Commemorating the Berlin Wall: forms and spaces of collective memory after the cold war

Since 1960s commemorative events are losing their pure institutional character as more different social actors at participating in the decision-making processes. This ongoing change arises then questions on how nowadays commemorative narratives and practices shape social ties, collective identities and forms of public memory during commemorative events. To clarify these issues I chose as case study the 50th Anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall in 2011. The case study is especially emblematic with regard to the controversial question of constructing a shared and shareable German Identity after 40 years of physical and political cultural separation. To better illustrate the commemorative event I constructed a typology based on four memory processes: ritualization, historization, marketization and routinization. These processes marked over time the urban places of the German capital city in different ways and they are at the origin of various conflicts of memory among different social groups in the reunified German society. Finally, this typology is useful as analytic tool since it highlights how during the commemorative event in 2011 the dichotomous master narrative of victims/perpetrators was avoided by the historization and ritualization of everyday places.