The destruction of the Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov in Sofia, Bulgaria happened under the first stable pronouncedly anti-socialist government of Bulgaria ten years after the fall of state-socialism in 1989. The decision was not justified through public decision-making or intellectual debate. Instead, political proponents and opponents of the demolition drew on the explanatory potential of cases of world history. Some indignant opponents recalled the decision of Spain and Italy to leave, untouched, the monuments of Franco and the buildings of Mussolini; some reminded the public of the preservation of Lenin’ Mausoleum in Moscow; some compared the decision of the government to the vandals’ assault of Rome. Yet, it was Stefan Sofianski, that time a mayor of Sofia, who seemed to have found the ‘right historical justification’. He compared the destruction of the Mausoleum to the unifying cathartic fall of the Berlin Wall. (Todorova 2006, p.399)

Drawing on the ironic discrepancy behind this justification, this paper argues that the destruction of the Mausoleum in Sofia and the fall of the Berlin Wall are not simply events with symbolic value incommensurable to each other. Instead, I compare them as different ways of post-socialist governments to ‘give resolve to the problematic past’ with the means of urban renewal. To do this, I use Arjun Appadurai’s conceptual framework of reading the city text as a charter of contested pasts. I demonstrate how the debates around the construction and destruction of both the Wall and the Mausoleum demonstrate the difficulty of coming to terms with the socialist in the cityscapes of Berlin and Sofia.

Reading History as a Charter

Writing about the fate of the Wall of Berlin (amongst other voids of the city), Andreas Huyssen speaks of the importance to use the city landscape as a ‘prism, through which one could focus issues of contemporary urbanism and architecture, national identity, statehood, historical memory and forgetting’ (Huyssen 1997, p.58). In this process, the representations of the past are woven in the fabric of the city in a multiplicity of competing, complementary or contradictory discourses. In this text I am aiming at a comparative analysis of two events and phenomena in the medium of the urban landscape of seemingly incommensurable scopes and importance. For this reason, I complement Huyssen’s phenomenological reading of the city as a texture of discourses, with a more suggestive categorical apparatus: Arjun Appadurai’s categories of contested past, as represented in his essay ‘The Past as a Scarce Resource’ (Appadurai 1981).

Appadurai’s discussion of the layers of past represented in a Hindu temple sheds light on the issues of contested memory, i.e. of struggle and power invested in the debates over the past. Reading material culture in general not simply as a text, but rather, as a ‘charter’, permits researchers to follow the interweaving of past debates in their material culture embodiment. Appadurai partly follows Bronislaw Malinowski’s reading of the explications of the past as ‘charters’. Yet unlike his predecessor, Appadurai sees them not as unquestioned ‘fundamental cultural variables’ (1981, p.210), but as ‘collectively held, publicly expressed and ideologically charged versions of the past, which are likely to vary within the groups that form society’ (1981, p.202). Appadurai studies a Hindu temple focusing rather on the norms that make a particular definable cultural framework of contentious debates over the past (Appadurai 1981, p.202). For Appadurai four general ‘substantive norms’, guide the process of negotiating and debating the past, ‘rather in the language of argument, than as a chorus of harmony’ (1981, p.202). The categories which Appadurai applies – authority, continuity, depth and interdependence – restrict the cultural consensus of cultures and allows them to manage their past. They make it possible to unravel and explicate in a deeply historical fashion the divergent discourses when reading (urban) history as a text.

