If the grand narrative of German reunification in the autumn of 1989 in media discourse used to be a more or less coherent story of successful reconciliation, recent political developments have made it necessary to question some of the nuances of this seemingly flawless narrative. One way of doing this is to present personal memories in narrative form for consideration as more or less autobiographical accounts from the inside, so to speak. A growing number of writers who were children and young people 35 years ago, at the time of reunification, are now starting to write about their childhood and memories of the reunification process. These stories display more or less biographical features, albeit composite and contrived.
In this paper, two novels, both dealing with the past, are compared: Grit Lemke’s affirmative oral history Kinder von Hoy (2021) and David Blum’s more critical Dantesque underworld narrative Kollektorgang (2023). Lemke’s depiction of a happy childhood is rather nostalgic, if not downright ostalgic (“East-nostalgic”), while Blum’s is much more discerning. Generational considerations may explain this difference in approach. What they have in common is that they ascribe significance to the big city with its high-rise buildings as a symbol of a collapsed system, based on their own memories of reunification.
Essay by
Lisa Källström and Jana Mikota
December 9, 2024
A sketch for the cover of the second East German edition to Pippi Langstrumpf (1988) showing a girl standing on her head on horseback is the starting point for this article. It was drawn by Cornelia Ellinger, only one year before the fall of the Berlin wall. The sketch becomes a starting point for a discussion of humor and materiality in the reception of Pippi in the GDR.
Essay by
Lisa Källström
December 11, 2023
The article deals with samizdat writing in the GDR, which could not be published legally. Thus, authors published their critical texts on handbills and smaller booklets. The article shows forms of distribution and focuses the analysis on individual examples and actors.
Essay by
Ines Soldwisch
June 20, 2023
The article summarizes the main findings of a socio-historical study devoted to the question of the political and social handling of “paranormal,” “parapsychological” or “occult” knowledge, experiences, and practices in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The “scientific worldview” derived from Marxism-Leninism and propagated in the GDR was essentially a scientistic conception of reality. Against this background, all occult or paranormal topics were rigorously rejected in the public discourse of the GDR.
By
Andreas Anton and Ina Schmied-Knittel
January 24, 2022
In her book on the East German experiment, The People’s State, Fulbrook launched a concept that owes a lot to her life-long preoccupation with Max Weber’s theories of Herrschaft. She calls it “participatory dictatorship”. An unbelievably large proportion of the population — roughly one in six, she calculated — took an active part in activities that had to be carried out to uphold the political system as such.
By
Anders Björnsson
April 29, 2014
Brasch’s novella does two things: it presents lives smothered by incarceration, and it also places the reader on the other side of the barrier, as a witness to the road movie that crashes into the Wall.
Essay by
Jakob Norberg
June 27, 2012
Sofi Gerber, Öst är Väst men Väst är bäst: Östtysk identitetsformering i det förenade Tyskland, East is West but West is best: East German identity formation in unified Germany, Stockholm University (Stockholm Studies in Ethnology 5) 2011, 248 pages
By
Michael Rießler
October 5, 2011
By matching agent lists with agent reports from the Stasi archives, Professor Almgren, who is affiliated with Södertörn University, has delved deeper into issues relating to particular individuals than the Swedish security police have.
She has established the incompetence of the Swedish security police and their inability to uncover threats to Sweden at the time.
By
Anders Björnsson
September 14, 2011
Elske Rosenfeld was 15 when the Berlin Wall came down. She realized that this was the end of the critical discourse that the citizens’ movements had brought to life in the GDR. When the 1990 election results were announced in the media, she cried. Today the topic of 1989 is her professional project as an artist.
By
Unn Gustafsson
April 11, 2011
On June 24, 2010 Regeringsrätten, Sweden’s Supreme Administrative Court, reached a verdict, marking a victory for Professor Birgitta Almgren’s research. Both the Swedish Security Service (Säpo) and the Stockholm Administrative Court of Appeal had rejected Professor Almgren's request to obtain the classified documents from the GDR's foreign espionage that the CIA sent to Säpo.
By
Anders Björnsson
August 26, 2010
Issue 2024, 4: 
Baltic Worlds covers; the Baltic Sea Region, Eastern Europe, Russia, CentralAsia, Caucasus and the Balkan area.