Repurposing the Ruin to Remember: Multimodal Rhetoric and Cultural Memory in the Post

Abstract

The memory turn in the humanities has been crucial for understanding the rhetorical work memorials and museums perform for the state. However, the postmodern development of the hybrid memorial museum remains underexamined as a unique rhetorical artifact. In this article, I combine postmodern museology with material rhetoric and multimodal argumentation to critique the particular trend of repurposing historical buildings from the commemorated moment in question into the physical memorial museum itself. Building from previous literature exploring juxtaposition as argument, I contend that repurposing ruins into memorial museums uses authenticity to create a kisceral rhetorical juxtaposition between the ruin’s former and current life as an argumentative strategy. Such work thus makes the repurposed memorial museum both a container and rhetorical object of memory. To exemplify this, I perform a rhetorical critique in situ of the Memorial Museum of the German Division of Marienborn (Gedenkstätte Deutsche Teilung Marienborn [GDTM]): a former East German border crossing. I show how GDTM leverages its architectural authenticity through this Janus-faced juxtaposition to curate cultural memory discourses regarding German unification. In conclusion, I posit how further post-Soviet infrastructures and other repurposed memorial museums offer a critical rhetoric that in our political climes is never more needed.

Keywords

memorial museums cultural memory Soviet Union multimodal rhetoric ruins authenticity juxtaposition

Es gilt jetzt, neu zusammenzurücken, den Kopf klar zu behalten, und das so gut wie möglich zu tun, was unseren deutschen Interessen ebenso entspricht wie unserer Pflicht gegenüber unserem europäischen Kontinent (The task now is to come together again, to keep our heads clear and to do as well as possible what is in our German interests as well as our duty to our European continent).

—Willy Brandt (November 10, 1989)

On November 10, 1989—one day after the fall of the Berlin Wall—West German politician and Nobel Peace Prize winner Willy Brant made a heartfelt call for German reunification (Brandt, 2009). Framing East and West Germany as two halves forming a coherent whole, his earnest remarks called for political unity following the 46 years of Cold War division. Here, Brandt posited that the best way to commemorate the victims and political losses of the division of Germany was to learn from, but never repeat, the sins of the past. Reuniting the divided country was thus framed as an act of reparations in which remembering “what-once-was” (C. Blair et al., 2013) was to become a critical political tool in proposing what-could-be.

The recognition that elites can cultivate and shape social discourses surrounding a past event for present and future needs has been dubbed “the memory turn” (C. Blair et al., 2010) of the 20th century. From Maurice Halbwachs’s (1992) seminal distinction between history, individual neural processes of everyday memory, and socially agreed upon understandings of past events, Nora (1989) and Assman and Czaplicka (1995) coined the concept of cultural memory¹—the “eclectic, selective reconstructions based on subsequent actions, perceptions, and on ever-changing codes by which we delineate, symbolize, and classify the world around us” (Lowenthal, 1985, p. 210). Here, cultural memory plays a central role in the “process of building and sustaining political structures that safeguard against a return to the wrongs of the past” (Blustein, 2008, p. 262). It thus becomes an intangible and tangible rhetorical device that fashions a “culturally institutionalized heritage of a society” (Assman, 1995, p. 129) within the framework of the prominent political ideology of the time (Hirsch, 2001; Irwin-Zarecka, 1994; Landsberg, 2004; Misztal, 2010; Nora, 1989; Poole, 2008; Tileagă, 2012).

While the intersection of cultural memory and rhetoric varies from examinations of rituals to social discourses, within rhetoric and argumentation studies there have been two particular artifacts of interest: the commemorative memorial (C. Blair, 1999; Bodnar, 1993; Haines, 1986; Linenthal, 1993) and the educational museum (Andermann & Arnold-de Simine, 2012; Crane, 2000, 2006; Edge & Weiner, 2006; Hansen-Glucklich, 2014; Hein, 1998; MacDonald, 2006; Sodaro, 2018; Tzortzi, 2011; Williams, 2007). However, the postmodern development of the hybrid memorial museum (Bernard-Donals, 2016; Dickinson et al., 2010; Obermark, 2019; Paliewicz & Hasian, 2016, 2019; Sodaro, 2018)—designed to deal with the horrors and complexities of the Holocaust (Levy & Sznaider, 2002)—has not yet received the same level of attention. In this article, I therefore expand upon the rhetorical and memory studies literature by taking a cross-disciplinary approach that brings together postmodern and new museological theory with multimodal argumentation theory and rhetorical criticism.

I begin by reading memorials and museums as commemorative and educative multimodal sites, respectively. I then rhetorically critique their hybrid sibling of the memorial museum and the particular architectural trend of repurposing original buildings from the historic moment in question. Echoing Marshall McLuhan’s (1964/2010) canonical argument for the medium as the message, my guiding questions ask: “What rhetorical work is at play by repurposing an artifact from the past into forming the architecture of the memorial museum itself?” This is followed by “how does this authenticity of architecture then attempt to standardize a cultural memory narrative?” While authenticity of location has been previously examined as forming a key part of a site’s communicative success (Belhassen et al., 2008; E. Cohen & Cohen, 2012; Miles, 2002; Tumarkin, 2005), I contend that repurposing in line with the authenticity of its location makes the memorial museum both a container and object of memory that invites the audience to infer (Groarke, 2015) its overarching, often state-led, arguments. Using Gilbert’s (1994, 2015) four modes of communication, I thus argue that repurposing is a rhetorical choice that deploys authenticity—a key concept in museology—to create a kisceral rhetorical juxtaposition in time and space as an additional propositional layer. I thus argue that repurposing the ruin to remember echoes Gionata Rizzi’s (2007) call for repairing relics to heal the injuries of war.

