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

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.

Dariusz Gafijczuk is Teaching Fellow at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, UK. His work has been published in such leading journals as History and Theory, Common Knowledge and Theory, Culture and Society. His interests span the fields of history, social theory and historiography.
 
Derek Sayer is Professor of Cultural History at Lancaster University, UK. His books include Capitalism and Modernity (1990), The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (1998), and Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century; a Surrealist History (2013). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Prologue: The Day the Wall Came Down (American Surreal); Derek Sayer
Introduction: Delicate Empiricism; Dariusz Gafijczuk
1. Ruins and Representations of 1989: Exception, Normality, Revolution; Tim Beasley-Murray
2. The Ruins of a Myth or a Myth in Ruins? Freedom and Cohabitation in Central Europe; Paul Blokker
3. Democracy in Ruins: The case of the Hungarian Parliament; Endre Dányi
4. Itinerant Memory Places: The Baader-Meinhof-Wagen; Kimberly Mair
5. Edith Doesn't Live Here Anymore: A Story of Farnsworth House; Yoke-Sum Wong
6. Comments on Comments: Fake Fragments, Fake Ruins, and Genuine Paper Ruination; Jindrich Toman
7. How We Remember and What We Forget: Art History and the Czech Avant-garde; Derek Sayer
8. Anxious Geographies - Inhabited Traditions; Dariusz Gafijczuk
9. Terezín as Reverse Potemkin Ruin, in Five Movements and an Epilogue; Michael Beckerman
10. Desert Europa and the Sea of Ruins: The Post-Apocalyptic Imagination in Egon Bondy's Afghanistan; Jonathan Bolton
11. History's Loose Ends: Reflections on the Structure of Velvet Revolutions; Peter Zusi