Dismantled Monumentality: Capturing Postsocialist Erasures in Berlin

ABSTRACT:Berlin-based photographer Gerrit Engel was the last to shoot the Palast der Republik, GDR government seat and cultural center, during the final phases of its state-ordered dismantlement (2006–2008). The resulting photographs contrast sharply with his photobook Berlin (2009), shot simultaneously and published twenty years after German unification. Whereas Engel's photobook is stylistically indebted to the New Objectivity of Weimar industrial photography and its successors, his subjective approach to the Palast elegizes its erasure. Although many accounts of GDR legacies turn on Ostalgie, Engel's Palast photos demonstrate the futurity of erasure through an aesthetic critique of monumentality as such.