Emplacing memory through the city: the new Berlin

The “New Berlin” represents the shimmering promise of Germany’s future. During the decade following reunification, city marketers deployed images of construction cranes to showcase the city’s transition from an icon of Cold War division to a spectacle of (Western) cosmopolitanism. As one city marketer for the public-private group Partners for Berlin, an organization that runs summer tours through Berlin’s building sites, remarked: “Berlin is a large architectural exhibition. Each and every year things change. . . . In Berlin, unlike other cities such as Munich, I have to go to these places again and again because things change so fast.”