To exemplify my claims, I perform a postmodern, multimodal rhetorical critique in situ of Gedenkstätte Deutsche Teilung Marienborn (GDTM): a German memorial museum of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) Helmstedt–Marienborn Border Crossing (HMBC; see Figure 1). I acknowledge Dewdney et al.’s (2013) call for critical analyses to include the “total assemblage” of the museum ranging from its online to its material presence. Moreover, recognizing that “reality is rather best seen as the results of the versions of our interpretations and constructions” (Wang, 1999, p. 354), I include my own experiences, observations, and inferences to fulfill Heitmann’s (2011) call for paying more attention to the tourist (p. 46). Through a multimodal rhetorical critique of this entire assemblage, I thus show how a kisceral rhetorical juxtaposition works in action, as repurposing ruins build a six-dimensional (6D) consubstantiality between the visitor, past peoples, and other post–Soviet cultural memory sites. In turn, I argue that such rhetorical choices create ethos for the state-led arguments made at the site. I thus conclude that such “emphatic experiences” (Huyssen, 1995, p. 14) have never been more critical for our current and politically turbulent times.

Figure 1.

Checkpoint Helmstedt after the border opening in November 1989.

Theoretically Creating the Memorial Museum

The recognition of cultural memory as a powerful rhetorical device has reconsidered historical events as collective yet symbolically constructed. Intangible and tangible artifacts alike create what Lipovetsky (Lipovetsky & Charles, 2005) termed a “paradoxical present” (p. 57): a narrative that rhetorically exhumes, rediscovers, and examines the past for present and future uses. While this paradoxical work can be enacted by any semiotic device that ascribes meaning, in the West, it is the memorial and museum that perform a unique rhetorical role in cultivating particular understandings from a historical event on behalf of the state (Irwin-Zarecka, 1994; Nora, 1989). For instance, Crownshaw (2007) noted how “by rhetorical sleight of hand the museum ascribes such a status to the artefact allowing it to conflate evidence that an event happened with evidence that it happened in certain ways, thus naturalizing the museum’s interpretation of the event” (p. 179). The curation of cultural memory is thus not a neutral act of knowledge exchange but is used to “reinforce social solidarity through a narrative of the past that celebrates a nation’s positive achievements” (R. J. Berger, 2003, p. 7).

The memorial and museum are both complementary yet discrete artifacts of cultural memory in contemporary Western society. Memorials cultivate cultural memory through the emotive affect of location and architecture combined. On the contrary, the museum’s 17th-century origins as a site to showcase European aristocratic wealth developed with Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand’s early 19th-century “Ideal Design” of the museum. Here, Durand rethought the surroundings of an artifact as communicative, thereby developing the notion of a chronological exhibit to mimic traveling through time (Giebelhausen, 2006, p. 227). Two distinct trends thus emerged in 20th-century museology: the museum inhabiting an abstract, neutral design to enable artifacts to “speak for themselves” (Andermann & Arnold-de Simine, 2012, p. 10), and alike memorials, the building itself being a rhetorical representation of its central premise (Giebelhausen, 2006, p. 234).

From these initial developments in modernist museology, the late 20th-century development of “new museology” (Desvallées & Mairesse, 2010; MacDonald, 2006; Marstine, 2006; McCall & Gray, 2013; Saumarez Smith, 1989; Vergo, 1989) reflected the cultural context of postmodernity (Lennon & Foley, 1999). New museology rethought meaning-making in the museum as an act of one-directional, top-down knowledge exchange of problematic master narratives (Lyotard, 1984) and Foucauldian disciplinary control (Hooper Greenhill, 1992; Bennett, 2005). Rather, efforts refocused onto “affording an experience” (Dekel, 2011, p. 267) for the visitor via exhibiting both emotion and personal narratives. Such work was described by Andrea Witcomb (2003) as making the postmodern museum a hypertext—a site of multiple entry points and pathways of understanding (p. 145)—that encourages the visitor to mentally and physically explore, deconstruct, and enable reciprocity in meaning-making (Erll, 2011; Mason, 2006).

Rhetorically Critiquing the Material Memorial Museum as a Container and Object of Memory

Reading the memorial and museum as rhetorical devices is critical for understanding their postmodern sibling of the memorial museum (Black, 2005; Hein, 1998; MacDonald, 2006; Tzortzi, 2011): a linguistic conceptual blend (Fauconnier & Turner, 2003) that combines the educative properties of the museum as a noun, framed by the commemorative adjective of memorializing. As a blended site of meaning-making, the rhetorical aims of this particular type of memory place were formalized in a 2012 international charter. This was summarized by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance as the memorial museum being not only responsible for protecting “the dignity of the victims from all forms of exploitation” but ensures to go “beyond conventional history lessons, that the interpretation of political events inspires critical, independent thinking about the past” (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, n.d.). Such concerns are highlighted in Amy Sodaro’s (2018) three functions of the memorial museum: (a) to engage in a form of historical truth-telling, (b) to create a place of healing and restoration, and (c) to act as a space for the moral education of differing publics (pp. 9–10). This means that even for Holocaust (memorial) museums that are by nature focused on the ideology of fascist Germany, they are also becoming ever more concerned with contemporary far-right policies and intolerance (T. Duffy, 1997, p. 54).

