The cultural politics of remembrance: sport, place and memory in Belfast and Berlin

Abstract

Recent debates about the construction of a new ‘national’ sports stadium for Northern Ireland have touched on but left relatively unexplored the closely linked proposal for a museum and conflict transformation centre on the same site. Work on the latter has ignored the proposed stadium. The article examines the stadium proposal within the context of debates about collective memory and the monumentalisation of social space in two cities – Berlin and Belfast – that have been characterised by division and traumatic past events. This article examines the cultural politics of remembrance in the two cities. More specifically, it considers the ways in which sporting spaces become implicated in the politics of memory, focussing above all on the proposal to build Northern Ireland’s new ‘national’ stadium on a site previously occupied by HM Prison Maze (or Long Kesh as it was known by its inmates) on the outskirts of Belfast. The article argues that, long after physical conflict is over, remembrance and the spaces used to construct and reproduce collective memory continue to be contested by cultural policy‐makers as well as the general public.

Keywords:

• space
• memory
• monuments
• sport
• Berlin
• Belfast