Debating German Cultural Identity since 1989 ed. by Anne Fuchs, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, and Linda Shortt (review)

Ever since unification, issues of German cultural identity, national history and memory have become especially prevalent. The twelve essays of this well-researched volume emerged from an international conference in Dublin on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. They include contributions by scholars from the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States, and Germany who examine the question of German cultural identity in the post-wall era from multiple disciplinary, geographic and ethnic perspectives. While most other anthologies related to the continuing public-political discourse on identity, history, memory, and generational shifts in German culture focus on literary and cinematic representations of the events since 1989, this volume also gives voice to historians, sociologists, art historians, and scholars of urban studies who provide multiple and diverse responses to unification. Tied to the book’s overarching emphasis on the ongoing controversies about contemporary German cultural identity is the central argument that, contrary to the discourse on normalization, German identity remains ethnically and politically fractured and subjected to “memory contests” regarding the recent past (a concept first developed with reference to the controversies about the National Socialist past in an edited volume of 2006 by Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and Georg Grote). The substantive introduction discusses some recent public disputes, including the rebuilding of Berlin’s Schloss, Germany’s integration politics and the legacy of the GDR, thereby providing extensive contextualization for the ensuing essays.

The first three chapters, organized under the main heading “Historical and Sociological Reflections: 1989 and the Rehabilitation of German History,” open with Peter Fritzsche’s essay which problematizes the general notion of history, historicity, and chronology with reference to “the internal logic of past systems” in light of the surprising and rapid events of 1989, thereby analyzing the subsequent “competing models of historical explanation.” Pertti Ahonen adds another historical dimension by examining the trials of East German border guards in the context of the disputes on German victimhood and addressing their far-reaching effects on “the transition to a new, united Germany.” From a sociological perspective, Jennifer Jordan reveals the significance of food (in particular apples) in Germany’s identity-transformations and continuities as “a site of collective memory” in East and West, positing that the construction of a German national identity happened not in opposition to, but rather through, regional identities constitutive for Heimat sentiments.

The four chapters of the second part of the volume focus on “Architectural and Filmic Mediations: Germany in Transit and the Urban Condition,” beginning with Andrew Webber’s contribution to the topographical turn in Cultural Studies (in reference to his previous study Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography [2008]) which argues that in Petzold’s film Gespenster urban spaces in the New Berlin are recast as sites of contested personal and national memory, mediating “the haunting hold of historical legacies” in the post-unification capital. In the context of the debates on migration, public memory and Germanness, Deniz Göktürk analyzes earlier stagings of the Berlin Wall in Turkish cinema from a transnational perspective, pointing out “the correlation of migration and national identity” in postwar German history which until now went unacknowledged in commemorations of German unification. The last two authors of this section focus respectively on Berlin’s and Dresden’s architectural reconstruction from an art historian’s point of view. Kathleen James-Chakraborty provides insight into the debates over the construction of a new architectural identity in a reunited Germany and highlights how international star architects with their creation of new landmarks responded to the “palimpsest of Berlin’s many layered political and architectural pasts” (a reference to Andreas Huyssen’s 2003 study) by transforming the city’s architectural legacy of modernism into “an instrument of memory” without, however, a recourse to historicism. In contrast, Jürgen Paul’s investigation of Dresden’s reconstruction of its old center and Frauenkirche (in...