This development of the postmodern memorial museum has played a significant role in what Radonic (2014) calls the “Europeanization of the Holocaust” (p. 492): a universalization of state-led understandings of this historical atrocity to help prevent any re-occurrences. Although similar rhetorical work has continued for eastern Europe post-1989, much of the locus of rhetorical critique on the memorial museum centers on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (Alba, 2015; Bauer, 2002; R. J. Berger, 2003; Bernard-Donals, 2016; Hasian, 2004; Lennon & Foley, 1999; Levy & Sznaider, 2002; Sather-Wagstaff & Sobel, 2012; Sodaro, 2018). Here, this site in populo (E. H. Cohen, 2011)—a place which embodies and emphasizes the story of the people to whom the tragedy befell—has been praised and critiqued for its rhetorical choices to best communicate the horrors of the past. But what has been less explored within Anglophone rhetoric is the transformation of historical ruins from the event in question into forming the memorial museum itself. Here, Holocaust and Cold War memorial museums have been formed in the former labor and death camps as well as within the Iron Curtain border defenses. Although it is not within the scope of this article to explore these in more detail, such memory places can be read in conjunction with heritage tourism (Bowman & Pezzullo, 2009) and dark tourism (Foley & Lennon, 1996; Light, 2017; Sharpley & Stone, 2009; Stone & Sharpley, 2008) as they accumulate the “premodern, the modern, and the postmodern into an integrative whole that can be interpreted as an intimation of postmodernity in some aspects of tourism in the late 20th century” (Lennon & Foley, 1999, p. 46).

The Four Multimodal Modes of Cultural Memory

To understand how the memorial museum communicates its state-led narratives, I posit that the trend of repurposing ruins is a layered act of signification. Just as humans make sense of the world through all five senses (alongside the so-called sixth sense of intuition), paralingual modes of signification support outright arguments made by logical propositions. Here, I draw from Michael A. Gilbert (1994, 2011) who argues that such rhetorical work is enacted through four differing modes of communication—the logical, the emotional, the visceral (the physical), and the kisceral (that which relies on intuition and fundamental assumptions of meaning). Propositional and nonpropositional artifacts synchronously communicate through multiple modes in what Groarke (2015) calls “an invitation to inference”—where their existence invites the audience to infer the reason for their being, their connotative and denotative function, and the communicator’s intended message in their usage (Birdsell & Groarke, 2007; J. A. Blair, 2012; Gilbert, 1994, 2011; Groarke, 2015; Kjeldsen, 2015).

Taking Gilbert’s and Groarke’s multimodal approaches to rhetoric and argumentation, we can begin to see how the repurposed memorial museum communicates cultural memory discourses in the creation of a unified polity on behalf of the state. Here, the memorial museum is a Janus-faced (Allison & Bloomfield, 2018, 2019) memory place. It is both a container and an object of memory made from multiple rhetorical artifacts via differing modes. Such artifacts can include, but are not limited to: visual photographs and interiors; the material rhetoric of objects, architecture, and location; the more ephemeral yet rhetorical labor of traversing the site; the pathos inherent in vernacular narratives; the various linguistic documents that provide a necessary informative and ethotic role; and its multimodal social media presence, among others. Through multiple layers of signification across four differing modes, these artifacts thus work together to present the total assemblage of this memory place by which to communicate its state-led narrative.

While Gilbert’s four modes all have their own roles to play, Gilbert nevertheless argues that the kisceral is the trickiest mode because it “relies on the intuitive, the imaginative, the religious, the spiritual, and the mystical” (cited in Gilbert, 2011, p. 164)—the societal doxa that are accepted by the public without question. The kisceral hence plays a critical yet underexamined role by laying out the unquestioned foundational assumptions of society from which more outright arguments are made. For the repurposed ruin, one critical assumption from the heart of museology is the use of authenticity (Hughes, 1995; Knudsen & Waade, 2010; MacCannell, 1976; Moore et al., 2021; Olsen, 2002; Starn, 1999; Zhu, 2012). Known as the gold standard of museology, authenticity is categorized as a state of being that rhetorically inhabits a moral goodness (Dickinson, 2002; B. E. Duffy, 2013). As both an adjective and a noun—a descriptor as well as a state of being—the kisceral assumption is that such authenticity is inherently valuable to a society’s moral consciousness. Moreover, authenticity is considered as portraying an objective truth, despite by its very nature being a subjective category that is given by a human to an artifact or experience. Thus, for the repurposed ruin, authenticity plays a central role in the ruin’s communicative power as this Janus-faced memory place both displays and inhabits as an authenticated historical object.

