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"The eleven essays in this volume explore the surprising resilience of productive instabilities enclosed in historical asymmetries, cultural paradoxes, and misplaced topographies. The recent history of Central Europe - a history that vividly blurs the line between imagination and reality - is a particularly vibrant case study of such dynamics, the same dynamics that lie at the heart of modern perception. It investigates how varied and opposing tendencies co-exist and are transposed from one cultural and temporal register to another; how they emerge and are maintained in constantly renewed, productive tensions - what we call 'inhabited ruins.' Along the way the reader will encounter music from the Terezin concentration camp as a reversed Potemkin village,the BMW as an itinerant lieu de memoire, Mies van der Rohe's architecture as spaces belonging nowhere, anxious geographies, extra-territorial sounds, misremembered avant-gardes, and post-apocalyptic identities that fell out of time"--
List of contents
Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Prologue: The Day the Wall Came Down (American Surreal); Derek Sayer Introduction: Delicate Empiricism; Dariusz Gafijczuk 1. Ruins and Representations of 1989: Exception, Normality, Revolution; Tim Beasley-Murray 2. The Ruins of a Myth or a Myth in Ruins? Freedom and Cohabitation in Central Europe; Paul Blokker 3. Democracy in Ruins: The case of the Hungarian Parliament; Endre Dányi 4. Itinerant Memory Places: The Baader-Meinhof-Wagen; Kimberly Mair 5. Edith Doesn't Live Here Anymore: A Story of Farnsworth House; Yoke-Sum Wong 6. Comments on Comments: Fake Fragments, Fake Ruins, and Genuine Paper Ruination; Jind?ich Toman 7. How We Remember and What We Forget: Art History and the Czech Avant-garde; Derek Sayer 8. Anxious Geographies - Inhabited Traditions; Dariusz Gafijczuk 9. Terezín as Reverse Potemkin Ruin, in Five Movements and an Epilogue; Michael Beckerman 10. Desert Europa and the Sea of Ruins: The Post-Apocalyptic Imagination in Egon Bondy's Afghanistan; Jonathan Bolton 11. History's Loose Ends: Reflections on the Structure of Velvet Revolutions; Peter Zusi
About the author
Tim Beasley-Murray, University College London, UK
Michael Beckerman, New York University, USA
Paul Blokker, University of Trento, Italy
Jonathan Bolton, Harvard University, USA
Endre Dányi, Goethe University, Germany
Kimberly Mair, University of Lethbridge, Canada
Jind?ich Toman, University of Michigan, USA
Yoke-Sum Wong, Lancaster University, USA
Peter Zusi, University College London, UK
Summary
Focusing on Central Europe, the volume proposes a new paradigm of how culture works, based on a model of "inhabited ruins" as a space where contradictory elements come together into continually renewed and frequently paradoxical configurations. Examines art, architecture, literature and music.
