New Research on East Germany Issue 8-1 May 21, 2017 Revue D’Études Interculturelles De L’Image Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies
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REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES NEW RESEARCH ON EAST GERMANY ISSUE 8-1 MAY 21, 2017 REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES NEW RESARCH ON EAST GERMANY ISSUE 8-1 MAY 21, 2017 NEW RESEARCH ON EAST GERMANY ISSUE 8-1, 2017 Sommaire/Contents Guest Editor – Marc Silberman http://dx.doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.GDR.8-1 Issue Managing Editors - Brent Ryan Bellamy and Carrie Smith Editor in Chief | Rédacteur en chef Previous Team Members | Anciens membres de l’équipe Research Articles Sheena Wilson Marine Gheno, Dennis Kilfoy, Daniel Laforest, Lars Richter, Managing Editor | Rédacteur Katherine Rollans, Angela Sacher, Dalbir Sehmby, Justin Sully New Research on East Germany: An Introduction • 4 Brent Ryan Bellamy Marc Silberman Editorial Team | Comité de rédaction Negotiating Memories of Everyday Life during the Wende • 8 Maria Hetzer Brent Ryan Bellamy, Dominique Laurent, Andriko Lozowy, Editorial Advisory Board | Comité scientifique Tara Milbrandt, Carrie Smith-Prei, and Sheena Wilson Hester Baer, University of Maryland College Park, United States Beyond Domination: Socialism, Everyday Life in East German Housing Settlements, and New Directions in GDR Historiography • 34 Mieke Bal, University of Amsterdam & Royal Netherlands Academy Elicitations Reviews Editor | Comptes rendus critiques – Élicitations Eli Rubin of Arts and Sciences, Netherlands Tara Milbrandt Adventures in Communism: Counterculture and Camp in East Berlin • 48 Andrew Burke, University of Winnipeg, Canada Jake P. Smith Ollivier Dyens, Concordia University, Canada Archives for the Future:Thomas Heise’s Visual Archeology • 64 Web Editor | Mise en forme web Michèle Garneau, Université de Montréal, Canada Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann Brent Ryan Bellamy Wlad Godzich, University of California Santa Cruz, United States Whose East German Art is This? The Politics OF Reception After 1989 • 78 French Translator & Copy Editor | Traductions françaises Kosta Gouliamos, European University, Cyprus April A. Eisman Ève Robidoux-Descary Faye Hammill, University of Strathclyde, United Kingdom The “Gentle Lie”:Women and the GDR Medical System in Film and Literature • 100 Sonja E. Klocke Anton Kaes, University of California Berkeley, United States It Tastes like the East …The Problem of Taste in the GDR • 114 English Substantive & Copy Editor | Rédacteur Dominic McIver Lopes, University of British Columbia, Canada Alice Weinreb Shama Rangwala Sarah McGaughey, Dickinson College, United States Troubled Faces: The Melancholy Passion of Anna Seghers’s Die Entscheidung • 126 Front Cover Image - Jahrhundertschritt by Copy Editor | Révisions Peter McIsaac, University of Michigan, United States Benjamin Robinson Wolfgang Mattheuer © Stiftung Haus der Geschichte Shama Rangwala Marie-Dominique Popelard, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle - der Bundesrepublik Deutschland Founding Editors | Fondateurs Paris, France William Anselmi, Daniel Laforest, Carrie Smith-Prei, Sheena Wilson Christine Ramsay, University of Regina, Canada Laurence A. Rickels, Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe, Germany Sponsors Will Straw, McGill Univeristy, Canada Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada Contributor Bios • 142-145 This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada ISSUE 8-1, 2017 · 3 MARC SILBERMAN NEW RESEARCH ON EAST GERMANY: AN INTRODUCTION MARC SILBERMAN ver a quarter century has elapsed since the end of the Cold War terdisciplinary collaborations but also synergies that go beyond a single Wall, a tantalizing but risky attraction concealed by the Iron Paris, Milan, Berkeley, and New York provided the seed for and Cold War competition, something like a German iden- and the unification of Germany, enough time for writers, artists, state or geopolitical focus. The three coordinators—art historian April Curtain. In retrospect I recall that my studies in German up alternative approaches to cultural life, including that of East tity was on the agenda. German unification was suddenly scholars, and the general public to have both remembered their Eisman (Iowa State University), literary scholar Benjamin Robinson (In- until this point in the mid-1960s had never introduced lit- Germany. Finally, in 1972 the politics of détente or Ostpoli- postulated not only on the level of political affiliation but Opre-1990 experience and witnessed a series of controversies in the retell- diana University), and historian Eli Rubin (Michigan State University), erature from East Germany or even mentioned much more tik led to the mutual recognition of East and West Germany also as a shared identity: for the first time since the end of ing or rewriting of that past. Now we are in the process of a generational all members of that younger generation and all represented in this issue than the fact of Germany’s postwar division. Indeed, I’m not as sovereign states, followed by the international community the Second World War being German