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  • The GDR Remembered: Representations of the East German State since 1989 ed. by Nick Hodgin and Caroline Pearce
  • David Clarke
The GDR Remembered: Representations of the East German State since 1989. Edited by Nick Hodgin and Caroline Pearce. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. Pp. x + 300. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 978-1571134349.

One side effect of Europe’s recent economic troubles has arguably been a shift in the focus of discussion about Germany’s future away from an inward-looking concern with the achievement of “inner unity” and towards more outward-looking debates over Germany’s predominance in the European Union and in the management of the European economy. The period leading up to the celebrations in November 2009 of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall nevertheless continued to be marked by controversies over the “proper” commemoration of the East German regime and the society it ruled over for forty years. In the years 2005 and 2006, for example, two separate historical commissions, one national and one local to Berlin, were set up to debate the future commemoration, respectively, of the GDR as a whole [End Page 484] and of the Berlin Wall in particular. In popular culture, these academic and political discussions coincided with the release of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film Das Leben der Anderen (2006), which subsequently became a worldwide success.

These debates have proved fruitful areas of investigation for scholars working in contemporary German Studies, Memory Studies, and other related disciplines, as evidenced by this and other volumes which appeared in English in 2011 (e.g., David Clarke and Ute Wölfel, eds., Remembering the German Democratic Republic: Divided Memory in a United Germany [Basingstoke, 2011]; Dennis Tate and Renate Rechtien, eds., Twenty Years On: Competing Memories of the GDR in Postunification German Culture [Rochester, NY, 2011]).

Nick Hodgin and Carloine Pearce’s useful edited collection, The GDR Remembered, takes as its focus “representations of the East German state” in the postunification period, and gives itself a broad remit to present “multiple narratives” (4) about the GDR across a range of media, from film and literature to museums, memorials, and the memory discourses of “ordinary” GDR citizens. One may not agree entirely with the editors’statement that those who transmit cultural memory “have a responsibility to present a non-biased approach” (14), but the case studies presented in the volume demonstrate very clearly themselves that, even if such a quasimoral duty could be established and an objective representation of the past were possible, these would inevitably be belied by actual practices of remembering in their various forms.

Because of the diversity of the examples that the contributors examine, the volume is methodologically plural. In the first section of the book, on literature and film, the authors’ approach is broadly thematic, with Laura Bradley and Anna O’Driscoll offering sensitive and enlightening readings of literary and filmic texts that use representations of the theater and melancholics, respectively, as a prism through which to explore the meaning of the GDR and its aftermath. Stuart Parkes’ discussion of representations of the GDR by non-GDR writers is less convincing in its argument that the texts are “one-sided” (66) for portraying the GDR negatively, implying that a literary text needs to be judged against some objective standard of social “reality.” Editor Nick Hodgin’s chapter, a particularly useful addition to the scholarship, demonstrates the value of looking beyond textual readings of films about the Stasi in order to assess how debates about such films become part of a wider “coming to terms” with the GDR past.

The second part of the volume discusses memorials and museums dedicated to various aspects of GDR state and society. The chapters can be divided roughly into two categories. Günter Schlusche, Pertti Ahonen, and Andreas Wagner offer largely historical or documentary accounts of various forms of commemoration: of the Berlin Wall in the case of Schlusche and Ahonen, at a regional level for Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in the case of Wagner. These chapters will be invaluable for readers desiring an overview of these important case studies, especially if they do not have access to [End Page 485...

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