Autumn 1997
Volume 24, Number 1

Eight years after the fall of the wall, seven years after the unification of East and West Germany, and just a couple of years before the final transfer of the national government from Bonn to Berlin, the city on the Spree is a text frantically being written and rewritten. As Berlin has left behind its heroic and propagandistic role as flashpoint of the Cold War and struggles to imagine itself as the new capital of a reunited nation, the city has become something like a prism through which we can focus issues of contemporary urbanism and architecture, national identity and statehood, historical memory and forgetting. Architecture has always been deeply invested in the shaping of political and national identities, and the rebuilding of Berlin as capital of Germany gives us significant clues to the state of the German nation after the fall of the wall and about the ways Germany projects its future.

Andreas Huyssen is Villard Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and an editor of New German Critique. His publications include Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (1995) and After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986).