deprivation of it in the form of photography. For them, the real home city is ostracized for producing a visual spectacle that caters only to the global gaze. These efforts seem to be as trivial as their messages, if there are any, in the images of an almost-forgotten cityscape that they love. Their memory that reflects the individual level tries to brush up against the amnesia of the new urban ideology that imposes on the old despite the fact that these artists are not necessarily interested in holding the old back and that they are enjoying the new. What is urgent for them is to express the sense of speedy loss and unpredictable metamorphosis caused by the marginalization of their everyday space in terms of vision and importance. Therefore, the consistency of their memory and perception of the city as a diachronic whole is at risk. The representation of the everyday in Bird Head’s New Village exposes no such trace of unconditional contentment towards an arranged reality. The motifs of their photos refuse to adhere to either a coherent structure or a documentary mission full of social meaning. Bird Head’s visual rendition of the utopian neighborhood is imbued with randomness. Both in color or monochrome, their semi-autobiographical images unfold in the manner

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of Michel de Certeau’s anti-Concept-city, a “condition of its own possibility–space itself–to be forgotten: space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology” (de Certeau 95) In interviews, the two photographers describe how chance, spontaneity, and lack of reason have led them while working with the images. Yet they overtly claim to not trust the truthfulness of photography–if photography “is all about ‘deceiving,’ this then becomes a question of methods. How do you deceive? In what way is the deception suitable? Everyone is looking for a way that suits them to work. The way we used does. This is how we compile our collections.” Through the representation of their bodies in the space, photography becomes a screen, which constitutes the realities of their emotion and memory. The elimination of the partitions among these realities is precisely what they are after.15 Through the representation of their bodies in the space, photography becomes a screen, which constitutes the realities of their emotion and memory. The elimination of the partitions among these realities is precisely what they are after. The production of the everyday space in Bird Head’s New Village, despite its redemptive gestures, carefully keeps its distance from a sentimental or even reflective nostalgia, which Boym characterizes as “linger[ing] on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time” (Boym 41). Bird Head’s New Village deals with the now, the very immediate present of emotions, which relate to multiple possibilities. On one hand, the memory narrative in their works reveals the resistance against the public amnesia of New Village space. Their composition of the outdated socialist space may be understood as a counter-image to two image productions: firstly to the idealized, framed scenes of the space in the 1950s, and secondly to the iconic image of the “other Shanghai” that is overly conscious of the global gaze. Chinese scholar Gu Zheng even saw the revolutionary impulses in their visual expression:

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Jie Hai. “Birdhead: The Emotional Gymnastics of the Photography Guerilla,” (2010). . Accessed on January 5, 2012.

Their camera, as a weapon of memory, is used to resist the amnesia of the past or one-sided memory, trying to restore the erased part of history and to recover the exiled reality. Their memory is an opposing memory against the amnesia in disguise of a kind of pseudo-memory. They memorize by taking photos, but this is not nostalgia….it is a withstanding, a resolute visual revolution (172).16

Thus, in Bird Head’s “indifferent resistance”, the four seasons of the new village, where bright color of the blossom in the garden and the somber statues of deer in the darkness indicate a fluctuating visual re-making of the space, are depicted in a mode of diverse perceptions: tension-ridden, anxious, playful, or sarcastic. Without melancholy for the destruction of the past, the images in New Village show the new potentials flourishing in the cracks of destructive changes. To include the New Village as an integral part of Shanghai’s urban narrative is important. Nevertheless, Zhang Hong’s desire to replace popular images of Shanghai with those of the New Villages and his negative criticism on “Shikumen nostalgia” as a big “cultural lie” co-conspired by scholars and the mass media seem also to be a bit overly lopsided (Zhang 2005, 43). Disregarding the New Villages and their historical value is not possible without understanding the change in the social reality that even ordinary New Village dwellers are willing to participate in. Forgetting the socialist legacies is not necessarily the opposite of nostalgic desires of any kind, as if only one of such desires should be remembered or remembered more. The construction of a hierarchy in cultural memory curbs reflection on its discourse that is embedded in highly dynamic relations. The photos of Bird Head explain very well the ambivalence and autonomy of local individuals. Their visual language illustrates how the space of memory in Shanghai animates the memory of space in its texts and contexts. Probably because of this unyielding but multilayered message, the works of Bird Head have found larger resonance beyond their personal context. Their rising status in the Chinese contemporary art scene and the successful circulation of their works in the international art market bring us to the following question: why are the actually peripheral spaces of the New Village able to garner attention in the art world? If art

16

My own translation, Gu 2008.

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is a utopian plan left unfinished, when individuals try to blast open new meanings in the holistic façade of uniformity of spatial memory, they also gain the freedom from being forgotten, which is precisely based on their marginality. Urban memory and imagery are produced as simultaneously peripheral and central. However, such differentiation will become meaningful only when today’s Shanghai is observed in a multilayered or multi-centered palimpsest without a dominant hierarchical structure.