Historical Background

The building of the Musoleum of Georgi Dimitrov in Sofia was a case of extraordinary complexity in the recent Bulgarian history. It was built in June 1949. The construction was designed and executed 6 days after the sudden death of Georgi Dimitrov during his political visit to Moscow. The first communist prime minister of Bulgaria after the regime change in 1944, an emblematic figure of the Anti-fascist resistance and a leader of the Commintern, Dimitrov was to be buried and commemorated as a national hero. The ceremony of the burial was the first of this sort it its, surprisingly bourgeois pompousness. In the rainy day of the burial the coffin of Dimitrov, covered with black tulle, was dragged by black horses with feathers around their heads. This affluent ceremony in front of the neo-classical building of the Mausoleum mirrored the rituals of the Saschs-Coburg-Gotha dynasty in Bulgaria. The USSR-fostered socialist revolution in Bulgarian in 1944 terminated this dynasty and sent its members in exile (Kostadinov 2005). Even if the authority of Dimitrov was contested in the communist circles, after his death he became the primary figure in the literary and historical canon legitimizing the socialist power throughout the regime. In the Bulgaria Dimitrov was amongst the main initiators of the uprising in September 1923 – the “first anti-fascist revolution” in Europe – which however failed with a bloody massacre of numerous socialists. He also contributed to the death of Traicho Kostov, the last openly oppositional voice within the party. On international level, as a head of the Communist International after 1934, Dimitrov seemed adherent to Stalin; his sudden death in the Kremlin indicated a different interpretation: the autopsy showed enormous level of mercury in his blood (Todorova 2003).  Dimitrov´s Mausoleum – the symbol of his heroic immortality – rose in the very centre of Sofia, across the main street from the former royal palace, surrounded by the buildings of the Bulgarian central institutions: the National Theatre, Party headquarters, National Bank, and State Archive. With its stage-like façade it was turned into a tribune of state power at all demonstrations and parades including Mayday, the anniversary of the Socialist Revolution, and the army parade. The generations of Bulgarians which studied under the socialist regime had their ‘pioneer’ i.e. their initiation into socialism, in front of the Mausoleum. The ceremony was followed by a visit to the embalmed dead body of Georgi Dimitrov.

 Before 1989: Army Parade at the Mausoleum
Available at http://www.duma.bg/2006/0806/250806/snimki/1403.jpg [
last visited 14.05.2008]

After 1989: A Peaceful Demonstration
Available at http://www.segabg.com/online/img%5C2000-10-18%5Ci070302.jpg
[last visited 14.05.2008]

After the Bulgarian ‘peaceful revolution’ in 1989, in the early days of 1990 a commission of 40 members was formed to decide the fate of the Mausoleum. Before the first assembly of the commission, however, the adopted son of Georgi Dimitrov – Boiyko Dimitrov – officially required, took away and cremated the corpse of his dead father (Todorova 2006). The public reactions to this act were controversial. Whereas big masses of the Bulgarian population went to the Mausoleum to take a last a farewell with the ‘father of the nation’ (Gradev 1992, p.79-80), a majority of disenchanted citizens enjoyed the last breath of socialism (Sabchev 2003), or were simply relieved about the possibility of a proper Christian burial given to the mummified body. Yet, the fate of the Mausoleum building was not so easy to solve. While a few unsuccessful competitions tried to come up with a decision what to do with its hollowed-out premises, it remained a ghostly construction in the very centre of the city. Covered by graffiti, and used as public toilets at night, it was casually cleaned to host manifestations, spectacular rock and jazz concerts, and opera and theatre performances.

Following a number of prematurely resigning governments in the winter of 1996-1997 a political and economic crisis erupted in Bulgaria. It was marked by the break of crowds into the parliament, a night of police terror, and a month of country-wide peaceful demonstrations. These events lead to the fall of Zhan Videnov’s socialist government and the raise of a new government after general elections. Replacing the failed cabinet of the former communist party elite, the new government reneged on its initial promise to open the files of the former State security. Instead, their symbolic ‘coming to terms with the socialist past’ happened overnight. An order of the Minister of Planning and Reconstruction Evgeniy Bakardzhiev to destroy the Mausoleum surprised Sofia in the middle of the summer holidays. Designed and built in six days, the Mausoleum disappeared in seven. Instead of its planned sudden detonation the ‘ceremony’ of its destruction was protracted into a number of smaller blasts. While the machines were taking away the vestiges, the building disappeared in more time that it was constructed.

