UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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    The Wrapped Reichstag and Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe: Some Difficulties with Contemporary Monuments in Post-Reunification Berlin
    (2008-05-05) Rook-Koepsel, Megan; Shannon, Joshua; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The proliferation of memory-sites following the reunification of Germany in 1990 was a testament to the great need of that nation for contextualizing and comprehending its recent traumatic histories. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Reichstag Project for Berlin, and Peter Eisenman's Memorial for the Murdered Jew of Europe are two monuments whose visual forms and conceptual narratives offer answers to the question of how to represent, complicate, and perpetuate memory through monument forms. Yet an analysis of the public reception and comprehension of these two works and the dialogues constructed around their realizations shows that in many ways each of these monuments falls short of its conceptual goals. In this thesis I will question whether an effective and appropriate contemporary monument to Germany's traumatic past is even possible, suggesting that often those elements that make up a successful monument are also the ones that provide for its failings.