Places of Memory

The Case of the House of the Wannsee Conference

K. Digan

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137456403
• eBook ISBN: 9781137456427
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Places of Memory examines the post-war history of the site where the 1942 Wannsee Conference was held. The author analyses the different uses of the house to investigate how a site turns into a site of memory.

1

An Introduction to Space and Place

Abstract: In the first chapter, Digan gives a short introduction to concepts of space and place and discusses how they have been used in historiography. Identifying a lack of conceptual clarity and an absence of ‘space’ and ‘place’ in historiography, she seeks to find a working definition of the concepts. Following geographer John Agnew, she argues for a concept of ‘place’ that consists of three elements: place as a locale or backdrop, place as geographical location and a sense of place.

Keywords: Annales; Braudel; geography; place; relational space; space; spatial turn

Digan, Katie. Places of Memory: The Case of the House of the Wannsee Conference. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137456427.0005.

If one started to talk in terms of space that meant one was hostile to time. It meant, as the fools say, that one ‘denied history’, that one was a ‘technocrat’. – Michel Foucault.¹

The discourse of studies about sites of memory makes implicit use of ideas of space and place. Historical literature about sites of memory often details the debates about a site of memory, but historians have done little analytical work to really think about what a site (of memory, or otherwise) is. Discussions and literature about sites of memory contain popular phrases such as ‘contested spaces’, ‘places of memory’, ‘sites of terror’ without really explaining much about if or how a space can be contested (‘it is’), a place can contain memory (‘it does’), or a site can be ‘of terror’ years after said terror has taken place (‘because it happened there’). These catch phrases, however, are not self-evident. They characterize and shape the way we research historical sites, how we treat them and how we experience them, but we do not really know what the terms mean exactly. In the course of this book I will use the case study of the House of the Wannsee Conference to gain insight into the understandings and relations between people and sites of memory. Because space and place are such important aspects of this understanding, I will first introduce a short theoretical framework of the concepts as they are used in historiography and the social sciences.

Historians and space

For a long time space was mostly conceptualized in physics and philosophy. For instance, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, Newton’s idea of absolute space (in which space exists independently and unmovingly of everything else) and of course Immanuel Kant’s space as an a priori category for perception.² However, more recent works in the fields of social sciences and arts have identified a lack of interest in space as a social or cultural concept, and have since set out to right that wrong. Sociologists, philosophers and – perhaps most obviously – geographers, as well as researchers of literature, media and art, have shifted their attention towards space since the end of the 1980s, marking the beginning of the spatial turn.³ Space became an important topic of analysis in studies of (geo-)politics, globalization, film, social movements and social inequality. One driving factor behind the awakened interest in space and place was the realization that space is both a key concept in many studies in human behaviour, and problematic and often under-analysed concept. Space loomed in the background of social studies but was not made explicit. Simply put, human behaviour always takes place somewhere, and to not include that ‘somewhere’ in analysis means leaving out an important dimension. With this realization, understanding exactly what space and place are became much more of a pressing issue.

One field stayed remarkably quiet in this spatial turn: history. Historians traditionally work in a paradigm of ‘time’, and are concerned with developments, events, periods, progress, decay and revolutions. Somehow space was often seen as something that did not fit into this framework. It was something to be left to geographers, and was, in Foucault’s words, ‘hostile to time’. Perhaps this explains why historians have been largely absent in the spatial turn. However, not all of them proved to be immune to the emerging importance of space. One school of historiography often credited with use of place is the Annales. In Braudel‘s Méditerranée, for instance, geography and environment play an important role in the argumentation, not merely as a backdrop, but as a determining factor.⁴ Similarly, the school placed focus on the regional scale, perhaps most famously in the work of Le Roy Ladurie, who in Peasants of Languedoc and Montaillou takes place, not time, as the starting point for his work. These works show that place is not just a setting or a context for the social, but that there is a give-and-take between the two.⁵ Another example often mentioned is Karl Schlögel and his book Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit, which starts with the now famous sentence: ‘Geschichte spielt nicht nur in der Zeit, sondern auch im Raum’.⁶ While Schlögel declines to offer a methodological approach to using space in historiography, his book is a mosaic of studies in the use and disappearance of space in historiography, as well as histories of geographical maps and migration (both obviously ‘spatial’ topics). The latter especially has become popular in historical research, as space is an important factor in migration studies, as well as the wider field of globalization studies. Space further appears as an important player in the study of landscape, for instance in histories or biographies of landscapes.