An (Im)possible Comparison?

The parallel between the belated demolition of the Mausoleum and the fall of the Berlin Wall is not so apparent at first sight. The latter was seen to give shape to the Iron Curtain, demarcating the awkward coexistence of the two blocs of the Cold War within the same city. For this reason, the destruction of central parts of the Wall was a symbolic action. On the 9th of November 1989, after months of negotiation of boarder control within the GDR, the SED first secretary Guenter Schabowski announced (by a mistake) at press-conference that the borders of the GDR were opened. The same evening people on both sides of the wall broke through it with their own hands. Instead of delayed politics of memory in a post-socialist state, the fall of the Wall was a moment when history seemed written by the people on the streets.

‘We the People’: The Berlin wall is destroyed by citizens of East Berlin…
Available at http://www.defence.gov.au/news/raafnews/editions/4711/images/18-berlin_wall.jpg
[last visited 14.05.2008]

Against this background, the parallel between the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the Mausoleum seems to be a grotesque counter-justification of the new Bulgarian government. Even if a whole generation of Bulgarians who suffered under communist repressions silently approved its fall, the process of negotiation was far from the democratic values they otherwise openly professed. The destruction of the building was done in the absence of direct citizens’ initiative or democratic decision-making, a scarce and rather sketchy intellectual debate, and no consequent campaign by the political opposition. It showed a rigid desire of the party in government to simply do away with the unresolved legacy of the socialist past – a task that was not undertaken by the crowds in the 1996-97 and was not a main issue of contention under the quotidian survival strategies that occupied Bulgarian citizens in the first years after the severe political and economic crisis. Hence, the events of 1999 ‘read’ the ‘charter’ of the Mausoleum in the historical texture of the city in a rather non-democratic, top-down manner. In his work on the Hindu temple, Appadurai uses the category of the past as a ‘charter’ to describe the related archival legal documents, as well as the temple liturgics, ascribing different roles in the temple hierarchy (Appadurai 1981, p. 203). In our case the very charts of the Mausoleum played a peculiar role. The sudden decision to demolish the Mausoleum in 1999 was justified through the documents of the Sofia city archive that backed the governmental ‘Order-RD-02-14-1531 from August 9, 1999’ (Todorova 2003, p. 395). The government’s team of experts had at their disposal the architectural plans of the building, but not construction charts, which, were never put to the command of the state administration after 1989 (Kostadinov 2005). Thus, the destruction took more time than the building.

Stages in the destruction of the Mausoleum (19-26.08.1999)

The minor destructions after the first detonations
Available at http://oshte.info/01/New%20Folder%20(2)/_427068_mausoleum300.jpg [last visited 14.05.2008]

The work of fire brigades in the dismantlement
Available at http://www.segabg.com/online/img%5C2001-02-24%5Ci090302.jpg
[last visited 14.05.2008]

Sofians walking around in the days between the unsuccessful attempts.
Available at http://www.temanews.com/img/tema/134/3433/14Mavzolei_va.jpg
[last visited 14.05.2008]

Yet, a parallel could still be sought in the debates around the place of the two constructions, and of the socialist past in the urban landscape of Berlin and Sofia. For Arjun Appadurai there are four ‘substantive norms’ that form the language of argument over the debated past: authority – which implies ‘cultural consensus as to the kinds of source, origin or guarantor of ‘pasts’ which are required for their credibility’; continuity – that evokes such ‘consensus as to the nature of the linkage with the source of authority which is required for the minimal credibility of the past’; depth – stipulating ‘cultural consensus as to the relative values of different time-depths in the mutual evaluation of ‘pasts’ in a given society’, and interdependence – ‘necessity of some convention about how closely any past must be interdependent with other ‘pasts’ to ensure minimal credibility’ (Appadurai 1981, p.203).