Ramshackle Area: “Postsocialist” Amnesia of the Urban Slums The formation of a ramshackle area (Figure 52 Ramshackle Area, Hongkou District, Shanghai) in Shanghai was a natural result of urban development. A large number of refugees and poor peasants from the lower Yangtze River region and beyond fled to Shanghai because of political and economic reasons since the time of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). Consisting mainly of refugees from nearby provinces, particularly Jiangsu, Anhui, and Shandong, during the hard years of natural disasters and wars, the population in the slum areas in Shanghai (i.e., Zhabei, Putuo, and Yangpu that were also made up of Workers’ New Villages) never lived comfortably at any time in history. Homeless and penniless, they built simple shelters along the railway or in the urban outskirts of the Chinese district. Majority of the poorest working class of Shanghai lived in these slum areas for two or three generations. The ethnic group from Subei, which is north of Jiangsu Province, mainly populated the ramshackle area. The social discrimination against this group still affects Shanghai today (Honig 1992). These slum areas carry the symbolic meaning of lifelong poverty, and the residents have little chances of moving up the higher social classes. They never disappeared from the map of Shanghai, although some of the working-class people during the socialist era enjoyed the privilege of occupying certain urban spaces such as the Workers’ New Villages.

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Figure 52: Ramshackle Area, Hongkou District, Shanghai.

The embarrassment caused by the ramshackle area lies in the great disparity between the socialist discourse of the ramshackle area and the reality after 1949. The interests of the working class and poor people should be prioritized. Urban planning and renewal during that time was regarded as the spatial embodiment of the ideological superiority of the working class and a political representation of the socialist regime. Moreover, the clearing of the ramshackle area is closely related to the construction of the New Villages. Cucumber Lane and Zhao Jia Bang Road demonstrate the achievement of the improvement of the working class’s living conditions. Both ramshackle housing units were cleared and then shaped by the modernization of the area. The renewal of the formerly dirty and dilapidated Zhao Jia Bang Road in 1953, which used to be the boundary street between the previous Chinese and French districts, is widely known as the story of “From Stinky Gutter to the Beautiful Boulevard” in Shanghai’s collective memory. The relocated households in the ramshackle area were moved to a nearby New Village. Cucumber Lane, an urban slum area, was turned into a socialist 255

“model community” in the 1960s. The discourse on the ramshackle area was initially framed as a product of the old rotten society before the communist regime and then as the object of clearance or renovation. However, the cases of urban renewal in propaganda did not reveal much about the actual condition of the expanding urban slums. The underlying reasons can be understood from two perspectives. First, the anti-urban policies were carried out in the course of socialist modernization. Such policies aimed at transforming a city of consumption into that of production (Chen 2007, 9), prioritizing the industrial development of the interior city over the more commerce and trade-oriented coastal city. In particular, the unfavorable policy for Shanghai’s economic development also slowed down the infrastructure construction of China’s largest city. The stagnant overall construction of Shanghai’s town area 30 years after 1949 made large-scale improvement of the ramshackle area impossible. Ultimately, the failure to control the expanding ramshackle area resulted from severe lack of funding for urban modernization. As the state was unable to subsidize the renewal, the residents of the ramshackle area were appealed to pay for their own renovations. The seemingly favorable socialist welfare housing system provided insufficient quota of the actual needs (Chen 2007). Second, the exchange flows of housing in the market were prohibited (Chen 2007, 17–18). Thus, the residents had no choice but to build more ramshackle constructions to meet the increasing living density. Third, the continuity of the former concession area as the political, cultural, and economic center was maintained, contradicting the ideological transformations to some extent. The central-peripheral and ethnic stereotype of the ramshackle area was solidified because of the delay in the change in spatial symbolic meaning and structure vis-à-vis the change in ideology. The new regime took over the old structures because of convenience and its disinterest in identifying with the previous symbolic power (Chen 2007, 5). Thus, the original distribution of spatial and symbolic capital remained the same, and the living environment experienced no significant change. The unevenness of the urban structure resulted in the increase in the ramshackle area. From 1949 to 1980, the ramshackle area increased from 323 to 450.4 square meters (Chen 2007, 6–7). In this case, the persistence of geopolitical class structure was guaranteed further by the spatial configuration. The space–class boundary became more inflexible with the continuity of Shanghai’s 256

urban ideology, in which the discrimination against the ramshackle area and its dwellers (particularly those of Subei ancestry) formed the main part of Shanghai’s identity memory (Zhao 175–209). The failure of the ramshackle area renewal in the planned economy indicates the prevailing idea that space is an empty container for social events and functions, overlooking space as a transformative power that forms social power and boundary. The marginal position of the ramshackle area is particularly obvious in the predominant image of Shanghai now and then. It can neither be found in the popular awareness of a rapidly developing metropolis of the 21st century nor in the spatial discourse in today’s conceptualization of the “old Shanghai”. The ramshackle area is forgotten not only because of its indecent urban slums but also because of the more complicated memory involved in the ruptures and contradictions in the past and present ideologies and in the highly political spatial practice. However, the amnesia of the ramshackle area does not only mean its disappearance in today’s popular image of Shanghai. The repression of the socialist memory at the private level reveals the certainty of spatial memories naturally constructed by the hegemonic rhetoric. In Ramshackle Areas: The History of Life in Memory edited by Chen Yingfang, the people’s memory and life in the slum areas are recorded in the form of their oral memoir (Chen 2006). A large number of current residents (mostly old people) in the two major slum areas in Shanghai (Yuanhe Long and Dongjia Wan, both pseudonyms), were interviewed in terms of their migration history, working history, social participation (i.e., position, work unit, political status, etc.), family condition (i.e., marriage, current situation of family members, and familial relationship), memories of major historical happenings (i.e., the Cultural Revolution), living conditions, spare time activities, expectations in life, community conditions, and their contacts with relatives in their hometown (Chen 2006, 397–398). Based on the narrations of the people living in shanties they built themselves during their lifetime, these people and their families live with great hardship and constant dissatisfaction: their memories of the difficult early life in Shanghai, today’s meager living conditions, common worries about payments for medical treatment, unemployment of their children, and deteriorating community environment due to the influx of the non-local immigrant workers. Some of these people still express 257