Janus-Faced Authentic Juxtaposition

I contend that the conservation of authenticated infrastructures to create the memorial museum is an argumentative choice. We can read authenticity in line with E. Cohen and Cohen’s (2012) authenticity of tourism, in which original buildings in original locations move from a cool authenticity of knowledge and toward the hot authenticity of experience through its cultivation of feelings (Cohen & Cohen, 2012) by using Gilbert’s four modes to present its multilayered argument. One example of such work was noted by C. Blair et al. (2013). Here, the physical location and infrastructures from a commemorated moment in time perform a communicative function that replicates Zelizer’s (2002) notion of the subjunctive voice in photographs. Rather than making linguistic statements regarding how the visitor should think and feel about this past event, photographs and material scenes from history “suspend in time that which we know is about to happen” (p. 167). Freezing a “particular memorable moment of representation midway through the sequencing of action” (Zelizer, 2002, p. 165), the past and present thus coexist simultaneously as what-it-was and what-is-now. Such a presentation reflects Pierre Nora’s (1989) lieux de memoire, in which such memory sites reference their past life while the surrounding environment reflects the present day. Through their iconic and semiotic authenticity as a site that no longer resonates with its environmental setting, these repurposed ruins thus communicate through a kisceral rhetorical juxtaposition that compresses both time and space in its simultaneous presentation of its past and present life. Authenticity hence creates through a literal and ephemeral juxtaposition of the past and the present.

I contend that this juxtaposition through authenticity is a critical part of the argumentative and rhetorical labor for the repurposed ruin-turned-memorial museum. Extending Bloomfield and Sangalang’s (2014) notion of visual juxtaposition that was then expanded to material objects by Allison and Bloomfield (2018, 2019), I continue this development by reading these Schrödinger memory places as juxtaposing material and immaterial authentic artifacts simultaneously. Rather than using linguistic propositions to explain the horrors and the lessons of history, the repurposing of historical authenticated artifacts turns ruins into self-referential illustrations of history. This results in a dual material and immaterial, kisceral rhetorical framework from which to infer and parse the arguments made on behalf of the state. This kisceral rhetorical juxtaposition creates an existential “emphatic experience” (Huyssen, 1995, p. 14) in the creation of a collective identity (Bernhard & Kubik, 2014; C. Blair et al., 2010; Wang, 1999) with both people of the past (Burke, 1969/2013) and those present at the site. This therefore makes the repurposed ruin, with its authenticated objects presented in medias res, become its own certificate of authentication. becomes its own certificate of authentication.

Repurposing the Ruin to Remember

Although Rizzi (2007) argued that a ruin “is a building which, having lost substantial parts of its architectural form, has ceased to function as such” (p. xx), I conclude that repurposing a ruin does not cease but reimagines function (Heitmann, 2011) through this juxtaposition. To exemplify my argument, I now turn to a rhetorical critique in situ of GDTM. Here, I posit that through these inferential modes of communication, GDTM’s authenticity creates a kisceral rhetorical juxtaposition that builds consubstantiality and consequently prevents Huyssen’s (2016) warning that museums can become a static mausoleum of historical objects. Rather, I posit that the rhetorical performance of authenticity is a highly dynamic action that relies on the reciprocity of the visitor to both learn from, but never repeat, these depicted sins of the past. The repurposed ruin thus creates its own ethos for its state-led cultural memory narratives.

The Multimodal Politics of Cold War Memory

The history of the former HMBC border crossing begins with the end of WWII in which a defeated Germany was divided into four zones of occupation: the Allied United States, the United Kingdom, France in the West, and the Soviet Union in the East. With the Soviets in control of large areas of Eastern Europe, the Allied West and East entered into a 45-year Cold War in which a physical and political border was built. Here, at 7,5000 miles long and up to 30 miles wide, this dividing structure was not only formed from two walls on both sides of the border, but also incorporated a whole range of border defenses alongside a no-man’s land between the walls that all worked together to form the so-called Iron Curtain.

With the mass breach of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the official demise of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day, 1991, many postcommunist countries raced to tear down their walls of oppression (Tzortzi, 2011, p. 32). However, in line with previous conservation efforts regarding WWII and the Holocaust, German political actors proposed an alternative course of action. In the creation of what Tileagă (2012) called a German politics of memory, the German state chose to conserve the distinctive Cold War and Soviet Union infrastructures. From passport control offices to subway stations, these disused relics not only became transformed into semiotic indexes to Germany’s post-WWII history but over time became cultural memory places: memorials, museums, and the hybrid memorial museum.

One key example of this ruin-turned-rhetorical infrastructure is the GDTM (Memorial of the German Division of Marienborn), created from the Grenzübergang Helmstedt-Marienborn (HMBC) in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. The HMBC was the largest and most significant border checkpoint in Germany situated between the Soviet and British occupation zones, thus becoming the sole access point for Western Allies traveling to a divided Berlin. From its 1945 opening as a small set of temporary wooden structures alike the initial Iron Curtain, as the Cold War and the border walls were fortified, by 1974 HMBC became a colossal 86-acre site of 1,000 personnel. In this giant configuration of Soviet infrastructures, HMBC contained many hidden secrets: from a tunnel system linking the control buildings to the 1980s installation of secret X-ray machines to covertly screen vehicles for escapees. Replicating the metaphorical naming of the border as an Iron Curtain hiding secrets from Western eyes, HMBC thus became a vessel for clandestine operations unknown to the outside world.

