Twenty Years On: Competing Memories of the GDR in Postunification German Culture ed. by Renate Rechtien and Dennis Tate, and: The GDR Remembered: Representations of the East German State since 1989 ed. by Nick Hodgin and Caroline Pearce (review)

For those who experienced the German Wende primarily through the media, a uniform set of images from that time is ingrained in our collective memory: jubilant crowds astride the Berlin Wall, uncertain East German border guards, parades of Trabis streaming through open checkpoints, enterprising Mauerspechte chipping away pieces of history. But how well do those conventional images really tell the story of the fall of the Wall and the subsequent dissolution of the GDR? Prompted by the 20-year anniversary of the Wende, these two recent collections of essays seek to diversify our understanding of the momentous events of 1989 and to expand the debate about the legacy of the GDR.

Twenty Years On: Competing Memories of the GDR in Postunification German Culture has its genesis in a 2009 interdisciplinary conference entitled "Remembering the GDR and Germany's Unification Process." An introductory essay by Dennis Tate highlights the "competing memories" of the subtitle. Cultural, collective, communicative, visual, textual: these various modes of remembrance are examined here, as is the role of memory in defining a culture. Given the nuances of memory construction— and by extension the relative truths that must accompany each competing understanding of the past—it follows then that attempts to define a culture through some notion of collective memory must be similarly complex. This complexity is addressed by the collection of fourteen essays that follows Tate's introduction.

The essays are organized in five sections: "Media Constructions of 1989 and the Elusiveness of the Historical GDR," "Challenges to the Dominant Discourse of the Wende," "Textual Memory," "Literary Generations—Competing Perspectives," and "Afterlives." Despite the interdisciplinary origins of this collection, the articles are mostly conventional critical exercises by scholars who work primarily in literary studies. Only the first essay in the volume—Hilde Hoffmann's "Visual Re-Productions of the Wende. The Role Played by Television Images in Constituting and Historicizing Political Events"—allows the editors at least a small claim of interdisciplinarity. The intriguing promise that accompanies Hoffmann's essay is diminished to some degree by the limitations of the book format: only seven black-and-white screenshots illustrate her diachronic examination of how the Wende was portrayed on television, in real time and ten years later. A conference audience would have had the benefit of actual video with narration.

It is perhaps because of those limitations that the remaining essays focus primarily on literary texts. Important "second generation" GDR writers like Reiner Kunze, Heiner Müller, and Volker Braun are largely absent from the discussion, in spite of their (at times contentious) engagement with the cultural and political dynamics of the Wende. Klaus Schlesinger is examined in two articles and Christa Wolf gets some mention within the context of the Literaturstreit, but given the stated emphasis on "memories of the GDR in postunification German culture," authors of the post-Wende generation rightfully dominate the discussion. Thomas Brussig (Helden wie wir, Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, Wie es leuchtet) receives the most attention, while Uwe Tellkamp (Der Turm), Ingo Schulze (Neue Leben), and Irina Liebmannn (Stille Mitte von Berlin; Wäre es schön? Es wäre schön! Mein Vater Rudolf Herrnstadt) are also discussed across several articles.

In the concluding remarks to her article "Mediating Immediacy: Historicizing the GDR," Andrea Geier states: "These novels by Brussig, Schulze, and Tellkamp create images of eastern Germany and of the decisive year 1989-90 that both complement and correct collective memory. All three employ a combination of thematic and narrative means that aims to recreate the...