Forget Hermeneutics? A Response to Lutz Koepnick

Abstract

Lutz Koepnick's essay Forget (GQ 74.4: 343-54) raises a number of timely and interesting questions about the ways contemporary German Studies ought to rethink its critical self-understanding and methodological concepts vis-a-vis post-reunification Berlin's quarrels with architectural space, national history, and cultural memory. If I disagree with some of his suggestions, I do so in full recognition of the persuasive significance of his call for an interdisciplinary urban studies project that, by focusing on the capital in its totality, critically investigates the multiple and contradictory ways in which globalized Berlin's staging of elaborate scenarios of visual consumption, digital images, and fragmentized may offer either emancipatory impulses for historical transformation or turn the celebrated past into reified spectacles. For a differentiated analysis of Berlin's self representation, Koepnick rightly asserts, it is insufficient to rely on the convenient trope of Disneyfication with its idealistic jargon of authenticity; nor should the dominant focus on the new capital lead us to ignore the diversity of regional sites of cultural memory outside the metropolitan center. It is within this context, however, that Koepnick displays what I see a rather problematic anti-hermeneutic bias. He recommends that German Studies should not only familiarize itself with urban theory and cultural geography, but must also resist any temptation to read built in analogy to literary texts and poetic expressions (345). As he claims, literary hermeneutics presumably displays the desire to decode authorial intentions and fixed meanings residing in texts stable inscriptions. Following Fredric Jameson's and Jane Kramer's remarks on contingent processes of allegorization (as opposed to the deciphering of symbolically encoded meaning) he suggests that architectural sites, by contrast, require that view historical meaning, public history, and individual memory as products of projection on the part of historically situated users (346). Although Koepnick concedes that architectural might shape the user's sense perception, index the past, or incorporate references, he claims that [i]n itself, built signifies nothing (346). Therefore, we should not forget that memory does not reside in certain buildings themselves, but in how given groups of people at given moments in time perceive and make use of them (347). Consequently, Koepnick denounces the high-cultural emphasis on the aesthetic, on an architect's intended meanings and references, the mother of all problems concerning postunification urban projects and architectural memories(352). As he summarizes his position, Far from actualizing the past in the present, the hermeneutic overdrive of postwall architectural discourse-the frenzied search for symbolic meaning and fixed interpretation-secretly suggests that monuments can do the work of memorization for us and it thus, in the final analysis, causes memory to recede (352). Certainly, nobody would question Koepnick's thesis that the study of a metropolitan culture Berlin calls for an interdisciplinary approach that goes beyond an unmediated application of literary criticism to architectural forms (my emphasis [345]). One will also agree with Koepnick when he asserts that in order to understand the relation of buildings to history and memory, we need to do much more than simply decode their formal organization of space (346). But contrary to what he goes on to claim, the hermeneutic reading of buildings like texts or artistic expressions entails much more than such a formalistic act of decoding fixed meanings. Koepnick, it seems, construes an unnecessary opposition between hermeneutics and architectural studies, well between poetic narrativity and visual sites of urban representations. By so doing, his argument threatens to undermine the very possibility for a dialectical mediation between different but intersecting cultural discourses that his essay otherwise advocates. …