Following the global iconic media event (Sonnevend, 2016) that was the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the resulting reunification of Germany, HMBC was officially closed on June 30, 1990—exactly 45 years after it first opened. But rather than tear down this historically significant site, the German government listed this structure for conservation. Six years later, on August 13, 1996, it was officially reopened as the free-to-access memorial museum GDTM.² Moreover, it is sponsored by the state-led Memorials of Saxony-Anhalt and funded by the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media. Such sponsorship thus makes GDTM a rhetorical, argumentative object for the state to curate public knowledge of the former division of Germany.

A Multimodal Argumentative Critique of the Repurposed Memorial Museum

In preparing for my rhetorical critique in situ of GDTM in the summers of 2017 and 2021, I began my initial exploration of this state-curated rhetorical structure by exploring the total assemblage of the site. Having discovered the existence of GDTM through a long-distance cycling guidebook along the route of the former Iron Curtain, I began by looking for further research on HMBC and its transformation into the memorial museum. I found little in the way of scholarly work on either instantiation. Moreover, within the public sphere, GDTM is mostly referenced in its former life as HMBC and the central role it played in a divided Germany. This therefore means that international advertising of its transformation is lacking, despite an official GDTM website promising an English-language option. Moreover, all postings on GDTM’s official social media accounts are in German. Together, this significant lack of English-language information thus infers that GDTM’s cultural memory work is directed toward its own citizens.

My initial inference continued to be confirmed as I explored not only GDTM’s social media but its online participatory culture websites (Jenkins, 2009)—Wikipedia, Wikimedia, Flickr, and personal webpages. Here I discovered that much of the coverage on HMBC and GDTM focuses on the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Repeating images of the first East German Trabant cars breaching the crossing are supported by local community members recounting similar personal stories. Such consubstantial, cultural memory work is then reflected by numerous events at the memorial museum: Cold War film screenings, public tours, German history lectures, annual happenings on May 26 to commemorate those forced to move from the region due to the GDR border regime, interviews with HMBC eyewitnesses, temporary art installations, educational workshops for both students and teachers, and Cold War book readings, among others. Taken altogether, GDTM thus asks the visitor—most likely to be a German national who was either directly or indirectly affected by the division of Germany—to recall and interpret this historical moment through both personal and political cultural memory narratives. So, before I had even stepped foot within Germany, the site’s postmodern reciprocity in meaning-making had already begun.

Being a rhetorical witness to a lieux de memoire

It was from this state-sponsored framework and commemorative call to action that I began my journey on one gray and rainy summer day: an appropriately solemn foregrounding of the kisceral arguments that were to come. Approaching the memorial museum from the neighboring freeway, despite having never seen the site in person beforehand, the distinctive Soviet architecture immediately invoked a feeling of familiarity from my cultural knowledge of this period in time. I therefore approached the memorial museum with a kisceral, solemn anticipation of what was to come.

As I turned off the freeway onto an unimposing road, I unknowingly had already begun my cultural memory journey. As Dickinson et al. (2006) argue, the rhetorical labor of cultural memory sites begins in the journey, as it primes the visitor and frames the inferential arguments that are to come. For my journey to GDTM, my direction of travel routed me toward an unidentifiable second back entrance at the South side of the memorial museum formerly used by HMBC staff. While using the staff entrance was an accidental error, it nevertheless produced a significantly different first impression than if I had used the main entrance. Situated next to a modern-day rest stop and motel, the main entrance highlights the touristic components of GDTM with a bare-bones welcome sign typographically foregrounding the German morpheme for commemorate (see Figure 2). In contrast, the Southern entrance lacks any modern-day indicators apart from one simple sign directing the visitor toward parking within the memorial museum site. This therefore created an unexpected juxtaposition between my previous experiences of memorials and/or museums which has taught me to expect certain museological elements—a clearly defined entryway, ticket booths, staff, and a clear path echoing Durand’s chronological layout of the museum. The main entrance’s material juxtaposition of time and space was therefore negated at this Southern entrance which subsumed me into an entirely Soviet vista.

Figure 2.

The bare-bones welcome sign at the Western main entrance from 2008.

Making my way into the empty and undefined parking space at this Southern entrance, Gilbert’s communicative modes were then immediately at work. In contrast to the act of meta-communication at the main entrance that would have interrupted the rhetorical performance of authenticity at the staff entrance, several initial impressions formed a critical priming function as I left my vehicle to explore GDTM. There was an instant visual impression made by the gray, crumbling infrastructures with their mustard yellow accents reflecting the color of the cloudy skies. In stark contrast to the flourishing green German countryside (see Figure 3), this sepia color pallet of these historical artifacts replicated a historical photograph in a semiotic connotation of times gone by. Moreover the lack of museological signifiers made authenticity into its own rhetorical device as it inferentially invited me to become Willis’s (2014) “rhetorical witness” to an authentic past. This authenticity thus beget a kisceral juxtaposition between my past understandings of the Soviet occupation of Germany alongside my present thoughts which wanted to know more about what made this memory site important enough to be conserved. Altogether, the solemn quietness, dark skies, sepia vista, and ruins inhabited a 6D quaility that wrought a significant rhetorical kisceral impression alongside a visceral feeling of foreboding of Nora’s lieux de memoire (see Figure 4).

