Table Of ContentDebating German Cultural Identity since 1989
Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture
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Debating German Cultural
Identity since 1989
Edited by
Anne Fuchs, Kathleen James-Chakraborty,
and Linda Shortt
Copyright © 2011 by the Editors and Contributors
All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current
legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system,
published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted,
recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
First published 2011
by Camden House
Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA
www.camden-house.com
and of Boydell & Brewer Limited
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-57113-486-8
ISBN-10: 1-57113-486-7
This publication is printed on acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America.
Contents
Introduction 1
Anne Fuchs, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, and Linda Shortt
Part I. Historical and Sociological Reflections:
1989 and the Rehabilitation of German History
1: 1989 and the Chronological Imagination 17
Peter Fritzsche
2: Unity on Trial: The Mauerschützenprozesse and the
East-West Rifts of Unified Germany 30
Pertti Ahonen
3: Apples, Identity, and Memory in Post-1989 Germany 46
Jennifer A. Jordan
Part II. Architectural and Filmic Mediations:
Germany in Transit and the Urban Condition
4: Topographical Turns: Recasting Berlin in Christian
Petzold’s Gespenster 67
Andrew J. Webber
5: Interrupting Unity: The Berlin Wall’s Second Life on
Screen — a Transnational Perspective 82
Deniz Göktürk
6: Beyond the Wall: Reunifying Berlin 100
Kathleen James-Chakraborty
7: The Rebirth of Historic Dresden 117
Jürgen Paul
(cid:2)
vi CONTENTS
Part III. Retrospective Reimaginings: The Death and
Afterlife of the GDR in Contemporary Literature
8: Labyrinths, Mazes, and Mosaics: Fiction by Christa Wolf,
Ingo Schulze, Antje Rávic Strubel, and Jens Sparschuh 131
Elizabeth Boa
9: Reimagining the West: West Germany, Westalgia, and the
Generation of 1978 156
Linda Shortt
10: “Dem Sichtbaren war nicht ganz zu trauen”: Poetic
Reflections on German Reunification in Angela Krauss
and Monika Maron 170
Anja K. Johannsen
11: Cultural Topography and Emotional Legacies in Durs
Grünbein’s Dresden Poetry 184
Anne Fuchs
12: History from a Bird’s Eye View: Reimagining the Past
in Marcel Beyer’s Kaltenburg 205
Aleida Assmann
Works Cited 221
Notes on the Contributors 247
Introduction
Anne Fuchs, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, and Linda Shortt
THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL on 9 November 1989 and German
unification on 3 October of the following year were seismic historical
moments. Although they appeared to heal the war-torn history of the
twentieth century, unification posed the question of German cultural iden-
tity afresh. Politicians, historians, film-makers, architects, writers, and the
wider public engaged in a “memory contest” that pitted alternative bio-
graphies against one another, prompting challenges to perceived West
German hegemony, and posing questions about the possibility of normal-
izing German history.1 These dynamic debates are the topic of this book.
By giving voice to multiple disciplinary as well as geographic and ethnic
perspectives, this volume describes the continuing struggle to reimagine
Germany as a unified, democratic, and capitalist country. The Berlin Wall
may have been largely obliterated, but traces of the challenges to such a
present remain inscribed on the physical fabric of the entire country as well
as on the memories of many of its inhabitants. By mapping recent German
cultural expression across a range of media, the contributions in this vol-
ume chart the multiple, and often conflicting, responses to the cataclysmic
events of twenty years ago that have characterized the opening chapter of
the history of the Berlin Republic.
The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall was accompanied by
a public celebration at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on 9 November 2009.
Entitled “Fest der Freiheit” (festival of freedom), it was broadcast across
the world, emphasizing the global significance of the events of 1989. The
presidents of Russia and France, Dimitry Medvedev and Nicolas Sarkozy,
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and American Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton represented the former Allied powers. Interviews with
Lech Walesa, the leader of Solidarity in the early 1980s and later President
of Poland; Miklos Nemeth, the former Hungarian Prime Minister, who
was the first to open his country’s borders with Austria; and ex-Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged the massive contribution of east-
ern Europeans to the collapse of Communism. Berlin schoolchildren and
grassroots activists from around the world participated in the celebration
by painting one thousand giant dominos, which were placed on the route
that the wall had sliced through the very heart of Berlin. These were then
(cid:2)
2 ANNE FUCHS, KATHLEEN JAMES-CHAKRABORTY, AND LINDA SHORTT
pushed over in a carnivalesque re-enactment. In this way, the festivities
reinforced the illusion of retrospective inevitability alongside the idea of a
national homecoming of the German nation in Europe.
This volume complicates the sense of unified national identity pos-
ited by such spectacles. In contradistinction to the discourse on nor-
malization, we argue that German identity remains fractured along
geographical, ethnic, and political fault lines. From the 1980s onward,
Chancellor Helmut Kohl aimed to “normalize” Germany’s past by his-
toricizing the Nazi period and placing it in a broader historical context.
Kohl’s promotion of conventional patriotism was superseded by the Red-
Green coalition government in the late 1990s, which pushed for nor-
malization of a different kind: instead of anchoring German national
identity in German ethnicity, the Schröder-led government now recog-
nized the multicultural makeup of contemporary Germany. In the field
of foreign policy, Germany’s normalization was further underlined when
the parliament voted in favor of the Bundeswehr’s participation in the
NATO campaign against Serbia, a step that replaced the constitutional
prohibition on non-defensive warfare with a commitment to “multilater-
alism, international cooperation and the defense of human rights.”2
However, while all these and later policy decisions did indeed signal the
end of the postwar period, the notion of normalization remains problem-
atic. Implicitly it posits a standard of normal historical development that
makes most of twentieth-century history (not just National Socialism)
look abnormal. Furthermore, in the case of recent German history the
idea of normalization disguises the hotly contested nature of German
identity debates, which continue to undermine easy regression into con-
ventional forms of tradition. In the following we will discuss a range of
recent public debates about good governance, citizenship, and German
cultural identity. These controversies include the controversial quest for
a national unification monument, the equally contested decision to
rebuild Berlin’s Schloss, the unexpected protests that erupted over the
railway project Stuttgart 21, alongside the continual debate on integra-
tion and the legacy of the GDR. Although thematically diverse, these
debates reveal the difficulty of creating a sense of shared nationhood. As
hot nodes in the discourse on German cultural identity, they reflect issues
that resurface in the essays that follow.
Symbols in the Cityscape
Attempts to create a unified German political and national identity by
rewriting the architectural landscape have been hotly contested, as recent
debates about proposed interventions in Berlin and Stuttgart continue to
show. Decisions about the built environment have created new national
