Post-Gdr Memory—Cultural Discourses of Loss and Assertion in Reunified Germany
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
I POST-GDR MEMORY—CULTURAL DISCOURSES OF LOSS AND ASSERTION IN REUNIFIED GERMANY BY MOLLY REBECCA MARKIN DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in German in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Anke Pinkert, Chair Professor Mara R. Wade Professor Laurie R. Johnson Professor Yasemin Yildiz II Abstract When considering the blockage of a nuanced GDR memory within post-unification discourses, the historical moment of 1989 can be understood as a moment of loss for East Germans. While post-unification scholarship has addressed questions of GDR identity and generational memory in other post-1989 contexts, there is a surprising lack of scholarly work that discusses loss across different Eastern German generations that share the same historical moment of collapse and loss - 1989. In this dissertation, I divide the various Eastern German generational engagements with loss and assertion after 1989 into four chapters. Each generation forms a different discursive constellation: melancholic mourning: (Christa Wolf - chapter one), ambivalence (Lutz Rathenow and Thomas Brussig - chapter two), reappropriation (Jana Hensel and Jakob Hein - chapter three), and nostalgia/anti-nostalgia (Andrea Hanna Hünniger and the GDR museum - chapter four). Age and social position at the time of rupture fostered different perspectives regarding the experience of loss. My examination uses a case study approach to investigate trends. Taking each author individually and analyzing the process of dealing with loss in their works to other generational approaches, new insights into post-GDR memory studies are provided. Although this study analyzes only Eastern German literary productions and museal constructions, it provides insights into the development of culture in unified, post-1989 Germany and into questions of where culturally mutable notions of East German identity fit into the processes by which a collective sense of German identity is shaped in the post-unification period. III Acknowledgements So many people have accompanied me on this journey into investigating GDR memory. I would first like to thank my doctoral committee, Professors Mara R. Wade, Laurie R. Johnson, and Yasemin Yildiz, who provided not only feedback on my project but also emotional support throughout the writing process and during my years as a graduate student at The University of Illinois. I am extremely indebted to my dissertation advisor, Professor Anke Pinkert, who after reading revision after revision must truly possess the patience of Job. Without her unending encouragement, expertise and valuable comments, this project could not have been realized. I have become a better writer and researcher under her guidance. I am also grateful to Dr. Robert F. Bell and Dr. Julie Markin, my sister, for reading through various drafts of my dissertation and giving very insightful feedback. True to the role of big sister, Julie provided invaluable knowledge and understanding of the dissertation process. I would also like to thank Christel Bell who nurtured my fascination with the German language and culture while an undergraduate student at The University of Alabama. This dissertation could not have been completed without the limitless support and constant encouragement from my family (my siblings and in-laws). I am especially appreciative to my parents, my “research assistants,” who accompanied me every step of this journey, providing emotional, financial, and intellectual support. As a child, they instilled in me the importance of completing a task and of never giving up. For this, I am very grateful. Last but not least, a special thanks to my husband, Clemens, for his companionship throughout the highs and lows of researching and writing. Whether accompanying me to the IV many public lectures given by my authors, reading chapter drafts, checking my translations, or simply challenging my ideas, he was my ever-present anchor. V TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION:………………………………………………………………………...........1 CHAPTER 1 FIRST GENERATION (KRIEGSKINDER): DISCOURSE OF MELANCHOLIC MOURNING….……………………………………………………………29 CHAPTER 2 SECOND GENERATION (MAUERKINDER): DISCOURSE OF AMBIVALENCE…………………………………………………………………….................81 CHAPTER 3 THIRD GENERATION (“ZONENKINDER”): DISCOURSE OF REAPPROPRIATION………………………………………………………………...............130 CHAPTER 4 DISCOURSES OF “NORMALIZATION”: “DIKTATURKINDER” AND THE GDR MUSEUM …………………………………………………………..............180 CONCLUSION:……………………………………………………………………………..…211 BIBLIOGRAPHY:………………………………………………………………………….