Figure 3.

The former staff and current Southern entrance.

Figure 4.

One of the many decaying infrastructures at GDTM.

Memorializing authenticity

As this rhetorical witness to history, the invitation to commemorate at the Southern entrance became more explicit as I made my way toward the center of the site: a large roof covering the former customs and passport booths. Passing by a cluster of buildings set away from the undefined parking space, I discovered an unassuming sculpture in which its materials were immediately recognizable as from the Iron Curtain (see Figure 5). Created by artist Achim Borsdorf, the sculpture acted alike a semiotic command to commemorate in its semi-abstract depiction of a building wall tie encapsulating an original piece of the archetypal Iron Curtain concrete border wall from the 1970s. The use of iconic yet decaying materials created a visual coherence between the artwork and the surrounding infrastructures that did not break but reaffirmed its rhetorical work. Moreover, the sculpture built upon initial kisceral impressions as I recalled and imagined the effects of a divided Germany and the suffocating nature of the GDR. The postmodern reciprocity in meaning-making was therefore already in full effect as I read this semi-abstract sculpture as making an initial metaphorical argument for the reunification of Germany.

Figure 5.

Sculpture by Achim Borsdorf at the Southern, former staff, entrance.

In continuing to move toward the border control booths, I then came across the first significant act of meta-communication: a set of contextualizing narrative supports (see Figure 6) in the form of multilingual information boards. Originally gray and light blue, unimposing, and semi-blended into the background, in 2020 these boards were replaced by standout upside-down horseshoe-shaped boards in a striking aqua color scheme. In contrast to the muted visuals and architectural design of the Soviet architecture, these new boards may provide significantly more historical information, but they also move the tourist from a kisceral to a literal juxtaposition of time and space. Such propositional work thus reframes GDTM beyond a historical ruin and a site of education.

Figure 6.

The original information boards.

An authentic container within a container

Surveying the information boards, their presence wrought the educative element of the memorial museum into play. Although visually breaking the veil of authenticity, they also added an additional propositional layer by dividing the holistic site into different themed containers of curated historical objects from the same historical event. Individual buildings—passport control offices, the morgue, a watchtower, admin offices, and a veterinary depot, among others—that are of interest in and of themselves, were also defined as containers for various collections of historical objects (see Figure 7). For instance, the former central administrative center of HMBC—housing the key figures of the passport control unit, GDR customs, and the border troops—was highlighted as housing the visitors’ center. I therefore decided to start my more educative exploration of GDTM there.

Figure 7.

One of the many passport control booths transformed into a container of other containers of GDR memory.

The consubstantial juxtaposition of time and space

Arriving at the visitor’s center, the juxtaposition between past and present was ever more pressing. The room maintained the sterility, decoration, and setup as any old-fashioned Soviet administration center, disrupted by more traditional museological displays. Multilingual audio guides, leaflets, and permanent and temporary exhibits depicted moments in a divided Germany, ranging from everyday daily life to the power of Soviet propaganda. Reading through these various English-language objects, a repeating theme laid out the metaphorical and physical framework for the museum:

The emblematic architecture of large roofs and rows of lamp posts on the grounds of the control area reflects the heavily monitored border between two political systems that not only separated Germans from Germans, but also divided all of Europe and the world into two opposing power blocs. Helmstedt-Marienborn is a place to commemorate those who lost their homes, experienced suffering or injustice, or were killed as a consequence of the GDR border regime. (Stiftung Gedenkstätten Sachsen-Anhalt, n.d.; see Figure 8)

Figure 8.

The infamous architecture of GDTM, its roof, and the border control booths.

Here, the leaflet recognizes itself as a metaphorical, container of a container of memory. This understanding thus forms a framework the surroundings one can see from the visitor’s center. As I observed the repurposed ruins, I saw that majority of the few visitors at GDTM as not appearing to follow the information board’s self-guided tour. Rather, they appeared to freely wander among the preserved buildings, often silent or whispering to their travel partners, walking slowly, and stopping to take in these various vignettes. Here, GDTM acts as two differing rhetorical objects at once. As HMBC—a singular authentic historical ruin of the past which the tourist can tour and explore—the roof is a literal container for various collections of authentic objects from the past. But at the same time, this open-air time capsule is brought from ruin to working memory place with its open doors, lights turned on, and limited meta-communication. This ultimately allows GDTM to be read as both a literal and metaphorical nesting container of memory.

Replicating the very few other tourists, from the visitor’s center I also began to organically move in and out of the different rooms and buildings, thus creating my own narrative of GDTM within the state-curated framework. Here, historical artifacts displayed in mid-use played out a vignette into both the everyday and exceptional moments in a divided Germany, all of which wrought a narrative of the lack of freedoms in East Germany. For instance, the passport control booth displayed artifacts from the era—stationary, magazines, typewriters, and so on—as if being used by a GDR guard who has just momentarily stepped away from stopping East German travel to the West. Similarly, the former currency exchange office’s in its medias res presentation, supported by additional contextual information on the walls and in paper leaflets, served a semiotic connotative function in enacting Zelizer’s subjunctive voice. This meant that the material and kisceral presentation of past and present wrought into being an emotive cultural memory of what it would have been like to live under such an oppressive regime and the lessons learnt.

