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Something strange caught Sophie Calle's eye when she arrived in former East Berlin in 1996: everywhere the French visual artist looked she was met with strangely empty or disturbed spaces. Like bone protruding from skin, a bare-looking steel structure poking through the shiny façade of the Palast der Republik1 (Palace of the Republic). In the centre of Michendorf's leafy Soviet Cemetery, an eerily vacant plinth covered in dust and debris. An awkward collection of granite blocks that looked like it had tumbled into the Platz der Vereinten Nationen (United Nations Square) from nowhere. Even stranger yet, when Calle asked locals what had once occupied these spaces, many struggled to remember. Or they responded with conflicting accounts. The more Calle inquired, the further she seemed to be led astray by some sort of faulty collective memory.
The results of Calle's inquiry, her photographs alongside collected accounts from former East German residents, were published in book form in 1999. The original French publication, Souvenirs de Berlin-Est (Memories of East Berlin), was given intriguing alternative titles in English and German, respectively becoming The Detachment and Die Entfernung.2 The latter can be translated as a distancing, a removal, but also an act of expulsion. Collectively, the three titles speak not only of concrete erasure, but also a kind of defence against memory. An aloof exterior, perhaps, that conceals something more disturbing underneath. It is these motifs that continue to make Calle's project so compelling almost twenty-six years after its original publication.
The empty spaces photographed by Calle had, of course, once been occupied by national monuments of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). A giant Vladimir Lenin statue, for example, had towered over United Nations Square (renamed from Lenin Square in ). In her book, Calle includes an archival photograph of the vanished statue, introducing us to a bulky version of Lenin emerging from his gran