The GDR Today: New Interdisciplinary Approaches to East German History, Memory and Culture ed. by Stephen Ehrig, Marcel Thomas, and David Zell (review)

Has the German Democratic Republic been "researched to exhaustion"? That was the provocative question posed in 2014 by Thomas Lindenberger, responding to long-held fears that scholarship on East Germany had reached a point of such insularity and hair-splitting that there was nothing left to say about the larger narrative ("Ist die DDR ausgeforscht? Phasen, Trends und ein optimistischer Ausblick," Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 24–26). Lindenberger's own response was "no": while there may be relatively few areas of East German life that have failed to attract the scholar's attention, new methods, approaches, and research questions mean that there does, in fact, remain a great deal to say about Germany's "second dictatorship."

This is the scholarly context within which Stephan Ehrig, Marcel Thomas, and David Zell have framed this collection of essays. Consisting largely of contributions from younger scholars, The GDR Today consciously sets out to demonstrate the vast potential for GDR studies offered by interdisciplinary scholarship and the breaking down of the "many dichotomies" (9) the editors see as having characterized historical and political understandings of the East German state.

Following an introduction that offers a brief but helpful overview of the current state of GDR research themes and approaches, the volume is divided into five sections. The first—"narrative cultures"—concerns itself with the issues involved in understanding various East German texts in context. Richard Slipp's essay on the reductive designation of Christoph Hein as a "GDR writer" raises interesting questions about the inveterate politicization of the East German past within reunified Germany. Elizabeth M. Ward examines, through an analysis of Michael Kann's film Stielke, Heinz, fünfzehn (1987), the political difficulties of recalibrating the antifascist myth for a younger generation in the late 1980s. Mary Frank looks at problems of context and intelligibility from the perspective of translation, providing an especially enlightening point of departure for scholars of all disciplines whose work is concerned with texts initially produced for East German readers.

The second section explores some of the tensions generated within the GDR by the need to construct a distinctive culture. Stephen Ehrig explains how Stefan Schütz's mid-1970s stage adaptation of Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas exploited the tropes of East German cultural traditions to produce a pessimistic critique of socialism's failed historical promise. Tom Smith employs a case study of the use of music in the novels of Walter Flegel to argue for a nuanced understanding of how multiple cultural traditions could exist simultaneously in the GDR. Finally, Christian Rau analyzes the practices of professional academic librarianship, demonstrating how in the GDR a Soviet archetype was rejected in favor of a traditional "German-Prussian model of the academic librarian as a scientist and servant of the sciences" (133).

The final three sections deal with questions of identity and memory in post-Wende Germany. In the first of these—"Post-Wall Narrative Identities"—all three contributors highlight the benefits of analyzing small units for grasping the complexities of East German memory since 1990. Dirk Thomaschke assesses narratives of the GDR past in local Ortschroniken, vehicles of history that self-consciously abjure big-picture and academic approaches, preferring instead to envision their communities as unchanging units into which the ravages of politics and history only intervene "from without." Taking a different perspective on a similar theme, Marcel Thomas uses oral interviews to provide a comparative account of post-1990 memory among residents from one East German and one West German village. He concludes that "East Germans were not exceptional in their nostalgia" (174). Hanna Haag's closing contribution also employs oral interviews, in this case to explore family narratives as a dynamic discursive space within which memories of socialism are transmitted and shaped.

Part 4 sees Daniel Kubiak and Marie Müller...