Speaking to the larger issues of a lack of economic and travel freedoms denied to East Germans, the exchange of currency had an extra connotative focus. Here, I read this scene as a rhetorical antithesis of how travel at sites like HMBC was an enactment of political freedom. This antithesis became a rhetorical device that was then repeated in a nearby cramped and bleak room used to perform border inspection procedures. Here, the display of various mirrors and other technologies used to look for escapees created a literal and rhetorical claustrophobic depiction of Stasi scrutinization as a material consequence of the GDR. Stepping into each building was thus freeze framing a historical moment in time in which GDTM juxtaposed a past event through a present-day understanding.

Subjunctive authenticity

As I visited the differing vignettes situated within and among the decaying GDR infrastructures worked, the hot authenticity of personal narratives and experiences became just as rhetorically important as the cold authenticity of statistics and facts about life in the GDR. Together, this assemblage of various authentic devices came together to create a kisceral rhetorical juxtaposition in time and space. At the former staff entrance, my initial impressions were not driven by linguistic propositions but were drawn from the environmental cues of decaying infrastructures functioning as an immediately identifiable index to the oppressive regime behind their creation and eventual demise. While linguistic narratives in the information boards and vignettes would bring me back to the present to reflect on what we can learn from the past for the now, I was invited to infer the proposition’s conclusion by imagining myself within this oppressive regime and moment of time: A is this meant to be capitalised? rhetorical act enabled through its multimodal authenticity. By imagining myself in the past, a significant consubstantiality was thus created: both with other visitors as modern-day witnesses, alongside the past figures who were directly affected by the division of Germany. This ultimately makes the rhetorical performance of GDTM in the subjunctive voice can not be done without a multimodal, inferential rhetoric that uses and curates cultural memory discourses.

From observer to observed

As I came to the end of my tour at GDTM, this consubstantiality was once more foregrounded in a deserted far-off corner of the memorial museum. This was the original border soldier’s observation bridge next to the freeway which was used to search for East German escapees (see Figure 9). In an area that appeared out of bounds for potential GDR scrutiny, such feelings were quickly dissipated by a poster on one of the HMBC bridges. Here, a close-up picture of a GDR guard using binoculars with the simple “See You” subtitle formed a visceral memory of what it would be to be watched by without consent: an act that is considered government overreach in Western.A sense of foreboding thus bookended my visit as I left the site. The closeness of the face of the immediately identifiable uniform with a slight upturned mouth recreated the claustrophobia of the earlier inspection rooms. Transforming me once again into an Moreover, as this rhetorical witness I found myself once more imagining myself as East German scrutinized citizen, it thus created a paradoxical present and empathetic consubstantiality between myself, other visitors, and the imagined, what-once-was East Germans. This meant that as I left the site, I ultimately left with a greater logical and emotive understanding of the many consequences of the division of Germany that are still felt today.

Figure 9.

The former observation bridge.

The Consubstantiality of the Rhetorical Witness

As the busiest border crossing between East and West Germany, HMBC’s central role during the Cold War has made GDTM a persuasive memory place. As a postmodern memorial museum, GDTM follows the example of the many Holocaust memorial museums of Europe as a repurposed artifact and container of cultural memory. From traveling to and from the location, traversing the authentic infrastructures with a solemn reverence, and taking photographs to capture the in medias res vignettes of a Soviet Germany, the visitor participates in creating the state-led cultural memory narratives through Gilbert’s four modes of communication. This is critically then paired with authenticity as a rhetorical device. I therefore contend that Through such inferential work, the tourist’s own subjective motivations and experiences become just as important as the physical site itself in creating a “rhetorical imaginary” (Allison & Bloomfield, 2018, 2019) of what-it-was to what-is-now.

I began this article by posing two guiding research questions from which to examine this multimodal rhetorical memory place. The first research question asked the following:

Research Question 1: What rhetorical work is at play by repurposing an artifact from the past into forming the architecture of the memorial museum itself?

I situated this question between cultural studies and new museology through a rhetorical lens. I argued that a critical reading of this rhetorical work of the memorial museum must acknowledge the growing architectural trend to turn the historical infrastructures that would normally be an object on display into forming the physical infrastructure of the memorial museum itself. This was noted in my second guiding research question:

Research Question 2: How does the rhetorical work of the repurposed ruin attempt to standardize a cultural memory narrative through the authenticity of architecture?

Here, I argued that meaning-making is made through a kisceral rhetorical juxtaposition of both time and space. I argued that McLuhan’s medium as the rhetorical message is enacted by the conservation of authentic objects in the creation of a subjunctive suspension of time. This repurposing thus hinges on the use of authenticity, both metaphorical and literal, as a rhetorical device that creates ethos to the overarching cultural memory narratives made in the total assemblage of the memorial museum.

