“Whose Streets? Our Streets!”: Social Memory and Contentious Politics in a Democracy

Abstract

In 2019, protests rippled across six continents affecting democracies and autocracies alike with such fervor that journalists repeatedly declared it the year of the street protest. Despite globalization and mobile technologies, contentious politics largely continue to take shape through the performances, narratives, and materialities of the street. That is, contentious politics take on particular place characteristics and thus must be studied in diverse places. This dissertation examines the contentious politics of Germany, a western democracy with a convoluted political history and memory culture. With its cautionary tale of the Nazi movement turned regime, Germany provides an especially valuable context within which to study social memory’s relationship with contentious politics. Based on ten months of fieldwork in Dresden, Berlin, and Munich, this dissertation demonstrates how contentious political actors engage in memory politics and perform, narrate, and employ the materialities of place to (re)mediate multiscalar memories. Inspired by Charles Tilly’s repertoires of contention, the stock of performances and tactics available to contentious political actors, the dissertation examines the role of place memories in present-day contentious politics through corporeal, spatial, and representational repertoires. Corporeal repertoires refer to repeat performances in which meaning making is achieved through the protesting body. As captivating as its visuality may be, it is often the protesting body’s aurality that first signals its presence to passersby. Music, from spontaneous to studio creations, are core to protest soundscapes and the efforts of contentious political actors to reconstruct place. Illustrated through original and appropriated songs, protesting bodies can wield music’s tripartite of meaning making—musical composition, lyrical content, and performance context—to build solidarity, recall a social memory, move bodies to desired political actions, or reimagine geographies. Spatial repertoires shift from the protesting body’s corporeality to its meaning making through mobility in urban space. Protesting bodies, as remembering bodies, occupy or weave together memory places to create new spatial narratives and in turn to (re)construct urban memoryscapes. As placelings, protesters mediate the connections between memory and place and engage in memory work for themselves, for the cities they envision, and/or for a larger imagined community. As exemplified through a historical spatial analysis of Munich digitally mapping 170 years of protest actions (1848–2019), certain places within a given locality become centers of contentious political action because of the deep histories they signify. Shifting from the visible protester to the concealed street artist, representational repertoires refer to meaning making through visual media intimately engaged with the materiality of place. Street art sometimes interacts with institutional memory sites (memory site interactant), but more often floats freely in the larger urban memoryscape thereby transforming liminal spaces into memory places (floating mnemonic actant). Already acknowledged for its placemaking capacity, street art’s mnemonic capacity to push, pull, and play with place memories is demonstrated through various examples commemorating anniversaries, drawing historical analogies, time-shifting historical figures, returning to “better” times, and crafting nascent memories. Evidenced by these chapters, German contentious politics, whether working for a cause or for a political identity, are steeped in social memories and rooted in the meaning making of place. Understood within the wider context of the present democratic crisis, I argue that social memory has become unmoored from the historical past and increasingly mythic in character, especially on the right. Just as democracy suffers from post-truthism and tribalism, so too does social memory. In fact, the memory problem may very well be exacerbating the democratic one. The presence of this problem in Germany, a nation so praised for its memory culture and handling of its dark past, casts great doubt on what constitutes a healthy memory culture. To restore the health of liberal democracies, societies must revisit their relationship to the past.