Apart from these examples though, historians have shied away from using the concept of space, let alone theorizing it. While space and place have become popular key phrases in studies about migration, geographical changes and – as we now know – memory studies, they are often not specified as concepts. Space and place (if a distinction is even made between the two) are generally seen as self-evident, common-sense concepts. In daily life, this is of course the case, but the stakes get quite a bit higher when they are used as central terms in a historical study. Looking for theoretical explanation (or complication) of ‘space’ in historiographical works is often a disappointing endeavour.

Understandings of place

To gain insight into the meanings of space and place, an obvious starting point is the study of geography. More so than any other science, geography deals with places all the time. The branches of human, political and cultural geography in particular deal with the relation between people and places. There have therefore been many recent attempts made by geographers to examine this key concept of ‘place’ and as a concept it has consequently made its way into geographical textbooks and handbooks. In A Companion to Political Geography, the chapter ‘Place’, written by Lynn Staeheli, is an example of such an examination. In the chapter Staeheli identifies five conceptualizations of space, noting that ‘ “place” could easily be one of the most contested terms in human geography’⁷. First, place is seen as a physical location, as the material opposite of ‘abstract’ space. Place is particular and grounded, and when it is studied in relation to social action it is often thought of as a ‘backdrop’. Though thinking of place as a ‘backdrop’ might be reductive, the suggested split between ‘abstract space’ and ‘physical place’ is prevalent implicitly and explicitly in literature about place. In The Road to Botany Bay (1987), Paul Carter states that ‘space is transformed symbolically into a place, that is, a space with history’.⁸ This is done, he argues, through the act of naming. According to Carter, the act of naming gives a place its history and, in effect, meaning. It definitely seems appropriate to see place at least in part as a physical location, but with the dynamic social character of memory having almost unanimously been agreed upon by the researchers of memory studies, this concept of place alone is not an exciting one to work with in terms of sites of memory. Second, Staeheli identifies a concept of place as a social or cultural location. This is the more metaphorical use of ‘place’, often associated with feminist and cultural studies and identity politics. Staeheli mentions the example of people ‘belonging’ in certain places in societies, like women traditionally ‘belonging at home’ and not in public places. While interesting and especially exciting for emancipatory studies, this understanding of place again does not seem particularly fruitful for a study of memory sites. Third, there is an understanding of place as ‘context’.⁹ This is different from a place as a backdrop, because place as context is thought to also influence human action. A context can inspire certain behaviour. This brings us closer to a relevant understanding of place for the subject of sites of memory. After all, after a site of memory is ‘born’, it elicits human behaviour in the form of tourism and certain attitudes of visitors (being quiet or respectful, and in some cases they cause emotional reactions). Fourth, Staeheli notes a concept of place as socially constructed through time.¹⁰ This concept of place is the first one mentioned that has a dynamic character. As social constructs, places can change. With its incorporation of social construction and its sensitivity to change throughout time, this is a fitting concept for the study of sites of memory. There is just one thing lacking from this understanding for the case of memory sites: though it includes a sense of history, it conceives of a place as an outcome of history, as opposed to a process. While studying a site of memory, it is not only important to look at the past of a site, but also at the present use and meaning of the site. This is the fifth and last understanding of place according to Staeheli: place as a social process.¹¹ This conceptualization includes both physical and social aspects, and points out that the combination of these aspects is something that is done continually, not once, ‘in history’.

Geographer John Agnew also argues for this last type of conceptualization, and notes that ‘place’ consists of three elements.¹² First, place is a locale, a material backdrop or setting against which social action takes place. This can be anything from a house to a state, informal or institu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  An Introduction to Space and Place
• 2  The Conference and the House
• 3  The Discussion about the Haus am Grossen Wannsee 5658 in the West German Press
• 4  Memory Space and Memory Place
• 5  Authenticity
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index