Re‐membering the European citizen: The social construction of collective memory in Weimar

Abstract

Collective re‐membering is examined in the context of the production of Weimar as European city of Culture. Weimar, cradle of German culture, and location of the prototype concentration camp, is formulated as a site of antagonism. The relationship between a walking/talking tour of the city and remembering is discussed with reference to Freud and Wittgenstein. Re‐membering is considered as suturing, and as ideological interpellation, hegemonic practices which are deployed in the context of walking in the city. The subject interpellated in Weimar, European city of Culture, is the blasé cosmopolitan (Simmel) and the flâneur (Benjamin) a subject capable of living with irreconcilable antagonism; an ideal type citizen that would be the keystone of European unity. Limitations of this hegemonic project are considered in light of the conditions of post‐modernity.