From Trauma to the Brand?The Jewish Berlin between Politics of Memory and urban Marketing

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Wolfgang Kaschuba
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 238925054

Jewish Berlin: This term refers on one hand to a key element of German Holocaust memory, on the other hand increasingly, to a new tourism brand. In the marketing practice of the capital, a specific historical city image has been evolved in recent years, which now presents a special mix of historical images, experiential history, current culture of memory and the promise of authentic traces of the lost German-Jewish life.In order to be in the interplay of marketing agencies, the tourism industry, the urban media, creative artists, caterers, festival agencies and finally the science initiated a process that can be called a policy of urban imagineering. This refers to a differentiated discourse and practice field; especially in the professional agent groups are actively involved to generate the specific images, narratives and symbols of the big cities. They deliberately accentuate the inherent logic (LÖW 2005) as a unique selling point, which feeds from the history and economics from the social and cultural development of urban areas and receives so historical plausibility and achieves new symbolic effect (KASCHUBA 2005, FÄRBER 2008). Urban imagineering thus always refers to both the historical images, such as to the symbolism of an imaginary (APPADURAI 1998). The proposed project assumes that the Images of the Jewish represent today a fundamental core brand in the process of urban imageneering of Berlin. Therefore the project intends to observe and analyze those images, strategies, practices and agents, who initiated and are part of this Jewish Berlin. In contrast to the previous DFG-funded project on Jewish Spaces: historical and symbolic landscapes in Budapest and Berlin, it is not primarily about the production of Jewish self-images, but now especially about the production of foreign images that lend imaginative signature to their urban areas. The working hypothesis here is that this Jewish Berlin as an imaginative construct is going to be now re-ethnicised and so eroticized: not as a historical part of German city- and culture of memory considered to be, but more than one of the many migrant-foreign urban cultures.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Israel
• Participating Persons: Professor Michal Bodemann; Professorin Dr. Christina von Braun; Professor Dr. Jackie Feldman