Authority: Sealed with Silence 

The Socialist revolutions in the first half of the 20th century rose against formerly privileged groups in the bourgeois societies. The newly obtained sacrosanct right to authority of the new leaders had to be reaffirmed through a new ideology. Besides in the classical texts of socialism, such a confirmation was found in the worship of personality: firstly of Stalin, and then of his disciples. The construction of the Mausoleum sealed the dubious story around the death of Dimitrov in Stalin’s premises in Kremlin (see Todorova 2006); mimicking the embalmment of the body of Lenin, the Bulgarian socialist party demarcated its own position in the context of the Cold War.

In this sense, the category of authority had a very similar symbolic structure in case of the Wall in Berlin. Building the Wall sealed the unresolved conflict between the own intentions of the city government and the USSR forces. The wall was built overnight as a wound on the previous face of Berlin, as the Mausoleum on that of Sofia. Both constructions were far from obeying rules of participatory design – on the contrary, they drew the very line of confrontation: in Bulgaria – between bourgeois monarchic society and socialist republic; in Germany between the two superpowers and ideologies that clashed in the Cold War. Both the Mausoleum of Dimitrov and the Wall were particular symbols of the distribution and redistribution of power and goods in the socialist society.  The social structure of the ‘participatory dictatorships’ in East-Central Europe used particular mechanisms to privilege the ‘dutiful’ citizens of the system, while ascribing retribution for any ‘diversion’. In Bulgaria the early years after the regime change in 1944 were marked by brutal suppression of the bourgeois and the intelligentsia, while its places were taken by members of the formerly deprived working and agrarian classes. Georgi Dimitrov personally encouraged the massacres in the 1940s. Ever since, socialist Bulgaria was known as the country “where political purges, including massive executions, were more extensive and more cruel than perhaps in any other Soviet block country” (Deak in Todorov 1999, p. vii). Concentration camps in the Bulgarian case persisted well into the 1980s (Todorov 1999, pp.38-39). A dense surveillance system penetrated all layers of the societal structure. Terror over the Bulgarian society was sealed with the blood of tens of thousand of lives, nurtured through the Manichean division of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and justified through the authority of abstractions like ‘the Party’, ‘the Socialist Fatherland’, ‘Mother Bulgaria’ etc. The reasons of persecution were different, starting from ‘bourgeois’ origin, through harmless political jokes, and to personal tastes and preferences: listening to imperialist Western radio or to rock music, wearing tight trousers or dancing to twist music were also amongst the ‘sins’ that the concentration camps ‘purged’ (Todorov 1999, p.8). One of the personally embodied images of this authority was Georgi Dimitrov, through his working-class background. In the mean time, children of ex-bourgeoisie were stigmatized and excluded from the pioneering ceremonies and not only. The mandatory ceremonies at the Mausoleum turned the building into a semi-cultic and a semi-hated, thoroughly controversial place in the topography of Sofia (Sabchev 2003). In Germany the division that the Wall introduced double-bind divides. The construction of the Wall marked deprivation of the citizens of East Berlin from their jobs and families in the West. However, as in the case with the Mausoleum, it also marked particular class structure of privileges within the East German society. The mass exodus towards the West that conditioned the Wall sealing in 1961 was stopped. Any attempt to leave for the West was highly suspected and the right for such was given to few people only. The emissions of radio and TV, vibes of rock concerts overheard through the Wall made the feeling of isolation even more urgent in the last years before 1989 (Ladd 1987, pp.29-30).

