Literature from 1945 to the Present Day By Joanne Sayner, University of Birmingham*

1. General Remembering the GDR. OGS, 38, is a special issue entitled ‘From Stasiland to Ostalgie: The GDR Twenty Years After’ and in­cludes: K. Leeder, ‘Introduction’ (236–41), in which she addresses how the contributors negotiate their way through the often polarized reception of the GDR in post-Wende debates and in doing so engage with memory studies, questions of generation, ‘Alltag’, and authenticity; W. Emmerich, ‘Cultural Memory East v. West: Is What Belongs Together Really Growing Together?’ (242–53), where he argues that the ‘cultural alienation’ between East and West will remain for at least three generations due to the ‘asymmetries of cultural memory’; T. J. Reed, ‘“In that dawn...”; Revisiting the Wende’ (254–64), reflects on an ‘outsider’s’ view of the events of 1989 and concludes with an all- too-brief consideration of texts by Werner Bräunig, Uwe Tellkamp, and Gottfried Meinhold; K. Kohl, ‘Conceptualizing the GDR — 20 Years After’ (265–77), addresses the role of metaphor for understanding the GDR and looks at a variety of different genres where metaphor is employed, including television, literature, museums, and autobiography; P. Thompson, ‘“Die unheimliche Heimat”: The GDR and the Dialectics of Home’ (278–87), argues persuasively that ‘Ostalgie’ is not a nostalgia for the GDR that was, but for the GDR that was not; G. Paul, ‘The Privatization of Community: The Legacy of Collectivism in the Post-Socialist Literature of Eastern ’ (288–98), reads Brigitte Burmeister’s Unter dem Namen Norma for productive re-imaginings of post-socialist community; L. Marven, ‘“ ist bekannt [...] für die Mauer, die es aber nicht mehr gibt”: The Persistence of East Berlin in the Contemporary City’ (299–309), takes issue with postcolonial conceptualizations of unification by examining the ways in which texts by Annett Gröschner, Monika Maron and Katja Lange- Müller reappropriate Berlin’s cityscape; C. Paver, ‘“Wenn man im Falle Weimars von ‘Osten’ sprechen darf”: Memory and Place in the New Bundesländer’ (310–20), reads the ‘rhetorical and symbolic figuration’ *This survey was compiled with the assistance of Anne Boden. 688 German Studies of Weimar in 1999 as symptomatic of representation of other regions of the former GDR; D. Berghahn, ‘Remembering the Stasi in a Fairy Tale of Redemption: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der anderen’ (321–33), takes a convincingly critical look at the film through comparisons with other East German films depicting the Stasi and parallel strategies employed in films about Nazism; J.-W. Müller, ‘Just another Vergangenheitsbewältigung? The Process of Coming to Terms with the East German Past Revisited’ (334–44), confronts the debates about the designation of the GDR as an ‘Unrechtsstaat’ and the polarized understandings of totalitarianism and ‘Alltagsgeschichte’. Stephen Parker and Matthew Philpotts, Sinn und Form: The Anatomy of a Literary Journal, Berlin–NY, de Gruyter, 396 pp., is an invaluable resource. It provides both a detailed analysis of the journal in question and also provides a typology for further research on cultural journals. Bourdieu is used convincingly as a theoretical framework that points to the specificities of the GDR context as well as to the continued general relevance of his ideas. Contested Legacies: Constructions of Cultural Heritage in the GDR, ed. Matthew Philpotts and Sabine Rolle, EGY, 3, 352 pp., is a genuinely interdisciplinary volume which considers art, film, design, literature, architecture, cultural politics, memorials and music. Two chapters look specifically at literature (the work of and Irmtraud Morgner), and two at film (the DEFA ‘Aufbau’ films and Konrad Wolf’s Mama, ich lebe noch). Contested definitions of physical and imagined space, antifascism, socialist realism, and the cultural canon provide the thematic foci for the articles. The contributions span from the immediate post-war period until the 1980s and serve to contradict the often refuted, but still persisting, claims of a monolithic GDR cultural heritage. Given the recurrent discussion of everyday life in retrospective representation of the GDR, the following volume proves informative: Alltag als genre, ed. Heinz-Peter Preusser and Anthonya Visser, Heidelberg, Winter, 250 pp., includes contributions on literary texts by , Arno Schmidt, , Brigitte Reimann, Werner Bräunig, Judith Hermann, Anne Weber, Katharin Dorn, , Wolfgang Hilbig, Thomas Alexander Schmidt, Marlene Streeruwitz, , Angela Krauss, Brigitte Konauer, , , Hubert Fichte, Thomas Meinecke, and on film (Das Leben der anderen, Helden wie wir, Good Bye, Lenin!, Kleinruppin forever, Herr Lehmann, Liegen lernen, and Glückskekse). Other media, such as photography and television, are discussed as counterpoints in several chapters. The case studies are read as archives of the representations of the everyday of the former East and West Germanies,