Gesamtkunstwerk Dresden: Official Urban Discourse and Durs Grünbein's Poetic Critique1

Abstract

I In recent years, Dresden, after and Leipzig the third largest city in the neue Lander and the capital of the State of Saxony, has emerged as particularly important site of cultural negotiation. In its palimpsest-like topography,2 the auratic reconstruction of classical monuments promotes the visual enactment of collective memory as motivating force for post-reunification identity formation in media-saturated capitalist consumer culture. In this sense, the Eastern German city has emerged as formidable counterweight to the centrality of Berlin. Often the old/new capital is assumed to be representative of the entire nation, labeled the Berlin Republic, and its quest for normalization after the Holocaust, World War II, and the East-West division.3 However, as Lutz Koepnick has stressed, Berlin's importance must not be allowed to stifle the critical investigation of the profoundly federalist and creatively decentered traditions of German urban culture, as well as the local textures and regional memories of other German areas (Forget 351). In this context, Dresden's cultural significance after Germany's reunification, I propose, comes into sharp relief through cultural studies reading that j uxtaposes the city's material culture and its discursive self-representation on the one hand with the poetry of Durs Grunbein on the other. Grunbein was born in Dresden on 9 October 1962 and he is the best known commentator on the historical topography of the city. As I will show, in the official city discourse, the recent reconstruction of the Baroque Frauenkirche serves as the metonymic sign of the city's vision of restored aesthetic totality, reflective of an understandable desire for redemptive recovery from traumatic historical legacies: the almost complete destruction by World War II allied bombings during the night of 13-14 February 1945, followed by the architectural functionalism of the GDR's planning policies, which sought to rebuild Dresden as socialist model city4 Dresden's new self-stylization imaginatively employs the Wagnerian concept of the Gesamtleunstwerle to legitimate its post-reunification recovery in ways that seek public support on national and international scale, but in so doing endorses an understanding of the past that differs significantly from Grunbein's own ironic poetry on Dresden. The writer does not celebrate an Aufhebung of disastrous history-its simultaneous preservation and transfiguration-in the city's presumably redemptive metaphysics of authentically restored beauty. Instead, Grunbein's post-reunification texts conceptualize Dresden as an unreal spectacle and an irreparably ruined work of art, where the irrepressible but unredeemable traces of the fragmented past reject complacent historical commemoration and nostalgic desires, while forcing the remembering subject to reflect upon his own historical belatedness. Seen together in this way, official city discourse and individual poetic voice compete with one another to provide the public sphere with conceptualization of Dresden that refuses to be totalized into seamless narrative or hypostatized as the essential truth. Instead, this representational collage of heterogeneous voices and subject positions alerts us to the problem of functionalizing traumatic past, incompletely coped with, for Dresden's future aspirations as cultural metropolis in Eastern Germany and in the New Europe. II Restoring East Germany's endangered landmarks, as Jason James has argued, represents a kind of redemptive labor. That is, it serves as means of compensating for and undoing the damage inflicted on national culture over sixty-year period marked by fascism, war, national division, and state socialism (Recovering 144). In the case of Dresden, the symbolic value of urban recovery received international confirmation in 2004, when the city and the surrounding Elbe Valley were included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. …