From Donald Trump’s gold-plated triumphal arch and Viktor Orbán’s National Hauszmann Program back to Adolf Hitler’s plans for Germania, authoritarian rulers have long attempted to reconstruct a glorious past to help sustain a grandiose future. Monumental architecture, infrastructures of control, and spatial practices such as drills and rallies help to consolidate these visions, holding memory and myth-making in place, and cementing narratives of national greatness through time. In this talk, Katharyne Mitchell examines the spatial history of one particular site, Tempelhof Field in Berlin, in order to probe the ways that these visions and practices both succeed and fail, and how they may be implicated in our present moment. The name “Tempelhof” derives from its use as the headquarters of the Knights Templar, a crusading medieval order. This military history reverberated in the Prussian era, when the site served as a military parade ground, prison, and barracks. It continued through the 1930s and 1940s, when the space served as a Nazi rally site, monumental airport, “gateway to Europe,” and forced labor camp. On this site, the spaces of the past have affected the present in every historical fold. Today, the airport hangars and field at Tempelhof accommodate thousands of asylum seekers in substandard conditions, the future development of the field is bitterly contested, and the far-right AfD is on the rise in the city, largely on an anti-immigrant platform. In the current conjuncture, can the spatial histories of authoritarian haunting grounds illuminate the present?
Katharyne Mitchell is a distinguished professor of sociology and former dean of social sciences at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Trained as a geographer, her current work examines the material histories and built environment of spaces of containment, including the spaces of church asylum, refugee facilities, and forced labor sites. Recent books include Making Workers: Radical Geographies of Education (London: Pluto Press, 2018), the Handbook on Critical Geographies of Migration (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019), and the Routledge Handbook of Critical Philanthropy and Humanitarianism (Milton Park: Routledge 2023). She is the recent recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, Guggenheim and Brocher Foundation fellowships, and a residency fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. Mitchell is the author or editor of 13 books and special issues and over 100 articles and chapters, and has been awarded grants from the MacArthur, Spencer, Fulbright, and National Science foundations.
IWM Permanent Fellow Ayşe Çağlar will provide commentary and moderate the Q&A session.