…217 1 Introduction Der DDR-Verlust provoziert grundsätzliche Anfragen an die eigene Identität, das entwertete Leben läßt Fragen nach dem Wert des Lebens überhaupt auftauchen.1 Hans-Joachim Maaz, Das gestürzte Volk: Die unglückliche Einheit, 1991 Im Jahr 1989 standen sich die Deutschen längst in Fremdheit gegenüber. So stelle ich es mir vor, am Anfang muss doch kaum mehr als Fremdheit zwischen Ost und West gewesen sein. Verlegenheit. Unsicherheit und vielleicht auch Misstrauen. Für uns wäre es viel eher an der Zeit gewesen, erst einmal nach Gemeinsamkeit zu suchen. Das hätte Jahre gedauert. Stattdessen ließen wir uns lieber auf eine Vergangenheit verweisen, mit der uns selber nichts verband, an die die meisten keine Erinnerung hatten, gar nicht haben konnten.2 Jana Hensel, Achtung Zone: Warum wir Ostdeutschen anders bleiben sollten, 2009 Ostalgic and similar practices reveal and contest at a particularly dynamic historical moment official master narratives of a united Germany by proposing an alternative vision of “Germanness”—of eastern German particularism and Eigen-Sinn. In this sense, they reveal much about the process of transition itself.3 Daphne Berdahl, 1999 Between 1989 and 1990, a West German narrative of democratic victory began to position the GDR as a second dictatorship.4 Eastern German responses to this new narrative reveal a discourse around a sense of loss and devaluation experienced by East Germans during this period as well as a development of an Eastern German counter memory to the new 1 Hans-Joachim Maaz, Das gestürzte Volk: Die unglückliche Einheit (Munich: Knaur, 1991), 35. 2 Jana Hensel, Achtung Zone: Warum wir Ostdeutschen anders bleiben sollten (Munich: Piper, 2009), 15-16. 3 Daphne Berdahl, “‘(N)Ostalgie’ for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things,” Ethnos 64, no.2 (1999): 205. 4 For a discussion of two “schools of commentary” on the GDR past, see for example, Konrad H. Jarausch, “Beyond Uniformity: The Challenge of Historicizing the GDR,” Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio- Cultural History of the GDR, ed. Konrad H. Jarausch (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 3-5. According to Jarausch the first school sees the GDR as a repressive state (Unrechtsstaat) with no democratic legitimacy (in other words as a second German dictatorship): “The theoretical foundation of this indictment rests on revived totalitarian theory which sees most Nazi mechanisms of repression repeated in the ostensibly anti-Fascist GDR” (4). The second school considers the GDR as a “failed experiment” which “seeks to recover the noble aims of socialism from the debris of its admittedly imperfect realization” (noble aims such as welfare provisions, inexpensive healthcare, free child care, equality in employment between men and women) (4). Jarausch cites as an example of the first school, Klaus Schroeder, Der SED Staat: Partei, Staat und Gesellschaft 1949-1990 (Munich: Karl Hanser Verlag, 1998). Jarausch’s position towards the GDR past, situated along with others such as Jürgen Kocka at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, lies somewhere in between these two polar views of the GDR past. Jarausch argues for “[. .] analyz[ing] the dictatorial character of the GDR comparatively, but at the same time acknowledg[ing] some of the normalcy of daily lives in the SED state” (ix). This is the position that I also take in this dissertation. The term “national narrative of democratic victory” is taken from Anke Pinkert,“Vacant History, Empty Screens. Post-Communist German Films of the 1990s,” Post-Communist Nostalgia, ed. Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 263-77. 2 hegemonic narrative of a formerly divided past.5 In the “Ten Point Plan” released in November 1989, Helmut Kohl addressed the need for East Germans to change their political and economic system (i.e., take on that of West Germany) in order for unification to succeed: “Ich habe angeboten, unsere Hilfe und unsere Zusammenarbeit umfassend auszuweiten, wenn ein grundlegender Wandel des politischen und wirtschaftlichen Systems in der DDR verbindlich beschlossen und unumkehrbar in Gang gesetzt wird.”6 Although in his speech, Kohl did not ask for a cultural change in notions of Eastern identity, real and imagined cultural differences between East and West would end up playing a greater role in the continued divided national imaginary, constituting the proverbial “wall in the head” of unified Germans. This dissertation examines post-unification literary texts by former East Germans as “counterdiscursive impulse[s]” that express “the possibility of a community different from that offered by the dominant culture.”7 According to anthropologist Daphne Berdahl, such “oppositional modes of memory” allow for a reconsideration of “the domains in which history and memory are constructed and deployed.”8 The literary productions analyzed