Debating German Cultural Identity since 1989 PDF
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Debating German Cultural Identity since 1989 Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield 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
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