gratitude towards the socialist regime as well as the improvement of their social status in the past though they also feel helpless and resigned to things that they cannot change at the same time.17 As stated in the preface of Chen’s book, many interviewees showed reluctance in reminiscing their stories to the student interviewers who could neither improve their situation nor understand their hardships, which is possibly their way of absorbing the shock of self-contradiction between the still valid ideology and the actual practice and system. Chen argues the following: Yes, the resolution they made when they fled to Shanghai, the toughness they suffered in drifting, settling down and tough working, the pride they gained when they were seen as “the master of country”, the contribution they made to the country and community, the passion they committed to the political movements, the drudgery they had in raising (mostly many) children, the houses they built on debt in the slum areas….what can all these mean in the time of today when the working class again fell down the bottom of the society and when poverty is a shame?? How could they and why should they recall everything in details and narrate everything with enthusiasm? (Chen 2006, 9)

The voices of the working class people who lived their life with “ku,” or bitterness in Chinese, have been in the periphery. Rather, they always live in the periphery of the city despite the social changes occurring and the glorious promise of a city life. The ramshackle area did not fit in any narrative of the city (i.e., the old, the socialist, and the post-socialist Shanghai), and it is in constant absence in the imaginations of the city. Its incompatibilities with the modern, grotesque, and cosmopolitan Shanghai were and are still valid today. Even the foreign criticisms on the urgent urban renewal of Shanghai focus mainly on Shikumen houses rather than the ramshackle areas and its people. Imagining Shanghai solely in terms of its bourgeois culture and space assumes and reduces its urbanity into a one-sided class imagination.

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Most of them have not experienced great political upheavals unlike the upper middle class in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution. However, with another fundamental change in social structure and ideology, they remain a subaltern class in poor condition today.

Figure 53: Cucumber Lane, Shanghai.

In another case study by Wing Chung Ho and Petrus Ng (2008) on Cucumber Lane, the public amnesia of the ideological rupture is revealed in the reconstruction and modification of the modernity discourse. The residents of Cucumber Lane, despite their age, gender, and past experiences from the socialist time to the present, seem to deliberately forget the socialist past and look forward to a better future. (Figure 53 Cucumber

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Lane Today) This attitude corresponds to the predominant narrative of the country’s modernization after the opening-up policy in the late 1970s. According to Ho and Ng, amnesia is “a metaphorical sense to refer to an empirical phenomenon, whereby events that occurred only decades ago seem no longer to be questioned by most people in the present” (Ho and Ng 390). Having undergone a highly politicized society from 1949 to 1992, the socialist ideologically highlighted space like Cucumber Lane has lost its original symbolic power. The users of the space now have to depoliticize their future prospects by repressing the past memories and naturalizing the anti-urban (largely anti-consumption) modernity into consumption modernity. The “different internal struggles” (Ho and Ng 408) of the modernity discourse have surreptitiously been steered towards an ambiguous signifier of “modern,” as if no alteration is significant at all. “The prevalence of the public amnesia of the socialist past has,” as indicated in the establishment of a consumer rights’ protection institution in Cucumber Lane, “seemingly kept people from questioning the socialist ironies…” (Ho and Ng 408). Therefore, the amnesia of the ramshackle area at both public and individual levels seems to have more implications in the discussion of modernity than that of ideology. The ramshackle area was a product of urbanization (free flows of people from the countryside to the city) and anti-urbanization (restriction of such flows and urban infrastructure construction). The amnesia of the fluctuation of understanding the modernity and maneuverability of its definition has been glossed over in the modernity discourse when it becomes difficult to legitimize the transformation of ideological rhetoric in today’s China.

II. Beyond the Ideological Turn: Memory and Spaces of the “Obsolescent” Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai While the first two parts of the book illustrate the passion of preserving memory in both cities as a postmodern revolt against modernity’s obsession with the future, this part shows how the nearly religious belief in the progressiveness modernity forgets its flip-sides that imply regression. In the discourse of modernity, one crucial reason for the 260

unconditional love for progress is the given moral value. In the case of China, for example, Chen Yun argues that the modernist intellectuals in China involved in the May Fourth Movement and the New Culture Movement in the early 20th century as well as the keywords that could create a new modern China are not the “Mr. Sai” (science) and “Mr. De” (democracy), which were mentioned in Chen Duxiu’s article in 1919 as two major counter-values to the Confucian ideologies. The dichotomy of “the new” and “the old” determines the basic tone of the modernity project in China. However the paradox lies in the fact that, if this dichotomy implies a perspective of modernity, the delineation between the modern and the pre-modern will acknowledge the modern and the discrimination of the pre-modern. Therefore, the difference between the new and the old is no longer a factual statement but is escalated onto the level of value principles (Chen 2005, 56.) Today, aftermath of these value judgments moves from the temporal dimension to the spatial dimension, where we find the remains of the innate contradictions within the modernity discourse. To a certain extent, this situation seems to be a reactionary move against the progressive historical view and its disastrous consequences. If the modernist view is to foresee a better future from the past by cutting off the connections between each other, the logic of valuing memory to propel the society toward a utopia through continuous revolutions and innovations seems to reverse the priority in temporal order: the past is more reliable because it de facto happened. Therefore, this actualization is sacred and loftier than the predictions of the future, revealing a deep distrust to the progressive view of modernity. At this point, the question of whether memory can also be taken as a form of ideology itself is raised. For me, the answer is yes and no. For people who take memory and commemoration as ways to gain legitimacy (e.g., nationalism or identity marker), humans are reduced to “a historical databank” with limited innovation.18 Furthermore, memory is believed to be more truthful than history, which can be more imposing than the historical narrative. Memory then becomes “an imposed ideology – imposed, sometimes by emotional blackmail. … The

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Paul Treanor, “Memory as ideology.” (Dec., 2002) . Accessed on 6 Sep., 2012.