emerged as a nation- shift, not only in the sense of a young adult generation with few of their with contributions—went to work immediately and developed a series of sure I had read anything in German that had been written of Western countries opening diplomatic relations with the al mission. There were attempts to rewrite the literary his- own memories of divided Germany but also of a younger generation of linked panels for each annual fall GSA conference since then. I was im- after 1933 except texts by those Germans who had been ex- GDR. This recognition, together with the regime change in tory of both East and West Germany; political theories of scholars whose knowledge about the two Germanys has been mediated pressed with the breadth of participation as I monitored these successful iled during the Third Reich, something I soon discovered I East Germany in 1971, sparked considerable interest in the modernization and totalitarian governance were reconsid- by their older mentors. I am one of those older mentors and suspect that panels and decided to organize a small workshop at my home institu- had in common with fellow students at the Free University. West about GDR culture and politics in general, even among ered; a wave of Ostalgie (the sentiment of nostalgia for the the next-generation scholars are developing new approaches, sources, tion, the University of Wisconsin in Madison, to provide a forum for the Moreover, until the early 1970s West German and American political scientists and sociologists. This interest in fact grew loss of East Germany) and sometimes even Westalgie (the and methodologies for research on the German past and present. I have next generation of GDR scholars, specifically those not in Germany, to literary scholars tended to see GDR literature exclusively as and continued more or less unbroken through the collapse counter-sentiment for the loss of a distinct West Germany) repeatedly considered and reconsidered my own scholarly trajectory vis- discuss their experiences and their own new research from the outsider political propaganda produced by state scribes. of the East German regime in 1989 with West German and washed over the cultural discourse; and perhaps most sig- à-vis East Germany both before and after unification.1 But I am con- position of being once-removed.2 This yielded the idea for the current Anglophone scholars sharing similar perspectives in fairly nificantly the vanishing point of 20th-century German histo- vinced that our younger colleagues, who—for reasons of their own—are issue of Imaginations. This began to change for a number of reasons, and in the regular give-and-take.4 ry began to shift from 1933 to 1989, with normalization and drawn to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and what since uni- course of the 1970s attention turned increasingly toward lit- united Germany’s integration into a larger European Union fication is known as eastern Germany as an object of interest and even Without stealing thunder from the contributions featured here, let me erary production in East Germany owing to lack of access The dissolution of the GDR in 1990 changed the dynam- now the guarantee that nie wieder Auschwitz (never again fascination, have important things to communicate. briefly summarize some of the trends that I introduced as a point of to other kinds of information or encounters with the “other ics of the discourse about this state and its culture and, in Auschwitz) would endure. I have also worked on Holocaust departure for the workshop and others that emerged in the course of Germany.” Literature was regarded as an accessible docu- a curious sense, made the discourse more real(istic) as the memory in Germany, which has taught me first that how As co-chair with Janet Ward (University of Oklahoma) of the Interdis- our intense discussion and the subsequent process of revising the essays ment, a reflection of or window on social reality. One reason process of figuring outwas bleibt (what remains) sharpened Germans remember their past is an object of deep scrutiny, ciplinary Committee of the German Studies Association (GSA), I was for publication. First, East Germany has become a historical entity, and for the shift was that postwar literature more generally be- our investigation of how it became what it was and why it and second that the process of remembering is more im- in a position to help develop focused networks of scholars within the GDR studies has acquired a history of its own, one that has bifurcated came an object of interest with the passage of time. If my own failed. Furthermore, because the GDR as a state configura- portant than the product, with competing views about the organization. In 2014 I took advantage of the position to establish a GSA into German and non-German (especially Anglophone) scholars, with education in the 1960s had focused exclusively on pre-1933 tion no longer existed, social-science interest migrated into past rarely yielding satisfying results. I suspect a similar vig- Network on German Socialisms that would explore “GDR studies”— somewhat different objects of interest and critical approaches, mediated developments, by the 1970s both scholarship and the teach- historical scholarship.