Continuity: Breaking (with) the Past

Struggles for social mobility and privileges on different levels were projected in the construction of both the Mausoleum and the Wall. It was the upturn of these imposed values and authorities that were sought by the demolition of both the discussed constructions to reject continuity with state socialism. Both the early upsurge of the Wall in Berlin, and the belated blast of the Mausoleum in Sofia did away with this symbolic division. Yet, both in the German and in the Bulgarian case the victory was confined to the symbolic level and had limited consequences in time. The demolition of the Berlin Wall did not abolish existing class discrepancies, but created a further ‘wall’ dividing the East and the West. The so called phenomenon “Mauer im Kopf” represented the claim that a new Wall (dividing poor and rich, North and South) was created after 1989. The possibility of any continuity with the state-socialist regime the East Germans to create their own Third Way society was lost in the process of reunification whereby Western politicians and activists were to judge who was to be guilty and who – not in the East German society. Neither did the destruction of the Mausoleum abolish the continuity of party relations and privilege in the Bulgarian society. While the change of regime in 1989 was marked by a rather revisionist ideology by the formerly underprivileged members of the society, the socialist party needed a new source of credibility in order to gain new authority. While the gradual change of the elite in the socialist party was silently taking place, its public breaking with the past required more than the change of name: it required a symbolic sacrifice. The non-intervention of the socialist party to the destruction of the Mausoleum was the price it allegedly paid to break with the past.

The Mausoleum between Being and Nothingness

An unsuccessful Post-Modern Project of the Mausoleum
Available at http://www.online.bg/kultura/my_html/2091/maket.jpg
[last visited 14.05.2008]

…  and the Voids after its forceful destruction
Available at http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en-commons/thumb/5/5b/250px-Sofia-NHG-imagesfrombulgaria1.JPG 
[last visited 14.05.2008]

Yet, soon after the demolition of the Wall and before the demolition of the Mausoleum the problematic persistence of these constructions in the city landscape was questioned by public intellectuals, politicians and the general public. Amongst the transformations proposed were enlisted a brewery or a wine cellar, the biggest club on the Balkans or a Madame Tussaud museum, a large sundial measuring the time from the fall of the regime, a museum of sculpture, a National History Museum or a monument to the victims of the two world wars. The citizens of Dimitrovgrad – a town called after Dimitrov – wished to transport the Mausoleum onto a “lane of the rejected” socialist monuments. Some practical considerations suggested to put the excellent conditions of the building to serve as a storage place of the National Archive or the National Library (see Todorova 2006,p. 404, Voukov 2003). Despite the numerous debates in the years to follow the regime change in 1989, the Mausoleum was not even turned into a monument of the past. Unlike many seemingly analogous cases of recuperation of former socialist symbols, the variety of projects for the future of the Mausoleum amounted to nothing. Furthermore, the projects that were developed did not present any palpable solutions to the city: they presented either nostalgic continuity with the past or a simple and unproblematic transition to the future that was embarrassing for a big number of the Bulgarian population. Once again, the case of the Berlin Wall was similar in the ostensible impossibility of delineating a straightforward course of continuity or discontinuity with the past. In the years after 1989 the fabulous fall was followed by a fabulous plunder of parts of the Mural, recuperation of its selected parts, decomposition of others, and a heated debate on what to do with the empty spaces that were left behind. While lively discussions were taking place of what the fate of the former socialist ‘rampant’ should be, the rampant itself was becoming a capitalist commodity and fetish for tourists ‘pilgrims (Ladd 1997, pp. 8-10). ”Before the final decomposition, parts of the wall were stolen and sold to tourists and department stores in the USA. One example is the “Berlin Wall Cold War Memorial” in the the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, where two whole blocks were exposed.

