Abstract
Starting from the reflections on concrete made by Günter Grass in his The Tin Drum, in a landscape dominated by the bunkers built by the Third Reich, an analysis of the unexpected relation between concrete and memory is made possible. Known for certain attributes like its brutality, “eternal modernity” and unnaturalness (Forty 2012; Forty 2005), concrete seems to be poles apart of memory and history; and yet, what Grass reveals in his novel through a tragicomic depiction of the concrete’s bunkers is exactly how these architectures (and specifically their material of construction) embody an era of trauma and meaninglessness like that of the WWII.
Through the analyses of the temporalities inscribed in the objects (Beyaert-Geslin 2015), it becomes possible to reflect on the dimension of time, history and memory that a culturally mediated material like concrete has been conveying through its uses. An euphoric “discovery” allowing for previously impossible building construction, concrete had already been imagined in many narratives, somehow anticipating its own birth in the form of a myth (Forty 2019).
Nevertheless, its historical uses, from being the material in which bunkers were built to its more recent mis(use) in the neverending Israeli–Palestinian conflict (Delso 2018) change its destiny and cultural perception, making of the material an “historicity in progress” (Ingold 2013).