Remembering and Rethinking the GDR

Saturday 14 January 2012 saw an estimated 5,000 visitors from Berlin and beyond swarming over the precincts of the former Stasi headquarters on Normannenstraße (Fuchs, 2012), which had been reopened following extensive renovations. The date for the event had been chosen to coincide with two significant anniversaries: the twentieth anniversary of the law which first granted German citizens the right to examine their Stasi files (2 January 1992) and the twenty-second anniversary of the storming of the Stasi headquarters by East German civil rights activists (15 January 1990). Visitors were able to participate in a full day’s programme of walking tours of the precinct, visits to the archive and back-to-back talks, culminating in the first ever podium discussion between all three heads of the Stasi files authority: the present incumbent, Roland Jahn, and his predecessors, Joachim Gauck and Marianne Birthler. The event included contributions from many prominent actors from 1989–90 and was conducted under the title Wissen wie es war (‘Knowing how it was’).¹ Quite coincidentally, that same evening a group of five cabaret singers from the group named ‘Chansonwerkstatt’, four of them born in East Germany during the 1970s, presented the final performance of a show titled Ostpaket: Wendekinder packen aus! (lit: ‘Package from the East: Children of the Wende unpack’) (see Chansonwerkstatt, 2012).²

This chapter will consider what it might mean to ‘remember’ the GDR after the fall of the Berlin Wall, setting out the theoretical concepts which have underpinned the discussions of the research network ‘After the Wall: Reconstructing and Representing the GDR’. We will contex-tualise those theoretical concepts in a changing global landscape of remembrance in which understandings of what constitutes knowledge of the past and what it means to relate to the past in a meaningful way have shifted radically.

Collective memory, comprising the ways in which the past is perceived, shared, and constructed through daily interactions, ceremonial, or negative manifestations such as taboo, has become a focus for scholarship that crosses disciplinary boundaries within the humanities and social sciences. This chapter points to some potential new avenues for memory research using insights from different disciplines. Specifically, it draws on political science approaches, together with those from cognate social science disciplines, to examine ways in which current memory research on the GDR might usefully be supplemented. Adopting an alternative perspective on some of the common assumptions and themes in GDR memory research helps us to reassess the analytical priorities of the field and to explore alternative research methodologies and agendas. It is well beyond the scope of this chapter to present a comprehensive catalogue of political science approaches to the challenge of remembering the GDR; themes have therefore been selected to highlight different ways in which a political science perspective may inform contemporary debates in GDR memory research. These include the temporal perspective of political science; the significance of memory for society; the construction of memory collectives; the contextualisa-tion of memory in identity formation; and constructions of victimhood.

Opening her radio broadcast titled ‘Resistance Fighters’ with these words, Greta Kuckhoff emotively conjures up those executed for antiNazi resistance. For her listeners in August 1947, this programme was a forthright confrontation with the memories of a survivor. For those currently interested in tracing how histories of resistance have been written, however, her words represent much more than that: they point to the delicate materiality of memory — to the contingency of last letters having been written, surviving the end of World War II, arriving with addressees both intended and unforeseen at the time of writing, and becoming the permitted subject of a programme in a radio station which was at that time under Soviet control. Both the letters and the transcript of the radio programmes are part of a fascinating history about the commemoration of resistance to Nazism which goes to the very heart of contemporary debates about remembering and rethinking the GDR: the subject of these sources is antifascism, one of the most contested terms in re-evaluations of East Germany’s past.

When an individual writes about his or her life, he or she produces a narrative that offers not only an insight into broader historical processes, but also a particularly subjective interpretation of these events and their impact on the individual and the group. Among efforts to come to terms with the past, life writing offers the reader a sense of authenticity that is difficult to replicate in other genres. Where these narratives are produced by the victims of state violence, they gain the status of testimony; these individuals may be viewed as eyewitnesses (‘Zeitzeugen’), whose past suffering serves to legitimate both their memories and their right to be heard. As Christian Heuer (2010: 76) argues, particularly in the case of traumatic histories, the narration of experience in ego-documents seems to become proof of the authenticity of the biography: ‘These documents are thereby more than simply narrated life history. They appear as documents of fact.’²

This chapter reflects on the ‘memory of GDR literature’ in a twofold way. It focuses on Klaus Schlesinger’s Trug (2000) and analyses the Romantic, uncanny make-up of the doppelgänger relationship it depicts in order to discuss the novel’s (thematic) treatment of the GDR past (i.e. memory of the GDR in literature). By situating the text within the author’s oeuvre and relating it to other exemplary Berlin novels published around the turn of the millennium it also demonstrates the afterlife of narrative techniques which may be described as ‘typical of the GDR’ in post-Wende Berlin literature (i.e. memory of GDR literature today).

Since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, processes of remembering the GDR have been widely discussed in unified Germany and the idea of Ostalgie has become a key strand in these debates. Broadly understood as a form of nostalgia for the GDR, the idea has often been interpreted as a romanticisation of the socialist past and an attempt to underplay, or even overlook, the oppressive nature of the authoritarian state. The importance of these memory debates in understanding post-unification eastern identities should not be underestimated; as Patricia Hogwood explains in Chapter 2, exploring memories of the past helps to make sense of patterns of contemporary behaviour. This chapter explores how easterners interact with and negotiate the term Ostalgie when constructing east German identities. It draws on a series of in-depth interviews which were carried out between November 2009 and December 2010 with easterners who were born in the GDR in the 1970s and now live in Berlin. The findings are part of a doctoral project which explored how these individuals constructed their own and others’ eastern identities, and how they engaged with and negotiated dominant discourses in this process. The interviews were designed to be largely participant-led, which ensured that participants expressed their own perceptions, as well as their understandings of the discourse about Ostalgie, without any prompting. Ostalgie emerged as a key idea in the ways that they made sense of themselves and of other easterners.