The demolition created a heated debate on if and where should some commemorative part or path of the Wall be left. While many West German politicians claimed that no vestige of the Wall should remain, the growing disillusionment with the reunification made the Easterners take another position: they reclaimed at least a path that would remind about their own defaced past. After the discussion, parts of the Wall were recuperated in a stripe of East Berlin along the Spree river; a part of the German Historical Museum entourage, the so-called East-Side Gallery still gathers tourists and evokes the [N]Ostalgie to the crumbling past of the DDR. Besides, the destruction of the Wall left thousands square meter of empty space that needed to be addressed with the means of urban renewal. It required consistent town-planning policy also addressing the layers of cultural and social memory laying buried at this place. Yet, the debates that followed were not necessarily consequent, let alone sensitive to the deeply problematic past buried in the deadstrip. Something was ostensibly missing in the notorious debate between Kiez and Kosmos: while deciding if a return to the traditions of Prussian architecture, or a shift towards hi-tech post-modern design would finally make the city a global metropolis, the town-planners neglected the symbolic and tragic role of the Wall in the history of Berlin. As the proposals for recuperating the Mausoleum in Sofia, the ones in the German capital were oriented either towards glorifying the fin-de-ciecle city, or towards post-Cold war future, with no sensitivity to the socialist past. The conservative neo-traditionalist “critical reconstructionists” and the “city marketers” had controversial ideas of how to de-void the voids of Berlin. The former vision was represented respectively in old low-rise tight European-like neighbourhoods Kiez and reconstruction of pre-war city monuments (Museum Isle, European Soho Complex in Mitte, Adler hotel etc.). The Kosmos variation was represented in the New Culture Forum (State Library, New Gallery and Philharmonia) designed in the time of FRG, and the new hi-tech complex of the Sony Centre at Potsdamer platz. ( on the Kiez-Kosmos debate, see Till 2003, pp.48-51). One critical voice in the debate was rised by Daniel Liebeskind. The Polish-Jewish architect proposed that Potsdamer platz remained a large abandoned field in the middle of the city to remind of the voids of the past (quoted in Till 2003, p.50).

Berlin Potsdamer Platz

A return to “Kiez”…
Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Potsdamer_Platz_2%2C_Berlin_1900.png
[last visited 14.05.2008]

…a futuristic view of “Kosmos”
Available at http://www.berlin-info.de/deutsch/sights/big/potsdamer_platz_sony_center.jpg
[last visited 14.05.2008]

…or the voids of Berlin?
Available at http://www.berlin-info.de/deutsch/sights/big/s_06_a.jpg [
last visited 14.05.2008]

Depth: Divergent Scales and Scopes of Memory

One could explicate the failure of the debate on these projects with the third norm of debating the past. The depth of the symbolic meaning of the Mausoleum and the Wall went beyond those of simple constructions of the urban landscape of two socialist cities. Their positive or negative meanings seemed incommensurable with those of the more functional and facetious solutions on offer. However, it was the incompatibility of the ‘pasts’ concerned, which made it impossible for a collective memory or a shared past to cohabit under the shadows of these history-laden, solemn constructions. One of the first reasons of this is the gravity of the symbolic that they represented. When discussing the fate of both the Wall and the Mausoleum, one could not help but speak of life and death: not only in symbolic, but also in physical terms. In a strange fashion, both edifices formed a ‘deadstrip’ in the very core of the socialist cities. The deadstripe of the Berlin wall was a sector between the two counterparts of the Wall: the guards were instructed to shoot whenever a person tried to run through this, the most notorious case being a 18 years old man who shrieked for help for an hour while dying before the eyes of the Western guards who could not intervene (Ladd 1997, pp. 23-25). The mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, wrote in his letter to Jawaharlal Nehru a few days after the construction of the wall ‘The walls of a concentration camp have now been erected inside Berlin’(quoted in Garton Ash 1993, p.59). The death that the Mausoleum in Bulgaria represented was from another ‘calibre’ in both physical and symbolical terms. It was expressed in the typically socialist worship of immortality of the death bodies – both local heroes and national political leaders as symbols of political order, considered to be the embodiment of lawful progress (Verdery 1999, p.28). In the methods of embalming, preservation, temperature and light maintenance those mausoleums were to serve as showcases of socialist technology and progress (see Gergov, 2000; Voukov 2003). A specially established Institute of Mind at the Bulgarian Academy of Science employed a team of scholars to maintain the “immortality” of Dimitrov’s corpse (Gergov 2000; Kostadinov 2005).

