Berlin. Whereas Ladd focuses on existing subject area structures as
embodiments of explicit periods of German history, Huyssen views
Berlin as a web site of ‘discontinuous’ and ‘ruptured history’.5 The fast succession of German states within the twentieth century has left marks and gaps in the town. Thus, additionally, to an expensive subject area heritage, Berlin is also
home to barren areas. it’s there that history lies slightly below the surface,
and such empty tracts of land, I contend, have even as a lot of interest and
historical potential as subject area structures still standing.6 Indeed, as
reconstruction in Berlin progresses and also the excavation of those deserted
spaces continue, there’s the potential for history to be ‘unearthed’, as
occurred at the positioning of the Prinz Albrecht building, currently home to the Topography
of Terror exhibition.7 Whereas during this instance the invisible heritage
of the property has been created visible, there are numberless alternative such
repositories of memory that shortly might disappear. As Berlin progresses through
the 21st century, the past grows ever a lot of distant and then, too, does
its memory. As Fritzsche writes, ‘the absence of presence [and] the
presence of absence’ ar complementary characters within the story of Berlin.8
Three empty areas are the main target of intense scrutiny within the years
following unification: the areas adjacent to Potsdamer and Leipziger Platz,
the Schlossplatz, and also the tract of land bordering the Brandenburg Gate.9
If, as Richard Terdiman claims, ‘memory is that the gift past’, ten then it’s appropriate to raise what proof of the past still remains. Whereas others
have investigated the subject area and archaeologic dimensions of the
rebuilt Berlin, i select to undertake a literary expedition, to explore the
ways that Berlin novels within the late Nineteen Nineties have embedded discussions concerning
these barren areas into their fables. For this purpose I examine 3
texts: F. C. Delius’s Die Flatterzunge and Peter Schneider’s Eduards Heimkehr
(both 1999) and archangel Kleeberg’s Ein Garten im Norden (1998). Delius
and Schneider situate the plots of their novels within the middle Nineteen Nineties, lending
their treatment of developments in Berlin’s cityscape an up to date