To examine this argument in further detail, my case study of GDTM is an exemplar of the postmodern rhetorical work of the repurposed post–Soviet memorial museum. Here, I echo Sodaro’s argument that the creation of a unifying cultural memory is critical for countries emerging from conflict and transitioning to democracy such as a post-Soviet Europe. Specifically, Sabrina Mihelj (2017) argued that European Union (EU) elites can potentially put pressures on former Eastern Bloc countries to remember their past in an “appropriate” way (p. 242). This therefore means that Just as Young (1996) warned that “the motives of memory are never pure” (p. 2), being a visitor to GDTM not only transforms the ruin into a contemporary rhetorical site. Rather, it ultimately remakes the visitor a rhetorical witness to history: from passive observer to Willis’s guarantor that the traumatic event will not re-occur (Willis, 2014, p. 18).

By repurposing the ruin as a memorial museum, I argue that its rhetorical successes outweigh the challenges of lacking a purpose-built infrastructure. While The ruin may not offer any additional discursive information, its tangible and intangible, kisceral and visceral rhetorical work speaks to the emotive work of postmodern new museology. This therefore means that Here, Repurposing foregrounds metaphorical and literal authenticity to both tell historic truths and provide a commemorative place to heal and restore. This rhetorical work of repurposing is nevermore clear than in relation to authenticity. Here, the repurposing of not only exhibits but the buildings themselves forms the semiotics work of the memorial museum. With both the collections and buildings themselves forming the semiotic work of the memorial museum, For the case study of GDTM, in this article I have shown how it presents a hyper-real meta-authenticity as each numbered ruin-turned-exhibit presents a semi-interactive window into East German life. The hyphens need to stay as they are. In the kisceral rhetorical juxtaposition of time and space, In addition, I contend that this dynamic architectural repurposing then helps negate denials of responsibility alongside the past. Here, this juxtaposition allows for building a multimodal consubstantiality between visitors at the memorial museum and those whose histories it is built upon. Ultimately, While 100% agreeance on cultural memories can never be reached, I contend that repurposing invites a new visual frame (McGeough et al., 2015) for rethinking the memory place as a site of trauma. Consequently, this means that GDTM and other similar repurposed memorial museums thus become Janus-faced sites of emotive commemoration and historical education.

I argue that This use of authenticity to create a Janus-faced memory space continues this state-sponsored memory work for GDTM. Through material rhetorical analysis, I showed how The in medias res displays provided evidence for the memorial museum’s own narrative and arguments by presenting the realities of living in a divided Germany. Here, alongside my own cultural knowledge of the Cold War and the division of Europe, GDTM laid out the consequences of a xenophobic political regime, the almost inevitable abuse and restrictiveness of communism by people in power, and ultimately how Germany is better off united rather than divided. Utimately, I contend that such work can be generalized out to repurposed ruins more generall. Here, I argue that a kisceral rhetorical juxtaposition turns the repurposed ruin into Spalding’s (2002) living and rhetorical museum, Moreover, it dismisses Huyssen’s (2016) warning that museums can become mausoleums. For the GDTM, these processes make GDTM a dynamic site of self-reflective cultural memory that builds consubstantiality through shared experiences. These are then facilitated by the memorial museum proprietors who are in turn sponsored by the State to curate a cultural memory of what-once-was and its influence today.

This role of cultural memory and trauma has never felt more pressing in this contemporary political climate. With the increase in nationalism, populism, the far right, and the resurgence of Nazism, these divisions in contemporary society drives a need to understand the power and affect of cultural memory. In our mediatized societies, the cultivation and communication of cultural memory may now be considered the realm of communication technologies. However, the simple act of visiting a site of authenticity creates a kisceral communicative affect that cannot be replicated purely through linguistic or visual propositions alone. Ultimately, visiting the repurposed memorial museums becomes a pilgrimage by which to make reparations for the atrocities of the past (Hansen-Glucklich, 2014, pp. 183–184). The repurposed is simply a stop along the way.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by the Annenberg Research Grant, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, USA.

ORCID iD

Marcia Clare Allison

Notes

Author Biography

Dr Marcia Clare Allison is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and an Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies 2021-24 Associate Fellow at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research explores how Western social change is a rhetorical process that is both enacted and thwarted against neoliberal ideology, doxa, and cultural memory. Her research therefore examines the major social disparities of our time as they are rhetorically constructed both on and off line: the climate crisis and environmental justice; social equality; deliberative democracy; and public trust and understanding in science.

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Repurposing the Ruin to Remember: Multimodal Rhetoric and Cultural Memory in the Post–Soviet Memorial Museum

Abstract

Keywords

Theoretically Creating the Memorial Museum

Rhetorically Critiquing the Material Memorial Museum as a Container and Object of Memory

The Four Multimodal Modes of Cultural Memory

Janus-Faced Authentic Juxtaposition

Repurposing the Ruin to Remember

The Multimodal Politics of Cold War Memory

A Multimodal Argumentative Critique of the Repurposed Memorial Museum

Being a rhetorical witness to a lieux de memoire

Memorializing authenticity

An authentic container within a container

The consubstantial juxtaposition of time and space

Subjunctive authenticity

From observer to observed

The Consubstantiality of the Rhetorical Witness

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author Biography

References