In its preservation of the immortal hero of the Bulgarian socialist nation through sophisticated scientific methods, the Mausoleum was a powerful guarantor of the past, a victory of socialist science over mortality. In the USSR, Vietnam, and North Korea the state-socialist power also created the image of immortality. The Mausoleums of Lenin and Ho Chi Min are still exemplary remnants of the personality cult.

To explicate further the difficulty of reconciling the socialist past, to forgive and to forget the atrocities of state-socialism, one could draw on the similarities in survivors’ witnesses in post-totalitarian societies. After years of suppression of the witnesses’ feelings and memories, sudden trend of devoir de memoire has persisted since the 1980s. Its main assumption: upon the use of the proper techniques, the most brutal crime against humanity could be reconstructed for the use of the moral education of the following generations. In the post-socialist countries such projects exist, but the interest of preserving the past is not so unambiguous and not so well desired community-wise. In the case of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe such steps have only recently commenced and with a mixed success: ‘each of the former communist countries is on its own in coming to terms with the past’ (Todorov 1999, p.28). The perpetrators were scarcely put to trial, and the victims and survivors never morally requited. In the aftermath of 1989 the ex-nomenclatural cadres applied a defense strategy mirroring the structure of the socialist regime itself. Responsibility was diluted and fragmented up the hierarchical ladder and down. It was also difficult to chase executioners, as they acted in the name of the functioning legal system of the era. And while the process of collective forgetting spreads through, it is rather a minority opinion of critical intellectuals that ‘punishing the guilty is a hopeless proposition today,’ but ‘it calls for little courage to denounce them [the socialist attrocities]’(Todorov 1999, p.2).

Interdependence: the Struggle of/for Cultural Conventions

Last but not least, the incommensurable depths of the narratives of the past brought about impossibility to ‘manage meaning’ and share conventions of the past in both the Bulgarian and German social history. In the lack of any comparable monuments of socialism in Bulgaria, the final destruction of the Mausoleum of Dimitrov drew on the interdependence of the Bulgarian case with cases of the world history, including the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the case of Berlin and the memory of socialism in Germany, interdependence exists on a complicated level: even if condemned, the socialist past and its embodiment in material culture and architecture are still dealt with in a rather chaotic fashion. The reason for that is the stated incommensurability of this totalitarian past with another past which still haunts Germany: the memory of National Socialism and the Holocaust. The Berlin local government is currently in a process of finalizing the Memory District in the centre of the city. The ‘ensemble’ of three memorial museums – the Topographie of Terror, the Jewish Museum, and the Memorial of the Murdered Jews in Berlin – is marked by architectural excellence and clever design (see Till 2003, pp.7-8); they all result from heated and public debates that started before 1989. They displayed to a high extent the desire of broad circles of Berliners to give voice to this problematic past. The memory of state socialism, however, is strangely missing within the so-called District of Memory. On the map of central Berlin, the only museum that could be considered as dedicated to the socialist past of the city – the Checkpoint Charlie museum – is exactly within the triangle formed by this district. Yet, even if this museum did belong to the memory district, the discrepancy between it and the other three members of the latter is rather blatant. The kitschy exposition praising the final triumphal victory of Western liberal democracy over state-socialism makes the message of the Checkpoint Charlie museum and its place in the ‘memoryscape’ of Berlin quite ambiguous. Neither the building, nor the exhibition of this privately run museum enters a dialogue with the solemn excellence of the other three memorials and museums. This observation perhaps explains why the Berlin Wall in particular, and the socialist memory in general, lose significance in any interdependent interpretation within the rich charter of Berlin urban memory con-text.

