Miniature Monuments : : Modeling German History / / Helmut Puff.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DGBA Backlist Complete English Language 2000-2014 PART1
• VerfasserIn: Puff, Helmut,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2014]; ©2014
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: Media and Cultural Memory / Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung , 17
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (300 p.)

Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History offers a series of essays on small-scale models of bombed out cities. Created between 1946 and the present, these plastic renderings of places provide eerie glimpses of destruction and devastation resulting of the air war. This study thus permits fresh angles on post-war responses to the compounded losses of WW II, and it does so through considering these “miniature monuments” (of, among others, Frankfurt, Munich, Schwetzingen, Heilbronn and Hiroshima) in a deep cultural history that interlaces the sixteenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries. Three-dimensional renderings in diminutive size have rarely been subjected to rigorous theoretical reflection. Conventionally, models, whether of ruins or intact spaces, have been assumed to be “easily legible”; that is, they have been assumed to be vehicles of the authentic. Yet rubble and other models should be theorized as complex simulacra of abstract realities and catalysts of memories. Miniature Monuments thus tackles a haunting paradox: building ruins. The book elucidates how utterly contingent processes of crumbling and collapse (the English words for the Latin ruina) came to command such great interest in modern Europe that tremendous efforts were taken to uncover, render, and, most of all, recreate ruins.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Chapter One -- Introduction -- Chapter Two -- Rubble City, Frankfurt -- Chapter Three -- Cities as Models in Munich -- Chapter Four -- Schwetzingen’s Built Ruins -- Chapter Five -- From Rubble to Ruins in Heilbronn and Elsewhere -- Epilogue -- Scaling Hiroshima -- In Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index