In your face! Bringing Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial to Thuringia: reaffirming German memory culture through creative place-taking

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses one act of informal creative place-making/taking. In 2017, the Berlin art collective Centre for Political Beauty installed a partial replica of Peter Eisenman’s 2005 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in a back garden in the Thuringian village of Bornhagen. The site was chosen because of who lived next door: a leading figure in the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany), Björn Höcke. This DIY, guerrilla-like intervention by activist artists raises broader questions about both “informality” and “place-making.” As we suggest, the work Deine Stele (2017-ongoing) represents a profound paradox: an otherwise highly critical art collective, not least towards the government, replicates an official state-sanctioned memorial in order to defend and enforce the so painfully won hegemonic memory culture. Both the work and its realisation combine complex elements of formality and informality. Moreover, while located very intentionally in Bornhagen, Deine Stele sits somewhere between, and connects, Berlin, Bornhagen and digital space. Rather than engaging deeply with local stories, it makes a more abstract theme – German commitment to Holocaust memory – concrete. We read this antagonistic intervention as a playfully provocative act of creative place-taking rather than place-making.