Networked Remembrance: Excavating Buried Memories in the Railways beneath London and Berlin(8 Cultural Memories)

Networked Remembrance is the first book to explore questions of urban memory within what are some of the most commonly experienced subterranean margins of the contemporary city: underground railways. Using London’s and Berlin’s underground railways as comparative case studies, this book reveals how social memories are spatially produced – through practices of cartography and toponymy, memory work and memorialization, exploration and artistic appropriation – within the everyday and concealed places associated with these transport networks. Through numerous empirical excavations, this book highlights an array of different mnemonic actors, processes, structures and discourses that have determined the forms of «networked remembrance» associated with the subterranean stations and sections of the London Underground and Berlin U- and S-Bahn. In turn, it invites readers to descend into the «buried memories» that are often imperceptible to those travelling by rail beneath the British and German capitals and encourages them to ask what other memories might lie latent in the infrastructural landscapes beneath their feet. This book was the winner of the 2014 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Memory Studies.

Table of Contents:
CONTENTS: Departure Points – Social Memory in and under the City – Working across and beneath London and Berlin – Mapping an Icon: The Underground’s Mnemonic Cartographies – Reflection: The Changing Symbolism of Berlin’s Network Map – Naming the Network: The U- and S-Bahn’s Commemorative Toponyms – Reflection: The Underground’s Toponymic Heritage – The Roots of Resistance: Memory Work at Samariterstraße Station – Reflection: The Compensatory Memorialization of De Menezes – Accounting for Trauma: Memorializing Accidents under London – Reflection: Memorial Absence in the U- and S-Bahn – Networked Ruins: Re-encountering London’s Disused Stations – Reflection: (Re)membering Berlin’s Buried Ghost-Stations – Art from Below: Creating Mnemonic Imaginaries in the Vestiges of the U10 – Reflection: Mixing Memory at Aldwych – Infrastructures of Memory beneath and beyond London and Berlin.

About the Author :
Samuel Merrill is an interdisciplinary researcher based at the Department of Sociology’s Digital Social Research Unit at Umeå University. He completed his doctorate in Cultural Geography at University College London in 2014.

Review :
«In Networked Remembrance, Sam Merrill explores in detail the production of social memory in what has so far been an underexplored terrain in memory studies, the underground transport networks. In a densely written, engaging and cleverly structured book, Merrill descends into the London Underground and Berlin Untergrundbahn (U-Bahn) and Stadtschnellbahn (S-Bahn) to offer an empirically rich take on the ways in which these two undergrounds become part of urban remembering (and forgetting).» (Petr Gibas, The London Journal 43/2018) «[...] the book makes an important contribution to the study of London and Berlin, the history of underground infrastructure, and understandings of cultural and social memory.» (Rebecca Clare Dolgoy, German Studies Review, 41/3 2018)