Download Free Dis Membering And Re Membering The Gdr Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Dis Membering And Re Membering The Gdr and write the review.

This dissertation examines the contemporary portrayal of the GDR in German "Wendeliteratur" and "Wendefilm ". Specifically, I investigate what techniques are used to claim a collective identity and how real and fictional memories are constructed and authenticated. The memory of East Germany is currently undergoing a formative process as past events are being re-evaluated in the context of a Post-Unification society. These emerging collective memories will shape the Post-Unification German identity. Based on current theoretical discussion of cultural memory (i.e., Jan and Aleida Assmann, Pierre Nora, Maurice Halbwachs) in conjunction with detailed literary analysis, I examine the complex and often ambiguous nature of these processes. Both semi-autobiographical narratives like Jana Hensel's Zonenkinder (2003) and fictional texts like Thomas Brussig's novel Sonnenallee (1999) are intended in part as stable "Identitatsangebote ", offering an identity framework for a generation of disoriented East Germans. I show, however, that through narrative instability, these texts undermine their own intentions, both creating and reflecting a volatile and insecure East German identity. Furthermore, while these and other works (like the films Good Bye, Lenin (2003) and Das Leben der Anderen (2006)) make vigorous claims to authenticity, I illustrate how they simultaneously negate these assertions by questioning the validity of personal memories and emphasizing the fluid border between fact and fiction.
Memories of and attitudes to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, within contemporary Germany are characterized by their variety and complexity, whilst the debate over how to remember the GDR tells us a lot about how Germans see themselves and their future. This volume provides a range of international perspectives.
Memories of and attitudes to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, within contemporary Germany are characterized by their variety and complexity, whilst the debate over how to remember the GDR tells us a lot about how Germans see themselves and their future. This volume provides a range of international perspectives.
German-speaking Europe is an array of images that have emerged from varied discourses about itself and its neighbors, and “Germany and the Imagined East” revolves around the exchange of views on and in the vast construct called “the East.” The world has been divided conceptually in countless ways, but the works in this volume treat aspects of Germany as both part of and also separate from any perception of an eastern border. From the former German Democratic Republic,“East Germany,” to Österreich—whose name loses its eastern association in the English version, Austria,—the East begins within the very world of the German language. But it is also the expanse off to the right of Germany, within which essays in this collection treat such political and cultural distinctions as former Yugoslavia, Romania and Russia in Eastern Europe, or Turkey and Persia in the Near East, spreading through India to China and Japan in the Far East. With a variety of perspectives on literature, film, philosophy, architecture, music and history, these essays comprise a multidisciplinary collage that invites scholars from all departments to explore the wealth of insights German Studies has to offer on East-West relations.
Exploring the ways in which the GDR has been remembered since its demise in 1989/90, this volume asks how memory of the former state continues to shape contemporary Germany. Its contributors offer multiple perspectives on the GDR and offer new insights into the complex relationship between past and present.
Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, Austria, Italy and Israel: “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” as a Historical Quest offers an account on post-war coming-to-terms with the Holocaust tragedy in some European countries, such as Germany, Austria, and Italy.
This account of the “laboratory of radical democracy” in the months before East Germany’s absorption in the West challenges memories of Germany’s reunification. For many, 1989 is an iconic date, one we associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The year prompts some to rue the defeat of socialism in the East, while others celebrate a victory for democracy and capitalism in the reunified Germany. Remembering 1989 focuses on a largely forgotten interregnum: the months between the outbreak of protests in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 and its absorption by the West in 1990. Anke Pinkert, who herself participated in those protests, recalls these months as a volatile but joyous “laboratory of radical democracy,” and tells the story of how and why this “time out of joint” has been erased from Germany’s national memory. Remembering 1989 argues that in order to truly understand Germany’s historic transformation, we must revisit protesters’ actions across a wide range of minor, vernacular, and often transient sources. Drawing on rich archives including videotapes of untelevised protests, illegally printed petitions by Church leaders, audio recordings of dissident meetings, and interview footage with military troops, Pinkert opens the discarded history of East European social uprisings to new interpretations and imagines alternatives to Germany’s neoliberal status quo. The result is a vivid, unexpected contribution to memory studies and European history.
This open access book is about Mozambicans and Angolans who migrated in state-sponsored schemes to East Germany in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. They went to work and to be trained as a vanguard labor force for the intended African industrial revolutions. While they were there, they contributed their labor power to the East German economy. This book draws on more than 260 life history interviews and uncovers complex and contradictory experiences and transnational encounters. What emerges is a series of dualities that exist side by side in the memories of the former migrants: the state and the individual, work and consumption, integration and exclusion, loss and gain, and the past in the past and the past in the present and future. By uncovering these dualities, the book explores the lives of African migrants moving between the Third and Second worlds. Devoted to the memories of worker-trainees, this transnational study comes at a time when historians are uncovering the many varied, complicated, and important connections within the global socialist world.
This book discusses how societies, groups and individuals remember and make sense of global neoliberal change in Eastern Europe. Such an investigation is all the more timely as the 1990s are increasingly looked to for answers explaining the populist and nationalist turn across the globe. The volume shows how the key processes that impacted many lives across the social spectrum in Eastern Europe, such as deindustrialization, privatization, restitution and abrupt social reorganization, are collectively remembered across society today and how memory narratives of the 1990s contribute to current identities and political climate. This volume establishes the memory of economic transformation as a research focus in its own right. It investigates different levels of memory, from the national through the local to the cultural, analysing key myths of the transformation, giving special recognition to the social space and vernacular memories of the transformation period and reflecting on how the changes of the 1990s are mediated in cultural representations. Given the book’s interdisciplinary scope that covers several fields, it will prove to be of interest to those working in memory studies, contemporary history, sociology, East European area studies and literary and film studies. It will also serve as a significant point of reference for those researching the interdisciplinary and rapidly expanding field of transformation studies and thus is an invaluable source across different fields.
Remembering German- Australian Colonial Entanglements emphatically promotes a critical and nuanced understanding of the complex entanglement of German colonial actors and activities within Australian colonial institutions and different imperial ideologies. Case studies ranging from the German reception of James Cook’s voyages through to the legacies of 19th- and 20th- century settler colonialism foreground the highly ambiguous roles played by explorers, missionaries, intellectuals and other individuals, as well as by objects and things that travelled between worlds – ancestral human remains, rare animal skins, songs and even military tanks. The chapters foreground the complex relationship between science, religion, art and exploitation, displacement and annihilation. Contributors trace how these entanglements have been commemorated or forgotten over time – by Germans, settler-Australians and Indigenous people. Bringing to light a critical understanding of the German involvement in the Australian colonial project, Remembering German- Australian Colonial Entanglements will be of great interest to scholars of colonialism, postcolonialism, German Studies and Indigenous Studies. But for the editors’ substantial new introductory chapter, these contributions originally appeared in a special issue of Postcolonial Studies.