Kathleen James-Chakraborty Boeken

After World War II, West Germans and West Berliners found ways of communicating both their recent sufferings and aspirations for stable communities through buildings that fused the ruins of historicist structures with new constructions rooted in the modernism of the 1910s and '20s. As Modernism as Memory illustrates, these postwar practices undergird the approaches later taken in influential structures created or renovated in Berlin following the fall of the Wall, including the Jewish Museum and the Reichstag, the New Museum and the Topography of Terror. While others have characterized contemporary Berlin's museums and memorials as postmodern, Kathleen James-Chakraborty argues that these environments are examples of an "architecture of modern memory" that is much older, more complex, and historically contingent. She reveals that churches and museums repaired and designed before 1989 in Düren, Hanover, Munich, Neviges, Pforzheim, Stuttgart, and Weil am Rhein contributed to a modernist precedent for the relationship between German identity and the past developed since then in the Ruhr region and in Berlin. Modernism as Memory demonstrates that how one remembers can be detached from what one remembers, contrasting ruins with recollections of modernism to commemorate German suffering, the Holocaust, and the industrial revolution, as well as new spaces for Islam in the country.

The early twenty-first century is witnessing a paradigm shift across the humanities away from an obsession with language and towards an engagement with the way in which physical space is imagined. This book showcases the impact of that shift upon the work of diverse disciplines. Applying insights from architecture and geography, which have long addressed space, to disciplines that have traditionally focused upon images and language, the contributors demonstrate how integral space is to literary as well as artistic imagining and identity at the same time that they propose novel ways of capturing and documenting spatial experience. The thirteen contributors to the book, most of whom live and work in Ireland and are associated with a range of different disciplines in Irish universities, show how the construction and representation of space, both real and imagined, contributes to the exploration of contemporary concerns such as identity, belonging and memory. The result is a snapshot of the ways in which contemporary Irish academia is addressing one of the most important new directions in interdisciplinary research.

Focusing on the idea of architecture for a mass audience, Kathleen James-Chakroborty addresses issues of space, simplicity, spirituality and spectacle.

Erich Mendelsohn's buildings, erected throughout Germany between 1920 and 1932, epitomized architectural modernity for his countrymen. In this study, Kathleen James examines his department stores, office buildings and cinemas, the downtown counterparts to the famous housing projects built during the same years in Frankfurt and Berlin. Demonstrating the degree to which their dynamic presence stemmed from Mendelsohn's attention to their consumer-oriented functions, James shows Mendelsohn to be more than an Expressionist, as he is usually characterized.