Focusing on Central Europe, the volume proposes a new paradigm of how culture works, based on a model of "inhabited ruins" as a space where contradictory elements come together into continually renewed and frequently paradoxical configurations. Examines art, architecture, literature and music.

Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Prologue: The Day the Wall Came Down (American Surreal); Derek Sayer Introduction: Delicate Empiricism; Dariusz Gafijczuk 1. Ruins and Representations of 1989: Exception, Normality, Revolution; Tim Beasley-Murray 2. The Ruins of a Myth or a Myth in Ruins? Freedom and Cohabitation in Central Europe; Paul Blokker 3. Democracy in Ruins: The case of the Hungarian Parliament; Endre Dányi 4. Itinerant Memory Places: The Baader-Meinhof-Wagen; Kimberly Mair 5. Edith Doesn't Live Here Anymore: A Story of Farnsworth House; Yoke-Sum Wong 6. Comments on Comments: Fake Fragments, Fake Ruins, and Genuine Paper Ruination; Jind?ich Toman 7. How We Remember and What We Forget: Art History and the Czech Avant-garde; Derek Sayer 8. Anxious Geographies - Inhabited Traditions; Dariusz Gafijczuk 9. Terezín as Reverse Potemkin Ruin, in Five Movements and an Epilogue; Michael Beckerman 10. Desert Europa and the Sea of Ruins: The Post-Apocalyptic Imagination in Egon Bondy's Afghanistan; Jonathan Bolton 11. History's Loose Ends: Reflections on the Structure of Velvet Revolutions; Peter Zusi