Amnesiopolis : modernity, space, and memory in East Germany

Amnesiopolis explores the construction of Marzahn, the largest prefabricated housing project in East Germany, built on the outskirts of East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and touted by the regime as the future of socialism. It also focuses especially on the experience of East Germans who moved, often from crumbling slums left over as a legacy of the nineteenth century, into this radically new place, one defined by pure functionality and rationality; a material manifestation of the utopian promise of socialism.
Abstract: Identical concrete housing blocks are an iconic legacy of life behind the Iron Curtain. Amnesiopolis studies the construction of Marzahn, the largest prefabricated housing project in East Germany, asking whether a move from 19th century slums to functional socialist housing offered a radical break from Germany's individual and collective pasts.