‘Stones do not Speak for Themselves’: Disentangling Berlin’s Palimpsest

AbstractAt the time of German unification, politicians, historians and academics expressed concerns that the material legacies of National Socialism had become too integrated into Berlin’s urban fabric. Unification disrupted the status quo of several such buildings and campaigners sought to use this as an opportunity to facilitate increased engagement with their National Socialist layers. Through exploring the contests that surrounded three high-profile examples, the Aviation Ministry, Olympic Stadium and Tempelhof Airport, this article will reveal the contingent nature of post-unification responses to Berlin’s National Socialist layer. Firstly, it will analyse the debates that surrounded the buildings and demonstrate that the problematisation of heritage is a process, one shaped and mediated by myriad factors not necessarily relating to the trace itself. Secondly, it will show that the attempts to bring about increased engagement with each of the sites’ histories have been informed by a common rationale, namely, the development of a ‘palimpsestic’ approach to each building’s layers

Curating Tempelhof: negotiating the multiple histories of Berlin's ‘symbol of freedom’

Despite its National Socialist origins, the post-war use of Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport has seen it recast as a ‘symbol of freedom’. Since the airport’s 2008 closure the site has been caught between calls for increased engagement with its use under the Third Reich and economic incentives to repackage it as an attractive events location. Through analysing the different strategies through which Tempelhof’s past is negotiated, this article will highlight the contested nature of Berlin’s relationship with the past and the complex interaction between memory politics and more pragmatic issues

Nazi Buildings, Cold War Traces and Governmentality in Post-Unification Berlin

Bringing together approaches from cultural and urban history, as well as German studies and political theory, Clare Copley's probing study reflects on post-unification responses to iconic Nazi architecture to reveal insights into power, legitimacy and memory politics in the Berlin Republic. Analysing public debates, physical interventions into the buildings and the structuring of the memory landscapes around them, the book demonstrates that the politics of memory impact not just upon the built environment of the post-dictatorship city, but upon the way decisions about it are made. In doing so, Nazi Buildings, Cold War Traces and Governmentality in Post-Unification Berlin makes the case for conceiving of a specifically 'post-authoritarian' governmentality and uses the responses to constructions like Goering's Aviation Ministry, Tempelhof Airport and the Olympic complex to explore its features

Understanding earthquakes using the geological record: an introduction.

Synthesizing geological and geophysical approaches to investigate the deformation of the lithosphere offers the potential for important new insights because of the range of timescales and lengthscales sampled by the different techniques, although successfully spanning this range represents one of the main challenges to be overcome when conducting such work. Nonetheless, significant progress has been made in linking such diverse observations and models. For example, the recognition of transient and mostly aseismic slip in some parts of subduction zones being coupled to field-based analysis of mixed-lithology fault zones has resulted in a new understanding of the mechanisms for generating transient fault slip at velocities intermediate between earthquakes and plate motions [1–5]. Similarly, observations of earthquake faulting in the lower continental crust made both petrologically (preserved as pseudotachylytes) and seismologically has resulted in a new appreciation of the diversity of rheology in the continental crust, and the importance of trace amounts of water in controlling the deformation [6–10]. In February 2020, the Royal Society hosted a Hooke discussion meeting to further explore links between geological and geophysical methods of studying faulting, titled ‘Understanding earthquakes using the geological record’. This introduction highlights some of the common themes of the meeting, relating to the factors that govern fault behaviour, and the feedbacks between faulting and the geological evolution of the Earth’s crust and upper mantle

Intra- and inter-rater reliability of the Assessment of Children’s Hand Skills based on video recordings

Introduction: Hand skills are essential for children's occupational performance. The Assessment of Children's Hand Skills is a new assessment that utilizes naturalistic observations to capture children's actual hand-skill performance in everyday contexts. This study aimed to explore intra- and inter-rater reliability of the assessment based on video recordings, which are different from original naturalistic observations.Method: Two raters scored video recordings of 54 hand-skill activities performed by 12 children with developmental disabilities, twice in 2 weeks. Intra- and inter-rater reliability was examined at the individual hand-skill item scores, activity scores, and children's composite scores of the Assessment of Children's Hand Skills.Findings: Intra-rater reliability at item levels was generally acceptable, and both raters exhibited moderate to high agreement between the first and second evaluations (intraclass correlation coefficients = 0.61-0.93) at activity scores and children's composite scores. However, the agreement between the two raters was unacceptable for most hand-skill items and activity scores. After rater effects were adjusted by Rasch analysis in children's composite scores, the inter-rater reliability was improved (intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.81).Conclusion: This study shows that the Assessment of Children's Hand Skills based on video recordings is reliable within the same raters. Further research is required to confirm its inter-rater reliability by involving more training and raters with varied clinical experience