Gestures of iconoclasm: East Berlin's political monuments, from the late German Democratic Republic to postunified Berlin

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the offensively triumphant political monuments of the former East German regime became objects of persistent critique. The four monuments causing the most heated debates in Berlin were the monuments to Lenin (1970), the workers' militia (1983), Marx and Engels (1986), and Thalmann (1986). They managed to raise difficult questions about the proper criteria for judging their value: were they historical documents or artistic objects, thus worthy of preservation as such, or were they symbols of an undemocratic rule, justifying their removal or destruction for the sake of a united Berlin? This dissertation reassesses their value by reversing the criteria and showing how the four monuments became sources of value from which responses were produced. Through an examination of the changing attitudes and violent gestures against the monuments before and after German unification, it brings to view the ironically productive energies released through the critiques practiced in Berlin in the early 1990s.;Drawing from published and archival sources, the monuments and photographs, as well as interviews conducted during 2007 and 2008, this dissertation demonstrates how the treatment of the monuments serves as a case study of iconoclasm. The study approaches iconoclasm not as an historical epoch, but as a mode of communication, arguing for the presence of a limited but necessary set of components, such as the simultaneous destruction and production of images and the crucial appearance of an imagined idolater. Defacement, castration, deconstruction, hostile jokes and the condemnation of idolatry serve as critical devices that produce both literal and figurative forms of violence. The strategic or spontaneous gestures are expressive acts driven by the desire to triumph over the other and leave behind an image as a document of the real or symbolic destruction performed. While the actors and the historical and cultural moment determine the kind of iconoclastic gesture employed, the dissertation also argues for a systematic theory of iconoclasm that lends itself to cases of iconoclasm beyond Berlin in the 1990s.