NEW MUSEUMS AND MEMORIALS IN BERLIN form the focus of controversial and politically charged public debates regarding the aesthetics of remembrance. Berlin is dense with reminders of difficult pasts, with the historical and architectural legacy of the National Socialist and the GDR periods, whose relationship not only to the present but also to each other needs to be negotiated and formulated. But even if the landscape of memory in Berlin has its own distinct features, it is still necessary to contextualize these debates in a wider global landscape of remembrance that informs and therefore helps to understand the contests taking place in Germany.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall the debates concerning the question of how to remember the GDR are as fierce as ever. The GDR memorial landscape is clearly divided: museums, documentation centers, and memorials focus either on state oppression or on everyday life in the GDR and its consumer culture. State funding and media coverage both fuel this polarization of the debate on remembrance of the GDR. The two sides cannot easily be divided into east versus west or left-wing versus right-wing politics. The lines are also drawn between two very different museal approaches: on the one hand is the idea of the museum based on a collection in which everyday material culture is preserved because the disappearance of these (historical) objects would be perceived as a cultural loss. A very different kind of institution focuses on the narratives as well as the material evidence of state oppression. The latter is not only more prominent because it receives political support and public funding, but also because it is based on the memory of a group of people who have an active and vested interest in giving voice to their own experience of oppression in the GDR. I would argue that museums such as the Berlin Wall Documentation Center in Bernauer Strasse (established in 1999, and with a revised exhibition set to be completed in 2012) and the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen Memorial (1994), the former remand prison for people detained by the Ministry of State Security (Stasi), have to be seen in the context of the global phenomenon of the “memorial museum,” defined by Paul Williams as “a specific kind of museum dedicated to a historic event commemorating mass suffering of some kind.