The Historic Preservation Fallacy? Transnational Culture, Urban Identity, and Monumental Architecture in Berlin and Dresden

Abstract

Historic preservation is concerned with cultural heritage. Yet in an age of heightened historical awareness and contestation of meanings, cultural heritage has itself come to be understood as a narrative subject to modification, alteration, and reinterpretation. In the case of architectural monuments, which often concentrate cultural memories and evoke them through material form, preservation implies a material politics of place: that is, people negotiate what will be saved and what will be demolished, what will be preserved, altered, or, indeed reconstructed if a building was destroyed at some earlier time. Reconstructions also raise complicated questions about the past, present, and future meanings of a place; what is reconstructed or preserved is always central to narratives of nationhood and to constituent local and individual identities that coexist, often in considerable tension, within that place.1