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monuments multiply because opposition is socially taboo.”19 Although prioritizing memory over the vision towards the future tries to subvert the spatio-temporal order of the “worship of the new” as a form of ideology, it is constructing its own ideology. This seemingly critical view has the possibility to turn into another form of institutionalized historiography, limiting the fluidity and selectivity of memory at a broader level. Here, the danger of taking certain memory as truth claims for granted exists in either democratic or less democratic contemporary societies. Therefore, the existence of the unknown spaces in Berlin and Shanghai questions the view that is now only preoccupied with remembrance. By forming an adverse discourse against this obsession with the future, mistaken memory or amnesia is overlooked as an indispensible part of memory. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt makes a connection between totalitarianism and the modernity discourse. The most obviously demonstrated novelty totalitarianism, as a new government form, is realized by ideology and terror. For Arendt, “Modernity is the age of bureaucratic administration and anonymous labor, rather than politics and action, of elite domination and the manipulation of public opinion. It is the age when totalitarian forms of government, such as Nazism and Stalinism, have emerged as a result of the institutionalization of terror and violence” (d’Entreves 2008). Ideology, understood as the integrated assertions, theories, and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program, appears to be a determining factor in the changes in urban spatial powers, orders, and forms in Berlin and Shanghai. As both cities experienced totalitarianism in their own terms, the reunification of Germany and the end of extreme-leftist movements in China are naturally the most important ideological shifts that can explain the new space-making processes. Paul Ricoeur also propounds that “(e)verything that compounds fragility of identity also proves to be an opportunity for the manipulation of memory, mainly through ideology” (Ricoeur 2004, 448). As space and architecture ultimately represent certain political intentions that can be traced back to the discourse of ideology, forgetting some particular urban spaces is not part of a constructed and manipulated ideological purpose. 19

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Paul Treanor, “Memory as ideology.” (Dec., 2002) . Accessed on 6 Sep., 2012.

As ideology is essentially a part of the modernity project, the inner tensions of memory politics can also be understood in a broader sense beyond the ideology for ideology’s sake. Several reasons account for this point. First, ideological shifts are the best embodiment of various understandings of polemics on modernity. They are results rather than processes of the debates and conflicts within the modernity discourse. Therefore, in the case of the East Berlin urban reconstruction in the 1970s and the renewal of the ramshackle areas in Shanghai, ideological guidelines cannot always be in accordance with the actual spatial practices. The possible reason for this situation is that space has its own transformative power, and it participates in the making of power. The solidification of the original power structure in the case of Shanghai, despite the ideological shift, also provides such an example. Moreover, the setting up of a hierarchical order between ideologies, as a legacy of the binary mentality, obscures the more fundamental tensions within the modern experience as a whole, as evident in the public memory of the Palace of the Republic in Berlin, the reconstruction of the Nikolas Quarter, and the peripheral position of the Workers’ New Villages in Shanghai. Forgetting or marginalizing certain spaces in both cities’ narratives of today reveals public and private ambivalence towards the vicissitudes and ruptures of human experience as a consequence of ideological narratives and formulations. Modernity is a human experience characterized by constant transformations. The forgetting of the Greater Shanghai Plan, for instance, will be oversimplified if it is scrutinized only in light of the repression of a new regime from an old one. When situated in the modernity discourse, the understanding of the Chinese spatial modernity should not only be examined in the dynamics of the national and global contexts. Thus, third, both the resistance to and the internalization of the public amnesia at the individual level, as shown in the photography of Bird Head and the oral narratives of the ramshackle area residents, also expose how modern urbanization in general (in this case, public housing projects) become spaces where new forms of social community, identity, and subjectivity come into being. Here, the tensions between the public amnesia of certain spaces and the individual memory narratives exhibit how modernity as discourse is used as an empty signifier through the predominant ideology. It also shows how modernity as a spatial experience

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provides individuals with grounds to produce counter-memory that seeks to provide new meanings against the facade of uniformity. In the two cities that seem to be so passionate about memories, the amnesia of certain spaces shows that efforts in conserving memory can be highly selective. No memory is neutral. If the invisibilities of the spaces mentioned above are understood in the logic of “the good”/the predominant versus “the bad”/the marginal ideology, that is, memory is judged and selected based on its ideological inclinations, they will be trapped in the same dichotomy that produces a kind of hegemonic moral judgment. Putting amnesia in the analytical model of the good ideology versus the bad ideology only makes one believe that the two are ultimately unrelated. Consequently, one always has to make the decision between lie and truth as well as between misrecognition and the real conspiracy. Therefore, memory should not be essentialized as ideology, political (in)correctness, and moral judgment. The continuous, invisible, and diverse nature of memory determines its openness towards unpredictable directions. Its close involvement with human subjectivity resists homogenization and proves to be broader and more complicated than any ideological dichotomy. Therefore, to simply reiterate either of the following ideas proves inadequate: memory and history are both objects of social construction, and memory is a liberating force of historiography. Both ideas underestimate the nature of memory that is neither totally predictable nor constructible. To say that memory is an open realm is not to say that it is an empty and homogenous “zero sign.” Memory’s openness stems from its staggering state, the impossibility of omnipotence, and its submission to human weakness. Memory continuously adjusts itself towards a certain awareness that is not necessarily progressive. Memory (both forgetting and remembering) may speak truthfully about trial and error of the society. Therefore, can one never make a moral judgment on memory as the standard of judgment is perpetually relative and is never settled? To a certain extent, the ethics of memory may be decided by the social consensus/ dissensus based on the competition among various powers in a particular society. One should constantly remain alert to any political correctness that passes as truth.

