Acceso usuarios
Diane Fellows
This essay is about one street, Lottumstraße, in Berlin, Germany, where my parent andgrandparents lived prior to 1940. The current morphology of the street is contrasted withmy mother’s experience of life on Lottumstraße during the 1930s. The essay is part of alonger investigation regarding issues of post-memory as interpreted by the second andthird generation of trauma survivors. The essay suggests that, through the act of erasure,traces of the original urban or street condition, and the subsequent urban mark-makingof each successive generation, would be perceived and interpreted in order toauthenticate the particulars of place over time. Traces underscore the responsibility tonot only remember historic events but to recognize that those events have contemporarypolitical and social implications. The larger scope of the work includes a film productiontitled ‘TopoNarratives 1-4’: four short stories based upon specific people and placesshaped by the events of the second world war that resonate through subsequentgenerations across topographies and contemporary political events. The workinvestigates the relationship of the second generation’s personal construction of place tothe public consequence of those private interpretations within the built environment.