The redrawing of borders in post-communist Europe led to a significant transformation of the continent’s diasporic landscape. The migration that followed the collapse of the Iron Curtain resulted in the reintegration of certain long-established diasporas into their ethnocultural homelands. 25 per cent of Bulgarian Turks, for example, were repatriated to Turkey in 1989 (Stewart, 2003: 30), while the following decade saw an influx of 1,630,000 Russian Germans to Germany (Pohl, 2009: 280). At the same time, entirely new diasporas were created, not by the movement of people across borders, as has traditionally been the case, but by the movement of borders across people. With the fragmentation of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union into smaller nationalising states, various ethnic communities were separated from their national homelands and subjected to processes of othering. Rogers Brubaker (2000: 2) describes this type of diasporic formation as ‘accidental’. ‘Accidental diasporas’, he observes, ‘crystallize suddenly following a dramatic — and often traumatic — reconfiguration of political space’.

A feature of post-GDR cultural memory is the clear division between museums documenting the inhumanity and criminality of the East German state and museums documenting so-called ‘everyday life’. This term (‘DDR-Alltag’) is widely used for those areas of East German life which, while subject to varying degrees of political and ideological pressure, were, for most people, free of state violence: the home, the workplace and leisure time. Even if Federal institutions such as the Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig (Leipzig Forum for Contemporary History) attempt to encompass both the state and the everyday, and even if museums of the everyday are beginning to address dictatorial terror, the two types of museum are likely to remain a feature of the German culture industry.

The East German past has been the focus of much debate and scholarly work in Germany since reunification in 1990. The official and government-sponsored discourse on this past is known as Aufarbeitung, the ‘reworking’ of the past, which regards the era of socialism as one part of the nation’s doppelte Vergangenheit, the ‘double burden in history’. Aufarbeitung comes with a very clear view of what the GDR was, the ‘SED-dictatorship’, and of what the present is, the free and democratic republic, a dichotomic mirror image of the ‘unjust’ and totalitarian socialist regime.¹ While the term SED-dictatorship, which is central to this discourse, seems to limit dictatorial rule to the ruling socialist party, it is fundamentally underpinned by an understanding that this aspect of the GDR shaped everything else: from the outcomes of elections to individual professional choices, cheap foodstuffs and low rents. More often than not it is thus used to mean the ‘GDR-as-dictatorship’ (see Beattie, 2008). Faced with a population that does not always seem to agree with these basic premises, Aufarbeitung has become a technique of governance that tries to form collective memory through commemoration, musealisation, education and research. The discourse is fashioned largely by concerns in the present, about citizens’ disengagement with politics and nostalgic sentiments about socialism, the loathed Ostalgie, which ‘whitewash’ the former regime.

Since the mid-1990s, Berlin has often been diagnosed as suffering from an acute case of ‘monumentitis’, an affliction which relates to both the number of monuments being constructed, and the protracted and controversial debates which accompany their construction and reception. On the one hand, this trend can be witnessed internationally as part of the contemporary ‘memory boom’; on the other, Berlin proves to be an extreme example, as demonstrated by a plethora of recent publications about the role of memory in this city (e.g. Ladd, 1997; Till, 2005; Jordan, 2006; Verheyen, 2008; Webber, 2008). Indeed, as the capital of a new, united Germany, Berlin has become a national ‘theatre of memory’ (Samuel, 1994) in which new cultural and political symbolism is being staged, and where the reconfiguration of a ‘normalised’ identity has — in the wake of two dictatorships and a divided Germany — challenged politicians and artists alike. Although the role of monuments has changed considerably during the twentieth century, from overt expressions of power to more ambiguous or subversive forms (Mittig, 1987), they continue to act as ‘symbols and repositories of memories’ (Ladd, 1997: 4), and play an important role in the construction — or rejection — of collective identities.

What did the GDR look like? Or more importantly for this chapter, how do we remember the look of the GDR? For most people, regardless of whether they lived in the GDR or not, this question would probably conjure up visual representations belonging to a well-known stock of media images which, through continuous repetition, have become iconic for the country and central to the production of historical knowledge.¹ Propelled forward by the growing mediatisation of history, a vast bank of images representing the GDR and in particular the fall of the Wall has been created since 1989. As a product of GDR memory discourse, this image arsenal reflects post-We n d e remembrance culture in its division between the political and the private sphere, and between the often institutionally driven focus on the Täterstaat (perpetrator state) on the one hand and, on the other, a broader notion of Alltagsgeschichte (history of the everyday) and the visual representation of the material world of the GDR in private museums (see Chapter 8), in films and on television.

Few would dispute that the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) placed considerable emphasis on the militarisation of GDR society. Following the creation of the National People’s Army (NVA) in 1956 and the introduction of conscription in 1962, the party urged the recruitment of career soldiers and promised privileges to those who served for longer than the 18 months of national service. The SED waged a propaganda battle to convince the population from kindergarten age upwards of the need to defend socialism, with a weapon if necessary. Additionally, the school curriculum included compulsory military education after 1978, while the paramilitary Society for Sport and Technology (GST) and the ‘fighting groups of the working class’ both enjoyed high status. In short, barely a family remained untouched by the GDR military. Wolfgang Kissel’s 1992 film Kinder, Kader, Kommandeure (Children, Cadres, Commanders), constructed solely with excerpts from officially sanctioned state-produced documentary films, succinctly and persuasively captured this creeping militarisation of GDR society.