Discussion

The parallel between the demolition of the Mausoleum in Sofia and the fall of the Berlin Wall is by no means unproblematic. Yet, as this text has shown, the parallels that could be drawn by the urban socio-historical comparison of these two controversial cases could give material for a valuable discussion on dealing with past in post-socialist urban contexts. The fall of both the Wall and the Mausoleum destroyed physic constructs, but created symbolic voids. In the texture of both Sofia and Berlin, in the voids of the Mausoleum and the Wall, the debate over the socialist past was gradually effaced from the ‘charter’ memory of the urban landscapes. Both the Mausoleum and the Wall remain a void in the memories of the city and a private spatial memory, lieu de memoire (Nora 1989), for the generations who were still there to remember. The lack of more democratic and creative (re)solutions of the fate of the two buildings, displayed the symbolic and physical impossibility of post-socialist governments and publics to find the common language about the socialist past.

Thus, the multiplicity of interpretations of the meaning of two constructions was buried in silence with the construction of both buildings. The abrupt dismantlement of both their material and their symbolic presence represented a quick-fix cosmetic solution for the scars of socialism on the urban landscapes of Sofia and Berlin. It did not address or treat the causes of the huge divisions of both the Bulgarian and the German societies that the Mausoleum and the Wall symbolized. A gap persisted between individual and family trajectories affected by communism. Trauma and mutual suspicion were too deep and created a silence that damaged the communication with the generations of people who lived in the aftermaths of the repressive regimes. Processes of coming to terms with the past in both the case of the Wall and the Mausoleum were belated and partial: in this the problems the socialist past of both countries and cities introduced to the public often aged untouched. They came out of fashion or were pushed aside by other seemingly more urgent conventions of shared cultural past or anticipated future. These conventions took over the symbolic and physical space that awaited in vain the material results of the reflection of the socialist past.

Still, whereas some scholars still describe the paradoxical persistence of the socialist past in the presence, or the mere desecration of the past (Voukov 2003), an alternative understanding should also be possible. I argue for the need of further hermeneutic interpretation of the post-socialist attempts to build a common discursive framework of shared past, in which, sadly, the parallel between the Berlin Wall and the Musoleum of Georgi Dimitrov seems to be possible.

References:

APPADURAI, A. (1981) The Past as a Scarce Resource. Man, Volume: 16 Issue: 2 (June 1981). pp. 201-219
GRADEV, V. (1992). Le Mausolée de Dimitrov. Communications 55. 77-88
GERGOV, G. (2000). The Truth about the Mausoleum [bg. Истината за Мавзолея], Sofia: Sibia
HUYSSEN, A. (1997). The Voids of Berlin. Critical Inquiry 24 (Autumn 1997). 57-81
KOSTADINOV, S. (2005). The Mausoleum of Dimitrov… [bg. Мавзолеят на Димитров]…, Show 33, 18.08.2005. 45 
LADD, B. 1997. The Ghosts of Berlin. Chicago&London: University of Chicago Press,
NORA, P. (1989) Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations 26, (Spring 1989) 7-25.
SABCHEV, K. (2003). The Mausoleum Which Divided People [bg. Мавзолеят, който разделяше хората]. Standard newspaper, 10.08.2003, http://www.standartnews.com/archive/2003/08/19/society/ s3817_11.htm [last visited 03.01.2007]
TILL, K. E. (2003). The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, and Place. London&Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
TODOROV, T. (1999). Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria, University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. [including foreword by Istvan Deak, pp.vii-x]
TODOROVA, M. (2006). The Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov as a lieu de memoire, Journal of Modern History, (June 2006). 377-411
VERDERY, K. (1999). The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Post-socialist Change, Columbia University Press, New York
VOUKOV, N. (2003). Death and the Desecrated: Memories of the Socialist Past in Post-1989 Bulgaria, in Anthropology of Eastern Europe Review, Special Edition

Mariya Ivancheva is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in Budapest. Her main fields of research are history and memory of socialism, dissent and its legacy, theories of elites and intellectuals, critical social theory and utopian studies, on which she has published a number of articles.

 
Související články:
Život v postsocialistické obci - Rumunsko
Život v postsocialistickém Kyjevě
Kolik nás stojí monopol státu? (Novi Sad)

Související koncepty:
Postsocialistické mesto