Miniature Monuments: Modeling German History offers a series of essays on small-scale models of
bombed out cities. Created between 1946 and the present these plastic renderings of places
provide eerie glimpses of destruction and devastation resulting of the air war. This study thus
permits fresh angles on post-war responses to the compounded losses of WW II and it does so
through considering these miniature monuments (of among others Frankfurt Munich
Schwetzingen Heilbronn and Hiroshima) in a deep cultural history that interlaces the sixteenth
eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Three-dimensional renderings in diminutive size have
rarely been subjected to rigorous theoretical reflection. Conventionally models whether of
ruins or intact spaces have been assumed to be easily legible that is they have been assumed
to be vehicles of the authentic. Yet rubble and other models should be theorized as complex
simulacra of abstract realities and catalysts of memories. Miniature Monuments thus tackles a
haunting paradox: building ruins. The book elucidates how utterly contingent processes of
crumbling and collapse (the English words for the Latin ruina) came to command such great
interest in modern Europe that tremendous efforts were taken to uncover render and most of
all recreate ruins.