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Conclusion

On November 9, 2009, a “Festival of Freedom” was held before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The highlight of the event was the fall of 1,000 colorfully painted dominos that were knocked down to symbolize the collapse of the Wall and the beginning of freedom in the divided city. The fall of the dominos signifies more than the fall of the Berlin Wall alone; the reenactment of the chain reaction also embodies the subsequent collapse of the Iron Curtain and the triumph of democratic liberalism in that part of the world. The euphoria at the end of the Cold War echoes what Francis Fukuyama calls “the end of history” (1992). For Fukuyama, the fall of the Berlin Wall proves that humankind’s ultimate desire for recognition in the Hegelian sense is the main driving force behind the evolution of history. Since the Communist system, which has severe weaknesses in terms of recognition, fell apart and led to the settling of ideological struggles, the political and economic development of the world has headed to a universalized future based on the principles of Western liberal democracy. Despite potentially recurring events, there can be no major variations that can change this tendency of human political form in a regressive manner. The euphoria in the early 1990s proved to be overly optimistic. Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, we witnessed a more complicated situation that could hardly be generalized in an evolutionary perception of history. On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Slavoj Žižek wrote that Fukuyama’s utopian vision in the 1990s “had to die twice: the collapse of the liberal-democratic political utopia on 9/11 did not affect the economic utopia of global market capitalism, but the 2008 financial meltdown surely has” (Žižek 10). The alleged advent of the capitalist-democratic world system, or at least the dream of it, requires new considerations on, for example, what Samuel Huntington formulates as “clashes of civilizations” (1996), the possibility of “the Third Way” (Giddens 1994) out of either socialism or capitalism,

the reminder from Jacques Derrida of the haunting “specters of Marx” (1994), and the omnipresent control of the “Empire” described by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000), to name a few.1 For some, the world order during the Cold War era was a stabilizer that ensured that “all kinds of other conflicts, which seemed minor at the time, would not come into the open” (Laqueur 2006). Moreover, the unpredictable future of the Chinese model, which combines political authoritarianism and free market capitalism, adds to the complexity of how the relations between political democracy and economic efficiency is imagined. The cases we find in this book about contemporary Berlin and Shanghai seem to provide a similar yet more intriguing picture compared with what Žižek describes as the three post-Wall reactions in Eastern Europe: “nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of Communism; embracing right-wing nationalist populism; with belated anti-Communist paranoia” (Žižek 2009). Nostalgia, nationalism, and anti-Communism are not only forms of resistance and disorder arising from the discontent caused by the transformation from one ideological predomination to another but are also the crystallization of the disputes that already existed even before the transformation. This book focuses on the extent to which the end of the Cold War intensified these acute disputes through the lens of space. If the Cold War witnessed the creation of space with various boundaries, the post-Cold War globalization seems to attest to the disappearance of this space. During the Cold War, space was produced by the actual and imaginary boundaries and centers that were premised on physical territory, ideology, and nation-state. These boundaries were rational, binary, and coherent. After the Berlin Wall collapsed, the narrative of these boundaries was replaced initially by the more loosely defined ones such as culture and civilization (Huntington 1996) and then by a restructuring of the spatial conception (Hardt and Negri 2000), in which the multiplication of areas with no boundary, 1

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See Samuel P. Huntington. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Anthony Giddens. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1994. Jacques Derrida. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

center, or history has been realized by an unprecedentedly large scale of global capital flows. The depoliticization of experience and lifestyle is accompanied by the emancipation of irrational, chaotic, and non-linear elements, and by the fragmentation of experience on a broader level. Moreover, the urban cultural politics of today reveals the manifold layers of the ongoing ideological polemics. On one hand, the dissolution of the Soviet–US bipolar system marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall situates the research in an era characterized by new international political networks, economic alliances, widespread information exchange, mobility of people, and novel forms of communication. The overwhelming impact of mass consumerism and the transnational business connections have created new demands on space and place-making. The thriving urban renewal projects in Berlin and Shanghai cater to Germany and China’s needs to step into the global arena with brandnew modern profiles. On the other hand, the tensions between the local and the national are evident in the increasing discussions on cosmopolitanism, in which the city is deterritorialized in the global mapping, being both an individual node in the global network and still within national boundaries. Therefore, the city becomes the locus of the representation of national desire and the symbolic space of the national will. When global consumerism replaced the antagonism between the two ideological camps of the Cold War, the city represents what the nation-state endeavors to present to the world: an agent for attracting a greater inflow of people and capital. Therefore, urban modernity is largely understood as the production of space for consumption, a space in which visuality is emphasized. However, the distinctive modern experience of the city (i.e., of the metropolis) in cultural, ideological, economic, and political aspects, may widen the gap between the local and the national. Therefore, the city provides a contemplative milieu for understanding the inner heterogeneity of the national discourse. The struggles among various historical narratives of different temporalities within a nation-state entail an examination of the memory of urban space, architecture, and other city artifacts if we understand space not only as, according to Henri Lefebvre, a homogenous and neutral container of events and history but also as a product of ideology and power. The main concern of Lefebvre’s theory is that space and

