| dc.description.abstract | The main focus of this research is on the concept ‘performing the city’s past.’ The aim is to find out how the past of Rotterdam is performed through the bearers of memory, the ‘Fire boundary’ (Brandgrens) and the ‘Soul of the Reconstruction’ (Ziel van de Wederopbouw) and how this produces a collective memory. The past is impossible to grasp, so the performance of the past will always be a representation of a (remembered) past. Only the remembered history can be performed by putting it in a contemporary frame of reference; therefore, it is about memory and not history. The performed past of Rotterdam is the collective memory of the Reconstruction period (1940-1968). Two bearers of memory through which this is done are the Fire Boundary and the Soul of the Reconstruction. Though these bearers of memory share the same subject and exist both for less than ten years, these are nevertheless two very different performances due to each of its creative appropriation of the past, which becomes apparent in the analysis on the criteria location, audience address and affect. The results show that two performances of the past, which both contribute to the same collective memory for the city, do this through different types of performances, in different settings (symbolic and staged versus material and place of history) and focussing on different parts of the collective memory (reconstruction and the undefeatable versus destruction and the battle). In this research, the concept of performing the city’s past proved to be useful to explain the renewed interest in Rotterdam for its past but I am convinced that it can also be used to account for other social, economic and cultural processes in society. | |
