Vandalismus. Gewalt gegen Kultur

Demolition or preservation? The dispute over the demolition of Berlin’s “Palace of the Republic”, the seat of the former GDR People’s Chamber, is just one of countless current examples. It is not only conservationists and urban planners who are daily faced with the dilemma that not everything can be preserved, or is not deemed valuable enough to be preserved. However, one cannot dispose of everything simply because it no longer corresponds to the spirit of the times. But where and how do we establish standards to decide what to do with our own and other people’s cultural assets and legacy? How should we weigh the loss of irretrievable testimonies of history against the demands of modernity or the human urge for symbolic destruction, especially in times of upheaval?