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the process of its production are a social or a political project.2 In The Production of Space (1991), Lefebvre reconceptualizes space to reorientate “human inquiry away from its traditional obsession with time and towards a reconstituted focus on space” (Dear 47). The novelty and revolutionary appeal of Lefebvre’s theory of space lies primarily in its negation of the conventional way of considering space as empty, neutral, and static but as a highly historicized object. Space is anything but empty. It always has meaning or even multiple meanings, and it is capable of producing meaning(s). According to different disciplines, there can be an indefinite variety of spaces including absolute, abstract, appropriated, capitalist, concrete, contradictory, cultural, dominated, epistemological, instrumental, leisure, masculine, mental, natural, neutral, organic, plural, political, real, repressive, social, state, transparent, and women’s spaces (Dear 47). Furthermore, Lefebvre asserts a theoretical unity of previously separate comprehended spaces that are physical, mental, and social. His core idea lies in proposing the triad of spatiality, namely, the perceived (material spatial practices), the conceived (representations of space), and the lived (spaces of representation) (Soja 66–75). According to Lefebvre, representational space is the “space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users,’ but also of some artists and perhaps of those… who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. This is the dominated – hand hence passively experienced –space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. Thus representational spaces maybe

2

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The productive capacity of space is primarily embodied in five forms of tension “between the free appropriation of space for individual and social purposes, and the domination of space through private property, the state, and other forms of class and social power” (Harvey 254). First, the reorganization of space is always a reorganization of social power; second, given that changes in space by economic investments that are involved with uneven profitability redistribute wealth and power, the democratic political power requires a spatial strategy; third, the politics of space can never do without social relations, which give it social content and meaning; fourth, the place as a site of Being is subservient to space as a site of becoming and producing because “the reorganization of space to democratic ends challenged dynastic power embedded in place” (257); and fifth, the conquering of space is made through the production of space (255–258).

said, though again with certain exceptions, to tend towards more or less coherent systems of non-verbal symbols and signs” (Soja 39). According to Lefebvre’s socio-spatial perspective, most of the previous research on space focuses on “spatial practice,” which deals with the “concrete materiality of spatial forms, on things that can be empirically mapped” and the “representation of spaces” (Soja 10), which is the conceptual model of space in the practice of urban planning. In Lefebvre’s conceptualization, the “spaces of representation” or the “lived space” is neither an empty container nor an abstract and transparent discourse; it traverses the dualism of material and conceptual spatial discourse and is “directly ‘lived’ through its associated images and symbols” (Lefebvre 38–39). The trialectics emphasizes the social-historical-spatial dynamics that blasts open the new possibilities of ontological understandings of the world – a view through which the roles of producers, designers, and users of spaces and their interdependence are all under careful examination. The key issue also touches upon the question of the Subject: The perceived-conceived-lived triad (in spatial terms: spatial practice, representations of space, representational spaces) loses all force if it is treated as an abstract ‘model.’ If it cannot grasp the concrete (as distinct from the ‘immediate,’ then its import is severely limited, amounting to no more than that of one ideological mediation among others… That the lived, conceived, and perceived realms should be interconnected, so that the ‘subject,’ the individual member of a given social group, may move from one to another without confusion (Lefebvre 40).

In this sense, the mutations of space as the imagery of boundary not only result in a new order of the global horizon but also fundamentally change the vertical tension between the national and its diverse local manifestations. In globalization, the simultaneous erosion and counter-erosion of national boundaries provides another opportunity to revisit those boundaries, particularly in the moment of change/becoming when the present functions as a critical agency between the past and the future. The study of the tensions between the national and the local tends to disregard the essentialization of boundaries, which are illustrated in their disparate memory (and/or historical?) narratives. We see in the cases I presented in the book various forms of entanglement and negotiation of collective, individual and social memories of

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urban space in Berlin and Shanghai: the troubled and actually highly unstable subjectivity of the modern nation-state, which are either represented in or hidden by the national monuments, the trend of nostalgia as counter-memory to an alternative discourse of the national modernity, and the persistence of personal, everyday life-oriented and “lived” experience in the spatial order despite ideological changes. Both memory and space manifest themselves in a kind of continuity with their own transformative capacities. Therefore, the differences in space can be articulated as memory differences. Whether geographical, class, cultural, ethnical, generational or gender-based, memory studies help to amplify the triadic relationship in Lefebvre’s epistemology of space by stressing such continuity. In this sense, this book scrutinizes the discourse of memory from two perspectives: memory as the representation of social vicissitudes and memory as the actor that exerts its own transformative power on the making of space and society.

Space of Memory Represents, Memory of Space Acts Urban space manifests itself primarily as a display window of the complexity of the national imagination in the era of globalization. On one hand, the representations of national identity are fragmented, self-contradictory, and dispersed. Having undergone two traumatic world wars and the successive political turmoil under communism, fascism, and the Cold War in the 20th century, the world in the post-Cold War era serves as a site for questioning the integrity of the modern nation-state based on a unified ideological ideal. Similarly, the ambivalence and uncertainty towards nationalism and national identity in their spatial narratives demonstrate the inner conflicts of national discourse in establishing its legitimacy. In Berlin, the end of the Cold War revealed a strong sense of disillusionment or the distrust of modern political utopian ideas. These feelings are illustrated in the restoration and reestablishment of remote empirical urban landmarks, such as the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Royal Palace in an effort to intensify the myth of a less controversial imagined community, and in the design of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe, which deliberately circumvents the symbolic meaning of the spatial signified. The preserved ruins of 270

