From its very conception some thirty years ago, Berlin's Humboldt Forum has been one of contemporary Germany's most controversial cultural initiatives. One aspect of this controversy has been the role of the Prussian past in reunified Germany. Housed in a reconstruction of the Prussian Royal Palace destroyed by the East German communist government in 1950, the visual symbolism of the project spurred a long struggle over the appropriate urban aesthetic for the country's capital city. In the view of many critics, the structure symbolizes the triumph of a particular conservative narrative of national memory that excludes the GDR, downplays National Socialism, and uncritically celebrates the Prussian past. This article traces how public debates about the structure of the Humboldt Forum have served as a vehicle for reflection on Prussian history and its relevance (or irrelevance) for reunified Germany.

Presentism used to be so simple. In the old vernacular it referred to a tendency to view the past from the perspective of the present (or, at its most extreme, maybe even use the past to illuminate the present). Historians disagreed furiously on the intellectual virtues of orienting their views of the past to the needs of the current day. But the content of the term itself was rarely disputed.

The communist regimes of Eastern Europe carried a particular set of assumptions about the way past, present and future related to one another. In the case of the German Democratic Republic (the GDR), these assumptions manifested themselves in official language and propaganda as a defence of the regime's dynamic and forward-looking historicity against the ‘ahistorical’ and ‘nostalgic’ modes of understanding that supposedly typified the historical consciousness of its West German adversary. By this view, the German Federal Republic – and the capitalist West more generally – lacked both a meaningful past and a meaningful future. This article investigates how the East German regime articulated its historicity as a direct expression of its state identity. In particular, it examines how it sought to rationalise newly emerging historical and cultural practices in the GDR within the framework of a modern and progressive socialist historicity, and how it deployed these as an argument against the ‘nostalgic’ practices of the Federal Republic.

This article considers the fate of Prussian buildings and memorials in East Germany between 1945 and 1961. Analyzing a number of case studies from Berlin and Potsdam, it places the treatment of these structures within the broader contours of history management practices. Although this era was characterized by a strong anti-Prussian sentiment in the GDR's historical discourse, it also witnessed a complex interaction between the SED and its historical inheritance. This interaction often influenced decisions about the fate of Prussian structures in the GDR as much as any animosity toward Prussia as a historical entity did.