Berlin Babylon: The Spatiality of Memory and Identity in Recent Planning for the German Capital

The 2001 film Berlin Babylon explores place-making tensions in reunited Berlin concerned with the spatiality of memory. Taking cues from the film and based on interviews with memory workers in Berlin, the article considers the problems surrounding national identity narrative (re) construction in Germany and the role of spatial imagination necessarily invoked by this. Foregrounding the role of capital city planning in etching or erasing memory traces in identity construction, the argument is made that in the presentation of identity ambivalence Berlin fortunately remains an uneasy place where a national narrative of continuity exists in tension with an identity narrative which seeks to incorporate rupture.