Abstract
In contrast to theories according to which urban memory is merely an arbitrary projection of historical meanings on architectural surfaces devoid of any inherent meaning, high-modernist writers like Kafka, Benjamin, Kracauer, and Rilke conceive of memory as networks of historical voices, traces, and echoes that are being articulated by material urban topographies figuring as quasi-subjects. In analogy to the hermeneutic act of reading (literary) texts, these topographic self-articulations are translated through various media and discourses—exemplified here by the novel, the essay, and poetry—into social discourses. Memory, then, is not only a temporal process but also a spatially located act of resisting modernity's hyper-acceleration. Reconstructing aspects of this aesthetic tradition opens up new ways of authentic interrogations of the past that may be of significant methodological value for intermedial cultural studies.
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