| Abstract | This paper frames the architectonics of memory in Berlin through two controversial memorials initiated after German unification. An interpretive framework of building memory guides the question of how the authority of Berlin's present is made vivid through commemoration. The Neue Wache and the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe reflect two distinctive instances of the reconstruction of the past for a new generation of Germans. Consideration is given to the primacy of the will to architecture itself as an eventful feature of the present through the contrasting approaches to commemoration. The cases described are the remaking of The Neue Wache as a national memorial, and the unmaking of National Socialism in the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe as two shapes of a common process of reconstructing the past from the vantage point of the present. (English)
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