The Inhabited Ruins of Central Europe : Re-imagining Space, History, and Memory

Focusing on Central Europe, the volume proposes a new paradigm of how culture works, based on a model of "inhabited ruins" as a space where contradictory elements come together into continually renewed and frequently paradoxical configurations. Examines art, architecture, literature and music.

The eleven essays in this volume explore the surprising resilience of productive instabilities enclosed in historical asymmetries, cultural paradoxes, and misplaced topographies. The recent history of Central Europe - a history that vividly blurs the line between imagination and reality - is a particularly vibrant case study of such dynamics, the same dynamics that lie at the heart of modern perception.

It investigates how varied and opposing tendencies co-exist and are transposed from one cultural and temporal register to another; how they emerge and are maintained in constantly renewed, productive tensions - what we call ''inhabited ruins.'' Along the way the reader will encounter music from the Terezín concentration camp as a reversed Potemkin village, the BMW as an itinerant lieu de mémoire, Mies van der Rohe''s architecture as spaces belonging nowhere, anxious geographies, extra-territorial sounds, misremembered avant-gardes, and post-apocalyptic identities that fell out of time.