the Wilhelm Memorial Church all the more warn of the disastrous aftermath of modern warfare on human civilization. In Shanghai, the forgetting of the World War I Memorial and the Sihang Warehouse in the war memory narrative exemplifies the ambiguity of modern China’s national subject in the contemporary history writing. The juxtaposition of the site of the First National Congress of the CPC and the Xintiandi leisure quarter provides a perfect example of the mutual utilization of communist national memory and capitalist commercial interest. The agents (i.e., nationality, political party, regime, historical event, etc.) that once served as unquestioned foundations of the national myth now turn out to be equivocal and fluid. On the other hand, the transformation of the post-Cold War urban space reflects the endeavor of the national in engaging itself in a unified imagination that is mainly based on economic considerations. One key issue in urban spatial changes in both cities lies in how urban modernity is understood and made into a way of the city’s “self-imagineering.” This situation explains the ardent nostalgia for the spaces of Weimar Berlin and the golden time of Shanghai, through which the revival of certain urban memories can be integrated easily into the global consumerist discourse. If nostalgia and cosmopolitan memory speak to what urban modernity likes to include, the amnesia and hostility towards the socialist spatial legacies indicate what it is eager to exclude. Cases such as the demolition of Berlin’s Palace of the Republic, the forgetting of the Shanghai workers’ new village, and the destruction of the Statue of Gu Zhenghong aim to marginalize the memory of the city and the nation’s “non-modern” remainders of ideological incompatibility. The “invisibility” of the space of the Greater Shanghai Plan also inspires contemplation in terms of the past and current struggles of Chinese modernity. Meanwhile, commemorative space today is not only about the historical experience it addresses directly but is also deeply interwoven with the current political calculations. My criticism towards commemorative space like the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum or the Korean Exile Government Museum drives at their all too overt diplomatic pragmatism and their disregard for encouraging the local public to engage in war memories with a reflexive and reactive subjectivity. In an interesting comparison, the endeavor to “protect” Germany’s war memorials 271

in the following case is also worth contemplating. In early 2014, Angela Merkel refused a request from the Chinese President Xi Jinping to accompany him to visit the Holocaust memorial and the Neue Wache in Berlin during his state visit.3 The request have largely been interpreted as China’s propaganda war against Japan rather than a sincere homage to the victims (parallel to the fact that China’s own official narratives of war memory focuses largely on the Japanese perpetrators’ atrocities, even more than the heroism of the Chinese people). The refusal, in the meantime, also signals a state gesture that Germany’s war memories must remain purified and exclusive to its local meaning even when it comes to the seemingly “universal” issue of WWII experience. As powerful as the top-down approach of the national and global spaces is in incorporating memory with the grand narratives, the memory of space does not only reflect how space is produced but may also reversely shape the spatial discourse. The tension between the national and the local focuses on how memory reacts to the predominant historical or memory narrative. The memory of local space provides a bottom-up alternative articulation vis-à-vis the overwhelmingly hegemonic power of the global and the national. The public installations of the anti-Semitic everydayness under Nazism and the incoherence of the spatial language of the Jewish museum in Berlin attempt to dissolve the centralized symbolic meaning of traditional commemorative space. The resistance of memory is also expressed in the works of young Shanghai-based artists such as Bird Head and even in the nostalgic consumption of the GDR spatial icons from both sides of the Wall. Memory can thus be regarded as more than an analytical representation of social space but as a way of producing space. More local and specific creation of the desire in shaping spatial forms as well as the autonomy of memory discourse should not be overlooked. The local, while consuming the global imagination, also uses global elements to 3

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See Ben Blanchard and Michael Martina, “Exclusive: China, eyeing Japan, seeks WW2 focus for Xi during Germany visit”. Feb. 23, 2014, . [Accessed on 03, May, 2015]. Also, Adam Talyor, “This is why Germany doesn’t want China anywhere near Berlin’s holocaust memorial”. Mar. 28, 2014. . [Accessed on 03, May, 2015].

articulate its distinct urban tradition from that of the national. Nostalgia is a popular cultural phenomenon that becomes the agent of the tensions among space, local history, consumerism, and visual culture. Therefore, the Shanghai Shikumen nostalgia and the case of the Hackesche Höfe can be considered as a reflective embodiment of the long-term polemics over different understandings of urban modernity within national boundaries. At the same time, while the disdain of Shanghai and its urbanity still linger in the contemporary national culture of China, the romanticization of Weimar Berlin can hardly overcome the memory of its much disliked cosmopolitanism, which is characterized by the Jewishness and Americanism and thus distinguishes it from the rest of Germany. After being the capital of the Third Reich and undergoing a lopsided development divided by two opposing ideologies, contemporary Berlin, long stuck in a dismal economic situation, can only be a culturally rich capital of visuality. Finally, fragments and trivial details of memory narratives found in mass media, film, literature, or academic research are enriching our perception of space. Although not overtly or intensively resistant to the major narratives, memory texts such as the depiction of Shanghai in 1925 in Yokomitsu Riichi’s novel, the hidden memory of the Tower to the People’s Heroes, the horse racecourse in the newspaper column, or the academic discussion on the May Thirtieth Movement from a perspective other than that presented in Chinese school textbooks are all memories of space that have seemingly no overarching influence. However, “invisible” remembrance or even selective amnesia, as shown in the oral narration of the Cucumber Lane or the residents of ramshackle areas, functions as a wider base of accumulative power that can eventually erupt. This book casts a glimpse on the possibility of looking at the “sense of place” (Relph 1976) in an amalgamation of subjects and texts, demonstrating how space, memory, and modernity not only reflect but also act on one another. By analyzing various current cases in the two discrepant cities, the book challenges the knowledge structures of modernity within binary, Western-centric, temporal, and nation-based frameworks. In this picture, urban modernity as a myth of causal and as a largely visual representation of an evolving project is dismissed. Considering modernity as a representation of spatial networks and 273

