Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper

Gabriele "Gabi" Dolff-Bonekämper (born 1952 in Münster) is a German art historian and heritage conservationist. From 2005 to 2021 she was professor of historic building conservation at the Technische Universität Berlin, and from 2016 the speaker of the German Research Foundation's research training group "Identität und Erbe" ("Identity and Heritage"), run jointly with the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Her main subjects are the theory of conservation, monuments of contemporary history, and the ways in which buildings and places become cultural heritage and are used to support collective identities.

Much of her writing concerns monuments whose memory is unwelcome: places of persecution and violence, the memorials built for them, and the arguments over the rebuilding of lost buildings. She worked in the monuments office of Berlin at the time of the reunification, when the buildings and monuments of the former East Germany suddenly had to be assessed for whether they were worth keeping, and the debates of those years — over the Neue Wache, the Berlin Wall and the Palast der Republik — have shaped her work since.

Life and career

Dolff-Bonekämper was born in Münster in 1952 as Gabriele Dolff. From 1971 to 1984 she studied art history, Christian archaeology and Romance studies (French) at the University of Marburg and the University of Poitiers, and at the Centre d'études supérieures de civilisation médiévale. She received her doctorate at Marburg in 1984–85, under and , with a dissertation on the history of recording and protecting monuments in Hesse-Kassel and Kurhessen in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, published in 1985. Until the radio-college () course on art ended in 1985 she was an editor at the German Institute for Distance Learning at the University of Tübingen, and then taught at the University of Stuttgart, where she worked on a computer project at the institute of art history.

From 1988 to 2002 she was an at the , recording the city's stock of historic buildings; after a stay at the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles in late 2001 and early 2002 she returned to that post. Her years in the Berlin office fell in the period of reunification, when the monuments of the vanished GDR had to be assessed: she has said that she was in the middle of the controversies about the Neue Wache and Helmut Kohl's plan to make it the central memorial of the Federal Republic, about the Berlin Wall as a monument one could neither bear nor remove, and about the Palast der Republik, which was experienced by East Berliners as a place of leisure and dismissed by West Germans as aesthetically empty.

She taught as a guest professor at the Institute for Urban and Regional Planning of the Technische Universität Berlin from 2002, and in 2005 became professor for the field of historic building conservation there. In 2016 the German Research Foundation approved a new research training group, "Identität und Erbe", as a joint institution of the Technische Universität Berlin, which coordinates it, and the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, funded with 3.2 million euros over four and a half years and led by Dolff-Bonekämper as speaker, with as deputy. The group, which also ran a public lecture series, examined how communities claim monuments, quarters and landscapes as supports for their identity, and why they accept, reinterpret or reject them.

Dolff-Bonekämper retired in the autumn of 2021 and remains active in the research training group; her chair was taken by the art historian and conservator . A festschrift, Denkmalwelten und Erbediskurse, was published for her retirement in 2021, and in 2025 she edited a collection of the research group's findings, Identität und Erbe: Konzepte, Konflikte, Konstruktionen, with Herold, Wolfram Höhne and other members of the group.

Research and writing

Conservation theory and monument values

In her theoretical work Dolff-Bonekämper argues for renewing the system of values on which conservation decisions rest. Her essay "Gegenwartswerte" ("Present-day values", 2010) takes up Alois Riegl's theory of monument values and asks how the values of the present day should enter into the assessment of what is worth preserving. A related strand of her writing deals with loss: in "Denkmalverlust als soziale Konstruktion" ("Monument loss as a social construction") she examines what it means for a community when a monument disappears, and how that loss is narrated.

Monuments of contemporary history

The best known of her essays is "Sites of Hurtful Memory", published in 2002 by the Getty Conservation Institute, on places that carry memories a society would rather not keep. She takes examples that were not built for what happened in them: the National Stadium in Santiago, used by Augusto Pinochet's military government to hold, interrogate and torture prisoners after the 1973 coup; the Santa Anita racetrack in Los Angeles, where Japanese Americans were assembled for relocation in 1942; and the railway station at Montoire-sur-Loir, where Philippe Pétain promised collaboration to Adolf Hitler in 1940. The essay asks why such places should be preserved at all when they offend those who do not wish to be reminded, what they convey that books, testimony and film cannot, and how they should be treated as material heritage. Alongside this she has written on the Neue Wache in Berlin, the Berlin Wall and the Palast der Republik, and on the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, then still a project, in an essay of 1999 on what she called borrowed pain.

Her work on the Berlin Wall, written while the remains of it were still being dealt with in the city, treats the Wall as an archaeological site in progress and appeared in The Archaeology of 20th Century Conflict. The same question of difficult heritage underlies her chapter in the Council of Europe's 2009 volume Heritage and Beyond, which reads the Faro Convention of 2005 as a framework in which communities rather than experts define what their heritage is, and her work with colleagues in Buenos Aires on a thematic inventory of the monuments left by the Argentine military dictatorship.

Reconstruction, authenticity and identity

In the German debate about rebuilding lost buildings Dolff-Bonekämper has been one of the sceptical voices. She is a co-editor of and a contributor to the 2010 anthology Denkmalpflege statt Attrappenkult ("Conservation instead of the cult of dummies"), which collects arguments against the reconstruction of destroyed monuments, and in "Ähnlichkeit erwünscht" ("Similarity desired") she weighs the social and formal value of rebuilt monuments against the question of their authenticity. Connected with this is her work on how heritage is mobilised for identity: her chapter on the Berlin Kulturforum reads its architecture as a medium of political conflict, and the research training group she led since 2016 was set up on the premise that identities are unstable constructions and that monuments are claimed as their supports, not simply inherited.

Reception

Her writing has reached English-language readers in anthologies on heritage and on the archaeology of conflict, among them The Heritage Reader (2008) and The Archaeology of 20th Century Conflict (2002). The Council of Europe published her essay on the Faro Convention in both English and French, in Heritage and Beyond and in Le patrimoine et au-delà.

Selected publications

Monographs

Articles and chapters

As editor

Memberships and academic roles

Dolff-Bonekämper is or has been a member of the , the , the German national committee of ICOMOS, the advisory board of the journal , the Arbeitskreis Theorie und Lehre der Denkmalpflege, the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art (2004–2007) and the Bürgerverein Hansaviertel. She co-edits the book series Stadtentwicklung und Denkmalpflege, has sat on the scientific committee of Perspective, the journal of the Institut national d'histoire de l'art, and was, before leading the research training group, a speaker of the "Identität und Erbe" research cluster in the Technische Universität Berlin's innovation centre for the design of living environments.

External links

• Literature by and about Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper in the catalogue of the German National Library
• Personal website
• Page at the Institute for Urban and Regional Planning, Technische Universität Berlin
• Research training group "Identität und Erbe"