Martin Sabrow, chair of the commission in 2005, concluded four years after the commission’s work that united Germany was still far from establishing a clear and widely accepted consensus on the meaning of the GDR, its place in national history, and its role in charting out a national identity (“Die DDR erinnern” 16). Comments like these reveal the general belief that memory could somehow be commissioned and that a selected group of experts, entrusted to bestow conclusive meaning on the past, could generate a consensus.
In the effort definitively to ascribe meaning to the GDR past, many have accused the state, with its dominant role in centralizing GDR remembrance, of installing a monolithic national memory (Markovits, Hammerstein et al., Wielenga, Pohlmann). Rather than investigating the commemorative framework that the state had tried to establish in the first fifteen years after the fall of the wall and that had triggered various responses expressed in different cultural spheres, critics approached the debate by sharply distinguishing between official or state-mandated memory and non-official or bottom-up (alternative or counter-) memories, often favoring the latter over the former.2 Ignoring the interdependence of the two and turning a blind eye to the pluralistic fashion in which the state has approached the GDR past, this critique reveals that commemoration is often evaluated in terms of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘right’ and
‘wrong.’3 In other words, these critiques assumed the role of judges in assessing commemorative articulations according to their degree of artificiality (memories imposed from above) and authenticity (memories expressed in bottom-up initiatives by grassroots organizations, activist groups, and victims). This approach suggested that remembrance would somehow be ‘truer’ and more meaningful, the more immediate the relationship is between the carriers of memory and the past that is remembered. It furthermore implied that there would be a “correct” way to remember that past, which could bring closure to the legacy of the past and consider it “bewältigt.”
The urge to assign conclusive meaning to the GDR past overlooks that the past is neither an unchanging entity, nor assumes conclusive meaning once it is articulated as “official memory” via state institutions or as “counter-memory” through non-official voices. While it is true that representations of the past derive from and are often used to explain relationships of a political nature, memory can neither be reduced to the politics of the state, nor can it be understood as completely detached from institutional influences. If we examine the means by which different actors engage in and exert influence in the making of cultural memories, we will be able to study memory in its social dimension, including the effects it has on political, social, and cultural organizations, and in turn, how these organizations shape memory. This project understands remembering as a development and process.
As an intervention in the field of Memory Studies, my dissertation is thus not content to fit various representations of the past into moralized compartments of ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Rather, I studies what meaning the past assumes when it is negotiated in different artifacts and how
3 Andrew Beattie has successfully shown that since the early 1990s, the German state has never claimed a monopoly
on GDR memory work. It has instead approached GDR commemoration in a relatively modest, inclusive, pluralistic, representative, and less dogmatic fashion. In the attempt to engage with and respond to popular memories and concerns, the state has consistently encouraged others to engage in this task and has promoted and generously
remembering comments on and constitutes the constellations of political, social, and cultural relationships to the past. I argue that remembering is contingent, changing, contested, and multi- facetted. In literature, film, and in memorial creation we see memory as a dynamic force in forming and renegotiating relationships to the past in the present. Through different modes of remembrance we see how Vergangenheitsbeziehungen arise and how they change, depending on present needs and according to the medium in which Vergangenheitsbeziehungen will be traced. Scrutinizing the role of literature, film, and memorial creation in articulating and reflecting on
Vergangenheitsbeziehungen allows for a greater sensibility to observe and describe how a
society experiences itself as a remembering collective and how remembering - expressed and shaped via cultural objects - constitutes a society.
The notion of a German Erinnerungskultur thus emerges as a realm of mediated relationships between the past and those who perform acts of remembering in the present. Analyzing the dynamics with which Vergangenheitsbeziehungen come to define an
Erinnerungskultur in the Berlin Republic, the remembered past is not the alignment of a society
with a specific narrative of historical time. The act of remembering in the present constitutes society and brings individuals into communication as society. If we understand how remembering is performed in various cultural forms and how Vergangenheitsbeziehungen are articulated, we can gain insight into how society arises and experiences itself in its remembering. It is my goal to make the discussion of GDR remembrance in literature, film, and memorial sites relevant to a more general understanding of the dynamic aspects of memory in order to highlight the discursive nature of historical thinking in the present.