relations (i.e., relating experiences of modernity in space in both broad and narrow senses) helps us to reflect on the hierarchical implication of modernity, which is characterized by time succession, the privilege of determining what can belong to “the modern,” and the right to claim modernity as “progressive,” “liberating,” and “civilized” and therefore all the antitheses to these implications of modernity. Regarding modernity as a transcendental or essentialized package for clear reading or as a historical experience of certain locales produces binarism. It potentially generates the oppression of one kind of usage of modernity imposes on another. The discussion on how the simultaneous networks cohabit or have been cohabiting becomes more revealing, as even the visible “end of history,” if there is one, is not an end. The ostensibly invisible but still ongoing dichotomous mentality still impoverishes human understanding of the self and of others. In this sense, the research on Berlin and Shanghai does not put both cities in a discrepant relationship between the East and the West, between capitalism and (post)socialism, and between progressive and reactionary perspectives but instead situates them in a wider discourse on modernity as a common human experience in the 20th century and beyond. This comparative study tries to provoke a uniquely mixed sense of stark unfamiliarity and familiarity that is not only beyond geographical and cultural frameworks but is also within such frameworks. The similarities between the two cities speak of the global history, whereas the dissimilarities reflect the local history. The dynamics between the similarities and dissimilarities constitutes the tensions between the global and the local. The exploration of the simultaneities of these tensions is crucial in understanding the difference and unity as well as the rupture and continuity in the discourse of modernity from a spatial perspective. As we struggle with the debates on the preservation or revitalization of urban cultural heritage vis-à-vis the rapid destruction of the old city’s character or share the increasing anxiety about the deterioration of the world’s ecology, the perspectives presented in this book provides the reassessment of the way urban spatial artifacts are perceived, which is significant as cities worldwide confront the uncertainties and challenges from the acceleration of history.

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euro-sinica

EUROSINICA is a book series for monographs of various thematic foci, sharing the goal of studying culture and literature in contemporary or historical contexts. The series, under the imprint of Peter Lang, was founded in 1984 by the German sinologist Günther Debon (1921–2005) and the Canadian comparatist Adrian Hsia (1938–2010). While the founding editors placed the emphasis on the transfer processes of classical literary works and motifs between cultures, the continuation of their work requires new approaches. Rather than operate within the conceptual framework of “cultural dialogue” between an East and a West viewed as distinct entities, the series’ editors tend to a view of cultures in contact. EUROSINICA is accordingly open for studies and interpretation of authors, personalities, genres and individual works committed to an understanding of humanity as a common source of values which, rather than be impeded by cultural, linguistic or ethnic disparity, are being reshaped and reinvented in different settings. The editors of EUROSINICA will consider manuscripts in European languages and expect to publish between one and two volumes annually. EUROSINICA aims for a balance between studies of contemporary and ancient focus. It thereby seeks to counter the trend of separating research on classical and modern issues and at once to stimulate cross-disciplinary discourses on literature, history and culture between East Asian Studies and other fields of the humanities.

Vol. 1

Günther Debon/Adrian Hsia (eds.) Goethe und China – China und Goethe 1985, 978-3-261-03468-7

Vol. 2

Günther Debon Oscar Wilde und der Taoismus – Oscar Wilde and Taoism 1986, 978-3-261-03600-1

Vol. 3

Adrian Hsia/ Sigfried Hoefert (eds.) Fernöstliche Brückenschläge 1992, 978-3-261-04492-1

Vol. 4

Adrian Hsia (ed.) Zur Rezeption von Goethes „Faust“ in Ostasien 1993, 978-3-906750-44-6

Vol. 5

Adrian Hsia (ed.) Tao: Reception in East and West 1994, 978-3-906752-52-5

Vol. 6

Kai Chong Cheung, The Theme of Chastity in Hau Ch’iu Chuan and Parallel Western Fiction 1994, 978-3-906752-74-7

Vol. 7

Adrian Hsia Kafka und China 1996, 978-3-906755-83-0

Vol. 8

Naoji Kimura Jenseits von Weimar. Goethes Weg zum Fernen Osten 1997, 978-3-906759-29-6

Vol. 9 Jian Wang, Die Dienerfigur in deutschen und chinesischen Theaterstücken 1999, 978-3-906763-33-0 Vol. 10 Lucie Bernier (ed.) Aspects of Diaspora 2000, 978-3-906766-66-9 Vol. 11 Werner Meissner, Western Philosophy in China 1993-1997, 2001, 978-3-906767-91-8 Vol. 12 Zhijian Tao, Drawing the Dragon, Western European Reinvention of China 2009, 978-3-03911-812-0 Vol. 13 Frank Kraushaar (ed.), Eastwards. Western Views on East Asian Culture 2010, 978-3-0343-0040-7 Vol. 14 Sher-shiueh Li/ Thierry Meynard, Jesuit Chreia in Late Ming China 2014, 978-3-0343-1439-8 Vol. 15 Lu Pan, In-Visible Palimpsest. Memory, Space and Modernity in Berlin and Shanghai 2016, 978-3-0343-1699-6